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Perhaps artists should have control of and profits from their work indefinitely. That would seem to be only fair.
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They do now. 70 years after the creator's death.
Personally, I think this is a bad thing for multiple reasons. First off, what incentive is there for an artist to create new material if they will earn profits for something essentially for the rest of their life. Granted, most copyrights seem to be owned by the studios.
How about stuff that doesn't really make a profit for the copyright holder anymore? Abandonware comes to mind. This is stuff like old arcade games which haven't been in arcades for years, but people have since created emulators to run these games on PCs. There really isn't enough interest in most of these games to really make a meaningful profit for them.
How about stuff where a clear copyright path cannot be determined? When companies go out of business, or are aquired, or owned by multiple people, the copyright path can be very muddled.
Then there is the issue of having a healthy public domain is in the public interest. Things have a tendency to be used in the public domain because they are free to use it how they see fit. People are familiar with a lot of what it considered "classical music", Shakesphere's plays, even "It's a Wonderful Life" because of public domain. Because of the changes in the laws, tho, fewer and fewer things are going into public domain. Who knows how much we will lose because of it. There are already a lot of silent films that may not see the light of day again because the rightsholders don't think it would be very profitable to release them.
Copyright is supposed to give the creator a limited window where they can have exclusive rights to what they create and profit from it. That idea has been abused badly.
I understand the reasoning behind DRM, and I can sympathize with it a bit, since things are easier to get free than any other time. Problem is, most of us would just like to use the music the way we always have, which is to copy it to a different format to play it on something else. Whether that format is cassettes, or an MP3 player of some sort, I would still like that freedom without having to buy the same thing again.
I also think that the "problem" is somewhat overblown. As someone who was young and broke, I certainly did copy music with my friends, since there wasn't really any other way for me to own it. If I wasn't able to do that, I probably still wouldn't have bought the album because I couldn't afford it. I think this is true in a lot of the situations in which it happens. Is it right to do this behavior? Not really, but I don't think it does much harm as well. Not to mention that when a lot of these people get jobs, they have a tendency to buy. I do believe that if you make a product redily available at a reasonable price, people will still buy.
Also, I've probably bought more music since the internet and file sharing than I did before, because I can actually listen to an artist before buying them. Considering how much music is out there, and how little of it gets played on the radio, how else do we get to hear these bands? Word of mouth can go so far, but I've also wasted money on bands people have said great things about. Sometimes, listening is the only way you'll know.
That being said, and getting back to the subject of this thread, I do believe that SACD hybrids are a decent compromise. We have the CD layer, which we can do whatever we want. Then, we have the hi-def layer, which is protected. For me, that's acceptable, since I'm probably going to compress the hell out of the CD layer anyways...
Jason
