Andrew Gowers’s review of intellectual property law has been published – you can download the report from the Treasury website here.
Some lawyers have already expressed disappointment – many think the report’s recommendations are not radical enough. But why propose a radical shake-up unless you think things are radically wrong as they are? Gowers says he thinks the system is basically sound, and so he simply suggests some reforms that sound pretty good to me, like recommendation 8 on “format-shifting” – he says it should be legal for consumers to load tracks from CDs they have bought, on to computers and MP3 players, instead of the current farcical maglie calcio poco prezzo sisutation where this is technically unlawful; and recommendation 13 on “orphan works”. He is suggesting European legislation be amended to allow a defence to breach of copyright where you’ve done a reasonable search for the rights holder but have not been able to identify him or her. The idea is to allow the creative use of, for instance, poems or photographs whose author cannot be identified. If the author emerges later, he or she would have a right to some of the profits from use of their work, and of course to enforce copyright in the future.
The recording industry will predictably be disappointed that he does not recommend and extention of the current 50-year copyright term for sound recordings (recommendation 3). But he’s quite right: any extension would simply benefit those performers, like Sir Cliff and Sir Paul, who are already immensely rich. It’d make no difference at all to poor artists.
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