Law & Disorder / Civilization & Discontents

No Beatles for you! EU adds 20 years to music copyrights

Three years after the push for copyright term extension began, the EU has …

It took three years of doing, but the music industry has finally won its European battle to lock up in-copyright sound recordings for another 20 years. Looking forward to The Beatles' music entering the public domain as the 50-year copyright terms expires? Not going to happen.

The Council of the European Union, where the various member state governments all have a say, voted yesterday (PDF) without discussion to increase the copyright term in sound recordings from 50 to 70 years. Small countries like Belgium, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Sweden voted against the extension, but it passed anyway.

The long and winding road to this point actually began in 2008, when the European Union announced a plan to extend musical copyrights to 95 years. The stated objective was to "help aging session musicians" who had been making small amounts of money from these recordings for 50 years but were about to be cut off just when the rigors of old age were taking their toll. (Why hadn't they saved money for the future during the last 50 years like everyone else? Who knows—it was a point no one seemed keen on addressing.)

In 2009, the European Parliament passed the extension, but it was blocked from adoption at the Council level (it was also lowered to 70 years from 95 years). After several years of lobbying, enough countries switched their position on the extension to allow yesterday's vote.

"Performers generally start their careers young and the current term of protection of 50 years often does not protect their performances for their entire lifetime," wrote the Council afterwards. "Therefore, some performers face an income gap at the end of their lifetimes."


Reactions have been predictable. The CEO of global music trade group IFPI, Frances Moore, said in a statement that the vote was "a victory for fairness. With this decision, the European Union is giving artists and producers in Europe the fair treatment they deserve."

Pirate Party MEP Christian Engström, who tried and failed to give Parliament another shot at voting on the issue, took to his blog to call the decision "yet another example of how the Council and Commission of the EU are completely in the hands of the copyright lobby and will do whatever the lobbyists ask them to, no matter how absurd or harmful to society it may be." (Engström has strong views on the issue. He recently said in an interview, "It is true that the record companies have lost half their revenues. I say: 'Excellent! Half the job done.' What record companies do is distribution—it used to be an important function but now any teenager in his or her bedroom can do that work for free. In a market economy, your company will disappear unless it’s competitive.")

The UK's Open Rights Group called the measure "a cultural disaster… Research showed that around 90 percent of the cash windfall from copyright levies will fall into the hands of record labels." The group also pointed out that the the UK's own government-commissioned reports on intellectual property had been skeptical of extending copyright protection—though there's a long history of ignoring expert opinion on this topic.

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