Copyrighted Music in Pubs

The is is a picture from the ASCAP website. Their claim to be creating music could be seen as ironic.

I have some friends who play music in restaurants and pubs and the topic of music licensing has come up. It turns out that if copyrighted music is played by radio, TV or a satellite, the facility doesn’t need to pay for it, but if it comes from a live band or a CD, then they need to be licensed.1  I know that this is enough to persuade some owners to not have live music, because I know of a couple who don’t have live music for this reason. This leads me to wonder what this sort of copyright enforcement is doing to our culture. I talked to a friend who has played music since the 1960’s and he said it didn’t used to be that way. He thought that perhaps it happened about the time artists and music labels started losing money due to online file sharing. Perhaps the music industry needed to find other ways to make money as their traditional ones dried up. However, if there are fewer venues for people to play music, then there is likely to be less music created at a grassroots level.  Most bands will start by playing other people’s music and then go on to playing their own. That’s part of the evolution, but that changes when it all has to be paid for.  There is also more than one organization that licenses music so you may need to have more than one license or take the risk of being fined. So once again copyright can be seen to protect the artist, but it also can be seen to be suppressing new art. I say this because new music always builds on the old, so if people have less access to the old music, they will likely create less new music. It would be interesting to find out how much artists make from the licensing. Considering that it must be split amongst many artists my guess is that it can’t be much. However, maybe it’s worth is for the record labels. I would think that having a lot of people play your music would result in more people buying it.  I don’t claim to understand how the record industry works, but I think the music I likes comes from many people playing rather than the few who have big budgets backed a corporation. Much the way big blockbuster movies are rarely the best movies, the big budget music is not the best either.

1. 11 questions about music licensing. (2012, January 1). National Restaurant Association. Retrieved May 20, 2014, from http://www.restaurant.org/Manage-My-Restaurant/Operations/Front-of-House/11-questions-about-music-licensing

ASCAP

BMI

Space Oddity Oddity

It seems that the video made by the Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield has been put on private because his one year license to use the song was up. He made a deal with David Bowie's copyright lawyers and now the time is up.  The story was posted yesterday and I see some of the versions of the video can't be watched, but I found one that still works and posted it above. I'm curious to see if it will get blocked. This gets to one of the issues that interests me about how copyright law is enforced. I would have thought that having the astronaut sing the song would have been good publicity for David Bowie and it obviously doesn't complete with Bowie's version. Why be so small minded about it that you are only able to parcel out one year. What happened to groovy David Bowie. Is he still mad about Vanilla Ice?  I suppose that it's reassuring that men's laws are still enforced in space. I wonder if an American has second ammendment rights in outer space? 

Astronaut Chris Hadfield’s ‘Space Oddity’ copyright license expires

YouTube Blocked My Video on Intellectual Property

 

I made the above video about intellectual property and the public domain and then uploaded it into YouTube. A block was immediately put on it because I used a segment of the Simpsons to comment on a joke they made about the public domain. I then contested the block stating that since I was using segment for the purpose of commentary and not entertainment, that it was fair use. As of this posting, you can watch it on YouTube, but I cannot edit it. However, the process seems to be working so far even though it is a guilty until proven innocent system.

Supreme Court Says No to Patenting Human Genes

Last June, just as I should have been finishing up with my class on intellectual property and the public domain, the Supreme Court ruled that companies may not patent the human genome. There is one exception though, if the company creates a man made gene then they might be able to patent that.  The words of the Supreme Court were “A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated.” 1 This is another great example of an argument between those who hold the patents and those who want to use the patented material. The company who made the patents, Myriad,  invested in locating these genes and was making  a lot of money from them. This was just good business.  However, the  case went to court, because doctors and patients were frustrated due to the fact that only the patent holders could use the genes.  They argued that this reduced the chances that there would be medical or any kind of scientific advancement using them. As John Koetsier says in his Venture Beat article “...that would curtail medical research and treatments as patent owners alone would have the right to create or licenses therapies resulting from knowledge of those genes — or to even study them.”

So this is a victory for those who don’t want genes patented and those who want more freedom to use information in general without the restrictions that come with intellectual property laws.  Even though there could be great profit for the companies making the patents, there is more to be gained by the public as a whole by allowing more people to use the information.  Had the genes remained patented, research on the genes would have become too expensive as royalties would have needed to have been paid for the genes the researchers were working on. I suspect the Supreme Court was able to come to a unanimous decision on this one in spite of the business angle because most of us are leery of having companies control something that is so essential to our humanity.  A quote from the Venture Beat article states it well, “Over the past 20 years, at least 41 percent of our genes have become the intellectual property of corporations,” genomics professors Christopher E. Mason and Jeffrey Rosenfeld said on the ACLU’s blog recently. “These patent claims contradict an intuitive sense that our DNA is no less ours than our lungs or kidneys.” It would seem only natural to have the human genome remain in the public domain.

