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Ring Tones Will Save the Music Industry
tabdelgawad writes "Well, not quite, but according to Jay A. Samit, senior vice president for new media at music label EMI Group PLC, quoted in this Washington Post article, "This is huge. This is the largest growth area for music companies and our artists". The article goes on to prove two facts we already know: that the music industry is greedy (already asking for a bigger slice of this pie!) and that the porn industry is a prime innovator in marketing and technology :-)"
Actually, that's already possible. Many European operators have webpages for phone subscribers where they can compose their own tunes and then send them to their phones.
Karma. Moderation. Is my
Duh, the second time you paid $0.50.
The record companies have the rights to the sheet music I would guess
That's true if the record company and the music publisher are owned by the same conglomerate, such as Warner Bros. Records and Warner Chappell Music (owner of "happy birthday to you") both owned by Warner Communications, a unit of AOL Time Warner Inc.
but they must not have any ownership if I listen to the radio and transcribe it myself.
No matter how you hear a copyrighted musical work, it's still copyrighted. Unlike with computer program copyright, there's no way to "clean-room reverse engineer" around music copyright. Even if you only unconsciously plagiarize a copyrighted musical work, you're still liable under USA copyright law.
Will I retire or break 10K?
what is the difference between me playing a tune on my piano at home (presuming that I've legally bought the music sheet) or me playing it on my phone?
Subject to the fair use doctrine and some other exceptions, the owner of copyright in a musical work has the exclusive right to perform the work publicly (17 USC 106). Playing a ringtone is potentially a public performance; playing a song on a musical instrument when nobody outside your family unit is present is not (17 USC 101 definition of "publicly").
Will I retire or break 10K?
The ring tones don't use any samples from the music and the music composition is totally different, both through different timing of the notes and through playing only one (or a couple) of notes at a time. Therefore the person who makes the phone ring tone is making a completely new piece of work and shouldn't need to give any cash for the permission to distribute it.
Re-read that paragraph.
If a ringtone's "musical composition is totally different" from an existing musical work then, by definition, it doesn't sound the same. However, what we're talking about is works that do sound the same.
Note, there is a distinct difference between "identical" and "the same".
When I was a kid, I could play John William's Star Wars theme tune on my tinny Casio keyboard. Sure, it wasn't "identical" - nobody was ever going to mistake my performance on a kid's toy with that of a full, professional orchestra - but it was "the same" as far as any listener was concerned. My friends and family were impressed I could play Star Wars and, to a 6 year-old kid, that was all that mattered.
However, if I had tried to sell recordings of my rendition of the tune as an original work then the corporate lawyers representing John Williams (or his record label) would have stomped all over me, and rightly so. I would have been infringing on the copyright of an established artist, pure and simple.
The same is true today, and not just in the arts world - just because I could create a close (but not identical) copy of the classic Coca-Cola bottle that doesn't give me the right to use it commercially packaging my own brand of cola or other beverage.
Bottom line: there is a world of difference between composing an original work (even one that is inspired by or draws on previous works) and a simple reproduction of it, no matter how basic. (I won't even bother expanding on the argument that the next generation of phones that support polyphonic ringtones can produce tunes that are as good as 128kb/s MP3s.)
If it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck and acts like a duck, then it's pretty likely to be a duck. Similarly, if a ringtone sounds like Run DMC's Walk This Way, The Prodigy's Firestarter, or whatever, then the same rule applies.
Finally, your assertion that "the only thing that you could even try and argue is under copyright is the songs name, which would/should get laughed out of any court", is laughable. You claim to be familiar with the arguments surrounding copyright ownership but yet you don't know that you can't copyright facts?
If what you said is true then the record labels would have shut down CDDB and FreeDB years ago. And artists (or their labels) would be suing each other left, right and centre over song titles. Last time I checked, Huey Lewis And The News weren't suing Frankie Goes To Hollywood over the name The Power Of Love, or vice versa.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
There are a lot of rogue WAP servers out there, and if you know where to go you can download the tones for free, the only thing you have to pay for is airtime, which would be ~30sec-1min (or you can download them to your PC and then PC-Link it to the phone). Also Nokia introduced a MIDI phone about 6 months ago, some of my friends have it and have set up their own WAP servers with MIDI from which they uploaded the song (apparently the PC link to that phone doesent seem to work). But i must admit that the sound is cool! (Ever seen heads turn as someone's phone starts ringing Zelda theme in full MIDI at the top of its digital lungs?)
Here is the link to ONE of the MIDI phones.
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
That cabs thing was a reference to a recent article where the music industry was harassing taxi companies for playing music in the taxi without paying royalties.
Kannel, a free WAP and SMS gateway, for all your ringtoning needs.