Klarinet Archive - Posting 000183.txt from 2010/07

From: Bill Hausmann <bhausmann1@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Sheet music copyright
Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2010 13:43:03 -0400

At 07:46 AM 7/10/2010, you wrote:
>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.

Fair remuneration is determined by the market. Free copies of
merchandise that otherwise must be paid for damages the market and
destroys value.

> > 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 is not the work that is stolen, but the fair remuneration. It is
equivalent to taking money out of the pocket of the artist.

> > 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.

Maybe and maybe not. And if the demand goes up, but only for the
free copies, that does not help the artist in any way other than,
perhaps, his ego. The other "diverse ways" are much to sketchy to
form a career around.

>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.

Of course, there is not real or artificial scarcity involved. If the
demand is there, more legitimate copies will be printed. The only
situation where this comes into play is out-of-print works. In this
day and age, of course, there should be no such thing, and Barnhouse
has proved that by putting essentially everything they have ever
published into a computer database so it can be accessed.

>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.

It does not matter if there is nothing TO distribute.

> > 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.

The public good is best served by making sure the producers of
intellectual property are rewarded for their efforts in a logical and
sustainable manner so they are free to produce new works. Any artist
who feels it is in his and the world's best interest to distribute
the fruits of HIS labors for free is perfectly entitled to do so.

> > 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.

Not "stupid," maybe, but uninformed. The girl had NO idea that
distributing free copies of Mr. Brown's work had a direct negative
impact upon his very livelihood. She saw it only as furthering his
reach to the masses, which is nice, I suppose, but does not
necessarily help him if he goes broke in the meantime.

The current copyright law may not be perfect, but it IS the law, and
it DOES protect the artists. The changes to the entire system that
would need to be made to convert to a free system while maintaining a
reliable income stream to the artists are so monumental as to be
quite impossible, in my opinion. But, as I have said before, take
your shot. Devise such a system, and see if you can get people on
board. Form your own publishing company that distributes all of its
works over the internet for free. At least you won't have to pay
much in income tax!

Bill Hausmann

If you have to mic a saxophone, the rest of the band is TOO LOUD!

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