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Happy Culture Freedom Day!
Blug_fred writes "For the second edition, today is the time to celebrate Culture Freedom Day. While not as popular as HFD or SFD, celebrating Free Culture involves finding Free Culture artists, inviting them to your place and having them perform, display or talk about what their creation(s). Of course you can always simply project a couple of Free Culture movies and launch a discussion about their business models. Either way you can find all the happening for today here on the map and we sincerely hope there will be something of interest near you."
..in Turkmenistan. On the 25th it will be national carpet day! (also in Turkemanistan). Who makes up these special days anyway and why should I listen to them?
Mr. Lessig and his followers do much to promote the public good and the quality of life. Copyright was invented to promote the public good by protecting the interests of creative people for a limited time. Now, in today's Market Society, (As opposed to Market Economy) this once-useful legal tool has been perverted to make money in perpetuity for property holders. These owners are rarely the creative people who developed the culture. For example: At the beginning of the 20th century a copyright lasted 14 years. The American songbook was remixed into jazz in the 1920s. The musicians had the right to do so because tunes from the sheet music craze a couple of decades before had devolved into the public domain. And from a little later? Just have a listen to Art Tatum's 1939 Tea for Two, which was written in the 1920s.
Jazz is an awesome cultural invention adored by fans all over the world. But, now, if you want to re-imagine or cover Sir Paul's Yesterday you still have to pay him (or somebody.) Hasn't society rewarded Mr. McCartney enough? It's time his music was kicked loose. Really. It is. And maybe if he was not still raking it in from work he did in his 20s he would be stimulated to do something new that was up to snuff. I am not a freetard. But, like Mr. Lessig, I hate to see society robbed of its heritage. And the culture held hostage by corporate interests.
A reasonable copyright term helped foster in the Jazz Age. And that is a beautiful thing. A thousand years from now someone will say: "America. Hmmm. Isn't that the place jazz was invented?" And twenty thousand years from now some being will say: "Earth? Hmmmm. Isn't that the place where Jazz was invented?" The point is that all we have left of any civilization is its culture. No one remembers the politicians and the rich guys. Just the artists they usually cheated.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
couldn't an argument be made that artists are now forced to create entirely new non derivative works if they don't want to license the older ones?
Eventually authors will run out of distinct works to create. See "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson.
In the diatonic scale, there are seven distinct intervals between pitches, and rhythm can be approximated as either a short or long time from one note to the next. This leaves fourteen possibilities for each note but the last, as the last note has no next note to make an interval or duration meaningful, or 14^(n - 1) distinct melodies of length n. But a song was deemed an infringement for having matched eight notes (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, the "My Sweet Lord" case). This sets n = 8, or 14^7 - 105 million distinct melodies. There are already far more people than that on this planet.