Posts by Simon Grigg
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Hard News: Friday Music: New Zealand's…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Damned if I can find a cover anywhere though...
Parts of it survive on AudioCulture, like this great Roi penned overview of The La De Da's in Dunedin for which I received a lovely email from Kevin Borich only yesterday.
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Hard News: Friday Music: SJD, with…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Ah, thanks muchly for that. I’ll draw Simon’s attention to those details.
Credits all added - thank you Ian. I love the way we can keep on adding detail to these pages.
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Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Pulling stuff back out of the public domain would be hugely problematic, starting with the question of who’s got copyright on previously-legitimate “unauthorised” derivative works made once PD applied.
Yep. Plus the fact that vast amounts of legitimately released music on vinyl, CD, Spotify and iTunes will become pirate. As will most of the Warehouse’s cheapie DVD racks.
Many other countries will be able to manufacture these but New Zealanders will not be able to access them legally.
These as an example.
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Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to izogi,
Have I missed something, then?
No you haven’t – unless I have too. I can find nothing in that document that supports retroactive removal from PD. And I’ve just been speaking with someone who I think would know and the one word response was “no”.
Given the drive to get this stuff back into the marketplace by the industry I think I can say that such copyright reversion would not be aggressively asserted by many of the major players anyway*.
*unless there was money to be made of course ...
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Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to Jason Kemp,
According to the bulletin, the TPP signatories will have to retroactively extend their copyright terms, giving longer copyrights to works that were created before the agreement was struck, and taking works out of the public domain and putting them back into copyright’s restrictions.
Wow – that’s something more than was expected. As of two days back the recording industry line was that it was not retrospective.
That means that this collection, to be issued next week to finally make available New Zealand works that have long been out of print, may now be contrary to a copyright that Universal had no idea they had until yesterday.
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Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to izogi,
One thing I find irritating is that copyright terms, and their extensions, all seem to be automatic and across the board, even when copyright owners have no interest or little incentive to bother going through the administration of making them available.
It varies from country to country – in Europe there is a use it or lose it provision on older works in some countries. That said, the same countries have moral copyright which, in France in particular, never seems to expire regardless of passing time and deals that may or may not have been done. When Warners decided to colourise Capra works his family sued to stop – successfully as I recall.
There have been cases of families successfully asserting moral rights on works that are otherwise in the public domain.
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Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to SteveH,
It’s 50 (soon 70) years after death of the creator. No one will lose any potential income during their life time either way. Honestly, I don’t see much reason why your family should continue to benefit from your creation 50 or 70 years after you die.
As Martin and and Russell have said above there is a distinction between master copyright and composition copyright. Master is 50 (soon to be 70 although the timeline on this is vague) after publication. Composition is 50/70 after death.
So in New Zealand currently any recording released in 1964 or earlier is in PD, whereas the song is still in copyright assuming the writer was still alive in 1965.
Thus Ruru Karaitiana's 'Blue Smoke' song is still owned by EMI (I think) whereas the 1948 Tanza recording by his group with Pixie Williams is public domain.
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Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to Martin Brown,
I wonder what happens to those whose rights have lapsed, or who fall into a gap between, say, a 2005 expiry and when this gets passed.
The advice I’ve been given by the recording industry is that it does not push items back into copyright if these have already lapsed. In other words the first 4 Beatles albums stay in Public Domain in NZ.
That’s certainly what happened in the EU – thus all those rather great soul and jazz comps in the marketplace these days.
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Hard News: Friday Music: The next Soundcloud?, in reply to Russell Brown,
but most people don’t even know he was briefly the singer in The Clean.
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The National Library’s Sholto Duncan has pored over the dead URL file of the New Zealand Web Archive and turned up hundreds of New Zealand music sites that exist now only in the Archive. Some of them really illustrate why we have such an archive.
Expect an AudioCulture story, penned by Sholto, on this very subject, in the near future.
I get an email a week asking about Mysterex - it's there in all its post-punk glory (although large parts of it are on AudioCulture now).
