EMI's threat to our musical heritage

This is one of the four 78 rpm records, seven sides, that make up Kajanus's famous early 1930s recording of Sibelius's Fifth Symphony. If you want to hear it on CD head off to amazon.co.uk or .com and you will find a couple of releases by small labels such as Koch. The company that made the recording hasn't issued it on CD and probably never will: EMI has very limited interest in historic recordings of this sort. In spite of this, EMI is trying to browbeat the EU into retrospectively extending copyright on recordings back another fifty years. The present European copyright period is fifty years, which seems about right to protect the interests of the company that made the recording. In America the copyright period is much, much longer and historical recordings, especially of American material, have all but vanished there. If the EU extends copyright back the chances are that nobody will hear this historic recording of Sibelius's Fifth Sympony again for very many years, unless they have 78s or hang onto their Koch and Finlandia transfers. The reason why EMI wants to do this is to protect its interest in a tiny number of artists, not least the Beatles. I've no objection to them keeping the Beatles exclusively to themselves because there has never been a period when their albums have been out of the catalogue, but they evidently have no interest in Kajanus and so should not be given the right to take him away from us.