Future of Copyright Anthology. A collection of texts from a crowd-funded contest (2012)

“How should a good copyright system look like? Obviously, the one our civilization uses now doesn’t fit the reality of today. Outdated, over-extended and unenforceable it leads to ridiculous court cases against random people and clearly fails to meet the needs of the digital world. Without good alternatives, the only solution some can imagine is to take what doesn’t work and get more of it, hoping that this will do the trick. It won’t.

In order to form the future of copyright system we need to step up and craft a model that will fit the digital reality, shaped by technology of today and tomorrow. There are some initial proposals, most notably Barcelona Charter or Washington Declaration, but we believe there’s room for improvement and we want to give it a try.

It is our great pleasure to present the results of the first edition of the Future of Copyright contest held by the Modern Poland Foundation. Our jury – Prof. Michael Geist, Piotr Czerski and Jarosław Lipszyc – awarded the main prize to Aymeric Mansoux, author of ‘Morphology of copyright tale’. Moreover, the jury decided to grant an honorable mention to Togi, author of the work “Give’. Congratulations!

We would like to thank you for your crowdfunding support and a high standard of the submitted works. We were pleasantly surprised by the interest shown in the competition, and we have decided to hold its second edition next year. We hope that with your help it will be even more successful and the collected works will provide a strong voice in the debate on the future of copyright law and system.” (contest organisers)

Publisher Modern Poland Foundation, Warsaw, 25 May 2012
Creative Commons BY-SA license
49 pages
via Aymeric Mansoux

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Joanna Demers: Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity (2006)

Is music property? Under what circumstances can music be stolen? Such questions lie at the heart of Joanna Demers’s timely look at how overzealous intellectual property (IP) litigation both stifles and stimulates musical creativity. A musicologist, industry consultant, and musician, Demers dissects works that have brought IP issues into the mainstream culture, such as DJ Danger Mouse’s “Grey Album” and Mike Batt’s homage-gone-wrong to John Cage’s silent composition “4’33.” Demers also discusses such artists as Ice Cube, DJ Spooky, and John Oswald, whose creativity is sparked by their defiant circumvention of licensing and copyright issues.
Demers is concerned about the fate of transformative appropriation—the creative process by which artists and composers borrow from, and respond to, other musical works. In the United States, only two elements of music are eligible for copyright protection: the master recording and the composition (lyrics and melody) itself. Harmony, rhythm, timbre, and other qualities that make a piece distinctive are virtually unregulated. This two-tiered system had long facilitated transformative appropriation while prohibiting blatant forms of theft. The advent of digital file sharing and the specter of global piracy changed everything, says Demers. Now, record labels and publishers are broadening the scope of IP “infringement” to include allusive borrowing in all forms: sampling, celebrity impersonation—even Girl Scout campfire sing-alongs.

Paying exorbitant licensing fees or risking even harsher penalties for unauthorized borrowing have become the only options for some musicians. Others, however, creatively sidestep not only the law but also the very infrastructure of the music industry. Moving easily between techno and classical, between corporate boardrooms and basement recording studios, Demers gives us new ways to look at the tension between IP law, musical meaning and appropriation, and artistic freedom.

Publisher University of Georgia Press, 2006
ISBN 0820327778, 9780820327778
178 pages

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Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, Juan Carlos De Martin (eds.): The Digital Public Domain: Foundations for an Open Culture (2012)

Digital technology has made culture more accessible than ever before. Texts, audio, pictures and video can easily be produced, disseminated, used and remixed using devices that are increasingly user-friendly and affordable. However, along with this technological democratization comes a paradoxical flipside: the norms regulating culture’s use — copyright and related rights — have become increasingly restrictive.

This book brings together essays by academics, librarians, entrepreneurs, activists and policy makers, who were all part of the EU-funded Communia project. Together the authors argue that the Public Domain — that is, the informational works owned by all of us, be that literature, music, the output of scientific research, educational material or public sector information — is fundamental to a healthy society.

The essays range from more theoretical papers on the history of copyright and the Public Domain, to practical examples and case studies of recent projects that have engaged with the principles of Open Access and Creative Commons licensing. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the current debate about copyright and the Internet. It opens up discussion and offers practical solutions to the difficult question of the regulation of culture at the digital age.

With a foreword by Charles R. Nelson
Publisher Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, UK, 2012
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
ISBN 978–1-906924–46-1
220 pages

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