On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 12:17 PM, <wjhon...@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. 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. 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. -- André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
