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Euro legal committee OKs copyright extension
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 13 February 2009
Moves at a European level to extend the recording copyright term from fifty to 95 years took another step forward yesterday as the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee gave its backing to the proposals.
As much, much, much previously reported, the UK record industry and recording artist community has been lobbying for sometime to have the copyright on recordings extended to bring it in line with the US, where the recording copyright term is already 95 years.
The argument is that it is unfair that songwriters and their publishers (as well as the artist who designs the record sleeve and the writer who writes the sleeve notes) enjoy a copyright term of life plus seventy years, while record labels and their artists and session musicians enjoy only a fifty year term, meaning many musicians who recorded seminal works in their early twenties lose royalty revenues in their early seventies.
It’s a pressing issue because a number of lucrative early rock n roll recordings are about to come out of copyright.
The campaign for extension was set back when, despite some support among MPs, the government’s 2006 Gowers Report said there was no case for more than fifty years of copyright on recordings.
But extension campaigners then got a boost when the EU’s Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy tabled proposals for a Europe-wide extension. Governments across the EU have subsequently been discussing McCreevy’s proposals at length, and the UK government late last year confirmed that, despite Gowers’ conclusion, they did now back an extension in principle, though not necessarily to as much as 95 years.
The latest draft of McCreevy’s proposals went before the influential Legal Affairs Committee yesterday, where they were given the nod. As previously reported, key to McCreevy’s proposal is that it is recording artists, and session musicians in particular, who benefit most from any extension in the term.
It’s widely known that many even successful artists earn modest sums from their early recordings, with their labels taking the lion’s share of monies generated through record sales, broadcast royalties and licensing deals. Meanwhile, session musicians are unlikely to be due, by contract, any cut of revenues, though all artists involved in a recording are automatically due a share of broadcast royalties, oblivious of their contracts with the record company who released the recording.
It’s as a result of the latter often overlooked copyright law that ageing musicians could still be earning albeit modest royalties from fifty year old recordings. McCreevy wants those musicians to benefit most from an extension in the recording copyright term, by increasing the automatic share of monies they receive after the fifty year cut off – ie so the extension isn’t just about boosting the profits of large record companies.
And while giving the proposals their approval yesterday, the Legal Affairs committee also stressed that it too wanted musicians not record companies to be the biggest beneficiaries of the extension. To that end they added an amendment to ensure musicians couldn’t lose the new royalties they would receive as a result of an extension because of previous contractual agreements with the labels they’d worked with.
The committee also focused in on the proposed fund for session musicians, which would get 20% of revenues generated as a result of the extension.
The vote of confidence in the proposals from the Legal Affairs Committee is the first of three steps to getting the extension proposals into European law. Next the European Parliament will vote on the proposals next month, and then they will go before the Council Of Ministers, where representatives from the governments of each country in the EU will have to approve the proposals.
While most people seem to think the proposals will now be passed by both the Parliament and the Council, there could be delays at the latter stage. Because of the various measures to ensure performers over labels benefit from the copyright extension, the proposals are much more complicated than just reaching a compromise on the actual length of the term.
UK IP Minister David Lammy said at a recent meeting at the Houses Of Parliament that while he and his colleagues had now accepted the case for extension, that “opinions on this vary across Europe – so there needs to be some canny footwork to make this happen”.
Still, yesterday’s decision is still an important step for the pro-extension lobby. Responding to the news, Feargal Sharkey’s UK Music told reporters: “In recommending that the current term of copyright protection for sound recordings is extended to 95 years, the Committee has recognised the value of music and the importance of the work of artists, musicians and entrepreneurs, both now and in the future, and that parity with other creators is fair and just”.
Globally focused trade body the IFPI added: “Europe is a source of some of the most exciting and innovative music in the world and this initiative will end the discrimination in the term of protection for sound recordings in EU member states compared to many other countries around the world”.
