Select Committee report: Selling on tickets isn't bad

Disappointingly, the actual report of the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee into secondary ticket sales - although published - isn't online yet, but the BBC has a copy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the recommendations look like a bit of a messy compromise. Which is a polite way of saying "fudge", of course.

The MPs recommend that there's no reason for legislation stopping the practice:

Committee chairman John Whittingdale said it was "neither practical nor in the interests of consumers" to ban ticket sales through the secondary market - where tickets are sold on.

Which is good news; the committee also blames promoters and venues for creating the problem in the first place by having a rubbish, or sometimes non-existent, returns and refund systems in place.

However:

Mr Whittingdale said giving event organisers a share in profits from resold tickets was the "middle way".

So: the promoters have more-or-less dropped the ball by making selling on the only way you can get any value from a ticket for an event you can no longer attend, and yet Whittingdale and his committee think they should be rewarded as a result?

The committee suggests that there should be an outright ban on the resale of tickets given for free to children and the disabled, which seems fair enough, but then:

There should be an "across-the-board commitment" that the "distasteful" sale of tickets for free events and charity events - such as Concert for Diana - will be stopped.

But on what principle? And who is define what "distasteful" is - okay, an event like the Diana concert where all the profits go to charity would count; but would Live Earth? And how about if half the profits are going to charity? What about ten per cent? Could a promoter make such a rule work to their favour if they offered a slither of one per cent of the ticket sales go to a charity? How about if the event is, say, raising funds for something that isn't a registered charity - perhaps to raise awareness of something, or to help out a band whose equipment has been stolen? Does that count as distasteful?

Perhaps what actually counts as distasteful will be cleaned up when we're able to read the full report. But the appearance of the phrase "the middle way" means we're not holding out much hope.

[Earlier:
Oral evidence to the committee
Evidence given in advance]

BPI MTV please them, please them

The Commons Select Committee has considered the pleas of the likes of Cliff Richard, and come out in favour of extending the period of copyright in sound recordings. It's a moral decision:

The House of Commons culture committee said people had a "moral right" to keep control of their creations while alive.

The copyright term for sound recordings should be extended to at least 70 years, the committee recommended.

Which is all well and good, but since most of the rights in recordings sit with companies rather than the people who actually did the work, we're not quite sure the Committee is really talking about the moral rights of the workers at all. Because that would mean, surely, taking the copyrights away from EMI and Sony and giving them back to the artists.

This has little to do with morality, and much more to do with business, and the hand of copyright holders sitting on the shoulders of the Committee.

To be fair, Paul Farrelly, Mike Hall, Rosemary McKenna and Alan Price haven't taken anything from the copyright-owning industry. And Alan Keen's participation in a cricket team which receives some money from Microsoft isn't probably going to sway him overmuch.

Phil Davies, though, has been enjoying trips to the horse races at the expense of Channel 4 for a couple of years and, although Channel 4 don't have much direct interest in the copyright status of 1950s records, its position as a major publisher of copyright material makes one wonder if an MP supposedly taking an independent view on copyright questions should also be taking their charabanc trips to Cheltenham.

Even more curiously, Janet Anderson and Nigel Evans both enjoyed a jolly to Copenhagen for the MTV Awards, paid for by MTV. Viacom, MTV's parent, has a lot of opinions about what should and shouldn't be allowed to happen to copyright material.

Helen Southworth, Adrian Sanders and committee chair John Whittingdale all had a lovely night out at the BPI Awards this year, paid for by the BPI and, indirectly, through the BPI, by the record companies. And who holds the largest amount of copyrights that are due to expire under the fifty year rule? What a strange coincidence - it's the BPI companies.

More than half the committee, including the chair, has been given recent treats by the copyright-owning industry. Now, it's giving something back. What a virtuous circle that is, providing you ignore the slightly unsavoury stink of MPs guzzling record company's drinkies before deciding on issues that directly affect them.