The great music copyright debate.

[Sepheritoh]

Because we've all lived through the era of tape, vinyl and cd we've always seen music itself as a commodity. It hasn’t always been this way. Maybe the p2p networks are decommodifying music. Perhaps musicians will have to revert to selling themselves as performers. Possibly.

I understand what you saying, but on the other hand - would it make sense then if developers revert to selling themselves as programmers?

[apflaum]

media wasnt always available. for the longest time musicians ONLY recieved money via performances. YEA! haha that was an ingenious insight mr/mrs.

[nuffink]

Because we've all lived through the era of tape, vinyl and cd we've always seen music itself as a commodity. It hasn’t always been this way. Maybe the p2p networks are decommodifying music. Perhaps musicians will have to revert to selling themselves as performers. Possibly.

I understand what you saying, but on the other hand - would it make sense then if developers revert to selling themselves as programmers?

I think that may well happen. As the tools get faster custom shop and built to order vsti's are a real possibility.

[TVD]

I have seen this debate scattered across various threads, and so I thought it was time for it to have its very own.

Now while everyone here is (quite rightly) against the unauthorized use of software, It is a very different case with music. While software developers are just plain screwed by theft, the situation for musicians is much more complex.

An example: a co-worker of mine is mostly into death metal and very political hip hop. She listens to very little singer-songwriter based indie-rock. Someone burned a copy of a Bettie Serveert c.d. and gave it to her. She would never have heard this c.d. had it not been burned for her. She just isn't exposed to that kind of music in her day to day life.

She has since gone to see this band live and bought two more of their discs. She is now a fan. The chances of this having happened without the initial act of 'theft', (i.e. the c.d. being burned for her) are minimal.

Now it is clear that in this case that an act of 'theft' was beneficial to the band: they recieved income (i.e. the money from the tickets and c.d.s subsequently bought) that they would not have received otherwise.

So with that as a starting point.....LET THE FIGHT BEGIN!

I'm with Chuck D on the subject of music downloading:

http://www.rapstation.com/promo/lars_vs_chuckd.html

[TVD]

I just love the part where Chuck D said that you can't beat technology all the time. He's not kidding!!!

http://www.rapstation.com/promo/lars_vs_chuckd.html

[TVD]

To be fair, here a little story from a former Metallica fan to add more to the story:



Today in Hip Hop

Banned from Napster

10 May, 2000

Hello Rapstation:

I was banned from napster this morning by Metallica and yet the only Metallica song I had on my drive ever was a two-minute bootleg of one of their rehearsals and they are playing an oasis song as a joke.

But, much more important than that song or the hundreds of others were my songs that resided in my public folder. I am a writer and poet who has been using digital technology to record my own songs and compress them into mp3 files to distribute. I also find old spoken word recordings and match them with 78rpm beats. For example, I chopped together Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, and Bukowski with a piano sample from Patti Smith's song Birdland and called it kerouac vs lenny bruce. Kerouac gets searched a lot on napster so my track was downloaded many times. I was spreading my music across the globe. Also, since the name I use for these recordings is big80blues.com my URL is carried along with my tracks.

So my art lives because it is experienced by anyone, I am not reliant on agents or record companies. I was free to distribute to a huge and avid community of 9 million. My reward for giving away my music was that it lives with strangers. I even get fan mail from people who enjoy my site enough to tell me why. I keep track of when and who download my content. Several a day and just this morning I noticed someone downloaded all my original tracks of my own lyrics and poems. But, when I logged back on I discovered Metallica had banished me for having their copyrighted songs on my drive which I did not.

I grew out of Metallica in high school. They just robbed me of the modern version of the duped tape network of the early eighties. That was how Metallica was first known, through their demo traded by metalheads all over the world. They have reached superstar status and want to close the door behind them. This is not about infringement it is about a new way to communicate and share. They should not destroy something so positive because it is temporarily painful for them due to possible loss of revenue. Not all of us have work that has stagnated since the late 80's. Not all of us live off a musical soul that died on a North European highway. Some us live in this time and must use computers to communicate. Not all of have lawyers to manipulate us into hating a technology not even understood. The members of Metallica have repeatedly stated their ignorance of computers or on-line community and yet they are smashing the most thriving example of it. They are cutting off my ability to promote my original songs and remixes. The 9 million plus users of napster are not a threat but a message.

