Cutting-edge copyright, part II

Remember those songs I sent to the US Copyright Office back in June? My certificate of registration came in the mail today. That was a surprise. The last time I registered songs, it took them four or five years to do anything about it.

Maybe registering online is just that much more efficient. If so, it's nice to know that the government is capable of using the internet for more than just spying on us.

Cutting-edge copyright

I just sent 28 songs to the US Copyright Office for registration. The last time I registered any of my work was six or seven years ago, so it was overdue.

A lot has changed in six years.

Back in 2006, I downloaded the proper form online, printed it, filled it out, and Fed-Exed it along with a CD and a check. Tonight I did the entire thing online. Even though a few of the instructions were more confusing than what I'd encountered before, it felt a lot more convenient. And cutting-edge.

Well, almost cutting-edge. Ordinary non-technical people have been ordering and paying for stuff online since what, 1999? But hey, it takes the government a while to catch up.

Personality infringement

Wendy Adams is an amazing musician who lives in Tucson. She used to gig all over town and give voice lessons; she was my first vocal coach. When health problems made it impossible for her to continue performing, she turned to art as a creative outlet.

Much of Wendy's art has a musical theme. Up until recently, her gallery featured a bunch of watercolor and pastel portraits of famous musicians. She's since taken those off the selling block. In Wendy's own words:

I finally got a little legal advice today (very concrete) about the workings of copyright, personality rights infringement and the use of celebrities likenesses in art not commissioned by the celebrities themselves. You can DO it. But you can't do it and sell them without permission. I have removed all art depicting celebrities from my studio.

I had known that if you took a photo of someone, you needed permission to sell that photo—a model release. Which makes perfect sense. A photograph is an exact visual representation. Selling it without the permission of everyone in it would be a violation of privacy.

But a painting?

The way I see it, when somebody draws or paints you, whatever ends up on canvas isn't you anymore. It's an image of you filtered through the artist's interpretation. The artist owns that, just as much as she owns her thoughts and feelings and beliefs.

Of course, I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who isn't famous. I suppose if Cinder Bridge hits the big time, I might theoretically become irked that someone's making money off my likeness. I'm the one who spent all that sweat equity building my personal brand, right? If an artist profits from the celebrity I've worked so hard to earn, I want a cut!

Theoretically. In reality, I don't think any of that would occur to me. It would be a nice ego stroke, knowing people wanted paintings of me on their walls. Or, if I reached the point where I became too jaded to care, I'd probably be making so much of my own money as a famous person that I wouldn't need the extra cash.

At any rate, I'm kind of fascinated by the implications of such rules, and how they apply.

• Does every portrait need to have a model release before it's sold, or only portraits of famous people?
  
  
• If the latter, how famous do you have to be before you're entitled to copyright your face?
  
  
• Comedians aren't sued for doing impersonations. Why is that different?
  
  
• What if I write a song about a celebrity? Do I need his permission?

I don't know, maybe I'm missing something. Is it just me? Or does this little piece of copyright law strike anybody else as odd?

* * *

Note: Tom Petty's Halloween by Wendy Adams is used here with her permission. She tells me that it's legal for me to post the image as long as there's no money involved.

The Bee Gees and Pink Floyd: Together at last

Oh. My. God. You have to drop everything you're doing and watch this right now.

You wouldn't think that a mashup of "Stayin' Alive" and "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2" was possible, would you. Sick and twisted and brilliant.

I wonder if Wax Audio obtained permission from the artists to do this thing. If not, I really hope lawyers don't intervene. I don't want to live in a world where this doesn't count as fair use.

Hat tip: @Larry Denneau.

A libertarian analysis of copyright

Interesting post up on Human Advancement about what copyright should be.

It is immoral to try to make money from another's work at the expense of sales by the original author, but this does not preclude all copying nor distribution as immoral.

It is immoral, and ultimately self-destructive, to always seek value for nothing.

Enforcement of any of this is immoral, both by the above, and because enforcement in any but small numbers of edge cases, is not possible without prior restraint or a requirement to prove innocence. Social sanctions are the only way to discipline behavior toward those principles, and that relies on how people evaluate the behaviors. [Emphasis mine.]

Entire essay is here. Read it. It's good.

I agree with all of the sentiments. I've repeatedly stated that I oppose draconian punishments for filesharing. I also oppose any punishment for limited filesharing—say, e-mailing a song to your friend because you think she'd like it.

On the other hand, I don't believe social sanctions alone will stop abusive sharing. They are mightily powerful if you happen to live in an Amish community or a small tribe with little meaningful connection to the outside world. They're not so powerful if your society enables easy hops to different social circles.

For social sanctions to work, a significant majority needs to disapprove of the bad behavior in question. Saying that's what should happen won't make it happen.

If I come up with some brilliant idea to make it happen, you'll be the first to know.

Speak of the devil

Sometime after we recorded Everybody Knows About Me, I sent a CD with that song and a few others to the U.S. Copyright Office for registration. I sent it FedEx to ensure that it wouldn't get lost. This was maybe 2006, 2007 at the latest.

