Response Paper Three

Music Will Never Be Caught in Any Net

The notion of copyright as it pertains to music deals with a very slippery area of intellectual property. Music was only recently recordable. In 1877, Thomas Edison recorded the first human voice and not long after did music begin to be a profitable business. In 1914 the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) was founded to "assure that music creators are fairly compensated for the public performance of their works, and that their rights are properly protected" in accordance with the 1914 Copyright Act. Live performances are the ethos of musical sound, whereas the record of music is the ethos of the music business. The notion that music is to be shared freely for the benefit of all society has always been, until recently, tied to the event of music; from ancient drum circle traditions to the Woodstock Music Festival of 1969. The freedom of access to recorded music through the internet though, combines that notion of freely sharing music to the record of music. Being as it is that music is shared freely and this notion is embedded within its very nature, it will never be fully tied down to any regulation of performance or recording.

The Napster affair brings out this very argument to life. Barlow argues that Napster represents the "real Internet" or one that "endows any acne-faced kid with a distributive power of Time Warner's" (page 1). In short, Napster allowed free sharing of recorded music (known as peer-to-peer sharing by use of MP3 files) that put the music business in jeopardy. But the business of music is not rooted in the manufacture and distribution of records of music as much as it is the performance of music. Therefore, it makes sense that freely shared records of music would only stimulate the music business further. As Barlow describes, the Grateful Dead were able to continue to sell out live performances as well as have studio albums go platinum based on the fact that their freely shared recordings of previous performances attracted new fans (pg. 2). Is it not surprising that "during the two years since MP3 music began flooding the Net, CD sales have risen 20 percent?" (Barlow, pg. 2).

Therefore, those concerned with the music copyright (such as ASCAP) should not be thinking that all is lost. Rather, they should embrace the fact that music is intended, by its nature, to be shared freely. If there is to be any new approach to the developed notion of copyright and music it should be to incorporate the understanding that it can be freely shared within both spheres of the event and the record. All the attempts to "no longer excuse personal use copying of digital works, either as fair use or under any other rationale" or develop sophisticated encryption technology (Cohen, p. 98) should be set aside. Any business of transaction that results in profit for the entrepreneurs of musical art should be considered a secondary benefit to the inherent patronage to music itself.