Supreme Court: No, you may not patent human genes (VentureBeat)

http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/13/supreme-court-no-you-may-not-copyright-human-genes/

Venture Beat Article

Giving Up Mary Poppins to Save Mr. Banks

Last year I went to see saving Mr. Banks. The story revolves around Walt Disney’s attempt to convince the author P.L. Travers to sell him the film rights to her book Mary Poppins.  It wasn’t until later that it occurred to me that I had just seen a big budget studio movie that was about intellectual property rights. I thought it was a nice contrast to the issues that we studied in our big thinkers class.  In Saving Mr. Banks you have the classic intellectual property rights situation where a company wants to buy the rights from an individual. It is very clear cut; Disney can’t make the movie unless Travers sells the rights. Those were the good old days because the issue was easy to understand. No gray area there. Once Disney gets the rights, he can put in dancing penguins if he wants and Travers just has to let go.  

Today we have just the opposite. Disney tries to stop millions of people from using their intellectual property. Since individuals are using Disney material for many different means, usually not to make money, it’s harder to find out when people are doing something illegal. They are also trying to keep control of something that they basically can never completely control. Disney can try to scare most people into following their rules, but they cannot possibly stop them all from using their creations. Had Walt Disney used Mary Poppins without permission then it would have been easy for P.L. Travers to know who to sue. For the  Disney company,  it’s more like being a traffic cop, deciding who to go after.

The fact that a Hollywood movie was made about obtaining movie rights shows how mainstream this issue is now.  Saving Mr. Banks also examines the emotional side of property rights. From the beginning it is clear that P.L. Travers does not want to sell and only considers it because she is broke. The movie spends a lot of time covering Traver’s childhood so that you understand why she is so attached to her work. Most of the time I tend to think of intellectual property rights as being about the money, but it is also about the artist’s emotion and connection to their work. Even if you get paid it can be difficult to see someone take your work and represent it in another way.  I’m not a big fan of Mary Poppins, but most of the people in the theatre were 10 or more years older than I am and many of them hummed along to the tunes. For them what Walt Disney did was magical, for Travers, it was changing the meaning of her work.  

You can see P.L Travers struggle with giving up the rights to Mary Poppins in trailer embedded below.

Aereo Debate

Aereo is a company that allows you to access local signals are broadcast over the airwaves. However instead of using an antenna on top of your house you pay Aereo for access to an antenna online.  With this service  Aereo bundles the  local signals and allows you to record the signals with a DVR in the cloud. In a recent debate that discuss a case that is before the Supreme Court, Neal Katyla argued the case for the broadcasters, who say what Aereo is doing is illegal.  Katyla argues that the broadcasters spend billions of dollars creating and distributing the content so it’s not legal for Aereo to come along and make a profit off of that content. He states in the debate that the Supreme Court case is not about whether or not what Aereo is doing violates copyright law (suggesting that is obviously is), but rather “….how broadly or narrowly the opinion should be written.”1      

On the other side of the case Shapiro filed a brief in support of  Aereo.  He argues that two courts have already decided that the company did not violate the law.  Shapiro also brings up the Sony Betamax case which allowed people to record the TV signals.  He points out that the broadcasters are required to provide a free over the air service and in this new world of technology, people are getting that signal in new ways.  In addition, he also argues that the over the air broadcasts are supported by advertisers and Aereo doesn’t block any of the advertising. It just makes the signal available to more people, many of whom  would not have access to the signal without Aereo.

        This is a wonderful case for looking at the issue of intellectual property. You have each side making the standard arguments. The companies that are creating the content say they created the content so should control how it is distributed.  The new tech company argues that if people are not allowed to access the information as freely as possible then innovation will be stifled. Although I want to side with Aereo on this I don’t really buy Shaprio’s comparison to the Sony Betamax case. Here Aereo is redistributing the information. They have taken it and sold it  are using it the same way the original broadcaster does. With a VCR the consumer records the signal but does not sell it to anyone else. However, since this case involves cloud based technology, it could have a big impact on businesses that store data online.

1 "Watch Now: PBS NewsHour | Justices Consider Future of TV and Copyright in Aereo Case | PBS Video." PBS Video. PBS, 22 Apr. 2014. Web. 16 May 2014.

Note: You can hear more about this from an interview with Shapiro in the following YouTube video:
Aereo and The Risk of Innovating with Gary Shapiro