Klarinet Archive - Posting 000179.txt from 2010/07

From: Joseph Wakeling <joseph.wakeling@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Sheet music copyright
Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2010 08:46:09 -0400

On 07/10/2010 07:31 AM, Bill Hausmann wrote:
> Theft of the author/composer's fair remuneration for his work. And
> morally you must consider that. The law certainly does.

But both morally and practically I (and the law) must also consider the
question of what is "fair remuneration", whether it necessarily needs to
be payment per copy, and whether the public interest is served or
damaged by the law enforcing such rules.

> Hence, true.

Copyright infringement and theft are different offences under the law,
for good reasons -- because intellectual works and physical objects have
fundamentally different characteristics. You can see whatever moral
equivalence you like, but the law makes this distinction.

> It lessens the value of the legitimate copies. If everyone is
> getting free unauthorized copies, it becomes much more difficult, if
> not impossible, to sell legitimate ones. You "use up" and "damage"
> DEMAND for the product.

I rather think you'll find that demand for music and other forms of art
goes UP -- by many orders of magnitude -- when it is made available
freely online. The price of putting a paywall around things on a
per-copy basis is that you actually cut off a good part of the people
who would otherwise engage with your work, and from whom you can make
money in diverse other ways.

Maintaining an artificial state of scarcity and restricted access to
information is a dubious business model in the internet age, with
dubious morality. Compare to the European Community's maintenance of
artificial scarcity of food to preserve the income of farmers -- morally
justified by the need to make sure that farmers have a fair income,
morally horrific when you consider that at the same time there was
actual starvation in other parts of the world, and hunger and
malnutrition even within Europe itself.

Now consider the moral and practical good that can come from free
noncommercial redistribution, by allowing access to intellectual work to
all sorts of people who could never otherwise have afforded it.

> You just use up the composers. It is not really about "using up" a
> resource, it is about drying up the source.

... and in an age where one public good (access to intellectual works)
has become potentially so easy, it's a moral imperative to consider
whether we can sustain that other public good -- the creation of new
works -- _without_ impeding access.

> Making a single photocopy copy for a friend is technically a
> violation of the copyright law, but not one they will
> prosecute. Allowing essentially everyone in the world to make free
> copies via the internet without the owner's expressed permission is
> clearly illegal, immoral, and actionable under the law. It violates
> the very essence of the copyright law and the protection it is
> supposed to provide to the producers of works. Many things that are
> "unclear" to you are abundantly clear to the rest of us.

>From "the rest of us" you would have to exclude numerous artists,
musicians, composers, writers, scientists, academics, legal scholars and
practitioners, publishers (yes, publishers!) and others, many of whom
share my point of view that these issues are "unclear", who like me
dispute the "morality" that you posit as a given, and some of whom take
far more extreme positions than me in terms of how copyright protections
ought to be rolled back.

I respect your position as a professional musician who is concerned
about there being sustainable future for his craft. I think it might be
reasonable to concede in return that many of those with differing
opinions -- me included -- have come to our opinions out of the same
concerns, and that where I (and they) dispute the status quo, it's
because we have put extensive effort into studying and thinking about
these issues, and the consequences of different approaches to them.

By contrast what's striking about many people who defend the status quo
is how unthinking and reflexive it is. Look at how Jason Robert Brown
responded when the young woman asked why she shouldn't share copies of
his work: "That's a stupid question."

It's _not_ a stupid question, and the answer deserves time, thought and
open-mindedness -- things we should all be prepared to give.
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