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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

It also means You can trust your music will be your own, for most of your life.

You think people who start their own rock band do it for the pension benefits? Also do you really think this is about a handful of rock groups that would benefit from this? It's all about the labels, period. They stand to gain a lot more from this than a bunch of 70 year old artists, who by the way, are still gaining from their more "recent" 50 year old music.

"Your music" is just a remix of sounds and words from earlier artists. Extending copyright like this stifles innovation and future creativity.

Please explain this nonsensical argument. How does the Rolling Stones holding the copyright to Paint It Black stifle someone else's innovation and creativity? Seriously. Innovation and creativity go with being original, and you're encouraging being derivative.

Look at Disney and don't tell me that a lack of copyright makes creativity. A lack of copyright just enables corporations to mass produce drivel from non-copyrighted works and cut out the talented people. Disney is barely a step away from just an algorithm that creates film scripts from Brothers Grimm stories.

There's no need for retro-activity here. It necessarily does not give any incentive for the works for which it applies, while still costing society the same high price.

When copyright periods are described, they describe the amount of time after the author's death that the work remains copyrighted. Your music is your own while you live with no limitations; this is about your estate and your inheritors deriving profit from your work, not about you.

No, not in this case. Composers and authors enjoy protection past their death, but this law refers to music performers. These are only protected for 50 years from the date they are created.

Ah, you seem to be right:

http://www.openmusicarchive.org/faq.php

This is important, as presumably you can't copy a recording with impunity if the musical composition is still under copyright (as with any songs written in the 1960s). If thats the case, it just means more people actually responsible for creating the recording get paid

If you write music, it will always be your music, even after the copyright has expired.

Copyright is about the government stopping other people from using a work without permission of the copyright holder, not about identifying whose work something is.

In that case force labels to revert 100% of the rights back to the original creators after 25 years. We will see how much those so called "artist rights lobbyist" work for that one.

It also means _you_ can trust your music rights will be your music label's own, for most of your life.

Then if _you_ care so much, why did _you_ sell out to _your_ music label?

There's other ways to handle the music labels than abolish copyright.

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