JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Songwriter Message Forum Songwriter payouts - Vanity article

In a word, YES. I think the net gain to humanity for 99.99999% of the less famous works to be SAVED outweighs that small number of those that would go on to be viable. Look at it this way, we didn't used to have this absurd length of time for intellectual property to be restrained. If civilization is to keep advancing, we need to be able to utilize it in new ways with new generations. If your work somehow survives as a commercial interest for nearly a century, great. But almost NOTHING will last that long, and everything else will be forever lost to humanity. By opening up hard copy archives we at least make it possible for those works to be digitally preserved. Right now no one can legally do that. And by the time they can, stuff like CD's and Tapes will be mostly unplayable and no one will know who OWNS it if it IS playable. This is a tiny era where we have hard copies of music and words and other media, but we saw it with early films, most disintegrated in their cans. More will suffer the same fate and nearly 100% of independent, non corporate music and other artistic content will vanish as if it never existed. ALL of it needs to be digitized and backed up for the future of humans to benefit from, learn from, and add an everlasting human footprint of the most important artistic era in history, the time when we could CAPTURE content in a tangible form and preserve it for future generations. Imagine if we had all the music made in first eras of history? Imagine if we had all the first hand histories ever known recorded for reference now? This minimal short term commercial window is simply going to ensure yet another century plus of humanity is ONLY view from the perspective of mega successful elites and nothing else. Aerosmith will be around, but not 99.99999999% of everyone else.