Lovers & Haters Get Vocal on US Copyright Review

As Congress contemplates whether to extend the current copyrights of non-public-domain works, pundits for and against are piping up with their side of the story.

In the 20-More-Years camp, we find Disney, major music catalogs, book publishers with best-selling titles, movie studios... and lots of lobbying money. Buckets, actually.

Their fear? Under the law that existed until 1978, many major copyrighted works published 56 years earlier (1955 or before) would have entered the public domain on January 1, 2012.

We're talking classic songs like 'Unchained Melody', 'Ain't That a Shame', 'Tutti Fruitti', 'Maybellene' and 'Folsom Prison Blues'. Just to name a scattered few. And films like 'Rebel without a Cause', 'The Seven Year Itch', and 'Lady & the Tramp'. Book titles include 'Lolita', 'Inherit the Wind', 'The End of Eternity', and Tolkien's 'The Return of the King'.

Meanwhile, folks like Google Books, the Internet Archive, and the Digital Public Library of America are pushing for a fresh flood of works to enter the public domain. The Atlantic recently helped make their argument by outlining how books that go out of print statistically tend to stay out of print, and thereby readers' hands. By entering the public domain earlier, however, more stories, poems and tomes could be saved in searchable digital archives.

For musicians, opening up the public domain also opens a Pandora's box that book authors don't face. On one hand, more songs could become available for covers and arrangements, increasing the variety of works available for commercial clients. On the other hand, if that's your original work hitting the public domain, you loose access to potential revenue via licensing and performance fees of your song.

What's your take on this debate? Do you think more works should hit the public domain, or is it better to protect a work (and its revenue) through copyright restristions?

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Lovers & Haters Get Vocal on US Copyright Review

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