Continuing the copyright discussion...

[TRichardsbass]

I just watched RiP! A Remix Manifesto.

Interesting arguments for how music came to be, how cultures have evolved and how the copyright has somehow become "evil". After watching it I am even more convinced about copyright law and its enforcement.

The entire movie banks on "culture" as some commodity that should be allowed to take anything and build on it without any regard to the person who created it or invested themselves in it. They actually used Brazil as a shining example of how free use should be. The argument is that Brazil is trying to dig itself out of poverty and decades of decline by essentially using for free ideas they never came up with or invested in. The movie even cites Brazil's "free use" of formulas for drugs that they refused to even think about paying for so they just stole the formulas and made them there, cheaper, for themselves. That is not improving on your situation, its stealing to catch up with what everyone else has worked hard to create to give them that advantage. The movie even says, "What if the whole world was like Brazil?" He meant it in an ideological sense. It, however, also can be taken literally. Brazil, why still one hell of a great place to party, has huge poverty, quite a bit of crime and is only beginning now to head toward some sort of growth. Why? Yes that other evil, BIG OIL! Their open minded, "free" society, culturally, hasn't done squat.

The interesting point in the movie to me is that several of the artists, including this dork "Girl Talk" talk about using the currently available stuff as the necessary ingredient. They completely ignore the current public domain, because it is old.

It would be really, really, really creative if Girl Talk actually sampled only public domain sounds and music and then made the great mashups he has. But he doesn't and won't. Why? Because he isn't that creative. Shouldn't be that hard to sample, say, a Wagnerian opera sequence, touch it with your computer and make something magical. But they can't. Why? Because they aren't creative, nor are they being creative.

The argument was also made for taking two things that were never together before and putting them together, that makes a new thing, and therefore it should be free use. So, with that argument if I "borrow" your car, then serve a salad buffet on it, I have combined two things that previously weren't, so I should be able to keep and use your car for as long as I want, with no payment to you, under the guise of moving culture forward, "remixing." Stupid.

Look, the one point it never actually discussed is that you can pay for the right to remix the music. You are FREE to use it, you just need permission or pay for it.

They made the discussion also about the "big, evil, record companies" a million times. Okay, so then I believe that every remix artist should be able to use any song for free. But they should not be able to make any money off what they do, including fees for DJing. That's fair to me. So, you great rap artists, you can sample all you want. But you will still have to work at McDonalds if you want to eat or get any bling. How's that sound? Oh yes, that's right...

The movie has a lawyer, I believe his name is Lessig, and he argues nearly a communistic approach. I would have loved to see the argument he would make in a communistic society. If everyone is equal, you don't need lawyers. Okay, so what would he want to do to contribute to this "free" society? I know full well that we all have to eat. So someone has to grow the food, run the farms, milk the cows and goats. In a "free" society as they sort of point to, hmmm, how many people are going to run hard to produce all the food we need? I know I'd much rather sit on my but and strum a few chords and say I'm contributing to the "culture", and that is as important as the guy growing the food. Problem is that even in a perfect utopia, that is not the case.

If you want to argue that copyright law is too long or restrictive, you can do so freely. I would ask then, if the copyright law were much shorter, would you be willing to never download or use a song under copyright for free, EVER? If you could guarantee that, then I'd give up my quite long rights for shorter rights. But you can't, and most won't, under the guise of "I can't afford it".

This brings me to the last point. The movie discusses the RIAA lawsuit that a woman lost over downloading 24 songs. The movie makes the RIAA out to be satan, because they won a court case for huge bucks, over songs that, yes, on a CD would have cost $8.99. So, why didn't the woman just pay the $8.99? Because everyone would rather not pay at all.

Look, I've been down this road a million times. I encourage to have everyone watch this documentary (available on Hulu for free, legally) and also "Before the Music Dies", also available on Hulu for free, legally. Then come back here and please comment. Add your perspective.

Tom

 

[seanm]

It's also available at nfb.ca for those of use outside the US.

 

[fdeck]

The movie makes the RIAA out to be satan, because they won a court case for huge bucks, over songs that, yes, on a CD would have cost $8.99.

Of course the RIAA isn't Satan.

Satan is the lady who sued McDonald's because she was given a cup of boiling hot coffee.

Gotta keep our nuisance lawsuits straight.