I received the certificate of registration in the mail today.

Funny thing is, I'd just been talking with Ron about this a couple of days ago. I told him that I knew I'd sent the thing off, but I wasn't sure if they hadn't responded, or if I'd gotten something from them and simply forgotten. The latter seemed like the kind of thing I would do.

Nope. It just took them a few years to get round to it. Better late than never, I suppose.

Tip Jar

A decade ago, one of my friends burned a Barenaked Ladies CD for me, Gordon. I've listened to it all the way through maybe three or four times since then. I particularly like the tracks "What a Good Boy" and "If I Had $1,000,000," and they've gotten multiple plays.

A few years ago I bought an iPod. Latest versions of the iPod have a cool feature: they will display the cover art for any album they recognize from the iTunes library. When I exported Gordon, I noticed that the iPod didn't distinguish it from the albums I'd bought. Unlike the packaging that came with my burned CD, the digital version proudly displayed a full-color cover.

I started to feel a little guilty.

To a certain extent, I'm OK with filesharing and copying. If I listen to a CD that someone has burned for me, or a song someone has e-mailed to me, I don't necessarily feel obligated to pay. Maybe I'll discover that I don't like the album or song. In that case I'll never listen to it again, and the artist is no worse off than if I'd never listened at all.

But I consider myself to be on the honor system. If I like the album or song enough for repeated plays, I need to fork out money for it.

So, Gordon. It was a good album. I liked it. It wasn't too late to buy it and make things right. I stopped into a Zia's some time later and found Barenaked Ladies CDs for sale. Yay! Except ...

I had a choice. I could buy a new CD for $17, or a used CD for much less—maybe around $9.

Under normal circumstances I would have just grabbed the cheaper one. But now I had a dilemma on my hands. The whole point of this venture was to give BNL my money. If I bought the used CD, they wouldn't see a cent of it.

That left the $17 new CD, which ... no. Gordon came out in 1992. It had stopped being new well before my friend burned it for me. $17 is a lot to pay for an eight-year-old album. I wanted to do the right thing, but I wasn't about to let the label gouge me either.

I walked out of Zia's with no CD in hand and very confused.

* * *

My recent writings about unauthorized downloading got me thinking about the Gordon situation. (No, I still haven't gotten around to buying a reasonably priced copy of their CD). Am I the only person who has faced this sort of thing? Maybe there are a lot of music lovers who would be happy to pay artists for tracks they've downloaded, but haven't gotten around to it ... and they already have the music, so there's no point in obtaining it again.

Then I thought, what if there were a convenient way?

Here's my idea. Build a site that uses Paypal or Paypal-like technology. Allow artists to register. Users could go to the site, find the artist they wanted to pay, and donate whatever they chose. They could do this to pay for music they downloaded, or just to support the band.

Users' names could be displayed (unless they wished to remain anonymous), along with messages to the artists.

We could call it Tip Jar. www.tipjar.com is taken, but it shouldn't be hard to come up with a good related domain name.

Would this pay for every unauthorized download? Doubtful. But it would be a step in the right direction, and the legal solutions haven't particularly worked. The goal is to develop a culture in which people recognize the value of supporting the artists they listen to, and to give them an easy way to do that.

I am not a programmer. If you'd like to take this idea and run with it, be my guest.

You can tip me for the idea when the site is up and running.

Google vs. the music blogs

A few months after unleashing its music search feature, Google is in the music news again. Seems they've disappeared a few music blogs in response to violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Well, alleged violations, anyway. Says Devin Coldewey in Crunch Gear:

The sites in question were, of course, walking the line in terms of legality. MP3 blogs are scary to the music industry, because they represent such a challenge to the established promotional and sales flow. This is not the place for a whole argument about fair use, but I think most of what these blogs did would fall under that definition, woolly as it is. They hosted MP3s of artists they were discussing or promoting, but not whole albums. One of the bloggers notes that “everything I’ve posted for, let’s say, the past two years, has either been provided by a promotional company, came directly from the record label, or came directly from the artist.”

Full article here.

Technically speaking, Google has the right to do whatever it wants with the blogs it hosts. That doesn't make their decision the morally correct one. The actions they took present a perfect example of the draconian measures I've been talking about.

There are reasonable debates to be had over what intellectual property means in the digital age, and reasonable boundaries. It's not at all clear that the deleted blogs crossed the line, and the bloggers weren't given a chance to defend or change their actions before all their posts were deleted.

I've been trying to figure out how to post Cinder Bridge MP3s on this Google-hosted blog. Now I'm kind of afraid to. Who can predict whether the powers that be will notice or care that Cinder Bridge is MY BAND, and that I'm the copyright holder?

Because, let's face it: they're not trying to protect copyright holders like me. They're trying to protect a dying business model.

The music industry eats itself

Hey, y'know how album sales are down? It's because of all that illegal downloading. It's got nothing to do with the way music industry runs its own business.

So run along now, boys and girls, and fork out $18 for the latest Hannah Montana CD. Whatever you do, don't read articles like this:

Why the Music Industry Sucks (Part XLVII)