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Originally Posted by gmw
So you feel entitled to have anything older than 40(?) years for free? (I'm assuming you're not talking about the newer albums of The Who.)
It's all very well to get sarcastic about how little the famous few need the money, but understand that copyright isn't really about them - if there were fees involved in extending copyright then they could certainly afford to pay them. Copyright is a much bigger topic than a few famous people.
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I don't really have an opinion on how long copyright should be, other than it should be just long enough to fulfil its stated purpose (to encourage creators to create).
When the particular issue of sound recording copyright was being debated, one point that came up was that the "little guys" weren't likely to benefit, or would benefit by a few pounds/euros a year (literally in some cases). The big names (famous people, large record labels) stood to make a lot of money. I'm afraid I don't have links or anything, this is from memory.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
Well, I was talking about the "public interest" - if the public is interested then I would consider that (at least potentially) significant. If there is no interest then availability wouldn't seem to be much of an issue.
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What about niche interests? Availability is an issue to the people who share that niche interest, but niches are unlikely to be commercially viable. An example - my father-in-law has a lot of vinyl records that are around 50 years old. None of them are available commercially now, and they're unlikely to ever be so. He'd like to turn them all into MP3s and offer them online to anyone that wants them. He can't do that, so they're unavailable to anyone. Legally, he can't even make copies for his own use, since the UK doesn't have a fair use exemption for private use.