The European Commissioner for Internal Market and Services, Charlie McCreevy proposed to extend copyright protection on music from 50 to 95 years. McCreevy might be a smart man and he might have noble reasons to propose such a change, but why exactly would he propose such a change now? Yes, a lot in copyright should be changed, but in general the period should be shortened, not extended. But instead of using this window of opportunity and propose to rethink copyright in Europe, McCreevy proposes a singular change in one field, which makes the copyright law even more complicated than it is already. McCreevy argues that this is not about the super stars such as the Beatles, but about little known studio musicians who depend upon copyright payments for their pension. While such a move might be appreciated by the artists, in the end most of them will not profit from this at all. The only real benefactors are the music industry and a handful of superstars. The consumers on the other hand – and the society as a whole – would suffer from such a move.

Copyright law such be rethought on every level. Experts should be assigned to every type of media and look for a new, more flexible and understandable solution. Copyrights should only be upheld if they bring a measurable profit to the artists and have little or no adverse effects for the whole society. If that will result in the extension of copyrights in certain fields, so be it. But extending the copyright period in a certain field just out of a momentary mood is highly irresponsible. Why is copyright flawed in general? First of all, because copyright is fix. It does expire after a certain time. For example if a book goes out of print and the publisher is not doing a rerun, the book will still be copyrighted. That means that you will still be punished if you upload a copy of the book to the internet. Therefore copyright limits availability of many works. Secondly copyright is only registered with the holder. There is no central register. Imagine an author gives a limited copyright of one book to a publishing house. Now the publishing house is sold to another publishing house. In many cases of small publishing houses, the publishers are not even aware, that they are holder of certain old copyrights. At the same time the heirs of an author will not be sure if they still have the copyright for digital reproduction in a certain language or not. Thirdly copyright is basically a one way system. Since there is no government institution to which you could return your copyright, many artists will keep the copyrights to their works, even though they do no profit from them anymore. If there would be a clear system to return your copyright, many works would go into the public domain a lot quicker. Fourthly copyright is a very singular approach. Copyright only considers the profit and right of the artists and does not care about cultural heritage or freedom of research, but let me get back to that when talking about these specific areas.

When thinking about copyright we should consider movies, music and books separately. While McCreevy solely talked about music, I will focus on books and movies, but let me start with music nevertheless. Copyright in music is a mess in its very own way, which would be reason for another article, but the subject gets even more difficult, because music might be free (not free of copyright, but free of charge) before this mess in the copyright legislation is resolved and that would call for a completely changed copyright. First of all copyright in music is often owned by different companies in different countries within Europe. The licensing is organised separately in every state. This has not been a major issue until digital sale of music became prominent. That in itself makes legally bought music more expensive in Europe. However the other problems of copyright are not as clearly applicable as they are with movies or books. At least I am not aware that the heritage issue I will discuss regarding films would be as pressing in the case of historic records. Nevertheless making an unnecessary change to copyright law in a time when the whole industry is in a time of restructuring seems weird. When we do not know how the music industry will look like in 5 years, why would we extend the copyright period for 45 years? But I stand with my statement in the beginning. If one seriously reviews copyright laws and comes to the conclusion that an extension of the copyright period in the case of music is reasonable, I will not oppose it.

In case of movies the copyright is even more complex. In the united states the copyright for movies was extended twice, however only if such an extension was applied for. However only copyright owners are able to know, if they did so. Therefore no one really knows if certain films are still under copyright or not. This has serious consequences. Many films of the early history of motion pictures are not available to the general public. However no one outside the movie industry can make these films public, because they would have to fear being sued for copyright infringement. But this has an even more dramatic consequence. Many early movies are slowly decaying. However as long as copyright is possibly owned by a studio, no one will pay for digitalisation and re-mastering and if necessary expensive reconstruction of old movies. That means, a whole part of early motion picture history is endangered of being wiped out completely. Especially in the case of movies copyright law should consider cultural heritage as a central aspect. First of all studios should be forced to reregister their copyrights with a central institution. Who ever fails to do so, loses the copyright. Secondly studios should be forced to save all their movies and make them available to the public in one way or the other. If they are able to earn money by doing this, good for them. If they do not have the funds to save movies, they should return the copyright to the state and allow for independent archiving and publishing by an organisation such as the Wikimedia Foundation.

When talking about books we actually have two issues at hand. On one side there is fiction, on the other there is science and humanities. Regarding fiction the problems are not as pressing. First of all availability is rather good. Secondly even if fictional books are only hardly available the consequences of them going into the public doain a little later or a little earlier is not as massive. Of course a more flexible copyright law would also be positive regarding fiction, but if not implemented it will not cause the fall of the occident. In case of scientific literature, especially regarding humanities, this is a totally different story. Here the issue of unclear copyright holders is even more prevalent, as many universities tend to have small publishing houses which come and go depending on the people currently affiliated with a faculty. When these publishing houses close the copyrights either go back to the authors or are taken over by the universities, which are more often than not completely unaware of that. This has one central consequence. Digitalisation is difficult or even impossible. However, as in all sciences, publishing in humanities is peaking. Accessibility and availability become a more and more pressing problem, which will only be solved through steps of digitalisation. (I will go into the details of this in my Humanities 2.0 series.) When you consider that approximately 80% of all book are in copyright but out of print and have unclear copyright holders, you can imagine the magnitude of this problem. In consequence a large amount of human knowledge production is not included in new research, which has drastic consequences on what we know and on what we base our political decision making processes in a more and more complex world.

When talking about copyright we should stop to consider only the interests of the artists and authors and include the interest of the consumers and the society as a whole, be it regarding cultural heritage or regarding our production of knowledge. Anything else would be irresponsible. Yes, we need to think and talk about copyright and if we see a need to expand copyright periods, so be it. But proposing a change to copyright regulation out of the blue, just to pretend that you actually still have power within a society, is unacceptable. However, such a reconsideration of copyright legislation will only happen when larger parts of the society start to understand that this affects the society as a whole. As long as only some geeks are complaining about this, people like McCreevy will not understand the need to take action.

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To get an idea about the connections between digitalisation, fair use and copyright, check out Lawrence Lessig’s screencast on Wuala. (Link)