UK Copyright Extension Denied

[GhostShip]

This is good news for UK consumers, and more than fair to the artists who make their living from music.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6186436.stm

The copyright on sound recordings will not be extended after an independent review commissioned by the Treasury.
The review was conducted for Chancellor Gordon Brown by Andrew Gowers, a former editor of the Financial Times.

It also means the earliest official recordings from The Beatles, from 1963, will be out of copyright in 2013.

Music journalist Neil McCormack told BBC Radio Five Live it was a blow to the industry.
"This was set before the advent, the big boom of rock and roll. The boom in popular culture which has led to a whole vast number of people making their living from these royalties

50 years of protected revenue is more than enough for spending what could have been less than an hour making a song.
I think a fair balance between the artists and the consumer has been reached, to extend the life span of copyright is to break to deal you already made with the law and the consumer and is based on pure selfishness, nothing stops an artist penning a few more hits every few years within their lifetime, many people work every day of their lives and a songwriter/performer should take note of that and respect the deal he intered into with the public.

[KM]

[quoute]The boom in popular culture which has led to a whole vast number of people making their living from these royalties

people like you who earn a living based on it? who have done nothing?

most artists when they release their "big hits" are in their 20's or 30's, making them 70 or 80 when it expires, if they are still alive, by then if they need the royalties then something is wrong... and how many of them even have royalties after that long? the few artists who didn't sign everything over to record companies and got their money they deserved then went and did something with that money long ago

after 50 years the people making a living from it are not the artists, and those people don't deserve a penny