 

[Rockmusician]

Personally, I think the person who created whatever it is, a product, music, etc should automatically own the rights without having to register it anywhere. As far as sampling is concerned, I am totally against. There is absolutely nothing creative about stealing someone elses material, combining the music switching some of the lyrics around and calling it your own.

Maybe I'm biased because I own several copyrights and my brother is an intellectual property attorney.

 

[Jason P Bass]

Of course the RIAA isn't Satan.

Satan is the lady who sued McDonald's because she was given a cup of boiling hot coffee.

Gotta keep our nuisance lawsuits straight.

Are you being sarcastic?

If not, I encourage you to know the details.

 

[Jason P Bass]

I personally think that the entire debate is old fashioned.

For about 1000 years, nobody made any money as a musician.

Between 1950-1990, you could get rich as a musician.

Starting in 1991, you can't get rich as a musician. (As an entertainer, dancer, MC, celebrity, pop icon, but not as a musician.)

People are going to look back at those 40 years as a bizarre aberration and nothing more, IMO.

Consider the demise of the professional telegraph operator, or the ice delivery man, or charging people for domestic long distance telephone calls.

 

[funkydanbass]

Couldn't make money as a musician before 1950 hey?

 

[Jason P Bass]

Is it Say Something Obvious Day?

 

[fractiouslowend]

Personally, I think the person who created whatever it is, a product, music, etc should automatically own the rights without having to register it anywhere. As far as sampling is concerned, I am totally against. There is absolutely nothing creative about stealing someone elses material, combining the music switching some of the lyrics around and calling it your own.

Maybe I'm biased because I own several copyrights and my brother is an intellectual property attorney.

So Hendrix wasn't being creative when he played all along the watchtower?

Or what about any musician who used the major scale? technically it's a song, or at least a melody, that someone at one point must have been the first person to think of.

This is the antithesis of what makes us human. How can we move forward if not by building upon the ideas of the past.

Surely, we shouldn't rip people off, and anyone remixing / covering material should ask permission / pay royalties, but only if they are making money from it.

 

[Billnc]

I personally think that the entire debate is old fashioned.


Consider the demise of the professional telegraph operator, or the ice delivery man, or charging people for domestic long distance telephone calls.

I'm a former Manual Morse intercept operator, present day bass player, jazz guitarist. I'm screwed.

 

[fdeck]

Are you being sarcastic?

Yes.

 

[fdeck]

Personally, I think the person who created whatever it is, a product, music, etc should automatically own the rights without having to register it anywhere.

That is the present state of affairs for music. It's more complicated for products, because of differences between copyright and patent law.

As far as sampling is concerned, I am totally against. There is absolutely nothing creative about stealing someone elses material, combining the music switching some of the lyrics around and calling it your own.

Maybe I'm biased because I own several copyrights and my brother is an intellectual property attorney.

Ask your brother if sampling is legal. I'm pretty sure that this issue has been addressed in the courts.

 

[more coffee]

Shouldn't be that hard to sample, say, a Wagnerian opera sequence, touch it with your computer and make something magical. But they can't. Why? Because they aren't creative, nor are they being creative.

Not to take this thread totally off track, but there are people out there doing exactly this.

From nerdcore impresario MC Frontalot

[Invalid or Expired Link Removed]

 

[TRichardsbass]

The movie is interesting because it focuses on "moving the culture forward" and four rules that are based on "the past" and "the future." Its biggest fundamental premise is "The past always trys to control the future."

Interesting concept, and the argument is made in an intelligent way. It still misses a lot of the discussion points though.

As for industries and jobs disappearing over time, yes, technology has done that. WE ARE THE ONLY THREE GENERATIONS OF HUMANS ON THE PLANET TO EXPERIENCE THIS ON SUCH A MASSIVE SCALE. Prior to about 1900 we were an agrarian world. Everyone pretty much grew their own food and fended for themselves. The technology itself changed our "culture" to what it is today. So for over 10,000 years humans basically just hunted and farmed. Then suddenly we had other things and an industrial revolution that changed society completely.

Jason, it is very possible that musician as a vocation will disappear. That, of course, also means that music, in a large way, may also disappear. We live in a society where you need money to buy our essentials, our needs. Music will become, or can become, just a hobby.

