Claude

Seriously, these are historic concerts, and you prefer not to see footage of these legends playing? A CD won't sound better than a DVD (except if your DVD player is sub-par).

I think it took an awful lot of lobbying to get this through. The proposal was blocked in the EU Council (the governements) for many months. At one point, it was so close that Luxembourg (which has few votes in the Council due to it's size) had the decisive vote, and the pro-extension lobby had Bono himself make a phone call to one of our ministers. It didn't work though. But in the end, they managed to turn one blocking governement around. Maybe Elvis called

I think some authors don't mind this confusion, as they like to make the directive appear more drastic than it is.

Hans, that depends on the definition of "retroactive". The Commission calls it "partly retroactive". "Non-retroactive" would mean the 70 year duration only applies to works created after the entry into force of the directive (which would of course miss the objective of keeping the music from the 1960s and later under protection) "Fully retroactive" would mean that the directive applies the 70 year protection to everything, which means that recordings fallen into the public domain would be protected again. That would be catastrophic for the CD commerce, as thousands of public domain CDs would have to be sold quickly until the deadline or be destroyed. "Partly retroactive" means the longer duration is applied to all recordings which are still protected. That's a much smoother solution, and the one that was chosen. It's explained on page 56 of the impact assessment document: http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/term-protection/term-protection_en.htm The text of the directive says

I'm rather indifferent to the decision, because I think the debate is foremost ideological. I'm personally not interested in public domain reissues, because of their often questionable quality, and because they are overpriced (strangely often more expensive than the official midprice reissues) With the current solution, the public domain labels can continue with their business but their reissue horizon will be limited to 1963 for the next 20 years. Maybe they can benefit from the "use it or lose it"-clause in the directive, which allows them to reissue material that is not being kept available (on disc or as downloads) by the rightholders.

The copyright term extension will NOT be retroactive. The text will extend to 70 years the protection of the recordings which are still protected at the date at which the EU countries must have transposed the directive, which is 2 years from the entry into force. So if the directive is now quickly approved and enters into force this year, the extension will apply to all recordings made after 1963.

The main reason why most music downloads are still only in MP3 quality is because it's the most compatible format, which can be played in computers (of course), on all portable players, and most newer generation car radios and DVD players. The hardware that supports FLAC is still quite rare, especially with portable players. The initial reason for MP3 - limited internet bandwith, limited storage capacity - is hardly relevant anymore. So I think that as soon as the major electronics companies support the same lossless compression codec, the market for lossless downloads will explode. Buying a rare OOP CD for $40 on Ebay or paying $10 for a lossless download of the same CD, my decision is easily made.

The fake german instruction videos about Gabelstaplerfahrer (fork lifter driver) Klaus are cult too

Yeah, but do friendlies count? I doubt that all the players take them seriously.

If it's a name of dutch origin, I would say "creet", but of course the usual pronunciation in the US could be very different.

What do the scratches look like? If the player did it, the scratches would all look similar.

How do you attach a bow to a real cat's ear, Hello Kitty style? With a safety pin?

All this on one laptop hard drive, and no backup. Probably not the last version of the story.

Here's one of his album covers. Quite fitting for the current story http://www.rogerdavidsonmusic.net/discography/

From the information given in the articles, the victim seems extremely gullible. How could he have fallen for this Opus Dei story?