On Balkinization, Christina Mulligan points out that the characters in “Glee” violate copyright law left and right:
The absence of any mention of copyright law in Glee illustrates a painful tension in American culture. While copyright holders assert that copyright violators are “stealing” their “property,” people everywhere are remixing and recreating artistic works for the very same reasons the Glee kids do — to learn about themselves, to become better musicians, to build relationships with friends, and to pay homage to the artists who came before them. Glee’s protagonists — and the writers who created them — see so little wrong with this behavior that the word ‘copyright’ is never even uttered.
You might be tempted to assume that this tension isn’t a big deal because copyright holders won’t go after creative kids or amateurs. But they do: In the 1990s, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) asked members of the American Camping Association, including Girl Scout troops,to pay royalties for singing copyrighted songs at camp. In 2004, the Beatles’ copyright holders tried to prevent the release of The Grey Album – a mash-up of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album — and only gave up after massive civil disobedience resulted in the album’s widespread distribution. Copyright holders even routinely demand that YouTube remove videos of kids dancing to popular music. While few copyright cases go to trial, copyright holders like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) don’t hesitate to seek stratospheric damage awards when they do, as in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset filesharing case.
I’m too lazy to reproduce all the links in the above-quoted paragraph, so go to the original post to see the links. And also to, y’know, read the entire post. :-)
Current law favors copyright holders. But morally, there’s nothing wrong with singing your heart out. Remixing isn’t stealing, and copyright isn’t property. Copyright is a privilege — actually six specific privileges — granted by the government. Back in 1834, the Supreme Court decided in Wheaton v. Peters that copyrights weren’t “property” in the traditional sense of the word, but rather entitlements the government chose to create for instrumental reasons. The scope and nature of copyright protection are policy choices — choices that have grown to favor the interests of established, rent-seeking businesses instead of the public in general.
The Constitution allows Congress to pass copyright laws to “promote the progress of science” — a word often used in the 18th century to mean “knowledge”. The stated purpose of the original 1790 copyright statute was to encourage learning. So you tell me — what promotes knowledge and learning: letting people rearrange music and learn to use a video camera, or threatening new artists with $150,000 fines?
It’s worth clarifying that the copyright violations that Mulligan’s OP refer to are when the kids in the Glee Club videotape and/or post online performances of songs. If they are just singing a song in the hallway, practicing it, or performing it in competition, that’s not necessarily a copyright violation. In some cases, those performances would be completely legal without permission, and in other cases, they would need to seek performance rights.
I don’t watch enough of Glee to know whether the show ever deals with it, but I know that when I was in pep band and show choir, our director and school, theoretically, paid for the permission to use all of the music that we used. If I recall, the cost of most of the sheet music for high school performances included performance rights.
Good post, Amp.
An excellent source of news about current copyright issues (and other interesting tech stuff) is the Canadian show “Search Engine” with Jesse Brown. You can download his podcasts here, or visit his blog here.
O.K. – but how do you balance that against new artists not being able to make a living because people pirate their work without compensating them? What new works will we never hear or see because they could never get to the point that they can spend full-time in their creative endeavors?
Yes, a copyright may be owned by a corporation, and they can suppress use of the copyrighted material in a fashion such as the above you don’t like. But the reason they own it is because at some point the originator of the work got paid. If the corporation can’t make a profit by purchasing the copyright then they won’t buy it. That means that the market for recorded works is considerably reduced, with considerably reduced payments to the artists.
That’s an easy one! By limiting copyright to a reasonable time frame and by limiting it’s scope (for example allowing performances by school groups).
I definitely agree that the time frame of copyright should be limited. If the purpose is to “promote the progress of science”–and I think the Constitution also contains the phrase “the useful Arts”–that need is not served by keeping several F. Scott Fitzgerald novels under copyright, decades after his death. He ain’t gonna write anything new.
But to suggest that school groups should be able to perform works publicly without obtaining permission is to suggest that no one should have the opportunity to make a living by writing material for school performances. I have trouble agreeing with that. There are playwrights, for example, who write an awful lot of plays that are really only feasible for school productions. Should that art form just die so that a high school glee club can perform “Bad Romance” for free?
