As revisited in the New York Times, the music industry is going through one of its periodic reboots in order to refresh copyright on some legacy properties – like early recordings of Bob Dylan and the Beatles. All this thanks to the 2011 decision by the Council of the European Union to unilaterally raise EU music copyright from 50 to 70 years.
This was not exactly an uncontroversial decision at the time, although at least we weren’t lumbered with the legislators’ (or media industry stooges/proxies’) original target of 95 years. Even the EU’s own inndependent experts objected to it. Professor P. Bernt Hugenholtz, Ph.D, head of the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam, protested that the European Commission consultation policy “seems to reveal an intention to mislead the council and the Parliament, as well as the citizens of the European Union. In doing so the Commission reinforces the suspicion, already widely held by the public at large, that its policies are less the product of a rational decision-making process than of lobbying by stakeholders.” The excuse at the time that ageing session musicians would somehow need residual income from these recordings until up to 95 years after the initial session seems franky farcical. However, it still passed, and we’re stuck with the consequences.
How much this has any application to literary copyright remains unclear – although with the U.S. pressuring Canada and other trading partners to ramp up its copyright arrangements to match its own hiked regime, the parallels should be obvious. But it does show how messed up the whole global copyright situation is – and how ready regulators are to dance to the tune of Big Media, regardless of the actual issues involved or the real benefits.
