We need to end music copyright. I have written about this before but following many debates with people I have written a full list of the reasons why we must end music copyright and why downloading unlicenced music should be allowed.
Although the industry would have you believe something different, downloading music is not the same as stealing. One has to concede that although there are similarities it is fundementally different from stealing. If I steal your car you no longer have your car. If I download music, I have the music and so does the original bearer.
It is perfectly easy to understand that if someone downloads music it does not mean that if they didn’t have the means to download it for free they definitely would have bought it instead.
Record companies and musicians are very violent. They lobby our government to take people from their homes, kidnap them in state prisons, and saction stealing your property or money in compensation for their alleged loss. This is unacceptable.
The ability to upload and download music accross the Internet has radically changed the music reproduction industry. Change is change. It can can be bad for some but history is clear that change is good overall. Change does not neccessarily mean that something should be reversed. The music industry as it stands will likely be damaged but that is no justification to continue as we are. Things change. A lot of people would have jobs digging our roads but no longer do it because we have mechanical diggers.
Let’s be clear about exactly what we mean by music. Only in the last few decades has music also meant something entirely different than its meaning through all of history. Music is the sound of people singing or playing instruments. This has always been true and is still true. Today it also covers the results of audio reproduction.
Governments shouldn’t play such a key role in creating so many millionaires. Protecting the music industry is probably the single most blatant action the government does to create huge inequality. Inequality exists elsewhere in society but is not so reliant on government.
Changing copyright law does not in anyway affect the ability of a musician to make an excellent living given they can charge money for live concerts. It’s up to you how you get into a secured music venue but buying a ticket is the easiest. I’ve already covered that musicians can already make a lot more money charging for concerts if they charge the optimum price using an online auction in this post on ticket touts and gig ticket prices.
Music celebrities are rarely good role models. We don’t need to make immoral people so powerful.
Intellectual property is a difficult subject. It’s a lot easier to justify allowing inventors to reap the rewards of their creations through patents considering what they have given society. It’s not so easy to justify it for music.
There are other ways for musicians to make money. Let’s not pretend music is some sacred art and consider placing sponsored adverts into the lyrics. It’s how others earn a living.
The vast majority of music is simply a rehash of other music that went before anyway. The lines of who really deserves the rewards for a lot of music is extremely blurred. It’s a strange concept to create enforcable rights simply for the reason that it is a creation of a human. New words, sometimes slang, are creations of people yet we do not create enforcable rights based on these.
What’s really ridiculous is that a lot of these millionaire musicians are still not happy even with the existing laws! They want an extension to the 50-year royalties period to make even more money! Unbelievable.
Music fans are dedicated people and they know they can get the music for free if they want it yet seem to be happy to give the muscians on a voluntary basis as Radiohead showed.
Record companies use unfair practices to distort the free market by lobbying government to ban parallel imports. My post on parallel importing of CDs goes into more detail on this travesty.
Copyright rules can still be enforced between complicit parties without laws. Musicians and other parties can still agree contracts regulated by 3rd parties to manage disputes and infringments. For example, rival broadcasters could agree to enforce copyright between themselves.
All this keeps the money in the pockets of the people who can spend it to create more justifiable parts of an economy. There is no danger of music itself being harmed by the end of music copyright. Some people’s careers will be ended by this but that’s starts the story in the middle because these laws should never have been created or enforced in the first place.