Copyright Exploitation: Content Domination is Unfair

According to PC World, The Beatles are remastered once again in a new and better format,

EMI will release next month a collection of remastered Beatles albums on a special edition USB drive, to the joy of fans and geeks alike. The apple-shaped 16GB USB drive will be loaded with the remastered audio tracks from the Beatles’ 14 albums, and will set you back a cool $330 (£200).

Perpetual Intellectual Property ownership hurts society. The Beatles, as so many other artists, have become a staple of culture. They are due compensation – insert every free market theory inducing creativity here – and I concur. However, there is a balancing act that must happen to prevent companies from exploiting consumers 40 years later. Society has a interest in letting artists make a profit and then eventually giving the community rights to the benefit from culture. Who is making the profit now? Not the Beatles! This unbridled profit motive does not extend indefinitely.

Selling “Beatles on USB” for a price that has not diminished over 40 years is capitalism manipulated.

Second, and what really is infuriating, is the continual re-purchasing of the same content.  Suppose I bought this media in 4 Track, 8 Track, Microcassette, Betamax, Laserdisc, Compact Disc, Mini Disc, WMA, MP3, Ogg, AAC, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, SD, Micro-SD, USB.  Why don’t we separate the physical product from intellectual product – Money. I contend that person simply does not buy an encapsulated product, but they buy personal use rights to the media not to unduly impinge on the creator.

Reselling the same content is a scheme for profit. I will buy my own 16GB USB for 24.99 and upload the content I already bought. How can it be legal to extort consumers like this?

Blame Game

I submit that business interests have undermined the constitutional principle that bans indefinite copyrights. In the 1998, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, pushed the established boundaries further; here is the bill as S.505 that was enacted in 1998.

“the duration of copyright willbe 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation,whichever is shorter”. – Copyright Basics by US Copyright Office

Special interests have built a perpetually increasing structure of copyright length. Not only have these products seen profit, often grossly so, but they seem poised to retain these rights almost indefinitely – as much as corporeal beings can perceive. By the time these copyrights expire, all the authors would be dead!

In Eldred v. Ashcroft (2003) opinion, these growing limits were upheld;

“Nothing before this Court warrants construction of the CTEA’s (Sonny Bono Act) 20-year term extension as a congressional attempt to evade or override the “limited Times” constraint. Critically, petitioners fail to show how the CTEA crosses a constitutionally significant threshold with respect to “limited Times” that the 1831, 1909, and 1976 Acts did not. Those earlier Acts did not create perpetual copyrights, and neither does the CTEA”

Ginsburg, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Rehnquist, C.J., and O’Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, and Thomas, JJ., joined. Stevens, J., and Breyer, J., filed dissenting opinions. Lawrence Lessig, for petitioners. Theodore B. Olson , Great Falls, VA, for respondent.

At what constitutional point does a copyright fail for perpetual reasons? The reasoning of the court suggests that so long as the legislature defines a finite amount of time that it does not offend the constitutionality.

Due to lengthy copyrights, companies will inevitably derive a stream of profit from the public… even though The Beatles content is 40 years old.  Further, the restrictive copyrights mean that they can keep reselling these same songs, on different formats, without violating any laws.

I, for one, can’t wait until the next arguments for 130 year copyrights. Take it away John.