Author: billthomuk

Corby, a steel town in the middle of Northamptonshire, has been getting some attention recently. Graham Williams’ YouTube documentary, ‘corby, welcome to hell‘ is five minutes of despair, while The Guardian ran a two-page spread in which the town is called “Britain’s official ‘yob capital’“, beginning with a splash of local colour – the toxic orange of Irn Bru.

With a metallic tinkle, a discarded can of Irn Bru is rolled by the wind along the pockmarked road outside the Arran community centre. Sheet metal is stapled over the windows of derelict flats nearby.

Corby in Northamptonshire has been branded the yob capital of an increasingly yobbish country.

Continue reading “Corby”

One of the big fights was over proposals to extend the copyright protection for sound recordings from 50 years. The idea is comprehensively demolished in Gowers:

4.26 But the fairness argument applies to society as a whole. Copyright can be viewed as a ‘contract’ between rights owners and society for the purpose of incentivising creativity. As MacCauley argued in 1841, “it is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good”.30 If the exclusive right granted by copyright (or indeed any other form of IP right) lasts longer than it needs to, unnecessary costs will be imposed on consumers.

I love the MacCauley quote! This is shortly followed by:

4.40 In conclusion, the Review finds the arguments in favour of term extension unconvincing. The evidence suggests that extending the term of protection for sound recordings or performers’ rights prospectively would not increase the incentives to invest, would not increase the number of works created or made available, and would negatively impact upon consumers and industry. Furthermore, by increasing the period of protection, future creators would have to wait an additional length of time to build upon past works to create new products and those wishing to revive protected but forgotten material would be unable to do so for a longer period of time. The CIPIL report indicates that the overall impact of term extension on welfare would be a net loss in present value terms of 7.8 per cent of current revenue, approximately £155 million.

and then:

Recommendation 3: The European Commission should retain the length of protection on sound recordings and performers’ rights at 50 years.

of course, it’s up to Europe so the fight is not over, but the evidence collected in Gowers must make it unlikely that the record industry will get its greedy little mitts on this one.

but ripping CDs is allowed.

The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property has just been published as part of Chancellor Gordon Brown’s pre-budget report.

In his introduction Andrew Gowers writes:

the Chancellor and the Secretaries of State for Trade and Industry, and Culture, Media and Sport asked me to establish whether the system was fit for purpose in an era of globalisation, digitisation and increasing economic specialisation. The answer is a qualified ‘yes’. I do not think the system is in need of radical overhaul.

Well, the report is 146 pages long so I’ll be ordering capuccinos here in CB2 in Cambridge for a while longer before finishing it, but on first pass I’d have to say that the report gets a ‘qualified yes’ from me too.

We can live with harsher laws, more rigorously enforced, if the framework is fair, reasonable and balanced. Cliff Richard will have to do without the royalties from his performance of ‘Living Doll’ (I think we should make a date in our diaries to upload a copy to Wikipedia the moment it’s out of copyright). And we will no longer have to rely on the grace and favour of the record industry to copy music from CD to hard drive just so we can enjoy the rights to listen to it.

Of course at the moment the report, in all its glory, is just ink on paper (or, in my case, transistors on a screen). When Gordon Brown commissioned it a whole year ago he confidently expected that he would be PM by now, able to deliver on promises and dispatch ministers to EU meetings and WTO summits to turn his proposals into action on the national and world stages. Sadly, he still waits in the Treasury and will depend on Blair’s consent for much that is proposed.

But it is a start. Neither as bad as I had feared nor as neutered as I expected.

More to follow..