In order to be able to survive, then your statement leads one immediately to a societal model where the musician becomes supported by the Patron. In that case, individuality and independence completely disappear, so the creativity everyone in the movie espouses also dies. In the olden days yes, Michaelangelo painted some great works, but he was basically told what to do. Leonardo DaVinci made a life of doing what he was told to do. Although we now hail them as extraordinary, I would argue that that many of the things they did or created were because of someones' idea, not theirs. Michealangelo did not create the Sistine Chapel, he was the ceiling painter. DaVinci did not lead armies, he was told to make weapons.

Google, yes GOOGLE, recently has been crying the same argument. "Software patents stifle creativity." That is a direct quote from one of the top three at Google. It was sour grapes, because Google's competition decided to pay for patent rights to a lot of what Google has, yes, stolen. Google knows that in the end they will wind up paying huge sums of money and possibly even go out of business, so they are attempting to make a public argument, as well as a governmental one, that everything should be almost open source. With the exception of THEIR products, of course.

We in the western world have economies so advanced that you can survive and thrive without producing one thing of real value. Video/computer games, movies, radio shows and podcasts and yes, music, cannot be eaten. They cannot be drunk. You cannot fix anything with them. If the infamous armageddon were to come tomorrow, they would become useless and garbage. So I would argue then that they should not exist at all, as they cannot in any tangeable way move culture and society forward. The building blocks are air, so all you will have after they die is air.

However, if you want to argue that these things are important, maybe even vital, to the exchange of ideas and the movement of culture forward, into the future, then the people creating and making them must be able to do it properly. Which, in most cases, means full time and dedicated. So therefore, in our society, they must have a means to feed, clothe and shelter themselves that comes from their creativity. THAT is the one point I know the movie misses. Copyrights and patents are vital to being able to keep creative people creating. If they cannot profit from their creativity, they cannot create.

The open source thinking world is just communism in a different form. Everything should be free is the same as everyone should be the same. Communism. Problem is, as I've stated before, someone still has to grow the food, slaughter the cattle in our current society in order for us to survive. Farming is one of, if not THE, hardest job on the planet, and it is 100% consuming of your time and efforts. So, in an open source world, why would anyone actually want to have to do all the really hard work when you can just sit back and wait for someone else to create it for you, possibly at the expense of their entire lifes work and worth?

Want to know why culture and the world did not move at todays amazing pace? Because until a couple of geniuses created and perfected the industrial revolution, everyone was consumed with just being able to feed themselves. I grow veggies at my house. They consume at least an hour or two every day during growing season, and several hours on the weekends. And I only grow a couple of things. I could not survive a full year on what I grow. Until a few people created the ability to work for someone for wages and then make it possible for you to purchase your survival needs the time and ability to "create culture" didn't exist. If you did something having to do with "culture" you were a slave or subservient to a King or ruler. They lived the life, you slaved the life.

I don't discount the need to move ideas and culture forward. It is and always will be important. However, the movie and a lot of current thinkers in the music biz spend a little too much time not realizing what they want is totally the opposite of what they are creating.

The focus of the film, the gentleman who is Girl Talk, it states he is in the biomedical field as a day job. His job, and a decent living, rely 100% on patents and control of those patents. Without that he wouldn't even have the computers he uses to steal, I mean create. I wonder if he ever thinks about that.....

 

[Rockmusician]

That is the present state of affairs for music. It's more complicated for products, because of differences between copyright and patent law.



Ask your brother if sampling is legal. I'm pretty sure that this issue has been addressed in the courts.

I didn't say whether or not it was legal. All I said is that I am against it and it shows no creativity.

 

[TRichardsbass]

I just realized that I described the fall of the Greek and Roman empires. A highly advanced, civilized "culture" that fell because of a group of less civilized, poor people who wanted the riches and power of the advanced civiilization defeated it and took it over. And plunged the world into the "dark ages."

Culture and free time are synonymous. You cannot have culture and art in any recognizable form without the time to appreciate it. That means free time. In order for a musician to have the time to create this great music, yes, even Girl Talk dude, he has to have non-working, non-surviving free time.

Without some protections, the artist, in any form, will no longer be able to create on the scale they do. The dark ages, if you will, of art and music.

