[pp.int.general] Protest certain musicians?

[Eduardo Robles Elvira]

Hello people,

You wrote a quite large email and will now only point quickly
something about one of your ideas which I don't think is a very good
one:

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Bernhard Schillo <b.schillo at gmx.net> wrote:
> Some people in the pirate party for example suggest a copyright of 15 years
> for commercial exploitation. I strongly oppose this, because it would
> disadvantage the creator instead of the companies who commercialise the
> copyrights. For my part copyrights can be completely abolished - but if that
> is not going to happen, in my opinion it's _not_ ok to reduce them to a span
> below the lifetime of the creator. A company, who owns distribution channels
> is able to make money of a composition within 15 years. A musician, who
> plays on the street, is not.
> (I mean copyrights for commercial use - the private use of copyrightet
> material should be free of course).

If we are to stick with copyright, I think it's important to set of
fixed years for its limited duration. Be it, 15 or 30, we shouldn't
say "reduce it to the lifetime of the creator". Think about it, I'm
sure that if the law said so then many authors would be "terminated"
so that their copyright ends. I mean, it's quite risky for the life of
a well-known and successful creator. That would be even more true if
you take into account that when an artist dies suddenly his works
sellings sky-rocket (think for example about Michael Jackson).

That's why we should set a fixed number of years of copyright term.
And these years of monopoly over the exploitation of the copyrighted
piece of work should be:
 * enough time so that the industry doesn't wait for the copyright
term to finish to start using it and profiting in most case. Sometimes
artists (a photographer for example) do a lot of pieces of work but
only some of those are really successful.
 * not too large, because you know, people living from a photo they
did 40 years ago is what I'd call parasites in the system. Copyright
should encourage artists to work more, not the contrary.

This my position about this topic, and PIRATA's position too. We just
need to agree a reasonable number of years for the copyright term, I
think 20-30 or so was suggested.

Regards,
    Eduardo Robles Elvira.