Gowers Review of Intellectual Property

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The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property was an independent review of the copyright law of the United Kingdom focusing on "intellectual property rights", conducted from December 2005 to December 2006. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, commissioned Andrew Gowers to lead the review; Gowers had just left a position as editor of the Financial Times when he took up the position on December 2, 2005. The review coincided with a 2006 survey carried out on behalf of the National Consumer Council, which indicated that over half of British adults infringe copyright law by duplicating and ripping music CDs. [1] Following the review, in January 2008 the government initiated a public consultation period on proposals to legalise personal copying. [2]

Contents

The review concludes that the UK's intellectual property system is fundamentally strong but makes 54 concrete recommendations for improvements, broadly covering the areas of: strengthening enforcement; providing additional support to business; and striking a balance between protecting intellectual property and allowing free market competition.

On November 27, 2006, it was reported that the copyright of recorded music should not, according to the review's recommendations, be extended from the current 50 years after the date of recording. The British Phonographic Industry and prominent musicians, such as Cliff Richard and Ian Anderson, had lobbied for an extension to 95 years, matching the length of copyright provided in the USA; other musicians, such as Dave Rowntree of Blur provided counteropinions. The Gowers Review found that the UK, compared with the USA, suffers no apparent impediment to creativity due to this disparity.

The Review's conclusions were published on 6 December 2006 as part of the Chancellor's annual pre-budget report. A full-page advertisement, known as the Fair play for musicians ad, was taken in the Financial Times of December 7, stating "Fair play for musicians: We call upon the UK Government to support the extension of copyright on sound recordings", and was signed by over 4,500 musicians, including a few dead ones. [3]

Repercussions

Richard Sargeant, a civil servant who wrote large amounts of the Review, [4] was later hired by Google. In January 2009, as Google's "public policy manager", he called for reforms to incorporate exemptions similar to the United States' fair use doctrine into UK and Europe copyright law. [5]

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Copyright</span> Legal concept regulating rights of a creative work

A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives the creator of an original work, or another right holder, the exclusive and legally secured right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Criticism of copyright</span> Dissenting views of copyright law

Criticism of copyright, or anti-copyright sentiment, is a dissenting view of the current state of copyright law or copyright as a concept. Critics often discuss philosophical, economical, or social rationales of such laws and the laws' implementations, the benefits of which they claim do not justify the policy's costs to society. They advocate for changing the current system, though different groups have different ideas of what that change should be. Some call for remission of the policies to a previous state—copyright once covered few categories of things and had shorter term limits—or they may seek to expand concepts like fair use that allow permissionless copying. Others seek the abolition of copyright itself.

A private copying levy is a government-mandated scheme in which a special tax or levy is charged on purchases of recordable media. Such taxes are in place in various countries and the income is typically allocated to the developers of "content".

A royalty payment is a payment made by one party to another that owns a particular asset, for the right to ongoing use of that asset. Royalties are typically agreed upon as a percentage of gross or net revenues derived from the use of an asset or a fixed price per unit sold of an item of such, but there are also other modes and metrics of compensation. A royalty interest is the right to collect a stream of future royalty payments.

The first-sale doctrine is an American legal concept that limits the rights of an intellectual property owner to control resale of products embodying its intellectual property. The doctrine enables the distribution chain of copyrighted products, library lending, giving, video rentals and secondary markets for copyrighted works. In trademark law, this same doctrine enables reselling of trademarked products after the trademark holder puts the products on the market. In the case of patented products, the doctrine allows resale of patented products without any control from the patent holder. The first sale doctrine does not apply to patented processes, which are instead governed by the patent exhaustion doctrine.

Ripping is the extraction of digital content from a container, such as a CD, onto a new digital location. Originally, the term meant to rip music from Commodore 64 games. Later, the term was applied to ripping WAV or MP3 files from digital audio CDs, and after that to the extraction of contents from any storage media, including DVD and Blu-ray discs, as well as the extraction of video game sprites.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Copyright law of Canada</span> Canadian statutes controlling copyright

The copyright law of Canada governs the legally enforceable rights to creative and artistic works under the laws of Canada. Canada passed its first colonial copyright statute in 1832 but was subject to imperial copyright law established by Britain until 1921. Current copyright law was established by the Copyright Act of Canada which was first passed in 1921 and substantially amended in 1988, 1997, and 2012. All powers to legislate copyright law are in the jurisdiction of the Parliament of Canada by virtue of section 91(23) of the Constitution Act, 1867.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Rights Group</span> UK digital rights advocacy group

The Open Rights Group (ORG) is a UK-based organisation that works to preserve digital rights and freedoms by campaigning on digital rights issues and by fostering a community of grassroots activists. It campaigns on numerous issues including mass surveillance, internet filtering and censorship, and intellectual property rights.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal</span> Sony BMGs implementation of copy protection measures

The Sony BMG CD copy protection rootkit scandal was a scandal focused on the implementation of copy protection measures on about 22 million CDs distributed by Sony BMG in 2005. When inserted into a computer, the CDs installed one of two pieces of software that provided a form of digital rights management (DRM) by modifying the operating system to interfere with CD copying. Neither program could easily be uninstalled, and they created vulnerabilities that were exploited by unrelated malware. One of the programs would install and "phone home" with reports on the user's private listening habits, even if the user refused its end-user license agreement (EULA), while the other was not mentioned in the EULA at all. Both programs contained code from several pieces of copylefted free software in an apparent infringement of copyright, and configured the operating system to hide the software's existence, leading to both programs being classified as rootkits.

