This week a major victory was won for the old fogies of the music world. The European Union announced a plan to extend the copyright term on recordings from 50 to 95 years. This means that an aging rocker who played washboard on a skiffle hit back in 1959 won’t need to worry about where his pension will come from after next year.
That’s great for Mr Washboard but what about if I’ve got a fantastic track I’ve put together sampling said skiffle hit from 1959? What if I’d been planning on waiting until it went out of copyright to utilise it? Suddenly that’s taken away from me.
That might sound selfish of me. Surely I shouldn’t be waiting to pounce on just-expired copyrights? Well, imagine if Shakespeare’s ancestors kept lobbying for the extension of copyright on his works? Just think of all the great adaptations and re-imaginings of the Shakespearian canon that would have been kept from the world. Surely Mr Washboard, being of sound mind and all that, would have known his copyright would be expiring and would have sorted out alternative pension arrangements long in advance?
Music copyright is indeed a mess. Geared towards protecting an ‘old guard’ (be that aging musicians or record labels clinging onto revenue streams by the skins of their teeth) it stifles the kind of innovation that people are clamouring for at the moment. Just look at the technology sector – data mashups are all the rage there. Whether it’s companies like Twitter and Youtube opening up APIs to allow access to their data in new and exciting ways or the BBC with their Backstage initiative, companies are desperate to see what developers out there can do with their data.
Back in the 80s, when digital sampling became possible, the ‘old guard’ fought strenuously against it. Pioneers like The Art of Noise, The Justified Ancients of MuMu and a whole host of hiphop producers were creating exciting things with existing art and yet they often hit brick walls in the shape of copyright holders blocking their work. The Justified Ancients of MuMu were even ordered by Abba’s lawyers to destroy all the unsold copied of their seminal work ‘1987: What The Fuck Is Going On’ thanks to the inclusion of a sample from ‘Dancing Queen’. They did so, in typical Drummond and Cauty style, by setting fire to them outside Bjorn’s house. It’s a great story but it still involved the destruction of a fantastic piece of art.
Lots has been said in recent years about how copyright could be reformed. The only reform that usually takes place, though, is term extensions forced through by rich record companies. So, how could we open up a vast body of work to be used in all sorts of interesting new ways? Andrew Dubber, an academic based in Birmingham, reckons he has the answer; give all new works an initial copyright term of just five years.
Under Dubber’s proposal, copyright would automatically be just five years from the creation of a work. After that time it would be up to the copyright holder to apply to extend the term for another five years if they felt the work still had commercial worth to them. There’d even be a ‘use it or lose it’ clause, meaning if the copyright holder hadn’t commercially exploited the work in the past five years they’d lose the right to renew the license. The idea is that, over time, works can be released into the public domain much quicker than under the current system.
As brilliant and forward-thinking as that idea is, the lobbying power of those in power will see that nothing like this will come to be in the foreseeable future. Still, I’ll hold onto the dream of releasing my currently unreleasable album of Kavana/Ned’s Atomic Dustbin mashups. Maybe one day…
