Theft and Ownership
The recent ruling against The Pirate Bay, a peer-to-peer file sharing platform operating out of Sweden, has heated up the debate about copyright in the digital age. This issue is a particularly important one for songwriters, as the ability to cash in on the copyright of our songs is one way we are able to make a bit of money.
So I thought I'd share a few thoughts about "theft" and "ownership", which have taken on completely skewed meanings in the current context.
Based on our current copyright laws, it's possible to "own" a composition because you were the first to write it down or record it. But that's an anomaly. Music can't be isolated from a tradition and fenced in that way. It's like owning a well so you can sell water: you didn't invent water, still can't own the watershed, and if there's a flood or a drought, ownership is no longer a guarantee of anything.
On the other hand, if you're a clever person who makes lovely clay vessels at your own cost to hold the special water from your well, you deserve to benefit from your efforts by selling the vessels. Just don't expect recompense if technology changes and someone puts in a 24 hour pipeline to every home.
As for theft: we all agree that if you steal a loaf of bread from me, I no longer have the loaf. Hence you've benefitted and I've lost. But if you steal a loaf of bread from me and then go and copy your loaf of bread a hundred times, sharing the loaves with all your friends, telling each one of them that I'm the baker of that bread, and I find that I still have my bread no matter how often that happens - it's really not the same thing, is it?
On the other hand, if you create a system to sell my loaves of bread endlessly at no benefit to me, duping the public into thinking it's all legit, then you're an exploiter if not an outright thief.
Our laws need to change so that file-sharing without commercial benefit to oneself or detriment to another is legal. In other words, if I record a cover of a Van Morrison song and put it on YouTube, no harm, no foul: he's lost no income, because that version of his song didn't exist before, and I've only gained whatever eyeballs I can draw - different only in degree from doing that song endlessly in live venues.
People who set up peer-to-peer networks with the implicit goal of facilitating pirating of DVDs and CDs are jerks. People who send MP3s of songs they love to friends and put videos of themselves on YouTube doing classic covers are merely human.
So I thought I'd share a few thoughts about "theft" and "ownership", which have taken on completely skewed meanings in the current context.
Based on our current copyright laws, it's possible to "own" a composition because you were the first to write it down or record it. But that's an anomaly. Music can't be isolated from a tradition and fenced in that way. It's like owning a well so you can sell water: you didn't invent water, still can't own the watershed, and if there's a flood or a drought, ownership is no longer a guarantee of anything.
On the other hand, if you're a clever person who makes lovely clay vessels at your own cost to hold the special water from your well, you deserve to benefit from your efforts by selling the vessels. Just don't expect recompense if technology changes and someone puts in a 24 hour pipeline to every home.
As for theft: we all agree that if you steal a loaf of bread from me, I no longer have the loaf. Hence you've benefitted and I've lost. But if you steal a loaf of bread from me and then go and copy your loaf of bread a hundred times, sharing the loaves with all your friends, telling each one of them that I'm the baker of that bread, and I find that I still have my bread no matter how often that happens - it's really not the same thing, is it?
On the other hand, if you create a system to sell my loaves of bread endlessly at no benefit to me, duping the public into thinking it's all legit, then you're an exploiter if not an outright thief.
Our laws need to change so that file-sharing without commercial benefit to oneself or detriment to another is legal. In other words, if I record a cover of a Van Morrison song and put it on YouTube, no harm, no foul: he's lost no income, because that version of his song didn't exist before, and I've only gained whatever eyeballs I can draw - different only in degree from doing that song endlessly in live venues.
People who set up peer-to-peer networks with the implicit goal of facilitating pirating of DVDs and CDs are jerks. People who send MP3s of songs they love to friends and put videos of themselves on YouTube doing classic covers are merely human.
posted by David Newland at 18.4.09
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