Record Industry Braces for Artists’ Battles Over Song Rights

No that was about a former manager who had been ripping him off. A genuine criminal. This was just a bad contract signed by a naive kid.

Rock PING

Public domain expiration of copyright is long established and was meant to build the cultural fabric of this nation just as the expiration of patents extends our technology development.

Big Media pwns this nation’s exported legacy of the 20th century and will not give it up now. The corrupt thugs who run the media know that they would be bankrupt if not for the 70 years of pre-published works that keep them solvant.

Ask the artists on Atlantic records about when the label stole the publishing rights to their songs. Ask those who managed to maintain some of their rights about the checks they were never paid for decades.

Look up the drug and other payola the big labels used in the 70s and 80s long after the INDEPENDENT labels got run out of radio airplay.

Public domain expiration of copyright is long established and was meant to build the cultural fabric of this nation just as the expiration of patents extends our technology development.

Big Media pwns this nation’s exported legacy of the 20th century and will not give it up now. The corrupt thugs who run the media know that they would be bankrupt if not for the 70 years of pre-published works that keep them solvant.

Ask the artists on Atlantic records about when the label stole the publishing rights to their songs. Ask those who managed to maintain some of their rights about the checks they were never paid for decades.

Look up the drug and other payola the big labels used in the 70s and 80s long after the INDEPENDENT labels got run out of radio airplay.

Shakespere’s works weren’t legally published in his lifetime. We know of them at least in part through bootlegged transcriptions.

The works of Edgar Allen Poe and Mark Twain are public domain as well as those of Charles Dickens. Doesn’t seem like they’be been “cheapened” as a result. Unless you think it has stagnated theater and cinema.

Broadway seems locked into a fascination recasting old movies with ironic casts these days rather than developing any “compelling” content.

Okay, I’m assuming there that by the time your grandchildren are controlling the rights, that modern remixing using sampling will have matured. But then entire history of music is full of remixing done the old way:

I guess Tallis’s Third Mode Melody was just doing fine turn of the 20th century, everyone was listening to it all the time, no need to breath new life into it — pity his great-great-. . .-great-grandchildren didn’t still have the rights so they could collect royalties. That Ralph Vaughn Williams was just a “cannibal”: he should have composed his own theme instead of lifting the melody to use in probably the most sublime orchestral work of the 20th century, Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.

And that Tchaikovsky, “cannibalizing” the Russian chant setting to the Beatitudes, The Marseillaise, and folk-dance tunes, without paying royalties! For shame!

Creativity and music are so much helped by making musical themes into property so that other composers can’t quote them in tribute or make thematic references. It would have been so much better if Paganini’s estate had prevented the composition of Variations on a Theme of Paganini, if a Haydn Foundation had prevented Brahms from composing Variations on a Theme of Haydn or been able to sue him for royalties, . . .

Why let’s extend this sort of thinking to my area of creative endeavor: no one can use a mathematical theorem unless they scrupulously request rights and pay royalties to the mathematician who proved it, or his estate or his publisher! Reprove a theorem you didn’t know someone else had proved, get sued! Mathematics would grind to a screeching halt.

Actually some of Twain’s work is still under copyright. The letters for instance.