The European Union has proposed a plan to retroactively extend the copyright terms on musical recordings for another 45 years. Apparently, it's unfair for performers who recorded tracks in their twenties not to keep receiving money for them in their seventies; under the current 50-year copyright term, "this means that income stops when performers are retired." Funny—we thought that most retirees faced the same problem.
The whole plan has the whiff of grotesque entitlement about it. Take, for instance, comments made earlier this week by bass player Herbie Flowers in support of an extension. "The term of protection for performers has not kept up with life expectancy and it is high time it was changed. I played on a couple of very successful tracks, including Lou Reed’s 'Walk On The Wild Side' and David Bowie’s 'Space Oddity,' and it would be unfair for me to stop receiving income for this performance after 50 years—probably just at the time when I will need it the most."
One wonders why, knowing all this when he recorded the tracks fifty years ago, Flowers hasn't been putting some of that money aside over the last five decades like everyone else who plans for retirement.
EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy announced back in February his support for term extension, but the plan was not actually put forward until today. It would extend protection from 50 years to 95 years for musical works, and apparently EU citizens should be grateful for such a modest retroactive extension plan; composers and authors already get life plus 70 years.
The plan won't cause consumer prices to rise, which we know because a music-industry-commissioned study says so. It's probably true, since relatively few fifty-year-old recordings sell in any real volume, and most of these performers' pay comes from radio performance payments now.
The high-profile Gowers Report, a lengthy copyright study commissioned by the UK government a few years back, recommended against just such a term extension, and the howls of music industry outrage ("How can you cut off retirees during their most vulnerable years?") sounded much as they do now. The whole bizarre debate never seems to haul itself around to addressing the fact that everyone who participated in the current system did so knowing about the 50-year term; no one is in danger of "losing" anything they were once promised, and they've had half a century to plan for the future.
McCreevey's most compelling argument for the extension is that, in his view, "Copyright represents a moral right of the performer to control the use of his work and earn a living from his performance, at least during his lifetime." Sounds fair enough, though it raises the question of why McCreevey isn't simultaneously trying to retroactively lower the copyright term on books?
The "poor retired musician" argument has been a staple of US lobbying efforts, as well, as artists have trotted up to Capitol Hill recently to demand that Congress force radio stations to pay recording artists (and not just songwriters) for playing their music. No one wants to come out against old and starving musicians, of course, making this the perfect defense whenever rightsholders want to extend copyright terms or rake in more money.
In the EU's case, though, an extra 45 years of protection won't even make that much money (for the artists, anyway); McCreevey's own numbers show that it will produce €150 to €2,000 per year for an "average" artist, an amount small enough that it hardly seems worth locking up the building blocks of cultural creativity for another 45 years. Fortunately, the proposal will allow works to enter the public domain if neither a record label nor a performer "shows any interest in marketing the sound recording" in the first year after the extension passes (assuming that it does).
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