WIRED: In the bad old days, before the internet and computing technology reduced the costs of distributing media to near zero, every media business plan needed to be predicated on seizing the exclusive rights to make copies - usually from the artists and creators - and clutching hold of them for as long as possible.

Like so much money-making in the entertainment industry, it was a gamble.

Unfortunately, it was often a gamble that society and the individual artist lost. The distributors - in the case of music, the record labels - often couldn't work out a way of turning a profit (or a big enough profit to keep them happy). That meant that those recorded tracks would soon moulder in a warehouse. The artist would make no money and society wouldn't get to hear their creation.

Fortunately, copyright has always had an escape valve from these tragedies of the uncommon. After 50 years, the monopoly rights over distributing a particular recording end. Anyone could re-issue the music - including the original artist, who had to sell away his or her rights.

That 50-year limit could not have been more perfect. Just as the riches of the 1950s and 1960s boom in recording are returning to the public domain, we are entering an era when distributing and listening to such music is no longer limited to what can turn a buck.

Sadly, in the United States and elsewhere, record industry lobbyists have successfully pushed for the period of 50 years to be racked higher and higher. Politicians here have finally said enough to these broken promises, and further copyright term extension looks unlikely in the United States.

But now it looks like lobbyists in the EU have managed to find the fall guy for their campaign to extend sound copyright terms across Europe: good old Charlie McCreevy, now commissioner in charge of the internal market.

McCreevy outlined his plans to advocate term extensions to his fellow commissioners yesterday, extending the term for phonogram performance rights across Europe from 51 to an amazing 95 years (that's 25 years more than any other time-limited intellectual property right in Europe).

What's intriguing about McCreevy's initial announcement is how defensive it sounds. His press release firmly declares that there will be "no negative impact on Europe's external trade balance" or "consumer prices".

He gives no evidence to back up these statements - unlike the UK's 2006 Gowers Report on Intellectual Property, which devoted several pages to examining and debunking the idea performing rights extensions had any economic benefit to the society adopting it.

Funnily enough, record labels used to claim that extending performance copyright would be "good" for the trade balance - a far cry from this new defence that it would not make things any worse.

The same goes for prices: McCreevy says that out of copyright tracks cost about the same as in-copyright tracks, so the terms don't matter to consumers.

What he doesn't say is what Gowers learned - that a shorter term leads to a larger proportion of older material being available. So even if prices stayed the same (and it's unclear they will), the public will benefit from a wider choice.

And he doesn't mention that record prices aren't the only place where performance rights affect the public's pocket: a copyright extension means extra costs for all businesses that play music - for example hairdressers, old people's homes and local radio.

He has always been seen as an advocate of the free market and a laissez-faire approach to the economy. One can only imagine that being at the heart of the EU bureaucracy has turned his head. Here, McCreevy is choosing sides between the incumbent old creative industries (record labels and state-regulated collecting societies) and the new innovators (companies like Google, last.fm and small, ad-supported internet radio stations, all of whom oppose copyright term extension).

And to help quieten the cries of outrage that will greet his proposal, he also announced more invasive regulation of record companies. Record labels will have to take the earnings they supposedly make from the copyright term extension into a fund, 20 per cent of which will go to artists.

Apart from that shockingly small percentage (an 80 per cent agent's cut? Who would voluntarily sign up for that?), how could such funds be policed? Does McCreevy want the Government to micro-manage record industry investments? Or does he expect the labels, whose track record of protecting artist interests when they go counter to their own is not good, to police themselves?

McCreevy certainly has the support of the recording industry in his efforts, with all their new soundbites to go with it. All he lacks is any evidence that copyright term extension might be useful or profitable to anyone else in the EU.