Davos Newbies

Ian Anderson, from Jethro Tull, has a complete piece of piffle on copyright in today’s Financial Times (fortunately for subscribers only, so most people will miss it). His point? Europe “only” provides 50 years of copyright for recordings, compared to 95 years in the US and 70 years in Australia, Singapore and Brazil. “Under UK and European legislation, the band’s first album, This Was (1968), is due to fall out of copyright in just 12 years’ time.” More terrifyingly, “Sir Cliff Richard’s first recordings start to fall out of copyright protection in just over two years’ time.”
Anderson argues that “thousands of working musicians” are harmed by this premature loss of copyright. Needless to say, no real figures are given.

The musicians who are fortunate enough to be earning royalties 50 years after their work’s release are not artists starving in chilly garrets. Almost by definition, those works that still have considerable commercial value 50 years on have made their creators very wealthy individuals indeed. I’m sure Larry Lessig has run the numbers on this kind of argument, but I’d wager that a tiny slice of total royalty income comes from work more than 10 years old, and a nearly infinitessimal amount comes from work more than 40 years old.

There must be an editor at the FT who is a Jethro Tull fan from way back, because I can’t figure why else this nonsense would be granted valuable column inches.

Martin Wolf, never the sunniest of economic commentators, is very worried at the state of Europe. He examines the “big three” of continental Europe — Germany, France and Italy — and finds weak, timid governments (subscribers only: I’ll repeat again that Wolf is the single columnist most grievously ill-served by a subscription firewall. His audience should be in the millions, not the mere handful, however powerful, that read the FT):

It is not that reforms have been absent; it is rather that they have been grossly inadequate. It is also not that policymaking elites are unaware of the challenges; it is rather that they are unwilling to expound them. In France, remarkably, the population seems to believe that everybody can – and should – be treated just like a civil servant. They seek a miraculous combination of almost absolute job security with rising prosperity. In a rapidly changing world, this is a form of collective cognitive disorder.

Administrative centralism tempered by popular upheaval has been the historic characteristic of France. Localism and clientelism have similarly characterised Italy’s politics. In Germany, unification has also made the country less governable: without it a grand coalition would presumably have been unnecessary. None of these countries has found it easy to change direction without turmoil. France is even achieving turmoil and no change in direction.

The world must now contemplate a future in which the continent’s most important countries have fragile governments presiding over disgruntled populations. Given their weight, these countries can make it impossible for the EU to function, by undermining the effectiveness of the European Commission, assailing the single market, resisting enlargement and opposing concessions needed to complete multilateral trade negotiations inside the World Trade Organisation. These governments augur ill, therefore, not just for domestic reform, but for the fate of the eurozone, the EU, and the EU’s role in the world. Failures of domestic politics and of public education on this scale cause more than a few little local difficulties. They have malign consequences for the wider world.