Music copyright is a world gone wrong

By Stephen Pate, NJN Network, Charlottetown, PEI, Canada January 31, 2009

Mike Masnick over at TechDirt has this thing about copyright. It’s his regular obsession. The post Yes, Artists Build On The Works Of Others… So Why Is It Sometimes Infringement? makes the point that we need to be able to transform other works of art. In the current frenzy to copyright, patent and tie down the last nickle from each idea we have we’re stiffling the collective creative process. Musicians, especially the starters, are encouraged to copyright your songs to get compensation for your work. Maybe you’ll get rich one day. Wow, that would be exciting. Wrong, totally improbable that a new artist trying to create original music will write something that makes a million dollars, especially if they build walls around it. It was not how music, especially rock and roll, got so great. Instead of registering your songs with Socan, just send them out to the world on the Internet and see if anyone likes them. You automatically have a copyright by law.

One day, a music producer listened to my songs. I’d play one. He’d ask, “Got another”. So I played for 2 hours. He kept nodding – “yes, yes, lovely, something there, hmmm seems ordinary in the lyric, etc.” All excited I asked him if I should copyright them to keep an artist from making a hit and not paying me. He smiled and said “Write 100 songs and pick the best 15 or 20. Then pick the best five of those and send them to everyone, record them, perform them and maybe a name artist will hear someone else singing your song and record it. Then he and all the other artists will say – who wrote that song? It will be you and they will come to you for more because they need good songs. If your songs are ordinary that won’t happen of course. Copyrights just build walls.”

The modern over-priced musician / artist demands copyright protection. There would be no rock and roll without country and blues. In the blues, there was only copying, sharing and transforming. Arthur Craddup’s “Milk Cow Blues” is only his version of the song. He stole it from other people who didn’t like lawyers and courts. Eventually Elvis Presley made a hit from the song and gave Craddup more money than he’d made in his whole life. It was Elvis’ performance that made money.

That process of cross-fertilization created the blues which a lot of over-paid rock stars transformed and built fortunes. Now we have to watch the sicko Gene Simmons’ family on TV just because he could play rock and roll.

Bob Dylan is a copyright freak yet almost everything he does is stolen from Shakespeare, Keats, the Bible, blues singers, country singers, and his girlfriends. Poor Dave Von Ronk had Dylan steal his cool version of “House of the Rising” sun only to have Eric Burden steal it again and make a hit song. It was the song, but without Eric Burden and the swirling Hammond organ, it wasn’t a hit.

On Bob’s last album he stole most of the songs including Muddy Waters’ version of Rolling and Thumbling and put his name on it. The CD went #1 in North America and Europe on release. Of course, fans get even by having hundreds of hours of Dylan bootlegs. What Bob Dylan fans will pay for is Bob’s transformation of older material and his inimitable style.

Let’s get real. How many of your songs, if you’re a songwriter, have totally original lyrics and melodies. Forgettaboutit. Those tunes were written long ago. There are only so many notes and combinations of notes available with our scale. We listen to music all our lives and that music is in our heads influencing new songs we create.

I heard a blues artist introduce a song one night “I wrote this blues song last night” then start “God told William, kill me a son…” I burst out laughing but he thought he wrote Highway 61 so let him have it.

Music transformed is real music and better because it grows faster. The stagnation of rock and roll occurs when walls are put up by silly people who want to retire after a few hits. They get fat, do crack, smack, heart attack, the rat pack, get slack, prayer mat, that ain’t where it’s really at, dicks are rude, on the boob, talkin about who they screwed, we don’t care, anywhere.