Extending copyright is music to major labels' ears

Pa ElGrande

Extending copyright is music to major labels' ears
Friday, January 23, 2009


McCreevy’s new directive could be better known as the “music label preservation order”, since it is designed to shuttle back into the record label’s possession the recordings of the first rock’n’roll songs, which are now beginning to fall out of copyright.

Copyright term extension is a policy that most economic experts, left and right, agree has given little benefit to artists and a lot to major media companies seeking to eke out an income from their back catalogue.

Since the first complaints were raised in 1998, the arguments have grown louder and stronger against copyright term extension.

We now know, through the rise of the net, that works can spread and can be protected by allowing them to be duplicated and spread by those who love them.

The public domain – the free space that all copyrighted works fall into after their time is up – is flourishing. It’s easier to find a work that’s fallen out of copyright (like Night of the Living Dead, a 1968 film that fell into the public domain due to administrative error), than to obtain a paid-for copy of many VHS classics.

Meanwhile, old films – not just Mickey Mouse – that should have entered the public domain by now, allowing them to be freely copied and preserved are literally fading away, rotting as single copies in film studio vaults.

But is giving rightsholders another chance to make a buck a bad thing? McCreevy would say not. He argued that extending copyright is a moral act, giving the living artists a pension they might not otherwise have. The truth is the majority of individual artists will gain €0.50 – €20 a year in “windfall” term extension profits.

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aidan_walsh

http://www.digitalrights.ie/2009/01/21/tell-your-mep-to-say-no-to-copyright-extension/

The European Parliament is currently considering proposals that would dramatically increase - close to doubling - the length of copyright in music recordings. We’d like you to tell your MEP to vote no.