Chris Pollette
Hello everybody. Welcome to Tech Stuff. My name is Chris Pollette and I am an editor here at howstuffworks.com. Sitting across from me again, as usual, is senior writer Jonathan Strickland.
Jonathan Strickland
Hi, and I’d just like to thank all the people who downloaded and/or streamed this podcast.
Chris Pollette
Excellent. That was very nice of you.
Jonathan Strickland
Yes, and I’d also like to thank our guest producer, Matt Frederick – amazing musician, a member of Lions and Scissors. Matt, I know you would do nothing to ever interrupt us in our podcast, isn’t that true? Matt’s nodding yes.
Chris Pollette
And he finished the Beatle’s: Rock Band in one day.
Jonathan Strickland
He did finish the Beatle’s: Rock Band in one day. He played the drums on expert all the way through.
Chris Pollette
Excellent.
Jonathan Strickland
Yeah.
Chris Pollette
All right. So actually, the Beatle’s were recently rumored to be coming to iTunes store, and they didn’t. Actually, people have been waiting for this to happen and there’s a reason why they didn’t come out yet with the digital versions of their songs.
Jonathan Strickland
What would that be?
Chris Pollette
That would be copyright.
Jonathan Strickland
Oooh, copyright. Now here’s a sticky situation. Now of course, copyright does not just fall under the realm of Tech Stuff. Technically, many of our sister podcasts could cover this topic. But copyright does hold a special place within the field of technology because things like the Internet have made it very easy to distribute information on a scale much larger than what could be achieved on one’s own previously.
Chris Pollette
Oh, yes. The idea of copyright goes back a very long time. And it was only recently – really, in the 20th and 21st centuries that copyright has been extended to amazing lengths. In the United States, the current length of copyright is the death of the author plus 70 years.
Jonathan Strickland
Right. And if it’s an anonymous or pseudonymous work for hire, these works go 95 years from the year of its publication. So when you can’t identify the author, 95 years from when it was published. That’s a long time. And there are various organizations that are responsible for pushing copyright to these extremes.
Chris Pollette
And in most cases, it’s not the author and it’s not the government who’s concerned about it. It’s more like the publisher.
Jonathan Strickland
Yeah, or giant corporations.
Chris Pollette
Well, yeah.
Jonathan Strickland
I can think of one in particular.
Chris Pollette
Yes, I know. The corporation I think you’re thinking of is generally given credit for -
Posted in TechStuff Tagged: attribution, copyright, creative commons, creative commons license, TechStuff, TechStuff podcast
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