This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Labels & Publishers Legal Top Stories
Bragg supports Green amendment to copyright proposals
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 23 April 2009
Billy Bragg has again hit out at the current European proposals for the extension of the recording copyright term from fifty to 95 years.
As much previously reported, UK record industry trade bodies like the BPI, PPL, UK Music and the Musicians’ Union have, for ages now, been lobbying, at both a UK and European level, for an extension of the copyright term enjoyed by sound recordings, which is currently just fifty years in Europe, compared to 95 years in the US, and the life plus seventy years term enjoyed by songwriters (and all writers for that matter, and playwrights, artists and film-makers).
After initial resistance from the UK government regarding term extension, Culture Minister Andy Burham and IP Minister David Lammy said they would support proposals submitted at a European level to extend the term, though not necessarily to 95 years. So far so good. Except Lammy says his interest is in boosting the royalty revenues of aging musicians, not record companies, and at the last minute said that the European proposals didn’t do enough to safeguard the long term interests of musicians over music corporations once a recording passes the fifty year point. In doing so he delayed the progression of the proposals.
PPL and the Musicians Union criticised Lammy’s role in causing that delay, arguing that they both represented musicians who supported the extension proposals as they currently stood. But then Bragg and the newish trade body he represents, the Featured Artists Coalition, said it supported Lammy and shared his concerns that the term extension proposals as they current stood were far too biased towards record companies over artists. In fact Bragg advocates a much more radical proposal than that being pushed for by Lammy – that the copyright term is extended, but after fifty years the copyright reverts to the artist, oblivious of past contractual obligations to record companies, and even if they never recouped on that record label’s original investment.
He says that that would give ageing artists the opportunity to renegotiate their record deals, fifty year old agreements which, he says, are no longer fair because they assume the record company is footing all kinds of ongoing manufacture and distribution costs that don’t exist in the digital age. He said the term extension as it currently stands “simply perpetuates recording contracts that were signed in the last 50 years [based on the label covering the costs of physical music distribution]. Now that they no longer have to do that, new revenues will go straight into their bottom line. This legislation offers the multinational record corporations a potential windfall of the size of the invention of the CD”.
The Green Party amendment Bragg supports proposes that any monies generated from a sound recoding after the initial fifty years be paid to a collecting society that would distribute them to artists and performers rather than record labels.
