EU Public Affairs Monitor - 30/12/08

Music copyright extension - strings attached: Sort yourselves out, warn Burnham and McCreevy 12th December 2008
Culture Minister Andy Burnham gave clear backing to extending the copyright term for sound recordings yesterday - but called on the music business to make sure it benefits musicians, not industry fatcats.

"We want the 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," Burnham said." [TheRegister]

UK ignores logic, backs 20-year music copyright extension December 12, 2008
"After a UK government-led commission said that the current 50-year term for musical copyrights was fine, and the government last year publicly agreed that there was no need to extend the term, culture minister Andy Burnham yesterday made the logical follow-up announcement that yes, the government would now push for a 20-year extension on copyright. Turns out, it's the moral thing to do.

Actually, by framing the issue as a "moral case," Burnham gets to sidestep the entire issue of logic. Critics have already begun to charge that he is ignoring actual evidence and the well-regarded conclusions of the Gowers Report, not to mention previous government policy. But when the issue becomes a moral one and the livelihood of aging performers is at stake, it's suddenly easier to avoid cost/benefit analysis. Doing the right thing isn't always logical or economical." [ArsTechnica]

Are Performers A Special Case? 23rd December
"While almost every serious commentator in the field of contemporary copyright law takes the view that no case has been established for the extension of copyright term in respect of sound recordings, the case for the extension of the protection term enjoyed by performers themselves has at least one doughty advocate.

IPKat reader and copyright specialist Professor Amanda J Harcourt writes:

"While Andrew Gowers' article (Copyright Extension is Out of Tune with Reality) makes a number of useful and pithy points, it does not fairly, in my view, state the case for the performer.

While the record companies in the 1990s indubitably "missed the boat" when attempting to debate and adjust their commercial practices to accommodate the developments of the internet - and now are suffering the consequences - there are moral arguments surrounding this new development. The songwriter and performer occupy the only moral high ground in the economic environment that is the music industry. This economic model of copyright has been taken to extreme by record companies. Guy Hands's early pronouncements about executive and administrative waste soon after his purchase of EMI were on point, but an understanding of the way artists are contracted by record companies demonstrates that those at the bottom of the royalty food chain - in this case the artist - have reasons for moral outrage." [IP Kitten]

Thomas on Copyright Reform:An Injudicious Threat to Consumers and Artists
"Recently, the Court in Capitol Records, Inc. v. Thomas vacated a $222,000 verdict awarded by a jury of the peers of Defendant Jammie Thomas.1 The Court held that it committed a “manifest error of law” by instructing the jury that U.S. law gives copyright owners the “making-available right” required by nine international agreements supposedly implemented by U.S. law. But Thomas did not confine itself to an analysis of whether U.S. law provides a making-available right.

After adjudicating the motion to vacate the jury verdict, the Court appended a gratuitous final section—Section K—that used Thomas as a platform to attack the wisdom of both the jury and Congress. Section K, by casting off judicial conventions, by opining on jury questions, and by mischaracterizing the conduct of a party to a pending case—tried to present the Defendant as a poster child for an ill-conceived advisory opinion on copyright reform. In Section K, looting thus became a nonprofit avocation and deterring deceit became “oppressive.” Worse yet, these characterizations supported “reforms” that would only encourage piracy, endanger consumers, and further undermine the vitality of copyrights." [PFF]

Triennial DMCA Review at US Copyright Office December 30th, 2008
"Has it been three years already? The US Copyright Office is again hearing arguments for exceptions for, as the December 29 Federal Register notice puts it, “certain classes of works from the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. The purpose of this rulemaking proceeding is to determine whether there are particular classes of works as to which users are, or are likely to be, adversely affected in their ability to make noninfringing uses due to the prohibition on circumvention.”

In other words, when is OK to ignore the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and hack DRM? (You’ll find information on how to participate in this democratic process at the end of this post.)" [CopyrightAlliance]