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What if it were

July 20, 2000 by Michael Boyle

illegal to buy a copyright, if they could only be assigned for a limited time? What if, unless you were a salaried employee (hence making your work a product of the company paying you), you owned your work, period? If you were permitted to lease it, but not sell it outright?

I’m always torn in a discussion of Napster and the other digital music schemes. I have, from time to time, made my living (or an important part of it) as a writer. My brother’s a musician. Many, if not most, of my friends are writers or artists of some sort or another. These people work hard at what they do. But when I look at a particular acquaintance of mine’s CD, she doesn’t own the copyright, the record company does. When I write an article, I own the copyright – the newspaper or magazine it is published in only owns certain rights; usually the right to first publication.

I think a clearheaded study of how copyright works and a legal expression of how that system should function would go a long way to solving a lot of the current issues. It’s one of those situations, I think, when the road ahead in terms of the specifics will only be apparent when the first principles are reiterated and strengthened.

Trouble is, the pattern is clearly in the other direction – away from privileging the rights of individual copyright holders, towards rights of corporate copyright holders and other businesses involved in such matters. I have personally been involved with a number of publications that have asserted that their purchase of first publication rights includes, with no further compensation, the right to place the work in databases that, essentially, exist in perpetuity. And the DCMA points in that direction pretty clearly as well.

For the moment, I don’t have a huge problem squaring my deep belief in copyright – the right I have over my creative and intellectual work with the free distribution of songs on the net, but that’s only because of the total belligerance and seeming cluelessness of the recording industry, and it won’t hold indefinitely. At some point, I believe that copyrights should be inviolate. So my conclusion, for now, is that the whole concept of copyright must be strengthened and affirmed. Trouble is – I doubt it would be by those with the deepest pockets in this ongoing dialogue.

Tags: ALA, Bell, Business, Data, Friend, GNE, Intel, Music, Personal, War, Writers

Offspring and Napster

June 6, 2000 by Michael Boyle

Offspring and Napster fall in love – again. This time it’s a two-way street. As any good relationship should be.

Tags: Copyfight, Music

Fun fun fun:

June 6, 2000 by Michael Boyle

A “definitive” documentary about the Sex Pistols called The Filth and the Fury (warning: embedded music and sound) is playing at Ex-Centris from Thursday.

Tags: Music, War

Special report on dead trees and plastic:

March 8, 2000 by Michael Boyle

Wired reports today on publishers who are beginning to put whole books online. Finally. It’s taking a while, but these folks should get it eventually. What magazine or newspaper doesn’t put most if not all of its content online at the moment? Magazine sales are at an all time high. Newspaper ad revenues are rising. I have experience with this – a book I worked on was entirely published on the net before we compiled it, designed it, and put it on paper to sell in stores through St. Martin’s Press.

New Media don’t replace or even really threaten old media – they complement it. Maybe the RIAA and the big music companies will figure this out. Where they see a threat, they should see an opportunity.

But the RIAA is like OPEC just before the end of the oil shocks in the 70s. Eventually someone will defect like some giant game theory test case. They’ll figure out that McLuhan was right – the medium is the message… and the medium of a CD publisher isn’t little plastic disks, it’s the music itself, and the idea of the music. And that day they’ll license like crazy to value-added resellers and make money from the brand, not some bulky clear plastic thing in a jewel case.

They’ll be the only recognizable survivors.

Tags: Books, Business, Media, Music, Wired

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