Daisy Bell Would Just Be Turning 19!

An enormously funny article - a rant almost - from the Guardian of all places. Written by Marina Hyde, it points to the absurd campaign by Bono, the so-called man of the year, to extend copyright protection of music from the current 50 years to a staggering 95 years. To be fair, it isn't just Bono, he's only one of 4,500 artistes who signed on to the campaign. But, please, read what Hyde wrote.

There is a moment in the spoof rock documentary This is Spinal Tap when a reporter poses a crushingly direct question to the eponymous band's lead singer at the wrap party for their disastrous US tour. "Is this, like, your last waltz?" he wonders. "Or are you going to milk it for a few more years in Europe?"

This vignette was called to mind by the full-page advertisement placed by 4,500 artists in Thursday's Financial Times that petitioned the government to extend the copyright on sound recordings to 95 years from the current 50. Anyone who assumed that this was these musicians' last waltz - or perhaps an elaborate ploy by Kiri Te Kanawa to get her name in the papers again - should set their faces to stunned. Now that the government has accepted the Gowers review recommendation that changing the law will give little public benefit, this ragtag army of multimillionaires and wronged creatives will be milking this one all the way to the European courts, even if the suggestion that in 95 years anyone will be dusting down a Katie Melua recording seems a triumph of optimism over sanity.

It was, of course, barely a fortnight ago that readers of these pages were pleased to take a lesson in political theory from my temporary Guardian colleague Mick Hucknall, the lead singer of Simply Red and a signatory of the aforementioned ad, who opened a presumably self-parodic opinion piece with the statement "copyright is fundamentally socialist". Mick then contrived to conflate notions of intellectual property - and there's something about "property" that grates with our fifth-form Marxist's thesis - with solid leftwing values, though I'm afraid I'd rather lost track of his point by the second mention of "the free flow of ideas", and realised we were being asked to conceive of a Beverley Sisters track as such.

Now aside from the absolutely incredibly egotistical pose struck by Bono in his Time Magazine picture (look at me! I'm significant!), as Hyde says, "….that this increasingly preposterous man should have spoken out on the business is hardly a surprise." But consider for a moment what this campaign would accomplish! If this law had been in effect for more than the past century, the song Daisy Bell (also known as A Bicycle Built for Two) would have been in the public domain for only 19 years today. Rock on, Garth!

And it would be using a walker built for two. Why, that's even better than the real thing!