It feels like Metallica have crushed my ability to send my music all over the world.

New business models must be found. These nine million users are a warning that you must change to survive. Litigation will only hurt users like me. Non-users like Metallica are not losing actual revenue due to theft of property. They state in interviews they are offended that they are being stolen from, daring people to have the guts to steal from Tower Records if they want to steal their songs. A piece of plastic in a showroom is supported by the trucks that get there, the road that guided the truck to the store, the clerk underpaid from the profit of the plastic discs sale, the factories that made the plastic discs. All these people lose revenue. You would be stealing a plastic object as merchandise. Downloading from napster is access to the information of the song. Your copy is not in the real space of stereos and coffeetables. No product is stolen, it is explored, collected, and traded. This is a digital pool of music lovers who cannot afford to pay 18 dollars for a CD. The modern record industry broke the system with greed. Artists have to be superstars to survive and their superstar millions buy much more protection than anyone like me. Well a world of distribution is being created where the artist can communicate his own art instantly and without ever reaching TOWERfuckingRECORDS. All others will follow or be relics.

Metallica's move has destined them to be relics

For breaking my connection to the napster community I hate Metallica. When I was in seventh grade I was given a duped tape copy of Kill Em All and as I blasted it on my boombox and flailed about the room I would never have believed such a sound could lead to greedy actions of the status quo. I do know these self-serving bastards have all their good music behind them and they will sink out of fashion as rich sods.

angry,

unagriot

[TVD]

Here is one more report I need to show all of you:

http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archive ... enemy.html

How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop

An interview with Public Enemy's Chuck D and Hank Shocklee

[ by Kembrew McLeod ]

When Public Enemy released It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, in 1988, it was as if the album had landed from another planet. Nothing sounded like it at the time. It Takes a Nation came frontloaded with sirens, squeals, and squawks that augmented the chaotic, collaged backing tracks over which P.E. frontman Chuck D laid his politically and poetically radical rhymes. He rapped about white supremacy, capitalism, the music industry, black nationalism, and--in the case of "Caught, Can I Get a Witness?"-- digital sampling: "CAUGHT, NOW IN COURT ' CAUSE I STOLE A BEAT / THIS IS A SAMPLING SPORT / MAIL FROM THE COURTS AND JAIL / CLAIMS I STOLE THE BEATS THAT I RAIL ... I FOUND THIS MINERAL THAT I CALL A BEAT / I PAID ZERO."

In the mid- to late 1980s, hip-hop artists had a very small window of oppor-tunity to run wild with the newly emerging sampling technologies before the record labels and lawyers started paying attention. No one took advantage of these technologies more effectively than Public Enemy, who put hundreds of sampled aural fragments into It Takes a Nation and stirred them up to create a new, radical sound that changed the way we hear music. But by 1991, no one paid zero for the records they sampled without getting sued. They had to pay a lot.

Stay Free! talked to the two major architects of P.E.'s sound, Chuck D and Hank Shocklee, about hip-hop, sampling, and how copyright law altered the way P.E. and other hip-hop artists made their music.

The following is a combination of two interviews conducted separately with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee. --Kembrew McLeod

* * *

Stay Free!: What are the origins of sampling in hip-hop?

Chuck D: Sampling basically comes from the fact that rap music is not music. It's rap over music. So vocals were used over records in the very beginning stages of hip-hop in the 0s to the early '80s. In the late 1980s, rappers were recording over live bands who were basically emulating the sounds off of the records. Eventually, you had synthesizers and samplers, which would take sounds that would then get arranged or looped, so rappers can still do their thing over it. The arrangement of sounds taken from recordings came around 1984 to 1989.

Stay Free!: Those synthesizers and samplers were expensive back then, especially in 1984. How did hip-hop artists get them if they didn't have a lot of money?

Chuck D: Not only were they expensive, but they were limited in what they could do--they could only sample two seconds at a time. But people were able to get a hold of equipment by renting time out in studios.

Stay Free!: How did the Bomb Squad [Public Enemy's production team, led by Shocklee] use samplers and other recording technologies to put together the tracks on It Takes a Nation of Millions.

