Mashup Policy
I was listening this morning to American Edit, an album-length non-commercial compilation of mashups based on Green Day's American Idiot, that's no longer available thanks to Warner Brothers' crack legal team. I'm honestly baffled as to the policy justification for a legal regime that allows this sort of thing. The purpose of copyright law, we recall, is to create incentives for the creation of new works and therefore ensure that there will be music for fans to enjoy.
Preventing non-commercial mashups will obviously directly reduce the amount of quasi-original music out there by a huge amount if it's rigorously enforced. Permitting them, by contrast, could only have a tiny impact on artists' incentives to write songs. If anything, a good mashup like "A Stroke of Genius" is going to increase the Strokes' record sales.
I thought it was you that correctly noted that the Recording industry is trying to change people's perception as to the point of the law. Originally it was to benefit society as a whole. They are trying to make it so that it creates a right for mucisians to make money of recordings.
I do wish there were at least one crackpot politician or pundit out there promoting the repeal of IP. It is certainly not as bad as, say, Boortz's tax crap.
December 15, 2005 12:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
American, and by extension, international copyright law is a complete sham. There's no sense believing that we enforce these laws "to promote the useful arts and sciences" at this point. We promote them to help the rich. You can keep calling attention to the stated goals all you want--and I applaud your efforts--but they are unquestionably not the actual goals.
December 15, 2005 12:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
For better or worse (well, for worse), IP law is an area where "public choice" theory can bring a lot to bear (and, by this I mean the better known and less interesting interest group aspect of public choice, not the more interesting voter preferences stuff). Basically, you have interest groups fighting it out in the legislative arena, and then we ask judges to interepret these laws, without giving much guidance on how to.
Many judicial adherents of public choice, such as the very conservative Frank Easterbrook (7th Cir. judge, brother of Gregg), believe judges should interpret these laws by "enforcing the legislative bargain"--that is, if the RIAA got a sweet deal in the legislature, they deserve that sweet deal and therefore Suzy downloading songs or making mashups is screwed.
The unfortunate thing is that there's no good solution, as the judicial solution would be massive judicial activism. This was rejected in Eldred and probably for good reason, because it would give way too much leeway to judges in interpreting what laws met and didn't meet the "to promote the arts" standard (I realize I'm bringing constitutional interpretation into this statutory interpretation discussion, but whatever...).
I guess this is all by way of saying that, yes, our IP law is screwed up, but I don't see any choice we have.
December 15, 2005 12:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
If anything, a good mashup like "A Stroke of Genius" is going to increase the Strokes' record sales.
Wow. Great tune. And you're right, what music companies don't get is how this will actually sell music.
I don't think things are going to change anytime soon. Certainly not if it requires politicians to change it.
For some reason, I don't think Biden and Kerry and Clinton get mashups.
December 15, 2005 5:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
If it is not the same as the original, then it is different. If it is different, then it is original. All art draws on the past. All intellectual invention is derivative. Without Darwin, we had Wallace. Without Leibniz, we had Newton. As Einstein said:
December 15, 2005 10:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Welcome to like mid 2004.
December 16, 2005 10:48 AM | Reply | Permalink