Hugh Davies over at The Telegraph seems to get in a little bit of a mess over the current campaign to extend certain music royalites.

Britain’s original rock ‘n’ rollers and trad jazzmen, including Sir
Cliff Richard, Acker Bilk and Kenny Ball, have joined forces to fight a
law that will soon stop them from receiving royalties from their old
hits.

They want to extend copyright protection for sound
recordings from 50 years to the 95 years adopted by America in 1998
after a similar battle led by the late Sonny Bono.

The
guitarist Joe Brown, 65, who started his career backing Johnny Cash,
Gene Vincent, Brenda Lee and Eddie Cochran in the 1950s, said
yesterday: "It’s just not right. It is thieving. They give me a heating
allowance but they are going to take my royalties away."

Well, sorta. There are several different types of royalties paid on songs and music. The one that brings in the really big bucks is on the song itself. This goes to the songwriter and is paid for not just each mechanical copy sold (ie, a percentage of the revenue from each single, CD, piano roll, sheet music etc sold) but also for each commercial rendition of the song, whoever it is actually recorded or performed by. The BBC, for example, pays a songwriter some 40 or 50 quid for each time it plays a single on Radio 1. Have a number 1 single and this (especially now, with the low sales that actually get to number 1) and this is likely to be the biggest revenue stream from it. But it goes to the songwriter, not the performer.

These rights last for 70 years after the death of the songwriter (it used to be 50 but was then harmonized with the German system to 70). They usually end up actually being owned by a publishing company who agrees to collect them for a fee, passing the rest on to the actual songwriter. This is how come Michael Jackson gets a cut of every Lennon and McCartney song, every version of "Yesterday" played on the radio and even "Happy Birthday", for he owns the music publishers (or did, not sure if he sold it on yet).

OK.

What these British musicians are asking for is something very different. There are also royalties on a specific recording of a song. These only apply to the actual sale of a mechanical copy (ie, anything from an 8 track to loading an iPod) and NOT to the public playing of it or radio play. These rights last, currently, for 50 years after the recording of that specific version of the song. Of course, the first generation of rockn’roll musicians are now finding that their specific recordings are now going out of copyright….the song writing royalties still remain. But they recorded them as the law was 50 years ago and is now. There is no "thieving" going on as Joe Brown alleges (younger ones might know him better as father of the husky voiced Sam Brown). It’s been happening with regularity, each and every year, things like the Glenn Miller recordings are now public domain, although the songs themselves may or may not be.

This isn’t people fighting a change in the law , isn’t some confiscation of something that is rightfully theirs. It’s people fighting to get their State granted monopoly extended, claiming further privilege over and above what they agreed to all those years ago.

As to making the law equal to the US, I’m not all that sure about that. I dimly recall a few weeks ago mention that US recordings are also going out of copyright after 50 years. The Sonny Bono act did indeed increase the songwriter’s copyright (to 70 years I think) and also made changes to those assigned to a corporation (thus keeping Mickey Mouse copyrighted by Disney) but I’m really not certain whether it addressed this specific point of the version royalties. 

Anyway, this isn’t someone taking something away from the wrinklies. It’s them demanding more.