Andre Engels wrote:
On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 12:17 PM,
<WJhonson(a)aol.com> wrote:
When I go to YouTube, the number of videos which
are some bad amateur
singer trying to sing some good song far outweigh the number of original videos
of that song/group. The amount of free content in music, in general is
rapidly approaching or perhaps past par with all professional music ever created
to this day.
A video of an amateur singer trying to sing a song is also a copyright
violation - they are publishing the song, and do not own the copyright
on either text or melody. They probably won't be prosecuted over it,
but legally they are violating copyright.
It *is* a violation, and that is a part of the problem. The bloody
awful YouTube singer does, however, receive performance copyrights for
what he does. Copyright by default means that anything, however bad or
trivial, has copyrights; this includes the weekly flyer from your local
supermarket. For all of the faults of US copyright law there was much
positive to be said about the former registration and renewal system.
Copyright laws were mostly created in a time when
situations were
different. There used to be a group of content creators, and a general
public. Copyright was mostly a right from one content creator to
another - you should not publish the book, song, whatever that I own
the copyright on. The public at large did not have the means to
publish, so copyright laws might as well not apply to them. What they
could do was so inconsequential (write over a chapter of a book, sing
a song in presence of their coworkers) that nobody minded exceptions
being made for them.
I see it as more between content father creators and filial publishers
than between content creators alone. Since the general public's holy
ghost had no dog in the fight it had no part in the eventual
agreements. Copyright was a social contract between creators and
publishers, and that still underlies its philosophy in common law
countries. Leave it to the French to fuck up the balance by
associating it with the rights of man and moral rights!
Now the public does have an interest in the fight, but mostly without
any interest in making money out of it. That calls for a review of what
copyright is all about from the ground up. That's a far more substantial
discussion than the enforcement discussions that the publishers would
prefer. It's the publishers, not the creators, that stand to lose the
most; they have every reason to see the holy ghost kicked out of the
trinity.
In the last few decades this changed. Automatic
copying became cheaper
and simpler with photocopiers, tape recorders, video recorders
becoming mass products. Still, their impact was relatively minor.
Although copyright industry saw these things as very problematic, they
were mostly used to make single or few copies. Few people would make
hundreds of copies of a single work to send them out. Fewer still did
so for money. Many more people had the ability to become content
publishers, but most of them did not use it.
Then came the internet, enabling every single one of us to make our
work available on an unprecedented scale. And with that the borderline
between public and content publishers really came down. And with that,
copyright became applied to situations totally different from the ones
for which it was created. It used to be clear that if you put a poem
in a book that sold in the shops, part of the proceedings should go to
the poet. It used to be clear that nobody had anything to do with it
if you put that same poem in your diary. But now, people are making
their diaries (blogs) available for everyone, without getting any kind
of compensation for the effort. Large amounts of non-professional,
non-commercial publishing to potentially huge audiences is a situation
that copyright laws did not foresee. Unfortunately, instead of
realizing that the effect of copyright laws, intended to protect the
rights of one commercial publisher against another are draconian when
applied to such a different situation, where the average citizen is
the one being affected, the main reaction seems to be to make the laws
even stricter.
In theory at least, the laws were there primarily to protect the
creators, not the publishers. Enforcement of copyright law should
primarily be the responsibility of the owner of the right, not of the
state except in the case of egregious and wilful violation where a
higher burden of proof would also prevail. The other point is that
damages should need to be proven with evidence, and should in no way
depend on speculative analysis about what the public might want to see
or hear. It serves no-one (except lawyers) when the costs of legal
actions far exceed actual damages.
Ray