Just before heading off into their summer vacations, the European Commission has decided [press release] to extend the copyright term for sound recordings, from 50 to 95 years.
This significantly lengthens the period during which new creators will be taxed by rightsholders. The EC says this will benefit elderly session musicians who would otherwise now start losing royalties for recordings made in their 20s, and denies that the extension does anything to gold-plate Keith Richards' swimming pool.
The Register mentions a "use it or lose it" termination clause without going into specifics. I haven't seen this discussed anywhere else so far.
The EC's other decision today was to adopt a "Green Paper" [what's this?] on copyright in the knowledge economy. This is supposed to be the start of "a structured debate on the long-term future of copyright
policy", and supposedly
The Green Paper is an attempt to organise this debate and point
to future challenges in fields that have not been a focal point
up to now, e.g. scientific and scholarly publishing, and the role
of libraries, researchers and the persons with a disability.
While this doesn't sound so bad, right below the text is a link to a speech that Commissioner McCreevy gave at a BSA-sponsored conference on Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), which contains choice paragraphs like:
So today we are here to talk about how we in the Commission can
assist the ICT sector in putting the innovation that is at the
heart of DRM technologies to use - so that other parts of the IP
community can deliver protected content securely to consumers.
I hope he's just flogging a dead horse. But this doesn't bode well for the broadened focus of the Green Paper debate.
