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A Clearinghouse For New Ideas About Copyright
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To document the public perception of copyright today, we went around Chicago with a video camera over two days in the summer of 2006, asking strangers what they think about copyright...
The talk lasts about 90 minutes, including the question-and-answer period. The audience members' backgrounds were in library science, computer science, publishing, and law, so the Q&A is as useful as the talk. LibraryThe Promise of a Post-Copyright World A Music Teacher Describes How Copyright Hinders Music Education The Professional Suicide of a Recording Musician Let the Great Cross-Referencing Begin: Google Book Search as Plagiarism Detector The Joyce Hatto Case: How Filesharing Defeats Plagiarism A Classroom Teacher on Copying vs Plagiarism Supporting Open Source While Opposing Copyright Copyright Bibliography See also...Right to Create, a web journal about how copyright and patent law interferes with people's ability to create new works. The Open Knowledge Foundation "Protecting and Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age" AgainstMonopoly.org, Thought Thieve$ ChillingEffects.org, a clearinghouse of Cease and Desist letters sent by information monopolists to people who copy. one small voice: publicdomain, CopyrightReform.us, a good advocacy site (more from the "reform it" than "scrap it and start over" school), with up-to-date news about recent copyright outrages. |
Copyright is not the real issue here.
There is nothing in Ostertag's essay that necessarily precludes copyright. In fact he hardly even mentions it. He is simply opting to control how his music is distributed. This should not be seen as an implicit threat to anyone's precious intellectual property rights, but as an alternative to the corporate distribution model that is potentially useful and liberating for artists, especially for those of us working on the margins of the "music industry" and releasing our work on our own or other very tiny labels that rarely press over 1000 copies.
Note that there are different kinds of copyright: authors and composers have copyright on the actual work itself; publishing companies (and artists, if they are smart) own the publishing rights; record companies hold copyright on the recordings they manufacture (their mechanical reproduction of the artistic work); collection agents like ASCAP and BMI get a cut for collecting these, but they do not actually hold copyright. It is ultimately up to the artist to choose how these rights are asserted.
Seems to me it is possible to hold copyright on your work, and at the same time choose how and when to exert it (assuming that you have not given control of your work to a record label). If I make a piece of music, I can decide to share it on my web site for free to non-commercial listeners. But if the producers of "The OC" want to use it in their soundtrack, they need to pay me. ASCAP or BMI may not like the idea of me giving away my music to fans, but it is not their property. And I do not have to register with them to hold copyright, but if I do I am simply hiring them to enforce it for me. Whether or not the percentage I pay them to do so is worth it is another matter.
Finally, I want to point out that Bob Ostertag is far from being a "hobbyist." He gets paid for different aspects of his work - through commissions, performances, teaching, etc. For most artists doing anything remotely challenging or non-commercial (or even artists with commercial aspirations who have not hit it big), income from recordings is a very small piece of the pie. And there are endless stories of artists who appear to be "successful" but actually spend years paying off debts to their record labels before they ever see a dime off of their hit records. If making a living off of your recordings is what it takes to qualify as a "professional," then I suggest that there are relatively few who qualify.
Steve Peters
http://steve-peters.blogspot.com