Wednesday June 10, 03:57 AM
Bee Gees singer lends voice to copyright fight
By Chris Lefkow
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Three decades after "Saturday Night Fever" shot to the top of the charts, Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees is lending his voice to the fight for artists' rights in the age of digital piracy.
"It's not a very healthy atmosphere in the music business at the moment," Gibb, who heads the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), said in an interview at the World Copyright Summit here.
"It's so splintered due to the downloading, radio station formats being as they are and even TV video stations not showing videos anymore, showing quiz programs instead," the 59-year-old Gibb told AFP.
"My role as president of CISAC is to bring more awareness to authors' rights so that they keep more of what they make out of their own ideas in the face of advancing technology," the British-born singer-songwriter said.
"We're trying to create encouragement for new songwriters to go forward to create the big catalogs of tomorrow," Gibb said. "The present environment doesn't seem to flourish say as (it did) when we were first starting out."
The "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack recorded by the Bee Gees -- Robin and his brothers Barry and Maurice -- for the 1977 disco hit starring John Travolta sold more than 40 million copies, a number Gibb said is unthinkable today.
"We've seen the zenith of the hard copy record, just as much as the man on the moon or the Concorde, it's behind us," Gibb said. "I don't think we'll ever see those kind of sales again."
CISAC is the organizer of the two-day World Copyright Summit featuring 500 delegates from more than 55 countries including policymakers, legal experts and luminaries of the film, music and literary worlds.
Looming over the meeting at a downtown Washington convention center is the threat posed to artists and their livelihood by illegal file-sharing of music and film on the Web.
"Technology is not actually helping," Gibb said. "It's not inspiring new writers, it's not producing new writers.
"On the one hand you've got people saying it can expose new artists, there's a benefit there," he said. "But there's a fall in the price of music because of downloads and the record companies feel that they've lost in the record shops and the songwriters are punished."
"The problem is you've got to give people incentive, and not just financial incentive," he said. "You want people to have fun, to be excited by the idea that their music might be acclaimed.
"If they feel that in the long run that they are not going to have a career, the carrot as it were, will be taken away," he said.
Gibb said Britain and the United States should take the lead in copyright protection, preparing the ground for the next generation of hit-makers.
"America and Britain are where the art of the popular song has flourished for the past 40 or 50 years," he said. "These are very important markets."
"It's important for the Obama administration to take authors' rights seriously, intellectual property seriously, because it is a product," Gibb said. "They take notice of things that you can see and touch.
"Just because you sing something doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken seriously."
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