In a speech to the trade body UK Music last week, Burnham said:
"There is a moral case for performers benefiting from their work
throughout their entire lifetime."
He announced that he has been working with Innovation Secretary
John Denham on revising the term of copyright for performers "to
consider the arguments for an extension of copyright term for
performers from the current 50 years."
"An extension to match more closely a performer’s expected
lifetime, perhaps something like 70 years, for example, given that
most people make their best work in their 20s and 30s," said
Burnham.
Gowers was commissioned by HM Treasury at the end of 2005 to
produce recommendations on intellectual property law reform. His
findings were published in December 2006. Some of his
recommendations have since become law.
The term of copyright protection for performers was among the
issues investigated by Gowers and his team. Currently composers
have copyright protection for life plus 70 years, whereas
performers and producers only have rights for 50 years. Some groups
had argued for an extension to 70 years in the interests of
fairness but Gowers recommended leaving the term unchanged.
Gowers told OUT-LAW last year that he even considered shortening
the term to less than 50 years.
"I could have made a case for reducing it based on the economic
arguments," he said.
"We certainly considered it, and if you look at the report that
came from the academics that we commissioned to examine the
arguments and examine the evidence they also argued very robustly
that 50 years could be arguably more than enough," said Gowers.
A report commissioned by the European Commission also
recommended that copyright terms should remain unchanged, and in
July 2007, the Government suggested that no changes would be
made.
"Taking account of the findings of [the Gowers and Commission]
reports, which carefully considered the impact on the economy as a
while, and without further substantive evidence to the contrary, it
does not seem appropriate for the Government to press the
Commission for action at this stage," said a report by the
Department of Media, Culture and Sport.
Writing in the Financial Times today, Gowers attacked Burnham's
"moral case" for a introducing lifetime extension.
"You might just as well say sportspeople have a moral case to a
pension at 30," he wrote. "All the respectable research shows that
copyright extension has high costs to the public and negligible
benefits to the creative community."
Gowers also criticised a recent proposal from the European
Commission to extend the term even further, notwithstanding the
recommendation in its own expert report. Internal markets
Commissioner Charlie McCreevy has proposed a Directive that would
give performers rights in recordings for 95 years.
He said that Burnham's and the Commission's proposals will
create "a windfall for a few music companies (for example EMI) with
some valuable recordings (for example The Beatles) that are about
to go off copyright." He said that local radio stations and
businesses that play music will suffer increased fees without
today's struggling performers seeing any benefit now.
Burnham has asked the music industry "to come back with good,
workable ideas as to how a proposal on copyright extension might be
framed that directly and predominantly benefits performers – both
session and featured musicians."
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