The rock dinosaurs of the 1960s are in line for a spectacular windfall after the EU announced plans yesterday to extend musicians' entitlement to retrospective royalties from 50 to 95 years. Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Cliff Richard and Roger Daltrey have all campaigned for what the record industry calls "the Beatles extension", which will guarantee most artists royalties covering their entire careers. The first Beatles recordings will come out of copyright in 2012 and EMI, which owns them, has been a leading campaigner for the change in legislation. Sir Cliff, 67, sees his first hit go out of copyright this year but under the EU proposal he would not lose a penny before his 113th birthday. Daltrey, lead singer of The Who, has said that thousands of musicians have no pensions and rely on royalties in their old age. For many campaigners, however, the extra income is probably not essential for paying the winter heating bills. Yoko Ono and Barry Gibb were among 4,500 who took out a newspaper advertisement in 2006 calling for 95-year copyright control.
The rock dinosaurs of the 1960s are in line for a spectacular windfall after the EU announced plans yesterday to extend musicians' entitlement to retrospective royalties from 50 to 95 years.
Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Cliff Richard and Roger Daltrey have all campaigned for what the record industry calls "the Beatles extension", which will guarantee most artists royalties covering their entire careers.
The first Beatles recordings will come out of copyright in 2012 and EMI, which owns them, has been a leading campaigner for the change in legislation. Sir Cliff, 67, sees his first hit go out of copyright this year but under the EU proposal he would not lose a penny before his 113th birthday.
Daltrey, lead singer of The Who, has said that thousands of musicians have no pensions and rely on royalties in their old age. For many campaigners, however, the extra income is probably not essential for paying the winter heating bills. Yoko Ono and Barry Gibb were among 4,500 who took out a newspaper advertisement in 2006 calling for 95-year copyright control.
It's only part of the story WRT music copyrights. These are the sound recording rights, signified by the (P) mark.
At the same time there's the traditional (C) copyrights in the song itself, and these, as usual, don't run out until death+70. So Cliff isn't suddenly going to starve when his (P) sound recording rights expire. Not that that's a compelling argument anyway, since Cliff has as much opportunity to invest in a pension as anyone else.
"Bringing sound recording rights into line with copyrights" is totally disingenuous, since creation+95 is just as different from death+70 as creation+50 was. If it were about making the licensing maze simpler, we could have just gone with something easy like creation+100 for both and at least we'd know where we stood.
No, the reason for this proposal is to please the music industry lobby, primarily the Big Four record labels that own the majority of the rights. They knew when they were paying to have the recordings created that they would have 50 years to profit as rightsholders; this is the contract between the creator and the public that copyright enshrines, to promote the creation of works that will eventually end up in the public domain. Instead the public domain will be cheated out of the music it was promised when that contract was made 50 years ago. Not just the tiny proportion of the music of 1958 that is still commercially viable today, but all of it - and that leaves the public much poorer.
So change the terms of copyrights if you like, but a retroactive increase in copyright is a gift from the public to the music industry from which we receive no benefit, and should be opposed.
