Thursday, March 11, 2004
Copyright in the news
I don’t have any gig reviews or album reviews this week, so instead a look at another issue affecting music fans. Copyright.
On Tuesday, the headline on London’s free paper, The Metro, screamed “Crackdown on file sharing”. The story actually alluded to the new European bill on copyright, dubbed “super DMCA”. The piece was a little reactionary, but probably quite rightly. It would appear that the law has been manipulated, possibly by someone close to the Vivendi Group, so that it not only targets mass pirates (a good thing!) to targeting downloaders.
Later on Tuesday the law was passed and will be implemented in member states over the next 2 years. We’ll have to wait and see whether this actually has an impact. Within 2 years the whole landscape will have changed, and we may have moved on in this debate.
There is an interesting response for the European Labour Party Press Officer here.
This week’s NME has several pieces on “The Grey Album” by Danger Mouse. For those of you who don’t know about it a quick summary: Danger Mouse has taken the vocal tracks from Jay Z’s Black Album and vocal and musical samples from The Beatles White album. EMI/Capitol, the record label holding the publishing rights to the White Album had a fit and banned the album. Anti censorship groups jumped on this and a number of web sites hosted the album for a day, dubbed Grey Tuesday, for people to download.
I haven’t heard the album yet, but I don’t need to hear it to know that it’s an innovative, creative work of art. This of course matters not a jot when dealing with our outdated copyright laws.
Here’s something I found out today, a copyright holder can block someone using a sample. They can also permit someone to use the sample but can decide on how much they want to charge for use of the sample. Contrast this with the la’s governing cover versions: A copyright holder cannot stop someone from performing a cover version and they can only charge a set fee for use. Also, if/when the cover version is performed (or played on the radio) the copyright holder, not the performer, receive the royalties. This would explain why EMI allowed the muppets from Fame Academy perform “A Little Help From My Friends” – they couldn’t stop it, and they made a nice pile of cash from all of the airplay on Capital.
So until the copyright law changes to permit a creative commons, where the use of an artistic work to create another artistic work is rewarded, artists such as Danger Mouse will be criminals.
Further reading:
Lawrence Lessig’s article in this month’s Wired magazine (an extract from his forthcoming book) discusses how the current media empires were based on work of early pioneering “pirates”. There is also a Slashdot discussion on this.
An interesting discussion on fair use on Slashdot today.
