Re: Re: Copying music. A Crime?


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Posted by Mike Solms on September 21, 2001 at 15:56:37:

In Reply to: Re: Copying music. A Crime? posted by Tony Clments on September 21, 2001 at 09:50:58:

Tony- I am in complete agreement that protecting intellectual property rights is a good and necessary thing. I think most musicians agree with and support this premise. What is ultimately frustrating to musicians is, I think, that music publishers continue to inflict 19th century ideas and practices on us.

Let's look at another business who deals with intellectual property issues; the personal computer software industry. PC software started out with a premise that was pretty similar to music publishing. What a company sold you was a discrete physical entity, a diskette. Those of you who have been around for a while no doubt remember "Insert Key Diskette to Begin Program." Lose your key diskette and you couldn't run your program. You could, for a fee, get another one but that could involve weeks of downtime.

Driven by competition, this outlook changed in fairly short order. What software vendors sell you now is a license to use a product, with certain restrictions. Practices like making backup copies went from being prohibited to being encouraged. The system is not perfect but vendors have protection and users have flexibility that reflects real-world use of the product.

I know the analogy is not perfect. A rival publisher cannot really produce a version of the Shostakovich 5th with more features. The current publisher cannot come out with Shostakovich 5th, version 2.0 and sell us an upgrade. What this has done, though, is prevent publishers from having to reevaulate exactly what it is they are selling. This refusal produces gains in the short term but is eventually self defeating. There is no reason that the license concept couldn't be applied to music publishing. It's like the Lily Tomlin line from the old "Saturday Night Live" sketch- "We're the phone company. We don't care, we don't have to." We've seen the results of that kind of thinking.



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