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What Counts as Music and Why?
The Importance of writes "There has been much discussion about compulsory licensing schemes. Most of the debate has been about music. But what happens when any file can easily be converted into a sound file and back again? Can shareware authors convert their software to digital music and get paid for sharing it? Can pornographers get paid for turning images into sound? Scott Matthews has written a program (Ka-Blamo) that does the conversion. LawMeme looks at some of the issues. This raises the question, what should count as music and why?"
According to websters: Music \Mu"sic\, n. [F. musique, fr. L. musica, Gr. ? (sc. ?), any art over which the Muses presided, especially music, lyric poetry set and sung to music, fr. ? belonging to Muses or fine arts, fr. ? Muse.] 1. The science and the art of tones, or musical sounds, i. e., sounds of higher or lower pitch, begotten of uniform and synchronous vibrations, as of a string at various degrees of tension; the science of harmonical tones which treats of the principles of harmony, or the properties, dependences, and relations of tones to each other; the art of combining tones in a manner to please the ear. Note: Not all sounds are tones. Sounds may be unmusical and yet please the ear. Music deals with tones, and with no other sounds. See Tone. Rap contains only beat, and is therefore not music,
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
> ...that dance artist (about 3 or 4 years ago IIRC) who made the graphic thing in Windows Audio Player show a (somewhat poor but still discernable) picture of himself.
That "dance artist" (I dislike that description, he's more than a generic techno musician) is in fact Aphex Twin. You can see the image through a spectrograph. Old Slashdot article here.
The "Rap contains only beat, and is therefore not music," line is misleading : Webster doesn't state anything like that.
And actually, most percussion instruments have a tone, so _your_ statement is bogus.
OK, there's public performance/display, but I don't see how that matters, since you can't publically perform software, and publically displaying software doesn't make much sense.
Actually copyright law does specificly recognize public performance and display of software. Running a program and displaying the results is a "performance". It is most easy to recognize it in the form of video games, often almost identical to watching a movie.
If you were to buy several copies of a game an set up public terminals to play it you could be sued under public perfomance, whether it is free play or pay arcade. You need a public performance rights licence for software to be "publicly performed" in an arcade.
The public performance right is generally held to cover computer software, since software is considered a literary work under the Copyright Act. In addition, many software programs fall under the definition of an audio visual work. The application of the public performance right to software has not be fully developed, except that it is clear that a publicly available video game is controlled by this right.
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