PLANET BUSINESS:Good news for the bank balance of Cliff Richard. The EU has ratified new copyright legislation that will allow musicians to reap royalties for up to 70 years after a recording is made, rather than the current, pension-unfriendly 50 years.
A bank of 1960s recordings that had been due to fall out of copyright will continue to earn money for musicians – as long as they didn't sign away copyright to labels at the time. The legislation has been dubbed "Cliff's Law", due to Richard's support for the change – though his debut hit, Move It, has already fallen into the public domain.
STATUS UPDATE
Rugby revenues:The New Zealand economy will be boosted by as much as $1.2 billion (€875 million) thanks to the Rugby World Cup, according to a report by MasterCard.
Twitter tips:Indiana computing professor Johan Bollen has developed a programme claiming to help predict the direction of share prices based on millions of tweets.
Greece should default, and default big . . . You can't jump over a chasm in two steps
- Mario Blejer,a former Bank of England adviser who headed Argentina's central bank after its 2001 default, describes current EU austerity programmes as "totally ridiculous".
THE QUESTION:
How manipulated are online hotel reviews?
Travel website TripAdvisor has removed the slogan “reviews you can trust” from the hotel review part of its website, replacing it with “reviews from our community”. The change, it says, is unconnected to a complaint lodged with the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority by KwikChex, an online reputation management company that’s deploying muscle on behalf of businesses aggrieved by the galling power of online comment forms.
It’s not just the potentially defamatory reviews of unhappy travellers and the fake reviews of underhand rivals that has KwikChex and its clients incensed – it’s TripAdvisor’s practice of “red flagging” hotels that it suspects of rigging its own reviews.
KwikChex alleges that TripAdvisor has “punished” hotels that tried to fight back against false negative reviews by adding a red flag to their listing – a claim TripAdvisor rejects. In this murky world, it seems there is little a casual hotel browser can count on, save perhaps the reliably high expectations that North American reviewers tend to have of European plumbing.
SHOP TALK
Johnnie Boden, old Etonian ex-stockbroker turned catalogue king, lives in fear of his clothing e-tailer's clientele "looking a bit tarty, a bit mutton dressed as lamb", he once told the Sunday Times. "Sexy is such a tacky word," in Johnnie's worldview. "We don't do cleavage. And that extra two inches can make a lot of difference on a skirt length."
But despite or perhaps because of “sexy” being “a word that’s banned” at Boden, the group is coining it. Revenues in 2010 rose 15 per cent to £232 million; pretax profits climbed 13 per cent to £32.5 million. A fondness for using smiling children in its publicity shots can’t hurt.
84
The percentage of professionals who say they feel “motivated” in their jobs, according to a survey by recruitment firm Robert Walters
