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Re: [ARSCLIST] Britain reverses position on copyright extension
Paul,
In all due respect, you will not find many takers here. I
am an artist
who has been recording music for nearly 30 years and never
made a dime from
it - it has cost me money actually. But at least I am
working on
conserving my own work, and still have control of most of
it.
There is a big difference between Artists and
Businesspeople, and when they interact, it is usually the
businesspeople who get the long end of the stick.
As far as I know, the copyright term in the US is life of
the author +75 years. This would seem to be a vehicle to
provide for the heirs of the copyright-holder, but in the
vast amount of cases, the copyright-holder is a corporation,
so the heirs of the author are out in the cold (as was the
author, in many cases). In effect, what we have in the US is
a vehicle which protects corporations like Disney from
losing copyrights on valuable properties (i.e. Mickey Mouse)
and provides no avenue for the plethora of media which is
locked up in basements and archives to be shared with future
generations. If I read the curve from Richard Hess' article
(which I would like to award kudos to) in the last ARSC
journal, there is much less time left, given the current
amount of material residing on analog tape, to preserve what
we have. Much of what is there will be lost, due mainly to
the lack of resources to preserve it. As a preservation
engineer in the current day and age, I feel incredibly
priviledged to be able to rescue the material I have worked
on, and I feel sad when I find that the work I have done is
still locked away from the people who are seeking it. An
asset is worth nothing if noone ever knows about it.
-Matt Sohn