OK, those of you still with me; the Supreme Court decided that some works by European composers which has previously been considered public domain are no longer in the public domain because those composers deserve the same copyright duration enjoyed by American artists. This is fair, and I don’t disagree that life of copyright should be standard for all compositions no matter what the composer’s country of origin. What I don’t like is that works which had previously been in the public domain are now under copyright protection again. This has never been the case before and it’s not good that it’s the case now.
The composers affected by this adjustment are people like Prokofiev and Stravinsky, whose works are extremely popular. Not only does this complicate matters for people staging concerts involving those works or creating new audio-visual works that will use the compositions, it also complicates things for anyone who had previously used the compositions either in a recording or a movie or television show. When they created the recording, movie, or show the work was in public domain and they only had to obtain a synchronization license for the recording; now they have to go back and obtain a license for the use of the composition itself. And since these works are already in existence the entity granting the licenses knows they have creators over a barrel when it comes to setting a price point. Without getting those licenses, a copy of any audio or audio visual work featuring music composed by these authors can no longer be sold, played, or aired legally.
This would include movies like Fantasia and Fantasia 2000, which both feature works by Stravinsky. (The first features “The Rite of Spring” and the second “Firebird”.) You start in with Prokofiev and things get worse; Children of Men, Center Stage, and State of Play all feature pieces by him. Not to mention episodes of “Ren and Stimpy” and “The Simpsons”. And those are just the big names, this decision will affect dozens of lesser known composers and unless the licensing departments of virtually every media producing entity in existence are paying attention there could be a flurry of very serious and very expensive lawsuits coming in the near future.
Honestly I could go on for pages as to why this is a bad decision. I won’t, because that would be self indulgent (like ranting about copyright issues on my blog isn’t, but whatever). Anyway, the point is this is bad, I am a copyright nerd and I really need a job that takes advantage of that second fact so I stop inflicting these sorts of things on people just here for more dumb stories about my life.
1 comments:
In "The Simpsons'" commentary tracks, they bring up how they would seek out certain Russian composers' works during the eighties because the music was next-to-free (the Soviets didn't acknowledge Western copyrights). I guess they could do what happened with "Daria" and just ditch the music cues for an added touch of awkward.
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