Copyright in the news…….

Copyright is in the news - and for a variety of reasons. In Sweden, the founders of Pirate Bay have been found guilty of copyright infringement and have received a prison sentence, UK copyright law has been judged as ‘failing’ by a consumer group and the European Parliament is about to vote on the extension of copyright protection. It’s all happening!

OK, let’s look at the UK first. Copyright law was last updated in the Copyright and Design Patent Act 1988 - which replaced the Copyright Act 1956. Yes, it takes that long for changes to be made. Of course, there have been subsequent amendments to the 1988 Act, mainly as a result of legislation from Europe which now assumes competence in this area (is competence the right word to be used in a European context?). The UK Intellectual Property Office have a useful unofficial consolidated version of the CDPA here. The last major revision, the Copyright etc Act of 1988 predated the majority of home computing and electronic communications, web access, file sharing etc. Amendments have been made but the Consumer Focus group found that UK law was the worst in a survey of 16 countries - “UK copyright law is the oldest, but also the most out of date” said Ed Mayo of Consumer Focus.

The problem is that UK law does not provide any fair dealing exceptions that allow the type of actions commonly accepted by the majority of the population. Things like making copies of music that you ‘own’ on CD to play on a different system, PC or iPod etc. It is estimated that over 50% of the population do this and nearly 2/3 (over 60%) think that this is quite legal. There was a review of intellectual property in 2006/2007 published by Gowers - but there has not been a great deal of action in the areas that affect the public most directly. There have been changes in the background - changing the Patent Office to the Intellectual Property Office etc. - but, so far, it has not proved possible to introduce new legislation to permit the type of use accepted by the public. Perhaps it is that the rights industry view this as a major issue and see public action as a major loss of revenue - also that other groups such as ISPs etc. do not see it as part of their core business to introduce controls on their users. Stalemate really. We now await the publication of the final Digital Britain report to see where that points. Maybe it will help to answer some of the critiscisms levelled by Consumer Focus.

OK - so what about Pirate Bay. An interesting case. Pirate Bay itself does not host copyright materials, rather it seems to be a directory allowing users to find materials to download. In that respect it acts rather like other search engines on the web. Of course, it helps users to find materials that they can download and thereby infringe the copyright of the owners but is it itself infringing copyright. Maybe it might be held to be inciting infringement. Pirate Bay has rather set itself up, over some time it has invited actions from the rights owners - a sort of catch me if you can approach. With most of the rights owners in the US and the web site in Sweden there were likely to be problems but it does now look as if the rights owners have managed to persuade the Swedish authorities that the actions of the site are illegal. The original plea requested damages in the order of 100,000,000 SEK but this was reduced by the court to 30,000,000 SEK. That is still far more than the defendants are likely to be able to pay so it seems unlikely that the rights owners will get their damages. And, with the servers located outside Sweden it may be difficult for the court to enforce take down actions. So, what will the rights owners get - one might suggest that their approach could have been to raise awareness and to generate publicity about the illegality of the actions. Well, if that was the case they seem to have done that. Are the Pirate Bay crew down and out - somehow I guess that is not likely.

So, it is back to the European Parliament. The music industry has brought pressure for a review of the period of copyright - arguing that some musicians who produced work in their early years are now running the risk of seeing their work passing into the public domain whilst they are still alive. I suppose you could look at Cliff Richard with hit records in every decade since the 1950s. Some of the early works are now reaching the end of their copyright term. The European Parliament now has a proposal before it to extend copyright term in order to allow musicians to continue to benefit from their works. Interestingly, analysis suggests that it is not the musicians who will benefit from the change (26p per annum!) but the big 4 music publishers who stand to make millions.

Will it go through? The Council of Ministers has blocked the action and there is a European Parliamentary election at the beginning of June. Maybe this is not the time to rock the boat - we shall see what the outcome of the vote is. As the Ministers are not minded to approve, I suspect the extension of term will not go ahead.

As the Chinese say, ‘may we live in interesting times’.