Don't worry, we won't ruin your Christmas festivities too much with long summaries of this year's Copyright news. But, aside from the merger of the UK's three recorded royalty collection bodies - PPL, PAMRA and AURA - three copyright stories deserve mention.
Firstly, the discussions in the EU regarding the so called iPod tax, where a levy is charged on the sales of CDRs and MP3 players which is passed on to royalty collecting societies to compensate artists and songwriters for the private copying of their music. These levies exist in most EU countries (though not the UK), but the technology sector has been busy lobbying to have them axed. A decision on the future of the levies was expected from the European Commission this month, but in the end officials said they needed more time to consider the issue. Needless to say the royalty bodies who benefit from the levies continue to speak in favour of them, while in the UK the Association Of Independent Music says that, far from abolishing the levies, European governments should consider setting up a wider levy system whereby technology, media or communication companies who indirectly benefit from music (by selling gadgets, or internet services or whatever) should have to pay a cut of their revenues to the music community. Which is an interesting proposal, though possibly a difficult one to implement.
Though 2006 was the year to be raising new ideas regarding copyright, because Chancellor Of The Exchequer, Gordon Brown, had commissioned former Financial Times chief Andrew Gowers to undertake a complete review of intellectual property law in the UK. The big issue as far as the record industry was concerned, of course, was the extension of recorded copyrights, currently 50 years, up to 95 years, to bring them in line with the US. This is important to the long established record labels, who are currently seeing valuable catalogue from the 1950s coming out of copyright. Hoping the Gowers Review would be a good opportunity to get such an extension on the government's agenda, the labels, supported by a string of artists though, most notably, Cliff Richard, began their 'Extend The Term' campaign. But alas, without result, because Gowers said he could see no case for extending the recorded copyright, despite the inconsistency between UK (or actually European) and US copyright terms. Despite Gowers' conclusion, labels and artists will continue to lobby government in a bid to secure a longer copyright - and sooner rather than later, what with the even more valuable 1960s catalogue due to come out of copyright in the next decade.
Finally in copyright news, there was the big Copyright Tribunal or, rather, there wasn't. The long running dispute between the record labels and digital music companies on one side and the music publishers on the other, was due to go before the Copyright Tribunal courts this Autumn. The debate was what percentage of digital music revenues should go to the publishers and songwriters. The publishers wanted more because, they argued, the record labels' cost in selling digital music were so much smaller than in physical CD sales. The labels argued that, especially because of the set up costs they had incurred in getting the download sector established, their costs remained high, so the publishers shouldn't be due a bigger cut of the pie than they were currently getting (about 8%). In the end most parties involved in the dispute reached an out of court agreement so that, while some issues regarding the streaming of music by digital media companies remain unresolved, the big Copyright Tribunal that had been due to take place never actually occurred.