Copyright, the protection of intellectual property. In essence it is a no brainer that an individual should be compensated for the use of their work. However, what are the limitations and guidelines that ensure the creativity and compensation is adequate and not a detriment to future works. In class we discussed the compensation rights to be 20-30 years after an artist died and incrementally it began to rise in years over the years.

I would have to argue that while the individual who created the music or book is alive they should always be compensated. Upon death, the compensation should then be a smaller percentage and upon 25 years after death no compensation. Consequently, there is a similar thing the US Government does with certain reports and investigations where they lock up the results for a significant amount of time ie. Nixon Tapes, JFK report and MLK report.

The issue is that things start to become trivial and issues will always arise when it deals with money. We have witnessed in the last few years major cases of royalty rights with the “blurred lines” and “stay with me” songs created by Robin Thicke and Sam Smith respectively. They each were charged by the public of stealing the creative rights to the song and sounding similar to the original song. As such, Robin Thicke was sent to court and ordered to pay millions of dollars in royalty and Sam Smith voluntarily (he probably knew he would lose in court) settled out of court with Tom Petty.

This really takes the fun out of enjoying the music – an artist creates a song and then we hear the backlash that takes away from the creativity of the song. Maybe that is just my weird thoughts…