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Burnham outlines government’s five point plan for music

By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 26 February 2009

Culture Secretary Andy Burnham was on a bit of a charm offensive at a BPI/ACM organised meeting the other night, which isn’t that surprising. After a year of getting up close and personal with the music business, talking up his support for the industry and making vague commitments to help it tackle its biggest issues of the moment, Burnham’s colleagues haven’t really delivered.

Yes, the government has reversed its position on extending the copyright term – the UK will support European moves to increase the term from the current fifty years – but IP Minister David Lammy has made it very clear he’s no interest in extending the term beyond 70 years (the industry wants 95 years), and that he’s only doing it for the benefit of aging musicians; record labels he has little time for.

And then there’s the ISPs and internet piracy debate. While Burnham has been putting pressure on the internet service providers to take a more proactive role in policing online piracy, hinting at possible new laws to force them to take that role if they won’t do so voluntarily, Communications Minister Lord Carter, in his much anticipated Digital Britain report, proposed the record industry sue anyone they suspect of file sharing. A strategy considered, adopted and then sensibly dropped by the UK record industry several years ago.

But Burnham remains confident he’s the man to help the music business survive these tricky times, and used the BPI/ACM event at the Houses Of Parliament this week to outline his five point plan to help the industry in the next twelve months. Though three of those points are basically educational initiatives which, while important, are hardly anything new, and with cross-sector trade body UK Music already developing a number of new education programmes, I’m not sure we need any more just yet.

The other two points of the plan deal with the aforementioned ‘big issues’. Copyright extension and piracy.

On the first point Burnham reconfirmed the government’s position. Lammy will support extending the European recording copyright when it reaches the EU’s Council Of Ministers, though only to 70 years, and with stepped up measures to ensure musicians benefit most from the extension. With some European countries against extension, and others supporting the 95 years that EU commissioner Charlie McCreevy proposed and the industry is asking for, presumably Lammy sees his proposals as being a neat compromise.

On the second point, Burnham turned attention away from the somewhat lacklustre recommendations in ‘Digital Britain’ regarding getting ISPs more involved in the fight against piracy, and instead stressed that this was also an international issue. Covering much of the same ground as at the Music Tank debate on the issue late last year, he said he would dedicate time in 2009 to speaking to his European and US counterparts

He told the meeting: “I am working towards an international memorandum of understanding, it is time for much more serious dialogue with European and US partners. No solely national solution will work. It can only be durable with international consensus”.

He added that he hoped to use the global creative industries conference he’ll stage in October (what he insists on called the “Davos for creative business”, though with less snow presumably) as a forum for debate on this issue. Record labels would presumably like it if the French and New Zealanders got to speak most at any such debate, them being most hardline to date when it comes to forcing ISPs to act on online piracy, mainly by introducing the sometimes controversial three-strike system.