Hank Shocklee: The first thing we would do is the beat, the skeleton of the track. The beat would actually have bits and pieces of samples already in it, but it would only be rhythm sections. Chuck would start writing and trying different ideas to see what worked. Once he got an idea, we would look at it and see where the track was going. Then we would just start adding on whatever it needed, depending on the lyrics. I kind of architected the whole idea. The sound has a look to me, and Public Enemy was all about having a sound that had its own distinct vision. We didn't want to use anything we considered traditional R&B stuff--bass lines and melodies and chord structures and things of that nature.?

Stay Free!: How did you use samplers as instruments?

Chuck D: We thought sampling was just another way of arranging sounds. Just like a musician would take the sounds off of an instrument and arrange them their own particular way. So we thought we was quite crafty with it.

Shocklee: "Don't Believe the Hype," for example--that was basically played with the turntable and transformed and then sampled. Some of the manipulation we was doing was more on the turntable, live end of it.

Stay Free!: When you were sampling from many different sources during the making of It Takes a Nation, were you at all worried about copyright clearance?

Shocklee: No. Nobody did. At the time, it wasn't even an issue. The only time copyright was an issue was if you actually took the entire rhythm of a song, as in looping, which a lot of people are doing today. You're going to take a track, loop the entire thing, and then that becomes the basic track for the song. They just paperclip a backbeat to it. But we were taking a horn hit here, a guitar riff there, we might take a little speech, a kicking snare from somewhere else. It was all bits and pieces.

Stay Free!: Did you have to license the samples in It Takes a Nation of Millions before it was released?

Shocklee: No, it was cleared afterwards. A lot of stuff was cleared afterwards. Back in the day, things was different. The copyright laws didn't really extend into sampling until the hip-hop artists started getting sued. As a matter of fact, copyright didn't start catching up with us until Fear of a Black Planet. That's when the copyrights and everything started becoming stricter because you had a lot of groups doing it and people were taking whole songs. It got so widespread that the record companies started policing the releases before they got out.

Stay Free!: With its hundreds of samples, is it possible to make a record like It Takes a Nation of Millions today? Would it be possible to clear every sample?

Shocklee: It wouldn't be impossible. It would just be very, very costly. The first thing that was starting to happen by the late 1980s was that the people were doing buyouts. You could have a buyout--meaning you could purchase the rights to sample a sound--for around $1,500. Then it started creeping up to $3,000, $3,500, $5,000, $7,500. Then they threw in this thing called rollover rates. If your rollover rate is every 100,000 units, then for every 100,000 units you sell, you have to pay an additional $7,500. A record that sells two million copies would kick that cost up twenty times. Now you're looking at one song costing you more than half of what you would make on your album.

Chuck D: Corporations found that hip-hop music was viable. It sold albums, which was the bread and butter of corporations. Since the corporations owned all the sounds, their lawyers began to search out people who illegally infringed upon their records. All the rap artists were on the big six record companies, so you might have some lawyers from Sony looking at some lawyers from BMG and some lawyers from BMG saying, "Your artist is doing this," so it was a tit for tat that usually made money for the lawyers, garnering money for the company. Very little went to the original artist or the publishing company.

Shocklee: By 1990, all the publishers and their lawyers started making moves. One big one was Bridgeport, the publishing house that owns all the George Clinton stuff. Once all the little guys started realizing you can get paid from rappers if they use your sample, it prompted the record companies to start investigating because now the people that they publish are getting paid.

Stay Free!: There's a noticeable difference in Public Enemy's sound between 1988 and 1991. Did this have to do with the lawsuits and enforcement of copyright laws at the turn of the decade?

Chuck D: Public Enemy's music was affected more than anybody's because we were taking thousands of sounds. If you separated the sounds, they wouldn't have been anything--they were unrecognizable. The sounds were all collaged together to make a sonic wall. Public Enemy was affected because it is too expensive to defend against a claim. So we had to change our whole style, the style of It Takes a Nation and Fear of a Black Planet, by 1991.

