I'll let T answer for himself about why he cares about this subject, but I'll say why I care about it, and why I think we all should.

As someone who loves traditional music, I appreciate the fact that it belongs to all of us, that we can make it our own. We can sing the version we learned as children, we can make up new verses for this week's special family occasion, or turn it into a protest song for this year's pressing issue. We can come up with new tunes based on the old tunes, without needing to get permission from a company which "owns the rights" to the old tune.

If there were not music which was owned in common ("in the public domain") then every new piece of music would be seen as being a variant of an older piece of music, and therefore owing royalties to it. This would have a chilling effect on the creation of new music.

I'm all in favor of musicians (and other artists) having monopoly rights to their work for their lifetimes. I'm also in favor of these rights continuing after their deaths (after all, we don't want to give anyone a financial incentive to kill the artist!) The question is, how long after death should these rights continue? And in the case of a work created for hire which belongs to a corporation, how long should the corporation have monopoly rights to it?

If the monopoly goes on for too long, it stops being a way to give an incentive for the production of new art, and becomes a way of giving income to those who had nothing to do with the creation of the art, by stealing from the public domain. And that steals from all of us.

Jean, you've made a career of singing the traditional music of the Appalachians. You may want to give some thought to how much you would have to pay if someone was able to come to you and say, "All of the songs you recorded are variants of songs which were registered with the Lord Stationer's Office in London between the years of 1535 and 1685, and therefore you owe royalties to my client. In addition, you must submit all future recordings to us before release, and will not be allowed to release them if my client does not approve of the differences between your version and the version which they own."

It's a frightening thought. And yet, if we allow monopoly rights to art to become eternal, that's what will happen. We've already seen a 75 year period extended to a 95 year period. We can be sure that, before the 95 year period starts running out, the companies that have large holdings in monopoly rights to artwork will be back to the legislature, campaigning to have the term of copyrights extended again. After all, they have a vested interest in extending their monopolies.

We need to understand that we have a vested interest in preserving the the public domain. While we need to provide for artists, and we want to make sure we provide well for them, at some point music needs to revert to all of us.

Jacob