I think performance fees should be reasonable, but I think the distinction in “fair use” between classroom educational use and public performance is fair.
The Constitution allows Congress to pass copyright laws to “promote the progress of science” — a word often used in the 18th century to mean “knowledge”.
“Knowledge” is what “science” means. What we now call “science” was still called “natural philosophy” in the 18th century, so I wouldn’t presume that the framers even had natural philosophy in mind. I’m not sure offhand when “science” replaced “natural philosophy,” but I seem to recall it was later in the 19th century. And given the tentativeness of much scientific knowledge, it wouldn’t hurt to go back to the earlier term: scientists too often claim to know what, in fact, they don’t.
I don’t think anyone here would advocate getting rid of all copyright restrictions on school performances. However, YouTube is notorious for yanking videos (or the audio to videos) that use copyrighted songs. I’m not sure how they are with copyrighted video mash-ups (or something that otherwise changes the original.)
IIRC, the penalties imposed on unauthorized reproduction of copyright material were imposed with the aim in mind of going after bootleg distributors. No one envisioned something like the internet back then, where you could have the freedom to create and share without needing to own professional-level equipment, or that you would do it without seeking a profit. It makes no sense to go after people who are using your song in their own free, creative performance for the same reason you don’t draw a mustache on your own campaign billboard – it’s good press and you might get a few new fans out of the deal.
The area it gets a little gray is if the artist doesn’t agree with what is being depicted/associated with their song. I still think most fans would comply if an artist stated they didn’t want a song used a certain way. The fan fiction community is a good example: there are authors who have stated that they do not want any adult fan fiction written about their characters, and most fans comply. The ones that don’t don’t get to post on major sites.
That’s an easy one! By limiting copyright to a reasonable time frame and by limiting it’s scope (for example allowing performances by school groups
You and I could find common ground here, Jake. I don’t think that Disney should own Mickey Mouse forever, for example. But unlimited use of art by high school performing groups goes a little too far as well. I can see a multi-class version of this, wherein not-for-profit or educational groups or groups not charging admission could use works under a different set of strictures than people who are charging for it, or are selling ads (such as You Tube).
I suggest that this is not true. What is true is that those in the media often take the work of scientists that the scientists present as evidence supporting a given theory and report it as established fact. There’s generally quite a bit of difference between the “Conclusions” section of a scientific paper and what appears in the media story about the work.
Typically, a school concert would involve “performance rights,” which are a subset of copyright. If you _record_ a school performance, then you are literally violating someone’s right to copy. And then posting that performance on YouTube involves both copyright and performance rights violations.
But it’s not entirely accurate to say that YouTube itself yanks videos that use copyrighted songs. Now that Google owns the company, with their current fancy Google technology, copyright holders can submit material to Google/YouTube, which will then scan all of their millions of videos “looking” for clips which seem to contain copyrighted stuff. If the copyright holder requests, YouTube will then yank any or all of the videos. At this point, the poster of a video can appeal, and I believe that’s when a human will watch it to determine if it seems to be copyright violation.
This is explained much better in a Slate article.
So instead of bootleg distributors, who required equipment and a distribution network to make small dent in the commercial potential of a work, the Internet allows a single individual to completely decimate most of the commercial potential of a work.
Oddly enough, under US copyright law, if you are using portions of copyrighted work in a performance that criticizes or makes fun of the original artist, you enjoy greater protections than if you are simply paying homage.
I’m not sure how fans of a work decimate commercial potential of a work by sharing the fandom with others. After all, I’d rather hear the original than someone else singing it most of the time, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. I have had things like FMVs and AMVs turn me onto songs I wouldn’t have otherwise heard of.
This is exactly my point. I don’t have a good solution for it, but I know it sure as hell isn’t suing all your fans.
If you’re strictly a songwriter, then “the original” is a series of markings on paper. There is nothing except “someone else singing it.”
The markings on paper are simply a crude communication device. The original is in the cognitive process of the creator’s mind.
Wouldn’t that be true of all art, and all communication, throughout history?