Bettered by the borrower - copyrights and music composition

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1987 by John Oswald

Singers with original material aren't studying Bruce Springsteen's melodic contours; they're trying to sound just like him. And sonic impersonation is quite legal. While performing rights organizations continue to farm for proceeds to tunesters and poetricians, those who are really shaping the music - the rhythmatists, timbralists and mixologists under various monikers - have rarely been given compositional credit.

I found this comment on PAN, a musicians' computer network bulletin board, during a forum in January '86:

"Various DX7 programmers have told me that they 'bury' useless data in their sounds so that they can prove ownership later Sometimes the data is obvious, like weird keyboard scalings on inaudible operators, and sometimes it's not, like the nonsense characters (I seem to recall someone once thought they were Kanji) in a program name. Of course, any pirate worth his salt would find all these things and change them . . . Synth programmers are skilled craftspeople, just like violin makers, so if they go to the trouble of making new and wonderful sounds that other people can use, they should be compensated for their efforts. Unfortunately it's not as easy as just selling the damn violin."

THE CROSS-REFERENCING BLUES

Musical language has an extensive repertoire of punctuation devices but nothing equivalent to literature's " " quotation marks. jazz musicians do not wiggle two fingers of each hand in the air, as lecturers sometimes do, when cross-referencing during their extemporizations, as on most instruments this would present some technical difficulties.

Without a quotation system, well-intended correspondences cannot be distinguished from plagiarism and fraud. But anyway, the quoting of notes is but a small and not significant portion of common appropriation.

Am I underestimating the value of melody writing? Well, I expect that before long we'll have marketable expert tune-writing software which will be able to generate the banalities of catchy permutations of the diatonic scale in endless arrays of tuneable tunes, from which a notnecessarily-affluent songwriter can choose; with perhaps a built-in checking lexicon of used-up tunes which would advise Beatle George not to make the same blunder again.

In his speculative story Melancholy Elephants 3 Spider Robinson writes about the pros and cons of rigorous copyright. The setting is half a century from now. The story centers on one person's opposition to a bill which would extend copyright to perpetuity. In Robinson's future, composition is already difficult, as most works are being deemed derivative by the copyright office. The Harrison case is cited as an important precedent.

Artists have been deluding themselves for centuries with the notion that they create. In fact they do nothing of the sort. They discover. Inherent in the nature of reality are a number of combinations of musical tones that wdi be perceived as pleasing by a human central nervous system. For millennia we have been discovering them, implicit in the universe - and telling ourselves that we 'created' them."