Shocklee: We were forced to start using different organic instruments, but you can't really get the right kind of compression that way. A guitar sampled off a record is going to hit differently than a guitar sampled in the studio. The guitar that's sampled off a record is going to have all the compression that they put on the recording, the equalization. It's going to hit the tape harder. It's going to slap at you. Something that's organic is almost going to have a powder effect. It hits more like a pillow than a piece of wood. So those things change your mood, the feeling you can get off of a record. If you notice that by the early 1990s, the sound has gotten a lot softer.

Chuck D: Copyright laws pretty much led people like Dr. Dre to replay the sounds that were on records, then sample musicians imitating those records. That way you could get by the master clearance, but you still had to pay a publishing note.

Shocklee: See, there's two different copyrights: publishing and master recording. The publishing copyright is of the written music, the song structure. And the master recording is the song as it is played on a particular recording. Sampling violates both of these copyrights. Whereas if I record my own version of someone else's song, I only have to pay the publishing copyright. When you violate the master recording, the money just goes to the record company.

Chuck D: Putting a hundred small fragments into a song meant that you had a hundred different people to answer to. Whereas someone like EPMD might have taken an entire loop and stuck with it, which meant that they only had to pay one artist.

Stay Free!: So is that one reason why a lot of popular hip-hop songs today just use one hook, one primary sample, instead of a collage of different sounds?

Chuck D: Exactly. There's only one person to answer to. Dr. Dre changed things when he did The Chronic and took something like Leon Haywood's "I Want'a Do Something Freaky to You" and revamped it in his own way but basically kept the rhythm and instrumental hook intact. It's easier to sample a groove than it is to create a whole new collage. That entire collage element is out the window.

Shocklee: We're not really privy to all the laws and everything that the record company creates within the company. From our standpoint, it was looking like the record company was spying on us, so to speak.

Chuck D: The lawyers didn't seem to differentiate between the craftiness of it and what was blatantly taken.

Stay Free!: Switching from the past to the present, on the new Public Enemy album, Revolverlution, you had fans remix a few old Public Enemy tracks. How did you get this idea?

Chuck D: We have a powerful online community through Rapstation.com, PublicEnemy.com, Slamjams.com, and Bringthenoise.com. My thing was just looking at the community and being able to say, "Can we actually make them involved in the creative process?" Why not see if we can connect all these bedroom and basement studios, and the ocean of producers, and expand the Bomb Squad to a worldwide concept?

Stay Free!: As you probably know, some music fans are now sampling and mashing together two or more songs and trading the results online. There's one track by Evolution Control Committee that uses a Herb Alpert instrumental as the backing track for your "By the Time I Get to Arizona." It sounds like you're rapping over a Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass song. How do you feel about other people remixing your tracks without permission?

Chuck D: I think my feelings are obvious. I think it's great.

[CANE CREEK]

I have seen this debate scattered across various threads, and so I thought it was time for it to have its very own.

Now while everyone here is (quite rightly) against the unauthorized use of software, It is a very different case with music. While software developers are just plain screwed by theft, the situation for musicians is much more complex.

An example: a co-worker of mine is mostly into death metal and very political hip hop. She listens to very little singer-songwriter based indie-rock. Someone burned a copy of a Bettie Serveert c.d. and gave it to her. She would never have heard this c.d. had it not been burned for her. She just isn't exposed to that kind of music in her day to day life.

She has since gone to see this band live and bought two more of their discs. She is now a fan. The chances of this having happened without the initial act of 'theft', (i.e. the c.d. being burned for her) are minimal.

Now it is clear that in this case that an act of 'theft' was beneficial to the band: they recieved income (i.e. the money from the tickets and c.d.s subsequently bought) that they would not have received otherwise.

So with that as a starting point.....LET THE FIGHT BEGIN!

if a guy steals a porsche 911 , then desides it was a wonderful drive so goes out and buys one himself did that make it ok for him to steal one in the first place ?

common wake up!!!!!!!

as for Chuck D , i ain't interested what he's got to say because he already made a heap of money before he desided to give away his music.

[lion_cub]

Now it is clear that in this case that an act of 'theft' was beneficial to the band: they recieved income (i.e. the money from the tickets and c.d.s subsequently bought) that they would not have received otherwise.

Does the end justify the means ?

This is an isolated example and may not represent the norm.

