h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hey Ben, i've read some of your postings and am quie interested in what yoo have to say.

I am doing a dissertation on 'How do copyright laws impact upon artist creativity in the digital age?' I would be grateful if you could get back to me by 07/04/03

Thanks in anticipation

The problem with copyright law in relation to modern creativity is that it refuses to make any kind of legal distinction between counterfeiting whole works for unauthorised resale and the partial or fragmentary reuse of existing work in creation of a new work.

This statement was made by recording artist Don Joyce who was sued by a large music company for copyright infringement. Do you agree with this statement?

Do you feel that sampling is an acceptable method of creating music?
Briefly explain your answer

There is a body of opinion who believe that the copyright system as it exists restrcits access to culture for the average person who can't afford to pay for it. What are your thoughts on this view.

Can an artist who uses another artists music in creating their own profess to owning a new piece of music? Please briefly explain your answer

Some digitised samples can be so far remove from the origina; that they are basically impossible to identify. Does this create a new piece of music?

Can the existing copyright laws still be applicable in a digital age?

Do you believe that current laws adequately take into account technological developments<


Thanks Ben

Ps How do you know so much on copyright anyway??

Hi ChynalZ, thanks for your posting. Sorry if my replies seem a little vague - just it's midnight:47 and I'm not at my perkiest. Hope they help. And remember - quoting without attribution may or may not by in violation of copyright law, but it'll get your dissertation rejected!

"The problem with copyright law in relation to modern creativity is that it refuses to make any kind of legal distinction between counterfeiting whole works for unauthorised resale and the partial or fragmentary reuse of existing work in creation of a new work.

This statement was made by recording artist Don Joyce who was sued by a large music company for copyright infringement. Do you agree with this statement?"

Well, that seems to be a question of legal fact, more than anything, so you should probably just ask a lawyer. Two ways to answer that: a) I believe copyright law *does* make such a distinction. I believe so-called 'fair-use' provisions do allow for the replication of an 'insubstantial' part of a text within another work. That is, you can copy a few lines of a poem for a review or a few pages of a book for a discussion, but not the lot. b) Perhaps a more pertinent way round to put this is that, is that in a digital age copyright law *fails* to enforce this distinction. So we have laws being passed, like the DMCA in the US and the European Copyright Act, which legislate in favour of Digital Rights Management systems, and outlaw working round these, without ensuring that previous rights of non-copyright holders are maintained. So 'How does the digital age impact upon copyright laws?'.

"Do you feel that sampling is an acceptable method of creating music?
Briefly explain your answer"

I'm not sure I understand your question. I mean, I understand what a lawyer or the RIAA mean when they ask it, but I don't really understand what the question actually means. There are people that say of paintings made with elephant dung 'That's NOT art', or grannies who say of modern bands 'That's NOT music'. I take it that, even if we view it as /bad/ art or /bad/ music, it's plain that it is music. So of course sampling is 'acceptable method of creating music'. We'll have to accept it because sampling does, indeed, create music.

Another response is 'acceptable to whom'. To take the lawyer / RIAA perspective for a second, presumably they think 'Well, the sampler might be happy with this, but it isn't /acceptable/ to the original musician'. If you've read my other postings then you'll probably know my response to this. Copyright isn't about making authors feel happy, and it's not about what they find 'acceptable'. It's about what a majority of society feels it wants. Copyright can have no basis in what a minority wants.

"There is a body of opinion who believe that the copyright system as it exists restrcits access to culture for the average person who can't afford to pay for it. What are your thoughts on this view."

I'm not sure why that should matter. 'Culture' presumably is being used here as an elitist term, referring to the things which society judges to be worthy of interest. Clearly culture is everywhere, and copyright can restrict access to it. It may limit the proliferation of parts of culture, and make society generally worse off, but then it might do what it was intended to do, and increase the public domain. This might seem an unexpected answer, but I guess I just don't see this separation of artists and audience. We all make culture. We all /are/ culture. It'd just be a great shame if copyright makes us all less valuable by telling us not to share and work together to make really great art. I like fairy tales, I like folk lore, I like ancient oriental tales as much as the last man. Life plus 70 years before you can adapt a story to make it better would have meant these things would never have appeared.

