At UK Music's Creators' Conference on 1 December 2008, Culture Minister Andy Burnham announced the backing of the UK Government to extending the copyright term for sound recordings to 70 years.
The decision goes against the recommendations of Andrew Gowers,
whose 2006 review of copyright is in favour of keeping copyright at 50
years. It is however more in line with the proposals made in February
2008 by EC Internal Markets commissioner Charlie McCreevy to increase
the term of protection to 95 years.
Presently, the revenues from
a sound recording goes to the musicians who performed on the recording
and to the owners of the recording. Burnham clearly supports the former
and called on the music business to make sure the measure benefits
musicians and not the industry big companies. "We want the industry to
come back with good, workable ideas as to how a proposal on copyright
extension might be framed that directly and predominantly benefits
performers – both session and featured musicians," he declared.
The
EC proposition adopted on 16 July 2008 introduces the extension of the
term not only for the performers but also for the producers. The
proposal has been largely opposed, many arguing that the copyright
extension will be detrimental to innovation and creativity and that
other measures would be more appropriate and efficient to support aging
performers.
The extension of the copyright term was also
discussed on 2-3 December 2008 in the Competitiveness Council that
backed the Progress report adopted at the end of November. The report
states that the extension of the term to 95 years is considered by some
Member States as too long, doubting the capacity of the proposal to
reach its objective in a satisfactory and balanced way. However, some
of these Member States might accept a more moderate extension.
As
a response to concerns expressed by some of the Member States that the
measure might be discriminatory if only applied to the music sector,
the presidency of the Council proposed that the extended term should
cover audiovisual performers as well.
Concerning the right of
session musicians to claim additional annual remuneration and the
performers' option to recuperate their rights in the absence of
exploitation by the phonogram producer, the presidency has proposed
that such rights might not be waived and the "use it or lose it" clause
for copyright – where the ownership of forgotten recordings reverts to
the performer – cannot be renounced by performers. Discussion on the
topic should continue.
As to the question of the harmonisation
of the method of calculating the term of protection of musical
compositions with words, the Presidency suggested the limitation of the
scope to musical compositions and lyrics specifically created to
constitute a musical composition with words. The question of the period
of application is still to be settled.
The draft Directive is
also considered within the European Parliament. The non-leading
Committee for Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) adopted
the Emmanouil Angelakas' (EPP-ED – Greece) draft opinion on 2 December
2008. Just a few amendments were adopted, among them the application of
the extended term of protection (95 years) not only to music performers
but also to audiovisual performers.
On 19 January 2009, the
Legal Affairs Committee is expected to adopt its report and the
Parliament will vote on the proposal in plenary on 18 February 2009.
