Re: Needletime / Pay for Play

On Mon, 19 Jul 1999, Bradley Silver <bradleys[_at_]wwb.co.za> wrote:
>
> How has the performance right in a sound recording (needletime)
> come to include performers' rights to receive a percentage of the
> appropriate royalty for the broadcast of the sound recording? If
> the owner of the copyright in a sound recording is the producer, why
> is it not the exclusive right of the author to authorise performance
> thereof? How did this come to be a right which benefits producers
> and performers? Is there a historical/theoretical basis for this?

Surely because in the _droit d'auteur_ tradition -- which is, after all, the mainstream -- artists, including performers, have *inalienable* rights in their work. In this tradition the sentence

> the owner of the copyright in a sound recording is the producer

is nonsensical. Author's Right (_droit d'auteur_) is quite distinct from copyright; it's more akin to a human right than a property right. "Inalienable" means I can't assign my right of free speech or assembly -- though I can rent them, which is what I do when I agree to work under a confidentiality clause for example.

The opening sentence of the French law is (in my slightly tongue-in-cheek translation) "There shall be protected emanations of the spirit" whereas the opening of the UK law is "Copyright is a property right..."

So, as I understand it, the needle-time provisions are the result, first, of a compromise between authors and performers in the _droit d'auteur_ tradition; and, second, of a compromise between this and the copyright tradition. Or, put differently, a compromise between French & German diplomats and the US record industry.

(Yesterday I heard the story of an EU diplomatic meeting which was trying to discuss the difference between copyright and _droit d'auteur_, and participants realised after a few hours that the reason they weren't getting anywhere was that the simultaneous translation service, not being readers of this list, were treating "copyright" as the *translation* into English of _droit d'auteur_ and _Urhebergerecht_, and vice versa.)

--
Mike Holderness
http://www.poptel.org.uk/nuj/mike/
<mch[_at_]cix.compulink.co.uk>

 The proposal of any new order or regulation of commerce which comes from 
 [the dealers] ought always to be listened to with great precaution,  and 
 ought never to be adopted till after having been long examined, not only 
 with the most scrupulous, but also the most suspicious attention. 
   It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same 
 with that of the public,  who have generally an interest to deceive  and 
 even to oppress the public,  and who accordingly have on many occasions, 
 both deceived and oppressed it. 
 ---------------------[Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, concluding Book I.]