> I think you could argue that NO recording this old should still be under copyright

In a court of law? Not seriously nor credibly. The term of a copyright is provided for by statute.

Pretty sure he's talking about the way things should be, not the way things are. The way things should be: None of this would be a problem. The way things are: Brewster Kahle is jeopardizing the archive's mission with his cavalier attitude towards copyright that is causing the archive to lose lawsuit after lawsuit. While fighting bad law is certainly a good thing, maybe imperiling the archive in the process is not. Unfortunately, such nuanced takes seem to be lost on people who treat these issues as a form of team sports and demand you either be simply pro- or anti-.

> While fighting bad law is certainly a good thing ...

... you still require a winning strategy and winning execution, or you've only done harm.

...which is precisely the point of the other half of the sentence you snipped:

> maybe imperiling the archive in the process is not.

> Pretty sure he's talking about the way things should be, not the way things are.

Well, I made my distinction, which you clearly read and were aware of but made this post anyway.

.....I mean, clearly someone was confused by what you said, and I took it as an opportunity to make my own point. I don't really see a problem.

On the other hand, we constructed the court of law to help society, not the other way around. Same goes for statutes.

Agreed - but societal interests are a mix of the constituents within the society which can be in conflict as a well as the overall society as a whole. We want to protect the rule of law, both legal and social norms surrounding property rights, we want to enable the free expression and production of cultural goods, we want to ensure artists can profit off their work. My take is that amongst people discussing this there is a rough agreement that IP rights (both copywrite and patents) should be weakened at least in duration, but no consensus on the specifics, and their is a concentrated lobby of rights holders that wants to maintain their legal ability extract rents from their collections. We wouldn't be served well be crashing the whole system (not implying the parent comment suggested this) but that means we need to figure out how to change things at the margin within the current political climate. One compromise I've been trying to push is to require payment to continue to maintain the exclusivity. Shorten the default timeframes, but require fees to relicense the material. Perhaps we could also require that the material get sent to an archive as part of this to ensure it kept (at the right's holders expense). If the LoC isn't up to it, they could authorize third parties. Make the fees higher (and increase them over time) to disincentivize extension of everything. This tradeoff means that the biggest properties - Disney films say - do get long extensions, but that doesn't lock up everything else. Same thing with patents. Also we can get more creative with mandatory licensing. The main innovation here is to stop making the cutoff such a hard boundary which makes things more contentious.

I've seen you say this multiple times but it makes no sense. Disney can get copyrights as long as they want, essentially, small time authors get little to no protection? This is even more entrenched. It doesn't even make any sense in the patent context because they all have very limited terms anyway. It's like a fun armchair quarterback sort of idea, but it's not going to get you very far in an actual game.

An American would have to argue this while running for office, and then argue it in Congress. Alternatively, get a position to exploit the "copyright exception" provisions.

It's a congressional law like any other congressional law. Needs to be passed by the house and the senate.

Or like most laws, an interested group find a way to get an audience with lawmakers to brief them on their concerns, help build consensus amongst their peers and staffers, and after work in non-publicized committees the main the details of the law get tacked onto some bigger bill and passed. Contrary to popular belief congress passes all sorts of laws on a bipartison basis regularly - just with little publicity, do to the mundane nature of many of the topics.

>Contrary to popular belief congress passes all sorts of laws on a bipartison basis regularly - just with little publicity, do to the mundane nature of many of the topics.

This must be why life keeps getting better and better for Americans each year!

It's illustrative of the fact that the RIAA would rather throw away 99% of its history than give up whatever little bit of juice is left today in the remaining 1%. It's not like they care to archive this stuff themselves; like the article says, they already needed to rely on collectors to give them recordings for a Robert Johnson re-release, and that was in the 1961.

Maybe it's their legal prerogative, but I'm of the mindset that if they are doing no good, at least do no harm.

Artificial scarcity is good for business. When the old stuff disappears, the new one sells better.

As an example, I recently started listening to eurobeat. I looked at Wikipedia and found that there is a CD series called "Super Eurobeat", which already published 250 volumes, containing about dozen songs each. Think about this again -- there are about 3000 songs, all of them already selected as "best of", just from one genre I previously didn't know about. Given that I don't spend much time listening to music, it might take me more than a year to listen to all of them; and after that point, I would be happy to start from the beginning again. So, from my perspective, it is not necessary to make new music, ever. And if we lived in the kind of world where copyright expires let's say after 14 years, most of that would even be legally free. And the same is probably true for most other genres.

Ok, this is extreme. New things are cool. But the more you are aware of the good old things that exist, the more work it takes to impress you. You will still be impressed with great new things, but much less with average new things, especially if they are expensive. And I suspect that the average new things make the largest part of the sales.

Well... for me "New Music" is anything I haven't heard before... there is a lot of amazing stuff recorded over the past 150 years. and so much of it is still "New!"

My favorite comment from the article was from the Hollywood/media exec lamenting that what IA was doing was 'theft'. Didn't Hollywood come about from people trying to outrun Edison and his patents? The hubris is astounding.

Time to lay RIAA to rest. A message needs to be sent: orgs that go after archival efforts like this get smote to death.

RICO statutes! Sic em boys!