Fair play for musicians is a full-page advertisement that was published on 7 December 2006 in the Financial Times newspaper calling on the UK Government to extend the existing 50 years copyright protection for sound recordings in the United Kingdom. It consisted of around 4,500 names in small print filling the full page and its style was consistent with other newspaper petitions. The text "fair play for musicians" appeared in large red type over the list of names. In the centre of the page a box contained the text:

The copyright law of Australia defines the legally enforceable rights of creators of creative and artistic works under Australian law. The scope of copyright in Australia is defined in the Copyright Act 1968, which applies the national law throughout Australia. Designs may be covered by the Copyright Act as well as by the Design Act. Since 2007, performers have moral rights in recordings of their work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fair dealing</span> Limitation and exception to a right granted by copyright law

Fair dealing is a limitation and exception to the exclusive rights granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. Fair dealing is found in many of the common law jurisdictions of the Commonwealth of Nations.

Under the law of the United Kingdom, a copyright is an intangible property right subsisting in certain qualifying subject matter. Copyright law is governed by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, as amended from time to time. As a result of increasing legal integration and harmonisation throughout the European Union a complete picture of the law can only be acquired through recourse to EU jurisprudence, although this is likely to change by the expiration of the Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020, the UK has left the EU on 31 January 2020. On 12 September 2018, the European Parliament approved new copyright rules to help secure the rights of writers and musicians.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Copyright Act of 1976</span> United States law

The Copyright Act of 1976 is a United States copyright law and remains the primary basis of copyright law in the United States, as amended by several later enacted copyright provisions. The Act spells out the basic rights of copyright holders, codified the doctrine of "fair use", and for most new copyrights adopted a unitary term based on the date of the author's death rather than the prior scheme of fixed initial and renewal terms. It became Public Law number 94-553 on October 19, 1976 and went into effect on January 1, 1978.

Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures (TPM), such as access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM technologies govern the use, modification and distribution of copyrighted works and of systems that enforce these policies within devices. DRM technologies include licensing agreements and encryption.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Copyright infringement</span> Illegal usage of copyrighted works

Copyright infringement is the use of works protected by copyright without permission for a usage where such permission is required, thereby infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, such as the right to reproduce, distribute, display or perform the protected work, or to make derivative works. The copyright holder is typically the work's creator, or a publisher or other business to whom copyright has been assigned. Copyright holders routinely invoke legal and technological measures to prevent and penalize copyright infringement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital DJ licensing</span> Type of music licence

A digital DJ licence is required in some countries, including the United Kingdom, Finland, Belgium and Italy, to publicly play digital copies of copyrighted music. The licence allows a DJ to copy music from original CDs, vinyl or other media, to a computer's hard drive, an MP3 player or other digital audio players, for example to be used with a vinyl emulation software program, or in some cases to other digital media, such as CD-R or MiniDisc. In the countries where digital DJ licensing is used, the licence is also required for playing music originally bought and downloaded directly on to a computer, usually in MP3 or similar format, unless the licence of the online music store explicitly allows the public performance of the downloaded tracks.

Directive 2011/77/EU on the term of protection of copyright and certain related rights amended Directive 2006/116/EC and extended copyright terms of recordings from 50 to 70 years. It was passed by the Council of the European Union on 12 September 2011 after the European Parliament passed it on 23 April 2009 establishing a term of 70 years, lower than the 95 years the European Commission had proposed on 16 July 2008.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Music piracy</span> Copying and distribution of music without the consent of creators or copyright holders

Music piracy is the copying and distributing of recordings of a piece of music for which the rights owners did not give consent. In the contemporary legal environment, it is a form of copyright infringement, which may be either a civil wrong or a crime depending on jurisdiction. The late 20th and early 21st centuries saw much controversy over the ethics of redistributing media content, how much production and distribution companies in the media were losing, and the very scope of what ought to be considered piracy – and cases involving the piracy of music were among the most frequently discussed in the debate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of fair use proposals in Australia</span>

The history of fair-use proposals in Australia is a series of Australian government enquiries into the introduction of a "flexible and open" fair use system into Australian copyright law. Between 1998 and 2016, eight enquiries examined, and in most cases recommended, the introduction of fair use in place of the current "fair dealing" system which allows copyrighted material to be used only if it meets one of four specific purposes as set out in the Act.

References

  1. "Shake-up 'absurd' copyright laws, says NCC". National Consumer Council. 2006-05-11.
  2. "Copying CDs could be made legal". BBC News. 2008-01-08.
  3. Lessig Blog: Ok, so I'm wrong
  4. The Register: EU votes for longer music copyright
  5. The Guardian: Google calls for UK copyright reforms