People grant protection to works on the provision that these works become freely available after N years. The copyright industry just goes ahead and extends this unilaterally, just because they want to. Why should the public keep up its end of the deal when the copyright industry doesn't?
I still don't see what this has to do with grandparent's point that this was affecting piracy. I certainly agree with your point. I just don't see how it's relevant to the points of either parent or grandparent.
We're heading OT, but perhaps that I didn't make obvious that my comparison was relative is what caused your confusion.
Relative to new stuff, there is very little pirating of stuff over 20 years old (probably even over 1 year old since content is ephemeral). While I don't have the numbers to hand, I'm willing to assert that the amount of pirating of Elvis, The Beatles, etc is tiny relative to the pirating of Sky Fall, The Hobbit, Gangnam Style, Call Me Maybe, Games Of Thrones, etc.
Does "amount of pirating" refer to the number of individuals downloading? The number of torrent files? The number of kilobytes downloaded in aggregate?
Last I checked, all the copyright lobby and their lawyers are interested in measuring are the number of infractions (as a proxy for a completely fictitious number of "lost" sales).
A single Beatles anthology torrent (like this one—http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6061246/The_Beatles_-_The_Com... —with nearly 1000 currently active seeds) contains a wealth of useful material for adapters, remixers, mashup artists, and other curators/authors of potentially transformative works, an untold amount of potential inspiration for creators of all stripes, and ~400 potential infractions waiting for whoever has the misfortune of being caught accessing it.
Compare this to one infraction for downloading a copy of Skyfall.
Furthermore:
>While I don't have the numbers to hand, I'm willing to assert that the amount of pirating of Elvis, The Beatles, etc is tiny relative to the pirating of Sky Fall, The Hobbit, Gangnam Style, Call Me Maybe, Games Of Thrones, etc.
I'm willing to assert—with just as much evidence—that you don't have the aforementioned numbers "to hand" because they don't exist.
Gangnam Style is available on Youtube for free. You don't know what you are talking about. You just don't, having missed all this internet stuff.
According to Last.Fm statistics it does not seem that any musical band is listened to more than The Beatles. And virtually everything by The Beatles in the circulation is "pirated". And this stuff should be damn near public domain if you ask me.
And that's just one modern hit versus the entire catalog of one of the greatest bands ever. Sort "audio" by seeds or leeches and it's pretty much new stuff all the way down.
>having missed all this internet stuff.
I assume the ironic bit where I used this internet stuff to disprove your point is lost on you...
It is free (as in beer) so pirating it is a kind of pointless activity. Combatting this type of piracy is pointless too: try to prove that pirates stole 0$ from Psy by not watching Gangnam Style for free.
The trick is: you have to integrate the numbers over time.
Once you multiply the Beatles number by ten [years of active file sharing versus one for Gangnam Style] you'll unsurprisingly find out that Beatles are the king.
You're not the only one person confused by "pretty much new stuff" at the top. This stuff falls as readily as it climbed. That's why I quoted Last.Fm. Beatles seem to be the most popular band ever up to this day, integrally. Do you have something to say about this? Because you claimed otherwise.
Consider how long the Beatles have been that high, and how long Gangnam Style has been that high. And then of course perform the standard RIAA multiplication by number of song files in each.
I'd like to point out that the legality of sharing is not determined by the fact that it's available as a torrent or that the torrent has been posted on a specific site.
I couldn't find the details about the licensing of Gangnam Style, but your argument seems to be that it's not "free" (an almost uselessly vague term in this context) because it's on TPB.
I will say that, in the mid nineties, a lot of my friends had cassette tapes of the beatles or pink floyd. If people pirate music today the same way they copied tapes back then, I don't think your assumption is very good.
Certainly, you need actual numbers rather than handwaving arguments.
Maybe not as much when compared to piracy of new releases, but very little? That's simply not true.
How do you explain the majority of modern independent music being heavily inspired by 80s pop and 90s hip-hop, especially when most of the producers are too young to have remembered listening to it over the air? What do you say when you look up an old music video on Youtube, and 70% of the time, the top comment is from a teenager? "Today's music sucks I'm 12 and none of the kids in my class listen to this but I think it's awesome like this if you're watching this in 2012!!!" has even become something of a cliche or a running joke at this point.
How do you explain What.cd, probably the largest private torrent tracker in existence, being largely dedicated to preserving and distributing out of print music? Anyone can find the latest Skrillex album on The Pirate Bay, but the true music lovers come to sites like What.cd to discover and trace the lineage of what they'll never hear on the radio.
How do you explain the ROM piracy scene, loved both by nostalgic 30-somethings and kids who never owned a Nintendo? How do you explain the people that spend months or even years painstakingly reverse engineering old, obscure games and translating tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of text, just to give them the treatment they wish had been available to them on a store shelf as children? What about the ones that do it completely anonymously, never receiving real credit for their contributions to history, in fear of legal repercussions or being socially stigmatized based on the subject matter of the works they translate?
Ditto for the anime/manga scene, where there is a seemingly endless supply of interesting old works in need of a translation?
How do you explain the continued love for classic films, from everything Disney's put out, to the original Star Wars trilogy, to Blade Runner, and so on?
There is a lot of cultural value in media that isn't exactly fresh. Private collections have allowed us to preserve the physical artifacts of human creation over the centuries, but a manuscript sealed in the tomb of a museum quickly fades from the public consciousness. The magic of internet-enabled piracy is that it has allowed us to keep mankind's creations culturally significant long past their expiration date, on an unprecedented scale. Today, we don't just remember the most standout works from previous decades that our parents passed down to us (or the ones their parents passed down to them). We discover things that few cared about when they were actually created, and give them a new life that their creators could never have predicted.
I suppose it may be hard to understand if you aren't in the thick of it, but so much of our modern culture is about appreciating and drawing inspiration from the past that an assertion like there's very little pirating of content that is over 20 years old completely baffles me.
> There's very little pirating of content that is over 20 years old
As someone else pointed out there's a lot of decent old music, as well as older films (Star Wars or Snow White anyone?). One thing people forget is that there's a lot of Software that's getting older. There's plenty of older games that are being pirated but there'll come a point when OSes we use now reach that age.
If there isn't much piracy then there aren't many purchases (often none) so there's no justification for an extension.
But earnings themselves aren't a justification, it's the public good that comes from the further works you create while striving for more royalties that are the justification for this expensive and wasteful bureaucracy.
And there's no reasonable argument for 150y copyright, but the very stories copyrighted (Snow White, etc) are a powerful argument against copyright at all. With modern copyright on the works they borrowed, Disney never would have existed - unable to pay for access to cultural heritage.
There's very little pirating of content that is over 20 years old, so I'm not sure how the copyright extension thing would justify piracy...