Opportunity here for further debate, for sure. I agree absolutely the intermediaries can and do benefit too much at the expense of the original rights holders/creators, so I welcome the dawn of internet tools allowing opportunities for creatives to prosper better from their own work without so much reliance upon “middlemen”. It will be interesting indeed to watch how the commercial world of the direct creator/user interface develops, and whether it is sustainable in the long term, or will somehow again be appropriated by intermediaries. How the law too, predictably and inevitably sluggish as it is, will respond will also be interesting.

To return to the oiginal point however: the duration of a film copyright is seventy years from the death of the last of the four designated principals. The fifty year protection (from date of broadcast) is, to my understanding, aimed at preventing ’signal piracy’ and unauthorised rebroadcasts. In the case of a film shown on television there are two distinct rights:
the copyright in the original work(ie the film, protected for life plus seventy);
the right in the specific broadcast (fifty eyears from first date of broadcast).

In the United States there are no rights in broadcasts as such, and this is one of the reasons for the controversy over the proposed WIPO Broadcast Treaty.

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I will return to your wider point at another time, but my argument is normative: the bundle of rights covered by copyright are protects too much for too long. The benefit of this over-protection accrues to intermediaries rather than to ‘creators’; invoking the interests of creators as a group to justify the extension of protection is unconvincing.

In addition the law does not take into account the tools now in the hands of users and the consequences for the distribution and creation of works. Attempts to impose an ill-fitting regime on the behaviour of ordinary users (eg p2p) are doomed to fail and can only have negative consequences.

I cannot do these arguments merit here on the fly, but believe that the current structure of the cultural industry is not to be protected.

In my researches I did my best by going to the source; the CDPA 1988, checking too for any amendments re life extensions, seeing of course as the Act is almost twenty years old now. However in paraphrasing the terms for the blog I lumped together in my mind the durations for films – which is as you stated – and broadcasts, which is fifty years straight. Mea culpa. So thanks for putting me right.

Despite this significant difference, it’s a curious thing that – at least according to the UK’s Patent Office website page on Film & TV copyright – we both appear to be wrong; it states fifty years from the date of broadcast only. It appears to have a bias against film; the duration of copyright for movies isn’t stated at all. A demonstration that – even within official communiqués – this disparity of copyright terms causes unnecessary and frustrating confusion! (Another argument for parity of lifetimes…?)

I suppose one answer to your argument is – and forgive me if this sounds a little facetious – why should music producers have reliance upon exploitation of old works in order to create new works? Are today’s producers dealing with such a dearth of imagination in their industry and themselves/their artists they feel it necessary to raid the back-catalogues?

I accept there will always be a desire on the part of recording artists to produce covers of past hits (and personally hearing some of the results I wish they’d resisted the temptation!), but surely that output is in percentage terms minute enough as to not be of significant impact, and – with the higher proportion of work produced being original compositions anyway – the music industry as a whole should surely be robust enough to deal with an extension of copyright. Publishers seem to deal with their novelists’ copyright term well, content enough it appears to commission “sequels” of well known titles after expiry; or with permission of their estate if still within the term. Film producers pay filmmakers to produce remakes of their classics. If one wants to take that route and use a predecessor creator’s work rather than create something entirely new, then accept there’s a price to pay. Perhaps we should look at the US music industry and ask whether US recording artists and their producers and distributors are being harmed by their 95 year copyright life.

Or perhaps I’ve misinterpreted your final paragraph, and you’re coming from the standpoint of “fair use/fair dealing”? By this I’m guessing you mean that future composers and songwriters should have right to “quote” within their new compositions previous song smiths’ work, as authors do within their novels, short stories/articles, without need to pay? Would this be a way to effectively make sampling of others’ songs free?

In the end, I come back to the one-time, out of public favour recording artist who may well require that revenue. Do we think of them, or the new hot-shot who absolutely positively must have their end of copyright golden oldie to produce their next hit?

I think the problem with your analysis is that it dos not taken into account the interests of subsequent generations of creators in having access to their predecessor’s works as raw materials for new creations. One man’s information output is another’s input and you don’t need to be a copyright radical to recognise that extending the duration is simply making it more expensive for today’s producers to make new works.