A Composer's-Eye View of the Copyright Wars

bonch writes "As an experiment, composer Jason Robert Brown logged onto a site illegally offering his sheet music for download and contacted hundreds of users, politely asking them to stop listing the material. Most complied, some were confused, and a few fought back. Brown chronicles a lengthy exchange he had with a teenage girl named Brenna, which provides an interesting insight into the artists' perspective of the copyright debate. He also responds to several points raised in comments to the article and says, 'I don't wish to be the enemy; I'm just a guy trying to make a living.'"

Comments

Re:Glynn Moody commented on this days ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you think no one would know that you're shilling your own blog, Glynn?

Re:It's not "trade"

[mjwx]

HEY DUDE IM SHARING UR SAMMICH THX MAN DONT WANNA GIVE UP MAH RIGHTS EITHER

If you can make unlimited copies of my sandwich without in diminishing the original then you, by all means may.

In fact I'm particularly hungry today so could you make me a copy of said sandwich.

OK, Sudo make me a copy of the sandwich.

Re:"I'm just a guy trying to make a living."

[Ivoch]

Yeah, what's with all that "music" and "movies" and "books" and "video games" etc crap? I just can't understand how anyone in their right mind could need to make or enjoy that stuff, when they could instead go work for a couple more hours per day in the fields or in the mines or something equally real and worthwhile. If everyone worked 16 hours per day instead of just 8 and then wasting the rest, just think about how much more advanced a civilization we'd be.

Re:Computer Generated Sheet Music

[mjwx]

I wonder how hard it would be to computer generate every possible combination of music in music sheet form. To the level of satisfying copyright "it's practically the same song" rule. That way it isnt a matter of generating every possible combination per bit. This would obliterate the copyrights of the future music industry. Placing all the copyrights in control of the distributed computing group that does it. A GPL equivalent or perhaps lesser one could be used. All music from day 1 on has to be released under that copyright. Which bars them from suing consumers.

Nice idea but fails in implementation.

There are 12 notes in music, C, C#, D, D# E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A# and B. In 4/4 timing there can be 16 combination of these 12 notes plus pauses (essentially left blank). So 13^16 = 665416609183179841 possible combinations of notes in a single bar ignoring slides, vibrato, hammer on/pull off, bends and half bends as well as all the funky effects of other instruments (admitting guitar bias here \m/). Assuming a tempo of 60 BPM there will be 120 bars per minute. Assume an average of 4 minutes per song (480 bars) and you get 1.2160339961839677144837309996667e+8555 -1 possible permutations (because you cant patent a song made entirely of pauses). Then we have variations of song length, timing, down/up tuning, major/minor/seventh/ninth and tempo.

It is much easier to go down the software patent course and patent each source note, then you only have 12 to worry about. BTW A is mine (patent pending).

Re:It's not "trade"

[vlad30]

If you can make a 1:1 copy of my sammich without degrading the original, then please, share away.

I'd say you have a patent but Prior art has been claimed by Jesus Christ

Re:short story:

[BoberFett]

You know what else sucks?

I got laid of a few months ago, but my previous employer is STILL using software I created years ago.

Perhaps I should ask them to stop using it?

Re:It's not "trade"

[Vintermann]

A two-year old sammich?

Just keep it. Please.