In a blog post, ORG Executive Director Jim Killock said the change means it will be harder to publish older works, and many will simply remain out of print. He also said research shows that 90 percent of the cash windfall from copyright levies will fall into the hands of record labels.
"Despite the rhetoric, small artists will gain very little from this, while our cultural heritage takes a massive blow by denying us full access to these recordings for another generation," Killock writes.
He references the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, an independent review of Intellectual Property in the UK, and the Hargreaves Report, an independent review of how the Intellectual Property framework supports growth and innovation in the UK, and how both were highly sceptical of the need to extend the copyright term.
The Hargreaves Report had said that copyright policy needed to be based on hard evidence, and that for copyright term extension, the evidence just wasn't there to support it.
It could have been worse however, the original plan was for 95 years, not 70. A petition signed by 15,000 citizens within the European Union opposed the term extension, and that helped to reduce it to 70.
"The campaign against term extension showed that copyright policy can no longer be a deal done in darkened rooms: the public has a strong interest in the cultural impact of excessive copyright and damaging restrictions," Killock wrote.
Written by: James Delahunty @ 13 Sep 2011 3:02
