I actually didn't know about recapture rights, so thanks for sharing that. It is nice that such a compromise was thrown in there, though it's not clear to me that the copyright cartels would take such attempts lying down. The legislation's requirements for recapture are not only fairly involved, but there seem to be several provisions that could become the center of a protracted legal case.

It's one thing to have legal rights; it's another to get people to actually comply with them, and the odds in court of a One-Hit Wonder from 1982 against a big record conglomerate don't seem too favorable, especially when the alternative is to continue collecting a royalty check.

There are a lot of points of inflection for a copyright broker like a label to jump in and attempt to run down the other party's legal war chest (a technique commonly practiced by large companies).

>Well the copyright of the of recording is there to protect the record label's investment. They aren't going to finance a record and it's promotion if someone else can come along and also release the same recording and collect money for it. That was always the plot.

The plot is as defined in the U.S. Constitution:

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

Today, the copyright regime stifles the progress of science and useful arts by cloistering our cultural, scientific, and creative heritage into the pockets of a few big corporations for a virtually unlimited period of time (the effective goal being "forever minus one day", as Jack Valenti put it).

Science and the useful arts are promoted by allowing rightsholders the opportunity to make a decent living out of their work for a while. They're not promoted by allowing rightsholders to make one popular thing in their 20s, live off royalties for the next 60 years, and then enable their posterity to be three or four generations of moochers for the remaining 60+ years left in the copyright.

We want to reward work, but not so much that creative people, let alone entire generations of their offspring, are deprived of the ongoing incentive to contribute. "Necessity is the mother of invention", after all.

Progress is not promoted by locking up cultural icons in impenetrable boxes. We're more concerned about a company's brand image than we are about free discourse or historical records.

Progress is not promoted by raining the force of the American government down on hackers and engineers who build communication systems that make copyright difficult to enforce, or by using arcane legal mechanisms like the CFAA and the RAM Copy doctrine to prevent developers from spidering the web.

I am all for allowing companies to profit, I'm a capitalist. But we need not take that narrative to its extreme and assume that we must allow corporations whatever is best for their bottom line without consideration to the larger social, cultural, and economic concerns at hand. People are creative and will find plenty of ways to cope with revised copyright laws. Remember, the primary goal of copyright is NOT to be a dollar-printing machine in the rock star's basement, but rather to promote the progress of science and useful arts, and we should structure things to ensure that is happening.

Copyright as it exists now primarily functions to serve corporate profiteers. The public only accepts it because it doesn't understand how draconian it gets, since most of the time their in-the-course-of-daily-life-infringements don't result in a lawsuit. We need to fix that.