The Copyright Conundrum

If the music industry has failed to control any aspect of its universe, it is its ability to foresee and effectively adjust to the digital era of music creation and distribution. With constantly changing mediums throughout my parents’ and my lifetime, each new recording device has come with its own set of intellectual property issues. These devices challenge copyright laws within America and the rest of the developed world which statically exist in a fluid, digital space. With increasingly digital music formats, the media literacy of artists, listeners and customers is also evolving with the availability and prevalence of new technology.

One particularly entertaining documentary which explores the limits and flaws of current copyright law with regard to digital music sampling is Rip!: A Remix Manifesto.

This documentary follows the artist Girl Talk, 28-year-old Gregg Gillis, a biomedical engineer that samples biological data by day, and by night, creates and performs "mash-ups" solely through his laptop - with one mash-up potentially containing as many as 21 different song samples. Rip! also explores the failings of the music industry's war on individuals' downloads and the overriding question of freedom of creativity/building on collective culture versus works in the public domain which became copyrighted and are now off limits. The entire documentary samples various media sources throughout, citing the "Fair Use" principle of copyright law which allows sampling for the sake of argument. Greg Gillis notes towards the end of Rip! that, even in his day job as a biomedical engineer, it is often difficult to promote new, innovative ideas on the biomedical front due to the complete ownership of various parts of the potential solution -- patents. While Rip! tends to ignore the benefits of intellectual property and copyrights, it does make a good case for the futility and adverse effects of preventing a knowledge and creativity exchange.

Most recently, Britain passed the Digital Economy Bill into law on April 8th, which has taken progress on the copyright front to promote knowledge exchange backwards in many senses. Where copyright law needs to be amended to take into account the innovation of technology and human creativity, Parliament has instead given additional oversight to the high courts by having the power to force internet service providers (ISPs) to act as agents of copyright infringement enforcement against their customers. The Ministers can identify copyright infringing users, which the ISP must notify, keep a detailed watch on, and punish (not to mention increased fines). In turn, the Ministers can also push blocking injunctions on ISPs of websites used for copyright infringement, if need be. However, clearly, the Digital Economy Bill is unafraid to find ISPs liable for their customers' copyright infringement which simply adds another level of regulation in an environment that is already very fluid and difficult to effectively control. Most likely, this will simply result in ISPs either being unable to keep up with the necessary amount of regulation and paying large fines to the state (as well as individual fines), or blocking injunctions and/or excessive regulation will promote an almost Draconian internet state, preventing the creativity and knowledge exchange that the internet promotes. Measures of this sort beg the questions of whether internet users' privacy rights are being infringed upon and whether these sorts of punishments (large fines, loss of internet access) will have broad, unintended effects, especially in the cases of families and schools. Like the ongoing misplacement of penalties in the U.S., Britain exemplifies another case of "punish, then evaluate," if sensible evaluation comes at all.