Hmm. Dont know about you there, but here downloading music and burning cd.s or otherwise copying music for PERSONAL use is not illegal.
If you start to sell the copies or play them in clubs or similar, then it´s illegal.

This is a totally uninformed statement. Just because you don't sell copies of music does not mean you are not breaching copyright !

[TVD]

as for Chuck D , i ain't interested what he's got to say because he already made a heap of money before he desided to give away his music.

And Metallica wish that they could be a rock&roll/metal bland like KISS.

BTW, Public Enemy makes a lot more money from their liveshows than their album sales. So yes, Chuck D is living very comfortable.

[TVD]

if a guy steals a porsche 911 , then desides it was a wonderful drive so goes out and buys one himself did that make it ok for him to steal one in the first place ?

Why steal a porsche when you can rent one at a car rental (Enterprise, National Car Rental, Avis, etc.)?

In order words (based on your example), it was NOT ok for that to steal the porsche.

BTW, did that guy ever return the porsche after he brought a new porsche of his own?

[kritikon]

I don't see what relevance the history of hiphop has to do with justifying theft...so what if a new form of music developed from it - that makes it OK? So Hitler popularised and used brutal fascism as a means of government -> which led to WW2 -> which led to the rise of an acceptable form of democracy and cooperation between formerly warring European countries, and it's mostly good now.... so that makes Hitler's fascism OK because it led to a good outcome eventually?

That's just bollocks. There's heaps of instances of artists being hauled up before courts for copyright infringement...in some instances they even lost all profits from their specific cases of infringement, but still went on to sell large and make money on the strength of their theft. It still means they profited in the long run from the theft. The Verve springs to mind as one example - they ripped off that Rolling Stones string riff and got royally done for it - apparently they made no profits from that song...but they made their name as a result and went on to become successful off the back of another band's effort. Yes, they still made other good music and deserved to sell it, but without that song I wonder how well they would have done? Even though it was a good song that they made from it. They most definitely profited from someone else's work.

And the hiphop examples are no clarion call...to a great extent hiphop has plagiarised and stolen from other artists, when it could have been done with their own work instead. Vinyl was used and samples were used simply because it was easier and a damn sight cheaper to rip off other bands beats and riffs rather than either learn to do it themselves or, god forbid, pay session musicians to do it. I'm sure there are lots of worthy hiphop tracks, but it still doesn't justify them thieving others efforts.
And "we paid them after the fact" doesn't excuse them either. "We'll steal your beats/music, and we'll pay you after we've profited from them if and only if we get caught" doesn't make them any better in my eyes.


I'm certainly not puritanical in any of this...I can see that some forms of piracy can lead to fans being made, and customers being generated. But it still doesn't negate the actual original theft.


It all boils down to the fact that there are very few of you lot out there (me included) who wouldn't be livid if some other tosser nicked your music and profited from it without your permission - and you need to expend money and effort in nailing them.
It's very well to ignore piracy when it's some fatcat successful band or record company who are the victims - that's just a rationisation - we all like to knock the big guys. eh? But how is it when YOU are the victim who's been burgled. When YOUR beat has been stolen, when YOUR riff has been sampled. And YOUR permission was never sought until they'd actually become noticeable to the authorities.

Some of us would happily let our music be used...but wouldn't you like to be asked BEFORE they used it...then you actually have the choice of negotiating a deal, or simply giving it away for free if that's what you want.

And if YOU have pressed 500 CDs at YOUR cost, given 3/4 of them away as promos, and made a pitiful handful of sales...then find out that there are another 500 copies out there that have been ripped from the handful that were sold or given away, and people are enjoying YOUR music through piracy, yet you didn't make any profits, and probably made a loss.

But hey, it's OK...some of those thieves might
become fans and go on to buy a CD or 2 of yours in the future. Yeah, they might f**king NOT as well, but they're still enjoying YOUR music for free.

Swap it all round and think on it long and hard how YOU would feel if YOU were on the receiving end of it, before you legitimise theft. There is no difference between software piracy and music piracy and DVD piracy, and any other form of imitative theft in terms of the morality of it.