 

[Jason P Bass]

As for industries and jobs disappearing over time, yes, technology has done that. WE ARE THE ONLY THREE GENERATIONS OF HUMANS ON THE PLANET TO EXPERIENCE THIS ON SUCH A MASSIVE SCALE. Prior to about 1900 we were an agrarian world. Everyone pretty much grew their own food and fended for themselves. The technology itself changed our "culture" to what it is today. So for over 10,000 years humans basically just hunted and farmed. Then suddenly we had other things and an industrial revolution that changed society completely.

Yeah, this is my point on a wider scale. But to refocus it again on music, everyone is bent out of shape about how copyright applies to recorded music. What I'm saying is that this is an argument about an industry that is evaporating before our very eyes. In 1990, CD sales were a multi-billion dollar industry. In 2010, they're a small billion dollar industry. In 2030, sales of recorded music probably be an even smaller industry.

Nobody argues about licensing and regulating telegraph operators anymore, because it's such a tiny, tiny economy that it's not worth arguing about. This is where I see the copyright argument going - eventually the pie gets smaller and smaller, and then nobody is going to bother fighting about it. This is MERELY a return to what is historically NORMAL for the world of music.

]

Google, yes GOOGLE, recently has been crying the same argument. "Software patents stifle creativity." That is a direct quote from one of the top three at Google. It was sour grapes, because Google's competition decided to pay for patent rights to a lot of what Google has, yes, stolen. Google knows that in the end they will wind up paying huge sums of money and possibly even go out of business, so they are attempting to make a public argument, as well as a governmental one, that everything should be almost open source. With the exception of THEIR products, of course.

You never know, in this crazy world of anonymous internet message boards, when you'll run into someone with CRAZY credentials in the US patent system.

What Google's PR department says, and where Google's money goes, are two very different things when it comes to the patent issue.

Any tech company who TRULY doesn't like the US patent system would immediately move to China or India (where the labor is extremely cheap and highly educated in technology) and there is no recognizable IP regulation - i.e. everything is "open source" whether you like it or not. But for some reason, Google (and Microsoft, Apple, Texas Instruments, AMD, Intel, and many other US-based computer companies) keep their R&D and intellectual property firmly located in the USA, the nation that has the strongest intellectual property regulation on the planet for computer software.

So tell me, how unhappy can they TRULY be about it all? And remember, you never know who is or is not qualified to anonymously talk about the patent system

The open source thinking world is just communism in a different form. Everything should be free is the same as everyone should be the same. Communism. Problem is, as I've stated before, someone still has to grow the food, slaughter the cattle in our current society in order for us to survive. Farming is one of, if not THE, hardest job on the planet, and it is 100% consuming of your time and efforts. So, in an open source world, why would anyone actually want to have to do all the really hard work when you can just sit back and wait for someone else to create it for you, possibly at the expense of their entire lifes work and worth?

But this model worked just fine for Linux. Redhat is probably the best example of a company that turned open source into an industry. In a nutshell, the software is free and Redhat charges money for the services. For a private home user, that's peanuts, but for a large company, that means a very profitable service agreement to make sure hundreds or thousands of workstations run smoothly. And when it's time for a software upgrade, the only cost to the customer is the labor! It's a HUGE competitive advantage over closed source software, but there's still a stigma attached to open source that handcuffs it in the marketplace.

What about DIY furniture? I did this last year for my deck furniture. You buy the plans in a book (i.e. open source) and build it yourself.

What about classical music? You can find all kinds of public domain scores online, learn it, and perform it. But the Boston Philharmonic is still around.

People get SO EMOTIONAL about the "open source vs. closed source" debate that they fail to see that, in almost ANY industry, you are perfectly free to try the open source business model if the market will bear it. But Linux remains relatively unpopular, my deck furniture looks home made, and audiences want to hear a professional symphony play modern music.

Nobody is stopping ANYBODY from going open source. Except, of course, the accounting department.

Anyhoo... it seems like you and I agree in philosophy. I think I'm agreeing with you more than debating, haha. When it comes to music and copyrights, I still maintain that 1950-1990 were simply a historical fluke, and 20 years from now we're all going to laugh about the years 1990-2020 when the "industry" flailed around in its dying years. We'll probably laugh at the term "industry" as well.

Look at it this way - nobody would sue someone else for copying their Facebook status update - although technically, as soon as you create a unique status update, you could argue that it is a copyrighted work. Why does nobody really care about copying Facebook updates? Because there is NO MONEY in it. Welcome to the future of sampling, stealing, and remixing music. In a few short years, there will be NO MONEY in it, and the complaints about copyright will evaporate.

