Extending the Term: The Gowers Review and the Campaign to Increase the Length of Copyright in Sound Recordings

Abstract

After the UK government commissioned a review of intellectual property in 2005, a campaign to "Extend the Term" of copyright in sound recordings was orchestrated by trade magazine Music Week on behalf of the recording industry and performing artists. Alan McGee was one of the few dissenting voices and stated quite explicitly that the campaign was motivated by major record companies wanting to protect their profits from the back catalogs of heritage rock acts rather than the rights of independent labels or the priorities of performers. This article will examine the arguments about the perceived discrimination against record companies and performers and ask whether increasing the term of fifty years is a sensible solution to this problem. It will also explore the way in which copyright has been treated as if it is a form of physical property and perceived as a pension for aging rock stars rather than a short-term monopoly right that allows creators and entrepreneurs an opportunity to recoup their investment and make a profit for a limited period of time. The debate exposed a hostile and damaging division between academics and representatives of the music industries and the conclusion will ask how academics can contribute to the policy-making process in a way that ensures their voices are taken seriously.

Thinking about Music Cities: Tales from England, Finland and Scotland

“…For someone interested in the politics of music, an orientation towards live musicrather than the record industry, which had previously dominated academic studies (c/f Negus 1999; 1992), had a number of implications. As I have noted elsewhere (Cloonan 2011), the provision of live music raises a number of concerns which are absent within recorded music, where the main issues concern the conditions under which musicians are contracted to record companies (Barr 2016) and the period for which sound recordings remain in copyright (Harkins 2012). Within live music, the presence of audiences in dedicated spaces has important implications, something that the Covid-19 pandemic made depressingly stark.…”

Creación e interpretación en el marco de los derechos de autor : el caso de la música popular tradicional.

“…Un tema controvertido es la duración de los derechos patrimoniales (Harkins, 2012;Giblin, 2017), ya que los derechos de los autores duran toda su vida y 70 años después de su muerte o declaración de fallecimiento; no obstante, para los intérpretes duran 70 años desde la interpretación o divulgación lícita de la grabación de su ejecución (Directiva 2011/77/EU) 4 .…”

“…Pareciera que la interpretación, desde el punto de vista de los diferentes ordenamientos jurídicos en materia de propiedad intelectual, es un trabajo rutinario (Caves, 2003), no creativo y de menor valor cultural (Bourdieu, 1984;Klamer, 2003;Heredia-Carroza et al, 2020) que la composición. El caso de la música popular tradicional ejemplifica lo anterior (Harkins, 2012, Heredia-Carroza et al, 2019c).…”

A twitter case study for assessing digital sound

“…Their example cannot be readily followed by state‐funded organizations, which must adhere strictly to laws governing intellectual property. The ability of the user to interact with the sound archive's data and metadata freely and at scale is hindered in most cases by copyright law and donor agreements that predate the Internet (Brylawski, ; Cleary, ; Harkins, ). In a related note, the subject of copyright (relative frequency 0.04%) and its contractual trappings did appear in the tweets of this dataset.…”