When I lived in California and the Internet was taking off, Napster and the lawsuits that shut down its model of free sharing of MP3s set off a lot of debates in my circle of musician and filmmaker friends.
Some of them thought that music should exist in a public space, where the information (music, film) was accessible (free) in the public sphere. This anti-copyright law movement reflected a desire to keep all media available to everyone. One of my DJ friends initiated a project where he asked composers he knew to make pieces that used samples from Beck. Since Beck bases so much of his music on samples already, it was a comment on the use of samples and how music should be made available to the public sphere.
For some of my other less experimental music friends, who rely on royalties to pay the bills, sharing music in the public sphere without compensation becomes more contentious. Sure, it makes sense to have your music up in sample form for people to get an idea of it. And I heard an excerpt on NPR (see link) last week about big hip-hop artists making long form albums that they release online for free, which the record companies allow because ultimately the publicity will, maybe bring more record sales. So, while the artists do share their music for free, their goal is also to make money through exposure.
And now with the peer-to-peer sharing sites such as Swedish company Pirate Bay and the torrent points technology, people can make downloads without being tracked easily. Pirate Bay has been shut down a couple of times and are in court this week appealing charges about IPR infringements and answering questions about making child pornography sites available. They argue that they do not post the content, and if they find a torrent that is not legal, they report it. They essentially don’t take responsibility for content since the users make the torrent points.
Siochru and Girard address the debate over Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) in the chapter, “Introduction to National Media Regulation,” from Global Governance: A Beginner’s Guide. The Pirate Bay case is a good example of how it is hard to govern some of the media forms online because it is hard to find who owns the content, or who placed links to another person’s content without permission.
I don’t think that making media accessible should translate into making people’s work available for free. Obviously people need to be compensated for work. But when people get used to all the free content, who pays the content creators? The smaller, independent projects, unsupported by studios or labels (or Universities) represent diversity and need to be funded in some way. The structure of how royalties are paid out definitely favors the bigger studio and network supported artists.
ASCAP (one of the music composing rights organizations in the US) pays royalties based on what networks and less funded stations such as PBS can pay. So, if you write the score for a film that goes on PBS that is high quality and took 3 months to do, you will maybe pay for some groceries. If you write silly music for the background of a show on a major network or a cable show, you get paid a lot more. The producers of the shows on networks (and PBS) submit cue sheets to ASCAP and pay the fees. Since PBS is so underfunded, they can’t afford to pay as much. The same idea applies to radio stations (which is why most radio stations lack diversity in the music available).
The Internet opens up many other opportunities for musicians to gain exposure, and for music consumers to get choices! I think the whole transformation on the music industry (that is in the beginning stages) will ultimately place more of the governance and regulation of music media into society. This will mean more diversity and plurality in the music available.. For now, the regulation is still balanced toward the industrial, where governments and other bodies work with existing IPR laws and other aspects of the media as related to the economy.
No comments:
Post a Comment