U.S. copyright law written for the rich

Filed in archive Legal on May 2, 2006

Copyright lawyer William Patry follows U.S. law from the founding of the country to present day in The Failure Of The American Copyright System: Protecting The Idle Rich. The corruption of the government to serve a privileged few at the expense of the general public is neither new nor surprising. But we should never forget it.

The conclusion from the article:

The real impetus for term extension comes from a very small group: children and grandchildren of famous composers whose works are beginning to fall into the public domain, thereby threatening trust funds. These estates have considerable political and financial impact with ASCAP, the performing rights collecting society. It is ASCAP and the other collecting society, BMI (in its traditional me-too role) who are pushing term extension, although their advocacy led to term extension being killed in the 104th Congress by those seeking to reform ASCAP and BMI's licensing practices for restaurants and bars. The estates of these famous composers frequently are music publishers as well, completing the royalty loop and eliminating any concerns about termination of transfers.

Individual songwriters and other authors have been left in the lurch, in a sad reminder that those who have forget those who have not. Instead of vesting the additional twenty years in the author, the twenty years is vested in the assignee, the music publisher. The result is that publishers and distributors have now become the initial beneficiaries of copyright. This violates the Constitution, which vests power in Congress to grant copyright solely to authors and solely in order to promote the progress of science. Granting rights to distributors and the estates of deceased authors cannot fulfill the constitutional imperative and is, therefore, outside of Congress's authority. It is time for the courts to set things right.