Bruce Houghton: Music As Lone Works Of Genius vs. Music As Culture

"Put simply, copyright law assumes that creative works are either wholly original, or they represent theft. That idea is nonsensical, because no works are wholly original."

- Andrew Dubber

Some will consider it heresy to post a statement like that on an "industry" blog like MidemNet.  And this is usually a place where pundits like me espouse our views in longish diatribes, but I'm not going to follow that rule either.

I'll just simply say that I believe that what Andrew Dubber wrote is true. I admit that I have almost no idea how current laws or the way that we do licensing deals should change because of it. But I am 100% certain that this needs to be part of our conversations going forward.

Comments

[Bruce Houghton]

You are welcome, Andrew.

You were inspired by Mike Masnick @ Techdirt who was inspired by law professor Peter Friedman who was inspired by blogger Rene Kita who was inspired by...

That certainly illustrates the true nature of originality.

For what its worth, I gave you credit not because you said it first (who knows who did), but because you said it best.

Maybe that's how creators shoud be rewarded.

[Dubber]

No works are wholly original - and nor is that quote. :)

Credit due to Techdirt (an RSS must-read) for providing the catalyst that sent me down that particular path today:
http://techdirt.com/articles/20090629/0230145396.shtml

But a lot of what I wrote in that 'Deleting Music' post actually stems from a debate I had with Nitin Sawhney in Italy a couple of weeks back. I'll discuss that in more depth on the site sometime in the next few days - but it was one of those conversations that really got me thinking, and I'm really grateful to him for that.

To some extent, the heroic Romantic era idea of 'Music As Catharsis' can be held accountable for quite a few of the tensions between 'Music As Culture' and 'Music As Commerce' that have been the recurring theme of all our music industry online conversations over the past five years or so.

So that's what I'm exploring in this book I'm writing. Early days yet - but starting to collect, collate and assemble the key ideas that will inform the discussion. That'll unfold over time at http://deletingmusic.com

Thanks for the linkage and the opportunity to open up the conversation to a much larger group of people.