Lonegan estate faces the Cumberland pension gap

Obviously, it would be a cold-hearted man who wasn't sympathetic to the plight of Sharon Donegan, whose annual income will start to diminish as her husband's recordings slip out of copyright into the public domain. But it's no reason to start changing the law:

Lonnie Donegan died in 2002, aged 71, while preparing for a concert. Sharon, his widow, said: “His recordings of Rock Island Line and Cumberland Gap are effectively worthless once the copyright term ends. It’s not even as though they made us rich. People say I must be a millionaire but, no, the royalties were just enough to get by.” She said that her husband’s performance royalties amounted to £30,000 to £40,000 a year.

The loss of that income will be a terrible thing, but it also illustrates the weakness of the argument for extending the copyright term in recorded music.

Firstly, the royalties aren't going to stop completely - Cumberland Gap, recorded in 1957, comes out of copyright this year; but Donegan recorded his work over a period of years and so the royalties will dwindle rather than end completely. Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour, for example, will still be earning money up until 2010; World Cup Willie until 2016.

Secondly, and more importantly: other people who had been earning thirty-odd thousand pounds a year might into their seventies might have thought it prudent to invest some of it in a pension scheme or similar. Bricklayers and shop workers and wheelwrights and miners and office workers all have to invest some of their income to ensure they can survive through retirement - and they only get paid for their work at the time they do it, they don't receive payment every year for walls laid or shelves stacked or wheels wrought or coal dug or reports stapled back in the 1950s. And it's not as if the fifty-year copyright term is a sudden innovation, is it?

Third: the songs don't become "worthless" - indeed, the songs suddenly become much more valuable as artists are able to take back recordings long since lost to record company copyrights. There's nothing to stop the Donegan estate releasing official versions of the songs themselves, keeping the portions usually swallowed up by the labels.

The lobbyists have produced a CD which is somehow supposed to make MPs change their minds, although it's got Jamie Cullum and Atomic Kitten on it, which is more likely to generate an all-out band on recorded music instead.