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:It's not "trade"

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how you have the right to share other people's material.
HEY DUDE IM SHARING UR SAMMICH THX MAN DONT WANNA GIVE UP MAH RIGHTS EITHER

(Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.)

Re:Proud To Be An American?

[novium]

You know, if you feel like an alien, why not go start your own country far, far, far away. With booze and blackjack and hookers. Or not. Just sayin'. Go on. And don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Re:I just wrote this guy an email:

[gillbates]

I understand your point about nobody owning ideas, but consider that Native Americans took it one step further: they didn't understand how anyone could own *land*. Some didn't even have the concept of ownership of physical property.

Now imagine what it would be like if anyone could legally enter your house and take whatever they wanted, so long as you weren't "using it at the time".

The very notion of property ownership is itself a legal fiction. If ownership of physical items is good, why should it stop there? Why not extend it to something a person can *create*? Why must we limit ownership to only those things which exist in the material sense?

It's kind of odd that there are people who believe that if I buy a chunk of marble and carve a statue, that I can own that statue, and sell it for a profit, but to do the same thing electronically means I'm somehow obligated to give my work to the world for free. It seems that in their minds I'm only entitled to make a living if the product of my work is a physical object. Oddly, those who do produce physical objects for a living (i.e. factory workers, etc...) also find themselves hard pressed to make a living.

And lets make the distinction between ideas and works. Copyright protects works, not ideas. That is, merely having an idea is not enough, you must tranform it into something which can be represented in the physical world, i.e. notes on a page, bits on a platter, etc...

I see the analogy with physical objects repeated often, but it's a bad analogy. Every physical object owned by someone is owned because it has some use to the owner, not because it takes up physical space and cannot be trivially reproduced. Likewise, even intangible assets - such as software - have some use to the owner. Consequently, they have value, and if we thought of things in terms of their value, instead of their actual status as physical property, it would be easier to understand why copyright exists. It's not a matter of physical property, but of the value of the work one creates which entitles the worker to remuneration for their efforts. Copyright enables markets for intellectual property to exist, much the same way laws against theft allow markets for physical objects to exist. In the same way that removing a physical object from a shop deprives the shopkeeper of the profit made, so does copying deprive the author of their living. (Think about that for a moment: if one is caught shoplifting, they must pay the shopkeeper the restitution for the sale price, not the price the shopkeeper paid for the item. That is, profit is an implicit part of the value of an item. Why would copyright be any different?)

Now this isn't to say that there have been abuses - just as with physical property, the owners of intellectual property can abuse their position in particularly egregious ways. But copyright is unfortunately the best system available at the current time, and unfortunately, for all the brainpower on ./, no one has come up with a better system which rewards creators in proportion to the value of their work, while at the same time allowing unlimited copying.