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It’s at times like this I like being proved wrong. 

There I was, only days ago harping on about Westminster apparently not – in the words of Monty Python – “giving a tinker’s cuss for the struggling artist” (John Cleese, God bless you!).  Now the House of Commons Culture Media and Sport Committee has fallen on the side of recording artists’ ongoing campaign to extend their copyright, according to a report issued by them.  

A Parliamentary statement issued to the press on 16^th May said the Committee had, after an eighteen-month inquiry into the effects of new technology on creative content, concluded in their report that, among other things, “We have not heard a convincing reason why a composer and his or her heirs should benefit from a term of copyright which extends for lifetime and beyond, but a performer should not”.  Interestingly enough, the statement then went on to say the Committee found “…the rejection of an extension to copyright term by Andrew Gowers in his Review of Intellectual Property, published in December 2006, failed to take account of the moral right of creators to choose to retain ownership and control of their own intellectual property.” 

Well there’s a turn up for the books.  Not only will this now have the still shining stars of the recording industry firmament who’ve been campaigning about this smiling, such as Sir Cliff Richard, but most important of all, the non-composing one-time stars and lesser known backing singers and musicians too, as well as their surviving heirs such as Sharon Donegan, Lonnie Donegan’s widow, about whom I posted so recently. 

Now I, like the Committee, feel the UK’s creatives, as an industry and especially as individuals, should be protected as much as possible, and the conclusions of the report have the ring of sound judgement to my ears.  In following this story these past months however, if I have started to have a second thought – or thoughts – it’s these:

First, the argument from those against an extension to seventy years like the National Consumer Council, who consider it unnecessary, basing this statement on the reasoning that the product which artists and record labels produce has a finite shelf life of years, not decades.  Now I’ve worked in the film industry and there’s tonnes of product that briefly appears on the rental shelves and is gone, perhaps never to see the light of day again.  And if it does show up again in Virgin or HMV, it’ll be for the hardcore genre geeks… if you’re lucky.  I’d equate the music biz in pretty much the same way; particularly in light of production-line “blink and miss them” pop boy and girl bands.  Can a significant amount still be earned over decades from one such flashes-in-the pan?  And another thing; is even the staffing time to do the book-keeping and revenue collection cost effective against the revenues?  It is a fair question.  Having said that, if composers have their lives plus seventy years to enjoy copyright protection, shouldn’t the NCC argue against that too? 

Then there’s my second, um… second thought, the opinion of such as Mark Mulligan of Jupiter Research; that the campaign is just for the benefit of the record labels who own the rights to the recordings, and hardly for the artists themselves.  Again it’s a fair point.  The labels are the first in line to cash the cheque. 

What may answer these concerns – partially anyway – is the fact recording artists and new bands are more empowered now to promote and sell their work themselves than at any other time.  Example; in using MySpace, I personally have discovered artists and bands I never would have known about and whose work is great. 

Digital media is re-shaping the music industry, at the grass-roots level, with the bands themselves pushing the envelope to forge their careers and build their own fan base.  What shape that future may be is still unwritten.  But, to me anyway, it seems right now that the bands may have a bigger hand in shaping it.  And if Web 2.0 and its further iterations is the future, then the need for a longer copyright may well be exactly what was required for bands to make the most of the tools they use to promote their work. 

So what happens next after the Committee’s report?  Well, we wait and see whether the government will step up and embrace the cause. 

© 2007 Julian Boote  All Rights reserved.www.dulynoted.co.uk

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