Free the music; Musicians' rights II

Pa ElGrande

'If nothing is done,'' he says, ''thousands of European performers who recorded in the late 1950s and 1960s will lose all of their airplay royalties over the next 10 years.'' The proposal would extend to performers ''the entitlements to royalty payments enjoyed by their counterparts in the United States.''

This misleadingly implies that a) most surviving performers from the '50s and '60s own or control their recordings; that b) therefore they stand to lose a proven ongoing income; that c) things are somehow rosier for musicians in the draconian, wholly corporate-owned recording copyright jungle of the United States.

More worrying, the proposal ignores the fact that a copyright extension to 95 years effectively robs EU citizens of their entire 20th century cultural birthright. The philosophical basis of the current European copyright term carefully balances equitable rewards to industry against the long-term interests of the general community.

As in other territories, EU copyright law recognizes a distinction between protecting a) the creator of a work (in this context, the original melody of a song and, where relevant, its attendant lyrics) and b) a recording - i.e., the event captured in the grooves of a vinyl record or the digits of a CD. The protection term for a work is calculated on the basis of the lifetime of its author (i.e. composer and/or lyricist) plus 70 years .

EU copyright in a recording currently lasts for 50 years from the end of the year in which it was recorded and/or first released. This is designed to give the recording's owners (typically, the record label) the exclusive right to exploit it for long enough to recoup their initial investment and make a decent profit.

After that, the recording becomes part of the public domain . It can then be reproduced and sold by anyone, without reference to the original owner, provided royalties are paid on any protected works featured in the recording. This is the legal basis for all legitimate independent reissues.

It is significant that the European Patent Convention gives industrial patents, which often involve many years of expensive research, a mere 20-year protection term from filing date. By comparison, even the existing EU 50-year copyright term for recordings seems generous. If it takes more than 50 years for copyright owners to turn a significant profit on a recording, perhaps they're in the wrong business.
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Again our rights are being taken away, little by little, this copyright extension is all about protecting major record cartels revenue from the likes of Elvis Presley and The Beatles. It is another reason to vote no to the Lisbon Treaty, since this will enable the concentration of even more power in Brussels and make the cartels efforts at lobbying more effective. Make no mistake the cartels ultimate goal is to eliminate public Domain and restrict cultural development and expression.