Christian M. Cepel wrote: | I wonder if this is indicative only of the music industry, or if any | parallels exist. I wonder if... say... the movie industry would | object if, someone purchased a movie (CD) and watched (listened) to it | over and over and wrote down (notated) the dialog (tune/song) into a | script (score/tab/abc/etc), and then used it to put on a small not for | profit or for profit performance (performance/session/etc), or just used | it for personal uses (practicing). | | I've never heard of such a thing being objected to (if someone would | wish to do it). It seems that the only forms of intellectual property | that anyone is fascist over is music. | | Written text, movies, music, software, etc... they object only if you | duplicate the original and then distribute it. I'm not making much | sense here...
The publishing industry is in fact working on this. There was a good case in the US only a few years ago, when a new author called Alice Randall published "The Wind Done Gone", a retelling of Gone With the Wind from the perspective of the slaves. The publisher of Gone With the Wind filed suit to block the publication. They actually won in the first few levels of the court, although it should have been summarily dismissed as an obvious instance of parody. The book has been published to good reviews (check with amazon), but the final court decision in its favor is sufficiently shaky that publishers have been encouraged. They see the possibility of the right combination of judges that would finally shut down parody and satire under the copyright laws. The movie industry in the US and many other countries has had many battles over this sort of thing. If you want to make a movie in the same setting as a previous movie, you had better have a good legal fund prepared, or you'll find yourself bankrupt by the lawsuits. The music recording industry is just the most publicised case right now. And much of this is because it's an industry where a few corporations developed a stranglehold that gave them all the profits and only a pittance to a small minority of the artists. But that stranglehold has been broken by the advent of the Internet. So we have a battle on our hands as the former oligopoly tries to grab control over this new means of distribution and prevent musicians from using it on their own. One of their primary ploys has been to extend the concept of copyright in ways it has never been used before, to eliminate the public domain in music and require licensing from a few industry agencies for all music. Misinterpreting this as "bashing America" is an extreme disservice to all involved. The problem isn't limited to America; this thread got started by mention of attempts to make European copyright laws like the American laws. As many people are pointing out, the current American laws are actually violations of the US Constitution. Copyright is now mostly used to interfere with creativity. Such laws only exist because of the power of large corporations in Congress. This is quite on-topic in a list devoted to music in any form. The growing copyright extensions are a serious threat to all individual musicians, both professional and amateur. I'll predict that we will hear a lot more about this issue here in the future, and in all other music-related mailing lists. (It is interesting that the abc user community has seen so few copyright problems so far.) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
