From: rej@sal.wisc.edu (Randy Jones)
Newsgroups: rec.music.makers.synth,rec.music.synth,rec.music.industrial,comp.music
Subject: Re: Make Sampling Legal...
Date: 27 Jan 93 20:38:48 GMT
Organization: Space Astronomy Lab, Madison WI

Mason Jones writes:
>Greg (not Ggreg) Taylor writes:
>: 
>: The second reason why folks might be upset by the whole sampling/copyright
>: brohaha is far less clear, I think - so much so that hardly anyone has
>: bothered to challenge it, even though it's a large and reasonable target.
>: The second reason is that the whole notion of "copyright" is rooted in
>: a set of assumptions about ownership, the status of recorded work, the
>: status accorded music in culture, and the status of "uniqueness" and
>: "originality" in the culture of the late 20th century.
>
>I don't know about this. Several of you folks are attacking copyrights
>as both a recognition of originality, and as a barrier to creation.
>Personally, I look at copyrights from my own point of view as merely
>protection given my participation in a capitalist society. If I don't
>copyright my works, then I run the risk of someone else appropriating
>it and profiting from it, which I frankly see as unfair. Christopher

How do you define "appropriation"? Consider: is appropriating a riff
or melody any less onerous than appropriating an entire musical tradition?
From an information-theoretical perspective, there is certainly more 
stealing going on when you call your "original" work, say, "rock" than there
is in the copying of "Stairway to Heaven" chord for chord, note for note.

This is what I take Gregory's sneer quotes around ""originality"" to imply
(in part): that what constitutes "original" behavior is socially constructed
and sanctioned in a way which perpetuates the existing Western thought
and power structure. 

>in a previous post stated that he had no problem with that, since if
>someone else made huge profits from it, he could as well. That's of
>course completely untrue. Warner, for example, could probably make a
>profit off a recording of frogs croaking if they put enough money behind
>the promotion and publicity of it.
>
>I view copyrights in a purely utilitarian manner. They are protection,
>pure and simple. 

Pure and simple? It's not even clear to me what you feel is being protected,
or what from.

>While the philosophical discussion of originality and
>the lack thereof is interesting, it's not clear how applicable it
>really is. Yes, a copyright requires that the work be viewed as
>'original,' their concern re originality isn't as deep as yours. It's
>a matter of whether you really as though using a piano, for example,
>automatically makes a work unoriginal. To believe that it does is a
>rather astonishing bit of anal-retentiveness.

Not clear how applicable it really is to what?

Although you haven't stated this, I'll guess that your definitions of 
protection and originality, which happily seem to correspond with those of
our courts, are rooted not in questions of musical or critical inquiry
but in finance. I respect that, as a working musician, you are bound
to have financial concerns. But using those concerns as a point of 
departure for this kind of discussion is like sitting down in a 
graduate philosophy seminar and saying "well, I don't think any of 
these complicated questions matter as long as my immediate needs are
taken care of."

>As I said above, the trifles are economic protection, which, however
>unfortunate it may be, is at present necessary -- depending of course on
>your goals. If your goals are merely to create some music, and you
>really don't care at all what happens to it, then of course you don't
>need that protection. If the idea of someone else making money from your
>creation (irregardless of whether it's actually original or not) doesn't
>bother you, that's fine.

Not only doesn't it bother me, I'm bothering to write this because I
don't want it to bother you or anybody else, either. 

As long as music is considered a commodity, "creation" will continue to
be channeled into certain socially acceptable forms of activity, including
sanctioned forms of "rebellion", "expression", &c. These act as safety-valves
for individual responses which could otherwise lead to substantive change
in our ways of thinking. 

My goal is "merely to create" some music, yes. I care a great deal, however,
what happens to it, because I'm fully aware that by distributing patterns
of sound to other people I'm engaging in a cultural dialogue which has
great potential to affect my future. And recognition of the profound effects
of financial concerns on this dialogue is crucial to furthering it.


-- 
| Randy Jones       | 
| rej@sal.wisc.edu  | 
Newsgroups: rec.music.makers.synth