If remastering means to going back to the original studio multi-track recordings (digitizing as necessary) and re-mixing them, I could see that as being a different kind of thing (and somewhat more worthy of a new copyright for a record company which actually does that) than just re-encoding the digital audio data which is what it sounds like Bluebeat were trying to do. As a result I'm highly skeptical that a court would see these two issues as the same (but IANAL so what do I know).
I sing in a professional choir; while we do perform music composed by our director, in most cases the stuff we sing is by living composers, whose publishers all charge per-copy royalties to record their songs. We couldn't afford to pay those fees ourselves on copies that we give away for free, so those recordings are not infinite goods. I imagine that any band recording cover songs that are not yet out of copyright would have the same problem, but I've never heard this being discussed.
I would love to be able to put up a whole bunch of our past performances as MP3s on our website, but I can only do that legally for the limited amount of our output where the compositions are no longer in copyright. Any ideas?
<pedantic>
Surely it's really the evidence that is being laundered; the policies that are being pushed flow "logically" from the incorrect evidence.
</pedantic>
IIRC the ARS Technica coverage of this story made it clear (they actually talked to Bahnhof) that the ISP never actually logged the information in the first place, and they're not deleting logfiles now. I don't think they've changed what they do at all, they're just bringing this fact to the attention of potential customers who might be interested in their lack of logging.
The idea that copyrights should die with the author is obviously a bad one, because as others have pointed out it creates an incentive for others to take advantage of that by killing the author. I think most people would agree that such incentives would be a bad thing, and it's actually a disincentive to the author to create new works because with each success their death becomes worth more to those people who would want to exploit it.
A part of an author's incentives to produce new works may also be to provide for their heirs. An established author who is older or dying would have little or no incentive to create new works if they would be unable to pass on the value of those works to their heirs.
Therefor the idea that copyrights should not be inheritable is obviously wrong from the perspective of the incentives of authors.
However, extending copyright terms is completely pointless as far as incentives go if the new terms apply retroactively to works that already exist at the time the law is enacted. Doing so would merely be giving the value of the future public domain lost over to the current owners for no public gain. Any newly enacted terms would apply to any new works and thus provide the increased incentives to create, but the retroactive provision is a pure negative for the public.
I agree with many that the existing copyright terms are too long, but that's not really the topic here.
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What does "remastering" actually mean? (as AJ)
If remastering means to going back to the original studio multi-track recordings (digitizing as necessary) and re-mixing them, I could see that as being a different kind of thing (and somewhat more worthy of a new copyright for a record company which actually does that) than just re-encoding the digital audio data which is what it sounds like Bluebeat were trying to do. As a result I'm highly skeptical that a court would see these two issues as the same (but IANAL so what do I know).
What if it's not our song to give away? (as AJ)
I sing in a professional choir; while we do perform music composed by our director, in most cases the stuff we sing is by living composers, whose publishers all charge per-copy royalties to record their songs. We couldn't afford to pay those fees ourselves on copies that we give away for free, so those recordings are not infinite goods. I imagine that any band recording cover songs that are not yet out of copyright would have the same problem, but I've never heard this being discussed.
I would love to be able to put up a whole bunch of our past performances as MP3s on our website, but I can only do that legally for the limited amount of our output where the compositions are no longer in copyright. Any ideas?
(as AJ)
<pedantic>
Surely it's really the evidence that is being laundered; the policies that are being pushed flow "logically" from the incorrect evidence.
</pedantic>
No, they never created the logs in the first place. (as AJ)
IIRC the ARS Technica coverage of this story made it clear (they actually talked to Bahnhof) that the ISP never actually logged the information in the first place, and they're not deleting logfiles now. I don't think they've changed what they do at all, they're just bringing this fact to the attention of potential customers who might be interested in their lack of logging.
Incentives (as AJ)
The idea that copyrights should die with the author is obviously a bad one, because as others have pointed out it creates an incentive for others to take advantage of that by killing the author. I think most people would agree that such incentives would be a bad thing, and it's actually a disincentive to the author to create new works because with each success their death becomes worth more to those people who would want to exploit it.
A part of an author's incentives to produce new works may also be to provide for their heirs. An established author who is older or dying would have little or no incentive to create new works if they would be unable to pass on the value of those works to their heirs.
Therefor the idea that copyrights should not be inheritable is obviously wrong from the perspective of the incentives of authors.
However, extending copyright terms is completely pointless as far as incentives go if the new terms apply retroactively to works that already exist at the time the law is enacted. Doing so would merely be giving the value of the future public domain lost over to the current owners for no public gain. Any newly enacted terms would apply to any new works and thus provide the increased incentives to create, but the retroactive provision is a pure negative for the public.
I agree with many that the existing copyright terms are too long, but that's not really the topic here.