In his Saturday blog overview on Swedish Radio midday news program "Lunchekot", culture reporter Johannes Ekman commented on what a number of Swedish blogers have to say on the subject of down-loading of files, free or commercial. An issue of as great importance, which has hardly been discussed in Swedish news media at all, is the on-going lobbying of the current giant media conglomerates - which have swallowed most of the world's former record companies - to make the EU prolong copyright from 50 to 70 or even 90 years on commercial recordings.
If this campaign is successful, it would outlaw most of the historical reissues of recordings by great singers and musicians of the past in all genres on a number of smaller labels all over the world, who do a marvellous job of keeping our cultural heritage before us. Most of which, the current owners of the old record labels have shown scant interest in, apart from recordings by a very small number of commercially viable "historical" artists. Of course, this sudden interest from the big companies in protecting their rights to recordings made before 1955 does hardly rise from an interest in keeping any greater number of artists of their predecessor companies before the public. I do not believe the current owners suddenly have taken such a great interest in Melba, Caruso, Kreisler or their less well remembered colleagues on 78s. The campaign has more to do with the fact that the actual copyright limit of 50 years now approaches or has already passed the earliest recorded efforts of popular artists like Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, in the classical field Callas and Karajan, and others, of which recordings exist in what the big public will consider as a "modern sound".
The big copyright owners are hardly interested in protecting recordings todaymore than 50 years old with a very limited commercial viability. What they want is to guarantee themselves the exclusive rights of reissuing and earning money for as long time as possible of records made from the advent of tape and LPs by artists and groups belonging to the pantheon of mass culture. The fact that a number of CD buyers all over the world will lose the opportunity of pleasure and knowledge that reissues of old recordings give them, that is just an accidental side effect. And if Naxos, Preiser, Marston, Malibran - just to mention a few in the classical vocal field, there are countless others in jazz, folklore, popular music, brass, spoken records, etc - or any other independent labels want to continue their work they will have to concentrate on music-making from the real pioneer years, from Edison and Bettini to the first world war.
A retroactive copyright law for 90 years would mean goodbye to projects like the complete Caruso 1903-20 on 12 CDs or the complete Melba 1904-26 from Naxos, most of Preiser's enormous "Lebendige Vergangenheit" series covering singers in opera, operetta, lieder and popular song from several generations up to the 1950s, Biddulph's fantastic - and well-sounding - project of bringing almost a century of string playing before an interested public. It would mean farewell to a number of labels who make us hear afresh symphony and other orchestral and choral recordings from the better part of the 20th century.
I am not talking about or defending other, often surprisingly well-marketed but less conscientious, reissue labels which - like many sold "under the counter" since the 50ies - do not tell us if they really licensed or paid anyone for reissuing this or that complete opera or orchestral performance, usually broadcasts and live recordings, from more recent dates, often in less than good sound with slap-dash presentation. I talk about the ones that have taken on themselves to keep our musical heritage of recordings before us as few of the remaining or transformed big record companies have ever bothered to do - since the demise of the LP and series like EMI's Voices on Record, etc, in the 1980s. We must not lose the possibility of listening to Chaliapin, Gigli, Mengelberg or Galli-Curci or their less well-known contemporaries, nor to Django Reinhardt, Zarah Leander, Bessie Smith or Louis Armstrong because somebody wants to assure themselves the right to earn more cash on The Beatles or Jimmi Hendricks after 2020. And don't try to tell me they worry about their poor relations... And if the lobbyists fail with the ministers of culture - as they have already done in a first case in Britain - they will put their hope for more understanding from ministers of commerce.
Everyone interested in keeping our musical heritage and a long century of recordings before the general public should ask the EU authorities and the governmental departments concerned in their countries not to consider any prolonging of copyrights for sound recordings for more than 50 years after a recording's first date of publishing.
Stefan Johansson
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