DOING THE BUSINESS

Big Georges Guide To Commercial Success: Copyright

Published in SOS April 2001
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Music Business

Big George starts another revolution, whether you like it or not...

I bet, like me, you don't go a single day without thinking about the law defining copyright -- the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act -- and the fact that it was passed way back in 1988. (No? Maybe I should get out more.) Our present Copyright Act is now more than a dozen Earth years old, which is equivalent to seven centuries in music technology terms, and the number of home-pressed or small production-run CDs for sale/promo/under-bed stacking this year will be a million times more than it was when the law was being drafted (and that is no exaggeration). These days we're all burning CDs and releasing albums, regardless of whether anyone wants them or not.

Technically, every time you burn a CD, or copy stuff onto a Minidisc or cassette, that may get passed on to someone else, you should apply for a licence from the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society (see 'What Does The MCPS Do?' box if you think MCPS is the company that empties your dustbin every week). But that, of course, would be ridiculous -- and, in truth, the whole issue of copyright in the 21st century has more grey areas than a high-definition plasma screen can handle.

The trouble is that music copyright and the collection of money generated by sales and performance of music is based on the principles of Victorian sheet-music manufacture. Meaning that the present royalty-collection system only works efficiently as long as you have a contract with a reputable publishing company (and that includes music publishers who over-charge, foist rip-off contracts on to you and do nothing to exploit your work, but merely sign you up so that no-one else will).

I Need Your Help     If you have pressed up a CD of your music in the past five years, however terrible it was (and trust me, we've all made some unbelievable old nonsense in our time), I want to hear from you! You can even send me a signed copy of your music, which I shall keep forever. What I want to know is: did you apply for a licence from MCPS? If you did, what happened? If you didn't (which I'm guessing is everyone), why didn't you? Was it because you wanted to buck the system? Or was it because you didn't know you had to? Write to me -- Big George, PO Box 7094, Kiln Farm, MK11 1LL -- or email big.george@soundonsound.com. Tell me what you want from the system and I'll tell them!

All publishers are influential members of MCPS and PRS and take care of all the licensing, notifications and registrations of works for you. You just sit back and wait for the cheques to roll in, 90 days after collection, less a sizeable percentage. They will even 'protect' you by including clauses committing them to work in your interest in territories yet to be discovered anywhere in the universe and on any sound recording medium yet to be invented, at any point in the future.

Of course, you don't need to have a publishing deal to be a lone-voice member of MCPS (and related organisation PRS). You can join; it costs £50 plus VAT and they will administer directly to you every few months with a glossy full-colour booklet containing pictures of their last visit to Czechoslovakia for a meeting with their foreign counterparts, and pages and pages of figures that would keep the staff of a high-street bank in overtime for a month

The truth is that everyone agrees that all is not well in the area of copyright law and that the present situation can't go on. The major media industries (in reality about four of them) are looking at ways of protecting the interests of their biggest stars (the likes of you don't matter), and at the same time exploiting any loophole in new technology. A few superstar acts want to bypass the entire system and maximise their own earnings within the shaky framework of the current arrangements. Whereas undiscovered artists are hoping to get caught up in the whirlwind long enough to be noticed.

Is it fair that the entire copyright law should be geared towards protecting and rewarding those at the top of the entertainment food chain? (I use the term "entertainment food chain" as I can't bring myself to describe the majority of Grammy/Brit winners as music.) More to the point, should we let those nice politicians and their select committees take heads of globalised record/publishing companies out to lunch in order to sort things out for us, all nice and neat? Or should we have our say in what will directly affect us?

So then, fellow SOS devotees, what are we going to do about it? I have a feeling in my bones that there is a MASSIVE change coming in the ownership of music, worldwide, with far bigger ramifications than Black Wednesday or the Wall Street Crash.

Are we going to allow big business to continue to decimate our industry, or are we, the people who actually make music, going to reclaim it for ourselves? I know I bang on about how the shocking state of the music business is getting worse, but only because it's true.

To be continued...

What Does The MCPS Do?     So who are the MCPS and what do they do? If you write to them, they will no doubt send you a glossy brochure explaining when they were formed, how they apportion their collections, and so on. But to save you the cost of a stamp and the sight of a pamphlet you won't read, that will lay around the house for ages, they are the people who collect the money from product sales (at the point of manufacture) and give it to the owner of the product (usually a publishing company) less 10 percent.