Theft: A History of Music

Thinking about how to engage students coming to intellectual property law for the first time is something that occupies my thoughts quite a lot these days. A copyright comic might be just the answer - and if it deals mostly with the law from that other common law jurisdiction across the Atlantic, that's not necessarily a disadvantage if the purpose of the exercise is to kindle interest rather than teach hard law. And if it has "theft" in the title I will be prepared to suspend my usual reaction to the connection of that concept with intellectual property.

A large part of grabbing a student's attention is finding a route into intellectual property law from somewhere they already know and like. Music provides an excellent entrée into copyright law - probably not Mozart, but possibly some of the more recent and high-profile cases, the two most celebrated of which were US cases (but there are many from the UK too). Music copyright is precisely what James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins’ new scholarly comic book tells us about. It is (the blurb tells us) 'a celebration of these and other musicians and composers who crossed barriers and built the playlist of extraordinary Western music from ancient Greece to classical to hip-hop. Published by the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain, “Theft: A History of Music,” brings these artists’ musical borrowings to the forefront, saying that instead of stifling creativity, such “thefts” were essential to musical cross-fertilization and creation of new genres.'

The blurb continues: 'But the book also comes with a warning: At every point of new musical innovation, there was resistance and efforts to control music, whether it was from philosophers, the church, or politicians.'

You can read the full article here, and listen to James Boyle discuss the comic on NPR's The State of Things. The mere fact that it's the work (partly) of Jim Boyle is enough to sell it to me: he's an excellent writer and lecturer and I have enjoyed his work in the past, although this is the first comic book of his that I have read (the first comic book of any kind that I've read, since I gave up "war bluds" at school). I read it, pretty much in one sitting, and found it stimulating, entertaining and informative. It's going to be an ideal introduction to copyright concepts in courses I teach in the future, and best of all (coming as it does from individuals and an institution committed to the furtherance of the public domain) it's a free download. What  more could you ask?

What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2016?

What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2016?  asks the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a piece designed to highlight the harmful effects of the extension of U.S. copyright protection from 56 years to life-plus-70 which happened as recently as 1978, the year in which I passed my Law Society Part II exams (well, most of them in the August of that year, after one attempt which was a complete failure in the February). That was when the 1976 Act came into operation, finally bringing the U.S. into the Berne Convention family.

My eye was caught by the reference to one of my favourite records,  Kind of Blue, recorded in 1959, so copyright would have expired this year if the old rules had still applied. Extending the copyright term is always contentious, and it seems to be accepted that it has to be back-dated so that existing works get the benefit of the longer protection, notwithstanding that the generally-accepted justification for copyright (that it encourages copyright owners to create more) is hardly served by increasing protection for things that have already been created, indicating that there was already sufficient incentive at the time; and in some cases the author, being dead, is in no position to respond to a new incentive anyway.

The EFF article doesn't make it absolutely clear whether it refers to copyright in the music or the phonogram. It seems to be more about the music, but copyright in the recording is also important, certainly in our copyright law - and, intriguingly, there's a very close relationship between the two, because Kind of Blue is a sustained piece of improvisation, so the sound recording in a sense is the musical work.

Here, the Copyright Act 1956 would have given the recording protection for 50 years from release, so it would have expired at the end of 2009. The music, notwithstanding its improvisatory nature, would have been protected for the life of the composer plus fifty years, a much longer term already than that provided for in U.S. copyright law. According to the sleeve notes, all the pieces on the album were written by Miles Davis, except two attributed to Miles (died 1991) and Bill Evans (died 1980), so even before the idiotic extension of copyright protection in the mid-90s copyright in the music would have run until 2041 and will now run for 20 years longer. The EFF's point, that if you wanted to use a Davis piece in a film you'd have been free to do it in the U.S. had it not been for the 1976 Act, never had legs in the U.K. (But if you want to use it that way, what's wrong in principle with paying for it?)

As for copyright in the phonogram, that would have expired 50 years after the end of the year of release - 2009. That's just a little too early to have been caught up in the ludicrous Cliff's Law extension of copyright in sound recordings, and clearly too late to give Miles any incentive to get his trumpet out again.

None of this, however, has stopped it from being available on YouTube.

Copying Is Not Creativity! Why Creative Artists Don’t Need the Public Domain - Office of Copyright

Copying Is Not Creativity! Why Creative Artists Don’t Need the Public Domain is a very interesting and thought-provoking blog post by Stephen Carlisle JD, Copyright Officer of Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Refuting the oft-cited dictum of either Stravinsky or Picasso, to the effect that great artists steal (he cites evidence that they didn't say it, which actually seems to be more like a lack of evidence that they did, along with a quote from TS Eliot that is supposedly what people think they are referring to, which became somewhat distorted because it really extols the virtues not of copying but of transforming an inferior piece of work), he takes issue with Judge Alex Kozinski (a brave move) who expressed the view (in his dissenting opinion in White v. Samsung Electronics America, 969 F.2d 1512, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, 1993 at page 1513) that everything in history has relied on copying:

“Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it’s supposed to nurture.”

Creative people not only don't need a public domain, Mr Carlisle argues, but it actually holds them back from being truly creative. Copyright doesn't protect ideas (or, you might say, ideas are firmly in the public domain), and that is what creative people need to work with. Great stuff. Copyright might be over-powerful, but what is needed (to my mind - this is not Mr Carlisle speaking) is not the present constant process of erosion - death by a thousand permitted acts, or "exceptions" as the philistines in government prefer - but a fundamental reappraisal of some key issues, like the worthless originality test.

In an earlier posting, which I found following a link from the artist's Facebook page (in the modern world that is how these things happen), Mr Carlisle had criticised the decision of Judge Jesse Furman in Dean v. Cameron, 2014 WL 4638355, Southern District of New York, 2014, to dismiss Roger Dean's claim against the director of the motion picture Avatar. Read his explanation of where the court went wrong by considering individual Dean artworks rather than the "total concept and feel" of his oeuvre - which no-one could deny is original and distinctive, and which many commentators also feel is reflected in the Cameron film. Even Mr Cameron seems to admit that Dean's work was a major influence (but then again, who could visualise a fantasy world without paying homage to the master?).

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