It's probably here to stay - the internet and changes in society have made a generation that expect the right to get exactly what they want, when they want it, and at no cost to themselves. But if you're going to steal, don't cook up some crappy excuses about your theft...at least have the integrity to realise that you're stealing.

I'm no innocent - I used to record loads of tapes in the past - from mates, from record libraries, from the radio etc. I don't however do that now - I don't use napster, I don't download any MP#s of copyrighted music or films or anything else. Because I finally realised that it IS theft.
There are easy ways of getting to hear new music without stealing it. You can listen to sections of music over the net, or on radio or TV, or even get off your arse and spend a few hours in a music shop and listen to the CD over their setup...there are always ways of doing it without resorting to the usual justification that "everybody does it, and I might buy it later"...you don't have to actually steal it to hear it and maybe buy it later.

Phew...didn't intend that to be a rant at the start....

[herodotus]

Copyright law was designed to encourage artists to share their work.

It was intended to protect them from blatant acts of theft (e.g. someone else, for example a publishing house, claiming authorship of their work and making money off of it.)

But now it is being used by huge corporations to rip off artists. Copyright law has become so complex that we have bizarre situations like an author not legally being able to read his own book on his own computer.

This complexity ensures that lawyers will have a large and increasingly dominant roll in the music industry. I have trouble seeing how this can be good for artists or for our collective culture. Something seems kind of skewed when the only really certain way of getting signed to a major label is to get your demo into the hands of the right ENTERTAINMENT LAWYER.

I am not saying what is right and what is wrong. But in the case of music, this whole "Stealing is wrong, period" attitude seems rather simplistic. The major labels, and the lawyers, "publishers", and promoters that work with it, have been ripping off artists and our culture for decades. And if its not against the law when they do it, that is because THEY WRITE THE LAWS.

Please check out the following links:

http://reason.com/0107/cr.mg.copywrong.shtml

http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

They are kinda scary if you ask me.

Also, if you make music professionally,check out:

http://www.nolo.com where you can find easily
understood explanations of the laws that apply to public musicians.

Please don't believe that the mainstream entertainment industries aren't stupid and corrupt and unfairly hegemonic in the marketplace.

They are.

[kaden]

Here's how *stupid* the prevailing climate in the music industry has made people:

The guitarist in the band I was recently in refused to show any of his original material to auditioning musicians for fear of theft. He put his foot down on doing transcriptions of the tunes too..."Writing them down just makes it easier for people to steal, and copyrighting only protects you if you're rich"

Given the fact that finding musicians who want to be part of an 'all original band' is difficult when they're not actually allowed to hear the original music, at least this guy is gonna be spared the trauma of actually performing the material in front of audiences who may have recorders in their anoraks.

K

[BONES]

Hmm. Dont know about you there, but here downloading music and burning cd.s or otherwise copying music for PERSONAL use is not illegal.

You left out a word - "YOUR PERSONAL use" not the personal use of your friends or the 10,000 people that "borrow" it from your HDD via P2P.

The guitarist in the band I was recently in refused to show any of his original material to auditioning musicians for fear of theft.

I used to roadie for this guy called Ken Davis. He used to be Fairlight's CMI demo artist and he swears black and blue that when he demo'd to New Order, one of the little demo pieces he used ended up as Blue Monday about 6 months later. Most interestingly, Blue Monday sounds a lot more like the music he was making at the time than anything New Order had done before. Needless to say, he did a great job of covering it. He also had a surprisingly indifferent attitude to them stealing his music.
In a case like that, who is to know whether New Order deliberately ripped him off or whether the riff stuck in their heads and just popped out at rehearsal one day? One of the earliest songs I wrote was actually based on somethign I had ripped off from This Mortal Coil without even realising it. I hadn't listened to that EP for yonks and didn't for a couple of years after, at which point I stopped playing that particular song. If its not deliberate, is it really wrong?

As for isolated examples of NAPSTER and P2P being good for artists, for every one person like that, I know two who have huge CD collections and have never paid for a single one. If I know two, there are millions more who I am yet to encounter. I even got an email from a small label teh other day with an .nfo file from one of their releases which has been pirated by some hacker group, just like software. The band haven't sold out their first pressing and some bunch o' c**ts are ripping 'em off. Wrong is wrong.