 

[Jason P Bass]

To look at it from a completely different angle:

Imagine a brand new artist trying to record their first song.

In 1950, to record a song, you needed:
1) A song (the creative work). Watch VH1's Behind the Music long enough and you'll hear plenty of stories that say, "Oh yeah, once we had the idea, the whole song came together in like 15 minutes. It just wrote itself." So in at least SOME documented cases, this is actually a tiny, tiny piece of work.

2) A recording studio. This requires somebody to purchase thousands upon thousands of dollars (in some cases, millions of dollars) of specialized, highly technical equipment at the cutting edge of what technology could produce.

3) General staff, paid to keep the business running. Those tape machines don't align themselves. Those vacuum tubes need replacing. Someone has to clean the carpets. Someone has to answer the phones and manage the schedule.

4) Technical staff, paid to produce the deliverables. You're not going to let some punk kids operate your $750,000 recording console. You need engineers to run the studio while the "talent" performs their song.

5) A record company. No undiscovered talent could possibly afford to book time at a professional studio. Now we have a producer who gets paid, his assistant, the A&R guys, the executives, their secretaries, all down the line. Everybody is getting a cut, if not on the front end, then on the back end.

And when it's all said and done, you spent THOUSANDS of dollars to get a 4 track recording that, quite frankly, sounds like someone stabbed an AM radio with a screwdriver. You can't hear the kick drum or the bass player.

This is an INDUSTRY where it is worthwhile to protect the HUGE INVESTMENT that goes into producing a musical recording. Even before 1 record sells, it takes a mountain of money to produce a recording. If I own the publishing rights, you better believe I will invest in lawyers to defend my investment against MC DoodleNuts who tries to sample and remix my product.

So what does it take to produce a song in 2010?
1) A song, same as in 1950. (Probably less, but let's not get snarky.)

2) A studio: any old laptop computer. I use a Dell that cost me $600 5 years ago, and about $500 in other equipment.

(The professional studio still exists, but ask them how business is doing. More to the point, this example is for a brand new artist trying to record their first song, and a laptop studio is probably the most common and best answer.)

We're done! I've recorded about 200 demos, so for an investment of about $5 per song, I produce CD quality recordings with basically infinite tracks. You can hear the kick drum and bass player.

My point is this - the technology has gone in ONE DIRECTION for 60 years - it makes it infinitely cheaper to produce a musical recording. Anything that can be produced cheaply will become disposable. (Aluminum flatware used to be so exotic that only royalty used it - then a new process to produce aluminum cheaply was discovered and nobody would even think of using an aluminum fork on Thanksgiving.)

You've got plugins to replace session drummers, pitch correction to replace talented singers, loops to replace session bass players. You've got plugins that replace costly outboard reverbs, compressors, and preamps. The hard drive replaced absurdly expensive multi-track tape machines.

But at the end of the day, some people expect the product, which is being produced for pennies, to be protected and revered as though it were 1950, when it cost thousands of dollars to produce.

I know the law SAYS it's protected, but if it isn't WORTH anything, then there's no point in hiring the attorneys, filing the suits, and recovering the damages - because there are no damages when someone violates the copyright of something that cost nothing (and is worth, probably, nothing).

Just my humble opinion. History will show whether or not I'm right, but history also shows that the same phenomenon happened to professional typists, elevator operators, telephone switchboard operators, sword smiths, getting a shave from your barber, the old fashioned kind of gardener, ... ... ...

 

[Jason P Bass]

Without some protections, the artist, in any form, will no longer be able to create on the scale they do. The dark ages, if you will, of art and music.

OMG, they'll be forced to SELL TICKETS! AAaaaahh!!!

 

[pklima]

I don't think copyrights would save the full-time professional musician anyway. I don't think piracy or sampling are a big deal. The big deal is that there are tons of people with enough money to get the necessary gear and enough free time who are quite willing to make plenty of music that pays little or nothing because they (OK, because we) get paid in various non-monetary ways. Cynically, most of those non-monetary ways can be summed up as "it gets us laid". We're rich enough and free enough to do this.

If you think that culture needs full-time professional musicians to advance and survive, that's an argument you could make, but I suspect copyrights will do little to keep them from getting undercut by hobbyists.