Re: UK music copyright to be extended to 100 years

I think we should remember that this latest article does not differ much 
from a variety of previous ones all related to performer copyright 
extensions and sparked by Elvis' "That's All Right" going out of 
/performer/ copyright. There has been quite a lot of discussion of this 
previously on the creative-friends list:
   http://lists.essential.org/mailman/listinfo/creative-friends

And there is a list of previous press coverage at:

   http://www.okfn.org/fcd/wiki/PublicDomainElvis

It /is/ worrying that this latest installment shows a minister 
supporting the music industry's lobbying . However this is an EU issue 
so the UK's power is limited (though the UK could push for this at the 
EU level though previous lobbying on this by the industry last year 
apparently went nowhere).

The minister's economic analysis in this latest announcement is very 
flawed. Any business supports projects on the basis of expected profits. 
It may use past profits to finance the initial outlay but only if it 
expects the project to (on average) pay that back. Thus the idea that 
money made on successful bands helps unsuccessful bands is fallacious. 
The fallacy can most easily be seen by taking the argument to its 
logical conclusion which is that we should simply hand over a £100 
million to the record companies -- which strangely no-one is suggesting.

Since this reopens the question of optimal term people might be 
interested in a basic paper~[1] I have written which allows calculation 
of optimal copyright terms which for a reasonable discount rate (>10%) 
implies that the optimal term is under 40 years.

Regards,

Rufus

[1] http://www.thefactz.org/economics/phd/copyright_calculations_v2.xml

Alex Macfie wrote:
> 
> On Jun 07, 2005, at 22:35, Bill Godfrey - LSoI Designs wrote:
> 
>>
>> (Insert a couple more.)
>>
> Very few musical works are still successful after 50 years. For every 
> Cliff Richard and Rolling Stones, there are hundreds or thousands of 
> artists whose works are long out print and locked up in some recording 
> studio's vault, if they still exist at all. Extending copyright further 
> will mean that they still can't be made available.
> 
> Also the few works that are successful are cash cows, which can make the 
> studios money for little effort. Recording studios are likely to use 
> their extended-copyrighted back catalogue as a *substitute* for 
> encouraging new talent, not as a way of paying for it.
> 
> Alex
> -- 
> Alex Macfie, Taipei, Taiwan R.O.C.
> [email protected]
> http://www.cgce.net/
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Free-sklyarov-uk mailing list
> Free-sklyarov-uk-Sspga/[email protected]
> http://mailman.xenoclast.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-sklyarov-uk