Keeping Watch on the Music Business: Copyright and Copyleft

This week's topic is inspired by a comment from Kris (TLNOYL) on last week's post, and his reference to this article on Wired: Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business. There are numerous issues involved in music and copyright and Creative Commons/copyleft that they can't all be covered here, but here's three of the big-time important ones and corresponding articles for reference so you can read up on these matters - please don't hesitate to comment on any of these points, and add your own remarks and ideas for solutions!

- The Seminal - Copyright vs. Copyleft: Joh Padgett interestingly refers to copyright as "the foundation on which the entire music business exists", and points out that exclusive rights to music were established as early as the 15th century! Music publishing copyright has an important role - they show who is responsible for having created a work (or at least who gets paid for it) and provide the means for obtaining legitimate permission to re-publish such works elsewhere (be it sheet music or obtaining the rights for using a song in a film or TV commercial). But, as any downloader knows or anyone confused at how to go move through the tangled web of obtaining permission or protecting their works, copyright is not always so cut-and-dry, or even beneficial. Enter copyleft. From the Wikipedia:

"Copyleft is a form of licensing and can be used to modify copyrights for works such as computer software, documents, music and art. In general, copyright law allows an author to prohibit others from reproducing, adapting, or distributing copies of the author's work. In contrast, an author may, through a copyleft licensing scheme, give every person who receives a copy of a work permission to reproduce, adapt or distribute the work as long as any resulting copies or adaptations are also bound by the same copyleft licensing scheme. A widely used and originating copyleft license is the GNU General Public License. Creative Commons provides a similar license called ShareAlike."

Putting copyleft into practice has already allowed for much creative blossoming to occur, in that it has made it fairly easy to identify what the rights are concerning a track, as in the case of Creative Commons designations an artist can choose from indicating "no derivatives", "non-commercial only", "share alike", and so on. Of course, CC licensing isn't always what an artist is going to want to choose for their works, but if they're wanting them to be more easily accessible to the public and modified, it provides a stunningly effective solution. Also curious to note is CC's emphasis on how a work is allowed to be used, whereas the focus on copyright has tended to be on how to prevent others from using it, unless they get the proper permission. CC simplifies how one would obtain permission, which usually pares the process down to merely linking back and/or naming the source. It can also lead to a pleasant surprise as well - I recently discovered, upon typing "Marilyn Roxie" in on YouTube, that, because my music is Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial licensed, someone had used a track of mine in a surreal short film they'd made called Box (and, naturally, attributed it back to me)! CC is also a remixer's paradise - see also ccMixter! Getting your works licensed via Creative Commons is free and can be done right on-line; if you'd like to give this a try for any of your works, you can check out your options over here: http://creativecommons.org/choose/

- New Music Strategies - How long should music copyright be?: While many readers are more likely to first think of copyrights lasting 50+ years, Andrew Dubber suggests that "the ideal term of both recording rights and composer’s rights is five years." This may seem like a crazy idea at first, as some of the arguments for lengthy copyright terms include that it protects works from entering the public domain and enables musicians to be rewarded from their works for a longer period of time, but considering the positives of a renewable, 5-year copyright length: they could be easily renewable, "Inactivity at the five year mark will lead to the default position of public domain - not the default position (as is currently the case) of ‘you can’t use this’.", and would allow out-of-print, commercially unavailable works to thrive out in the open where people can hear them, and not be restricted to the frequently frowned-upon domain of underground music blogs and torrents, and most importantly they could allow "for far more music (coming) into the public sphere for the good of culture, and provide opportunities for enterprise." Being that the on-line music community has changed so much in the way that people listen to and obtain music, it's only the natural course of progress that laws and the way music is considered from a business perspective to shift to reflect this, and take advantage of the positives.

- RIAA - Piracy: Online and On the Street: The RIAA have a fairly scary run-down of the negative repercussions of sharing music, continuing to enforce the idea that sharing digital files is the same as stealing physical copies and blowing out-of-proportion the actual amount in damages caused. I don't mean to slight the RIAA, really - protecting artist's and recording company's rights is an important, and essential service, and the spiral has just continued right on downwards with the general assumption that they are an "evil" organization - admittedly, their actions have made music fans, downloaders or not, distrust them perhaps as much as they frown upon those who would share music without permission. Cash penalties for sharing copyrighted works are well in excess of what is reasonable (they say: "Criminal penalties can run up to 5 years in prison and/or $250,000 in fines, even if you didn’t do it for monetary or financial or commercial gain.", though cases so far typically have settled for a few thousand), though, encouragingly, the RIAA and other copyrighted-works defenders have largely shifted their focus away from downloaders (perhaps because there are simply too many to track them all down) and to the uploaders of files. P2P network sharers have been dealt the biggest blows, whereas blog uploaders are often simply asked to remove the offending item (Web Sheriff, anyone?). Oh, hang on. Wait a minute. Doesn't that sound like a more logical step? Just asking for the album to be removed if someone is bothered by it being uploaded? The reason why P2P is dealt with the way it has been is because the uploads are available to a massive amount of users and typically much more material is uploaded by each individual, while on blogs, uploads are more scattered and varied according to the poster's taste - I have a personal aversion to P2P and have never used it myself, though the technology is interesting: more info on this at the Electronic Frontier Foundation's A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing.

This all wraps back around to the concepts of copyright and copyleft - a new way will have to be sought out in order for listeners to get the music they want (the future seems to point to cheaper, easier, and more of it) and laws about copyright and creative protection being revised and being enforced (sensibly!). The solution is right in front of us, but reaching it must involve cooperation from all of the parties concerned.

(Top-left artwork by zio_fablo)