Here’s a dull sounding subject which doesn’t seem to have had an enormous amount of coverage this week. The House of Commons Committee for Media, Culture and Sport has published a report of recommendations across a wide range of media issues. There are 28 in total, covering a wide range of issues – I’ll concentrate on just one.
We recommend that the Government should press the European Commission to bring forward proposals for an extension of copyright term for sound recordings to at least 70 years, to provide reasonable certainty that an artist will be able to derive benefit from a recording throughout his or her lifetime.
According to PPL, the UK is an unattractive place to record because you get 95 years copyright on recordings from date of recording rather than the paltry 50 you get here. Catalogue values are reduced as a result of this shorter period, so the argument goes.
Of course, most recordings that remain in copyright as they approach that 50 year limit are completely unavailable, unless you can hunt out old pieces of vinyl. Certainly, all the famous recordings are readily available – The Beatles, Elivs, Cliff Richard… But not the rest. The other songs that were in the charts.
Seemingly, the whole of the record industry agreed with the proposal to keep their recordings exclusively to themselves. Who’d have thought?
Read more here and here.
Incidentally, I can’t help but notice that a certain amount of The Beatles back catalogue is now vaguely appropriately priced for recordings that are forty years’ old or so. Sgt. Pepper is a tenner in Virgin just now. I don’t doubt the musical genius of the pieces, just the appallingly over-priced nature of them. Until now, at least. It couldn’t be anything to do with iTunes selling the albums at around eight pounds a pop someday soon?