According to this, the labels rammed thru a law that prohibits playing anything later than 1972 without paying copyright. If true, that accounts for hearing nothing but goldie oldies on the radio.
Which is why the CD business is going to pot. Used to be, air play drove record sales. The labels used to bribe DJ's to spin their singles. Payola it was called. Now that we have no airplay, we have no CD sales.
The entire music business would be better off going back to the old system, radio stations can play any thing over the air copy right free.
Sounds like the kinda idea a buncha suits would have.
Showing posts with label copyright. Show all posts
Showing posts with label copyright. Show all posts
Friday, February 13, 2015
Monday, November 26, 2012
Legalize Downloading
This is the youth vote issue par excellance. Republicans could take it up and attract just about everyone who owns an Ipod. Not a peep out of Republicans or Democrats on this issue last election. It's like they never heard of it.
That probably comes from two reasons. Pols are mostly old fuds in their 60's who don't even do email, and have lost contact with the college age generation. They don't understand. And the labels have given lots of money to keep downloading illegal. Money talks to most pols. Money may not vote, but it does talk.
Just making downloading legal would be a fairly drastic step, it would mean the end of copyright. Authors depend upon copyright for their livings, many of them would stop writing if copyright went away. Movies need big money to make. Without copyright protection they could not raise that big money, so we would be reduced to watching things like the Blair Witch Project.
A decent halfway step, would be to reduce the length of copyright. Used to be copyright and patents ran for 14 years. The last copyright law revision, aided by Disney and the labels, jacked copyright up to life of the author plus 70 years, halfway to forever.
With copyright set to 17 years, most of the music sloshing around the internet would be legal. The young are playing and downloading mostly stuff that was popular when I was in college, and that was more than 17 years ago.
Trouble is, making a policy of "17 year copyright" meaningful to the young would take a heap of doing. Most of them would have difficulty connecting "17 year copyright" with "most of my music would be out of copyright" and "downloading out of copyright music is legal".
That probably comes from two reasons. Pols are mostly old fuds in their 60's who don't even do email, and have lost contact with the college age generation. They don't understand. And the labels have given lots of money to keep downloading illegal. Money talks to most pols. Money may not vote, but it does talk.
Just making downloading legal would be a fairly drastic step, it would mean the end of copyright. Authors depend upon copyright for their livings, many of them would stop writing if copyright went away. Movies need big money to make. Without copyright protection they could not raise that big money, so we would be reduced to watching things like the Blair Witch Project.
A decent halfway step, would be to reduce the length of copyright. Used to be copyright and patents ran for 14 years. The last copyright law revision, aided by Disney and the labels, jacked copyright up to life of the author plus 70 years, halfway to forever.
With copyright set to 17 years, most of the music sloshing around the internet would be legal. The young are playing and downloading mostly stuff that was popular when I was in college, and that was more than 17 years ago.
Trouble is, making a policy of "17 year copyright" meaningful to the young would take a heap of doing. Most of them would have difficulty connecting "17 year copyright" with "most of my music would be out of copyright" and "downloading out of copyright music is legal".
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