CHARLES AZNAVOUR, the ageing but still popular singer, has joined forces with one of the biggest musical stars in France to fight European copyright laws that make their early recordings free for anyone to copy and sell at knockdown prices.

Aznavour, 81, and Henri Salvador, 89, the doyen of Gallic crooners, receive no royalties from CDs of their early songs. Copyright runs out after 50 years unless the performer is also the composer, and their ages have made them among the first victims.

So far the courts have ruled against their efforts to get the law changed.

Sir Cliff Richard is leading the battle on this side of the Channel and is having a similar lack of success. In the United States rights apply to records for decades after the death of the performer, Salvador, whose Latin-tinged records were hits in the early 1950s and who continues to tour, is incensed that his early performances are now in the public domain.

“It is a scandal. They are selling off cheap my name, my image and my old recordings, mixing them up any old how, and I cannot do anything to stop it,” he said during a tour of Quebec.

“I would point out that I am still alive,” he told Le Journal du Dimanche.

Last week lawyers for Salvador pleaded in the appeal court in Paris against a lower-court rejection last year of his demand for a halt to sales of his early recordings by the Auchan and Carrefour hypermarkets.

JB Music, which released the 18-title discs of early Salvador priced at €1 (65p), insisted that it was doing nothing wrong. “I am putting an artist within the reach of wallets in all legality, and I am extending his fame,” Jacques Attali, the chief of JB Music, said.

Laura Guez-Mamane, the lawyer for Aznavour, who began as a song-writer for Edith Piaf in the early 1950s, said that French law failed to protect older artists.

The same point is being made by the British-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which is lobbying for an end to what it calls the “huge disparity” in copyright between the EU and the United States.

Sir Cliff argues that he is about to be deprived of income “simply because I have outlived the copyright on my sound recordings”.

Early Elvis Presley recordings, such as Blue Moon in Kentucky, have already entered the public domain in Europe, and the Sixties star Johnny Hallyday, 63, still France’s highest-earning singer, is to lose the rights to his early recordings in five years.