“There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit.”
— Robert A. Heinlein (“Life-Line”)
Carl Orff was a genius – the European counterpart of Aaron Copeland. His opera, the Carmina Burana, is one of the most recognizable pieces of music in human history, and a magnum opus of twentieth-century classical music. It was based mostly on modern interpretations of Hungarian folk music and nursery rhymes that had fascinated Orff since he was a child. He blended these influences into a sophisticated and powerful work of music.
Apotheosis may not be geniuses, but they were giants of the early wave of electronica. Along with Moby and the Utah Saints, they popularized and paved the way for a whole new genre of music, turning up in night clubs and college radio shows. Their music was intense; electronica in the early nineties was rich and baroque, owing as much to classical and jazz as it did to funk and rock. Nothing illustrated this better than “O Fortuna”, where Apotheosis took Orff’s “O Fortuna” aria from the Carmina Burana, and reworked it into an amazing modern masterpiece. It was dark, it was daring, it was powerful, it was beautiful, and it was immediately outlawed.
The estate of Carl Orff (Orff himself being long dead) believed it was undignified that the Carmina Burana be reworked into popular culture, and immediately sued to stop the distribution of “O Fortuna”. It worked: you cannot buy it in any record store for any price, unless you shell out more money than you really want to for a rare used record. This piece of music, derived from a work authored by a man who was a famous and avid recycler of other people’s music, was denied to our culture because the record companies believed they could somehow make more money this way. This isn’t an isolated case. The pop band The Verve was apprehended by the Rolling Stones’ legal eagles because they sampled an orchestral cover of an obscure Stones song for “Bittersweet Symphony”. Current law means that the people who own the rights to a song own it, essentially, forever. The major ethical problem with this is that the Stones owe more than a little to the old American bluesmen – poor blacks who turned folk music into something beautiful and unique at the turn of the century. The Rolling Stones learned their riffs (“stole”, if we are to use the term the record companies want us to use) by listening to old blues records. They influence and steal as much as they are influenced and stolen from. This sharing of ideas, this give and take of concepts and art is central to the human experience. We call it culture.
Culture is instinctual. Culture is participatory. Any distinction between producer and consumer in music and art and literature and film is artificial. Clamping down on the distribution and dissemination of art, literature, learning and music is dehumanizing, and now it’s enshrined in law. The “rights” afforded the owners of copyright are so out of control, Girl Scouts can’t even sing “God Bless America” around the campfire without getting express written consent and paying a royalty. You think I’m kidding?
Now here comes the backlash. If copyright is dead, then our culture sure as hell isn’t going to suck up to it anymore. Copyright law was intended to benefit both the owners of intellectual property and the general public, a carefully considered compromise that lets the individual and the civilization both benefit. This balance has been deliberately and maliciously destroyed. Copyright law is so powerful and wide reaching, it is no longer recognizable – leaving the public domain a derelict and dusty wreck. In essence, war was declared on Western culture by a wealthy and powerful elite. Too bad they’re up against the smartest and most resourceful foe imaginable: the computer geek. Thanks to the propellerheads populating our new digital world, culture has freed itself. Welcome to the Internet age.
You, too, can be part of this backlash. If you want to listen to Apotheosis’ “O Fortuna” for yourself, you can. You cannot buy it legally, but you can still listen to it, cut it to a CD-R to play in your car, and groove to it at your next party. Simply fire up Rapster or Macster, and search for “O Fortuna” or “Apotheosis” on the free Napster service. Hell, download the original “Carmina Burana” while you’re at it, and compare it to its derivative.
Napster is currently under assault by the RIAA, the legal monster bankrolled by the multi-billion-dollar recording label giants. This legal sturm-und-drang doesn’t matter very much. New technologies, like Freenet and Gnutella, are being devised to ensure anonymity and decentralization when sharing information on the Internet, making it impossible for the RIAA and its ilk to find anyone to sue.
The merry hackers who invented the Internet thang are motivated by a gift culture: the more you give away, the more noble you are perceived as being. Linus Torvalds gave away an operating system kernel he wrote (you may have heard of it: it’s called Linux), and now he’s the most famous computer programmer in the world. These geeks and counterculture technologists hold an ethos that’s slightly out of step with current cultural trends, a chief tenet of which is: all information should be set free. They don’t see themselves as pirates or thieves – they see themselves as liberators. Considering the sorry state the law has allowed intellectual property rights to slide to, I see them as liberators, too. Big business and bigger governments will do their absolute best to censor, silence and control what is being shared and said online, but the geeks so far have always remained two steps ahead of them. Society needs the propellerheads too much to outlaw or suppress their work completely, so it’s likely the renegade geeks will remain two steps ahead.
So now you know why it’s useless to worry about protecting your copyright. Modern copyrights are so ludicrously powerful on paper, they run against the public interest. That means all those marvelous rights are all but unenforceable. So what can you do? The Association for Editorial Photographers has the right idea.
For a long time, the grim inside joke among professional photographers was “What’s the difference between an photographer and a pizza? A pizza can feed a family of four.” Publications would use the threat of bargain-basement-priced amateur hopefuls and clueless low-ball pros to keep the prices charged by competent pro photographers low – low to the point where many photographers hold second jobs, or lose money until they go bankrupt. Photographers held some comfort that they could re-use a few of the photos they took on assignment as stock photography used by advertising agencies. This is an increasingly small comfort. In the modern digital age, royalty-free stock photos are everywhere. There is a flipside: because the Web is a visual medium, the demand for good content that stands out from the crowd is higher than it ever has been.
Enter the EP. The Association of Editorial Photographers isn’t a union; it’s something just as good – a trade association. Collectively, freelance photographers who belong to the EP have bargained for higher rates up front, in return for allowing publications more extensive re-use rights. This is a win-win scenario, and they are seeing a great deal of success. Most recently, Business Week doubled their freelancer day rate and page space rates, and got the right to re-use magazine photos on their website in return. A definite victory for both sides: photographers can feed their families, and publications don’t need to worry about paperwork and renegotiation hassles to get the content to where they need it. Now that copyright is dead, content creators need to organize and use their collective bargaining strength to fight for higher pay up front. Once their work is on the Net, it is for all practical purposes in the public domain, and publishers who pay for content need to realize this and reimburse their creators to compensate for this loss of control.Stupid artists are suing 300,000 fans for sharing music. Smart artists that have done the math are already figuring out how to make money in an age where they don’t have to hook up with corporations that sell records at shopping malls across the country. No one needs to buy plastic discs or tapes to play music anymore, and despite being pretenders to the content throne, those shiny discs were all that the record companies had to offer. It’s going to get very, very bad for the fat-cat middlemen and content distributors, especially recording labels who are finding themselves in the unenviable position of being the twentieth-century equivalents to buggy-whip manufacturers. Stupidity and greed killed copyright, and now the murderers themselves are marked for death. Who says there isn’t justice in the world?