The EU is considering a plan to extend musical copyrights for another 45 years, ostensibly to help out aging performers who are being cut off when the current 50-year terms expire. But those musicians (can someone introduce them to the concept of saving for retirement?) won't see much of the new cash, according to the UK's Open Rights Group. Most performers will make less than €30 a year, even as major labels and big stars take far more.

The Open Rights Group, a UK "grassroots technology advocacy organization," is responding to a request for comments from the UK's Intellectual Property Office. UKIPO wants to know how it should weigh in on the EU-wide proposal, and the Open Rights Group's response is clear: the proposal is a bad idea.

This was also the conclusion reached by a leading European copyright expert, Professor Bernt Hugenholtz, in a paper actually paid for in part by the European Commission. (When the Commission simply ignored the paper in making its policy proposal, Hugenholtz went public with his astonishment and displeasure.) It was also the conclusion reached by the Gowers Review in the UK, which took a wide-angle look at intellectual property issues and concluded that copyright term extensions weren't necessary or justified by the facts.

In its analysis, the Open Rights Group focuses on one of the key problems presented by the EU: aging musicians whose royalties run out just as they become old and infirm. According to the group, a 45-year term extension is hardly the best way to address the issue.

"The Commission makes much of the challenging financial situation facing aging performers," it says. "While we do not accept that IP law is an appropriate mechanism to deal with this situation, as we will demonstrate in the second section of this submission, it also turns out to be a very inefficient one."

That's because 90 percent of the extra money generated during the extended term will go to music labels. Of the 10 percent that goes directly to artists, eight or nine percent will go to the "top 20 percent of earning performers"—in other words, the most successful groups, which have already made millions.



Courtesy Open Rights Group

That leaves only one to two percent of the entire pie for the remaining 80 percent of performers. This is the money that most of the poor and aging musicians will split. There are several proposals for doing this, but even the most optimistic Open Rights Group calculation shows that these performers will average a maximum of €26.79 per year. Labels would make anywhere from hundreds of thousands of euros to millions of euros a year.

Such calculations lead the ORG to ask whether it wouldn't be more sensible to address the issue of poor musicians by looking at "the contractual terms between performers and producers," or to examine "retirement and social insurance schemes" to make sure they're effective.

Given the EU's proposal, ORG can't help but wonder if facts weren't the primary determinant in choosing to go forward with a term extension fight; the evidence "strongly suggests that [the Commission] has been swayed by special-interest lobbying," says the group.