"Can an artist who uses another artists music in creating their own profess to owning a new piece of music? Please briefly explain your answer"

Obviously. The question presumably is whether they'd be right in claiming that. I think the answer to that too is obviously right, if any music is new. I somehow suspect it's a *very* long time since anybody produced a new sound audible to the human ear. In the general scheme of things, the number of unique sounds is very limited. So the 'other artists' already just used commonly available sounds and arranged them in a supposedly novel way.

There's another reason why it is obvious they're creating a new piece of music. If you sing 'Oggy oggy oggy' and I sing 'Oi oi oi', I'm not just making a new sound, I'm reply to yours. You can use someone else's words or music without it being a reflection on the original. When McGough writes 'They don't f*** you up, your mum and dad, despite what Larkin says' (well, actually he didn't have those asterisks there, but apparently the BBC doesn't believe that that word is part of literature), he's not just copying Larkin, he's commenting on Larkin. Clearly using other music is a powerful way of commenting on it, and clearly this right is important. What's the point of singing '#Britney, her lyrics are such dro-o-o-os#', when '#Isn't she lovely, that hollywood girl, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah#' would say it so much more clearly?

"Some digitised samples can be so far remove from the origina; that they are basically impossible to identify. Does this create a new piece of music?"

Yes. Obviously, trivially, yes. A perfect facsimile would be a 'new piece of music'. It would be a new token of the same music type. And, again, there is no truly 'new' music anyway.

"Can the existing copyright laws still be applicable in a digital age?"

Again, I don't know what this means. Yes, they can, they just need to stay law. That's what law is. I don't really understand what 'a digital age' is, but if you just mean 'Are they out of date?' then, actually, I'm not sure even how to answer that. I think the current length of copyright is obviously far too long. It would always have been, and that has nothing to do with 'the age' it's in. So the answer is presumably that recent developments have been for the worse, the seriously worse, but would have been inappropriate any time.

If you're asking 'Is the whole concept of copyright out of date?', I'm not sure, but I'm inclined towards 'yes'. I don't believe that copyright stills serves it's original intention very well. I'm certain that art would not stop were we to abandon the copyright framework. Far from it, I think it might flourish. What we'd lose are the manufactured rubbish that appears to be the only benefactor of current copyright laws. Passionate musicians will always make music, whether they get paid of not, they just have to, for their soul. And so long as there are trespass laws, they'll still make money on gigs, which is where /real/ bands still make the vast majority of their money, rather than a couple of pence here or there from an album.

"Do you believe that current laws adequately take into account technological developments"

Actually, I'll answer a straight 'no'. I don't see how technological developments come into it. If copying something is illegal, it's illegal whether it's easy to copy it or not. How can you say 'current laws don't take account of Napster' (for example) 'so we need stronger ones' when copying music already was in breach of copyright law? So people can do it easily: they're still criminals and that's what the law is there to define. In fact, the law seems to do very /well/ in this respect, and the RIAA etc. should be very happy. Current laws say very clearly that the people they want to be guilty *are* criminally guilty.

In fact, additional laws will obviously catch a (potentially overlapping) different group to the intended one. If we don't want people copying music, outlaw the practice - whoops, we already have. Clearly the only difference with outlawing, say, P2P programs will be on those things which currently aren't illegal (boringly: only things that aren't currently illegal can be made illegal by new laws). So it is only the non-copyright-infringing practices that are affected.

I don't really know how to say this more clearly: if you want to outlaw copying, outlaw copying. No technological invention can 'evade' that, though it could make it harder to stop the criminals.

"Thanks Ben"

you're welcome.

"Ps How do you know so much on copyright anyway??"

I don't know much. I know what the original point is, and the rest of it all follows quite straightforwardly from there, really.

As to the rubbish such as the DMCA and the EUCD, I know about those because I run Linux and am interested in Free Software, and so I kinda have to be aware of these issues....

Pah! Not so much as a thank you....