[Commons-Law] From 50 to 95: EU seeks to accommodate increasing life expectancy of retired rockers

[Pranesh Prakash]

Dear All,
Nate Anderson's piece is so well argued that there is not much one can add
by way of comment.  One point which I believe deserves greater discussion is
the role that differing views of copyright (for benefit of the individual
vs. for benefit of society / as entitlement vs. as incentive) play in
argumentation around things like copyright term.  If one argues for it as
entitlement (neo-Lockean/neo-Hegelian justifications, etc.), then it seems
to me to be easier to justify even a retroactive copyright term extension.
Any thoughts on this?

Cheers,
Pranesh

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EU caves to aging rockers, wants 45-year copyright
extension<http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080716-eu-caves-to-aging-rockers-wants-45-year-copyright-extension.html>

By Nate Anderson <http://arstechnica.com/authors.ars/Nate+Anderson> |
Published: July 16, 2008 - 01:00PM CT

The European Commission today filed its proposal for extending musical
copyrights from 50 to 95 years, retroactively. The argument? Think of the
children aging musicians.

The European Union has proposed a plan to retroactively extend the copyright
terms<http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/term-protection/term-protection_en.htm>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<http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080214-eu-commissioner-lets-extend-music-copyrights-to-95-years-ars-50-years-is-plenty.html>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 <http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061206-8367.html>, 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<http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070801-radio-should-it-pay-to-play-songs.html>(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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