Listen here…
Listen here.
So I stumbed across this funky service from Swedish Radio, that lets you post a few words in a small Java window, and in a few minutes, they take each word, run it through their musical database and spit it back to you in bits of music. The quality stinks and it would never get around to passing as real music, but there is something interesting here.
My first thought was, how does the web-site get around the copyright laws. Second, who has time to search all the songs and find just those precise words. I contemplated these complex questions over a bowl of cherry cobbler, and soon the answers were pretty crystal clear. The copyright issue is moot, because the radio station has probably already paid the necessary copyright royalties to the appropriate “money grubbing” authorities. The second issue is a bit more complex but one that I think will eventually apply to some of what is going on in openwebpublishing. Apparently their entire collection (or at least a fairly large chunk of it) has been put in a database, and they have engaged some sort of search mechanism to prowl through the database to look for specific words that are parts of the lyrics of songs.
Which finally brings me to the third point. Does each separate word have a copyright? “Samplers“, those folks that take bits of published music and put it in other peices of music often called mashups, are often in the hot-seat for “borrowing” copyrighted music. So again, how small is the smallest snippet that must be considered as copyrighted. (A good read about these copyright issues and how they impact Web 2.0 is Simon Moore’s “March of the Spiders: Policy Challenges for Copyright in the Digital Publishing Environment” – Sorry but the PDF version no longer works)
Which in turn, leads me to my final point….people who are engaged in copyright law are making far more money than the original artists that produced the content that was copyrighted.
And we are just talking music so far. We still haven’t discussed text, or photos, or design….and the list may go on and on forever. I suggest that it is this over-application of copyright intent that will eventually cause Google to lose money on their purchase of You-Tube. There was a day when You-Tube just didn’t seem to care that the content authors, borrowed a bit here and there from originally copyrighted material. Now that Google is in charge, they are paying much closer attention to where the material comes from. Already, some vloggers are looking at other web-space to display their craft. What if someone copyrighted colors in a photo? Do think this is far-fetched? I am an amateur glass-blower and I know for a fact that there are many glass blowers out there that have their own secret formulas for developing some of the brilliant colors that go into their works. Some have even gone so far as to copyright those formulas….not the colors but the formulas. There is no reason to believe that photo artists may seek the same creative protections…or at least those that pretend to protect the artists for a fee. So who owns the copyright for the Blue in sky or the Periwinkle in some flowers? Or the letter “A” (Big Bird and Elmo shudder in disbelief). It seems to me, that the net is already causing a lot of us to re-think protection of materials. Copyright rules are way behind the times, and need a lot of adjustment before folks are going to adhere to them.
But I like to think that there is a new and better approach out on the horizon. There are literally thousands of netizens who are working hard to put content under Copyleft protection. They are seeking ways to put music in Creative Commons where anyone can use it. Music 2.0 will eventually compete with copyrightable Music 1.o….and there is a good chance Music 2.0 will win.
In the meantime, I am on the watch for ways that people who are more interested in the music than the money, that are willing to step over the copy right boundaries. People who love music and creativity so much that they are willing to donate the music to worthy causes….independent musical content creators. I have created several videos that used commercially copyrighted music. In those cases, I tracked down the original artists and asked permission to use their works in educational videos. In every case, I was granted permission by the owner of the copyright. So who do the copyright funds really go to…..well, that’s another issue for another day.
Finally, with the tedium of current copyright law, it is becoming increasingly necessary to find databases of content, to check against to make sure that we are using a word or term, or a color, or a tone that has not been previously copyrighted or has be copyleft-ed or if need be, to whom I need to pay the royalty fee. Consider for a moment, the size of a database that would include all the tones possible for all the instruments performed by all the performers in all the possible ways of all times. That’s some whopper of a database. Who is going to put it together….Google, perhaps…with it’s football fields of server constantly prowling the net for the new and the old, maybe they have the collective computing and storage power to do such a thing. Already, they want to put every word in every book ever written into a database…..it is but one step away from questioning whether or not they are constitutionally violating copyright amendments by doing so.
(Listen here for the final comment. )
So twenty years from now, lets meet here again to see if I was right or wrong. And in the mean time, light in up. They can’t lock us all up.
