[Upd-discuss] We can't let the music industry suits stifle creativity

[Teresa Hackett]

 From edri-ip list.


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Copyright wrongs: we can't let the music industry suits stifle creativity
David Rowan
The Times, 16/6/05

BOB GELDOF is not the only superannuated rocker whose political gifts 
overshadow his more limited musical contributions to recent cultural 
progress. Sonny Bono, too, is a name currently buzzing through the 
Culture Department’s chill-pad in Cockspur Street, even though Bono 
departed his California stage set seven years ago. His biggest hit, you 
may recall, was the audaciously self-serving law he championed that 
extended United States copyright protection by 20 years. Worryingly, it 
is a tune that our own Culture Minister, James Purnell, appears unable 
to clear from his head.

Mr Purnell, who is in charge of our “creative industries”, believes that 
we, too, need to “modernise our intellectual property framework” along 
similar lines. Following a music industry campaign to extend the 
copyright term for sound recordings from 50 to 95 years, he has been 
rapping in rhythm with the EMI and BMG massive: in a risky, 
talent-driven business like pop, the suits, apparently, need guarantees 
of long-term financial returns. As he told the Institute for Public 
Policy Research yesterday, the record labels need copyright reforms 
“that will allow them to make returns on their creativity and to invest 
in innovation”. What he failed to explain was the damage that such a 
short-term corporate grab would do to the public good...

The essayist and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay understood the 
perils when a similar battle to extend copyright was being waged in 
1841. Amid calls to stretch the protection to 60 years after death, 
Macaulay saw no public benefit from a monopoly lasting longer than 42 
years or life. “Are we free to legislate for the public good, or are we 
not?” he asked in the House of Commons. “Is this a question of 
expediency, or is it a question of right? An advantage that is to be 
enjoyed more than half a century after we are dead, by somebody utterly 
unconnected with us, is really no motive at all to action.” Many 
valuable works, he argued, would be suppressed — and publishers treated 
with such contempt that the reading public would happily turn to 
“piratical booksellers”...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1657575,00.html
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