Recording Industry Hypocrisy On Full Display In Continuing To Push The CLASSICS Act That Expands Copyright

Recording Industry Hypocrisy On Full Display In Continuing To Push The CLASSICS Act That Expands Copyright

6 years ago
Anonymous $2WKDXfy9lA

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180528/22024539933/recording-industry-hypocrisy-full-display-continuing-to-push-classics-act-that-expands-copyright.shtml

In the past few months we've written a few times about the problems with "The CLASSICS Act", which is part of an otherwise mostly unobjectionable copyright modernization bill. You can look back at the previous posts, which get deep into the weeds on the problems of the bill, but the short version is that in an attempt to change how pre-1972 sound recordings are treated (specifically, to get streaming companies to pay a brand new "performance right" license on those works), the CLASSICS Act creates this new right, but leaves out all of the supposedly balancing factors of federal copyright law -- including the time limit before these works should go into the public domain.

Hilariously, for merely pointing out why it seems silly to give the record labels (and, yes, it's mostly the record labels) a brand new right, taking it away from the public, and doing so in a manner that does nothing for the public other than remove a right that it already had (oh, and which does nothing to incentivize the creation of new music), Billboard's famed tech hating columnist Rob Levine has posted a silly screed, claiming that anyone challenging the CLASSICS Act must be an "anti-copyright" activist.