Wolverine is not amused.

Here’s an example of crossing the line with copyright: On April 1, 2009, thousands of people were able to watch an online, unfinished cut of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. This film is not due to open for several weeks. First of all, piracy of this sort is just plain theft. People have dedicated months if not years to realizing this film, and salaries are paid to not only Hugh Jackman but also, say, the caterer. Stealing the film reduces the economic incentive to provide work to the public.

Equally annoying is that this is not even a final cut of the film! Let’s put this in composer perspective: Imagine you have been commissioned to write a symphony to the New York Philharmonic. (It’s okay to imagine big!) Now, suppose you are listening to your MIDI mock-up of the score–and we all know how bad those can sound — and you are considering adding a section to your slow movement, and maybe cutting a large portion out of the third movement, Why? Because you think it will better serve your aesthetic intentions. Now suppose you discover your MIDI mock-up of your incomplete masterpieces suddenly hits the internet somehow. You are embarrassed because it is not your complete vision, the NY Phil is angry because they want the premiere with all its attendant excitement, etc. etc. etc.

The point: we should support the arts we like, just as much as we expect to be supported as artists. To be audiences of art carries resposnsibility.

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The internet is shaking things up in ways no one could have ever expected. Take the recent Google / Viacom battle. Google owns YouTube.com, and claims it is not culpable if anyone posts copyrighted material there. If the copyright owner asks for an infringing video to be removed from the YouTube website, Google will remove it. But this is very expensive for Viacom, to spend all day trying to find copyright infringements and so Viacom says Google must bear the responsibility of policing the YouTube website. Viacom has recently sued Google over this issue.

Can there be a compromise?

Perhaps not, and whoever wins, it will have a detrimental effect. In the New York Times of March 17, 2007, Joe Nocera writes that for either side…

Victory would be sweet, but losing could be disastrous. If Google wins, YouTube will never have to pay much to anyone for copyrighted content, and companies like Viacom will wind up either handing over their material or continuing to ask that it be removed — again and again and again. Smaller companies — not to mention the artists themselves — will probably have less control over their own work. If Viacom wins, YouTube will no longer be able to allow copyrighted content to be posted — which will surely hurt its business prospects. And it will make it more dangerous for any Internet site to use copyrighted material — even when it is legal to do so.

Copyright in the age of the internet is going to make the lawyers rich for decades to come.

The post Copyright is a Blunt Instrument, cont. appeared first on Richard D. Russell.

And now we have to ask: What history is being lost due to copyright?

To wit: Check out the great article in the 3/11/07 New York Times about the daunting task the Library of Congress faces in digitizing their collection. If the Library managed to digitize 500,000 text records a year, they would still need 1,800 years to complete the task, to say nothing of the expense.

And to say nothing of who holds the copyright.

Tim Brooks, author of “Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919″ (University of Illinois, 2004) is quoted:

“Copyright is a very blunt instrument. Once you have copyright, you have total control; there’s very little room in the copyright law even for preservation, much less reissuing material.

Examples of works being lost due to copyright include original recordings of John Philip Sousa’s band and Noble Sissle, an African-American tenor whose recordings are owned by Sony BMG.

If there’s no obvious money gain in releasing these old recordings, they just sit in the vault.

How much new music of today is being kept behind the closed doors of copyright?

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