Originally published at: Ed Sheeran assails copyright claim "culture" after winning Shape Of You case | Boing Boing
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I’m not blown away by his output; however, Ed Sheeran does seem to be a decent person and have a well checked ego (I’ll even overlook the song in Game of Thrones; in light of later events in that series).
Having said that, I just got him completely mixed up in my head with James Blunt.
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Understandable. Similar warblings.
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“There’s only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music.”
Hey, Ed. You’re pretty popular. I bet if you used more of the many chords that aren’t regularly used in pop music that you would still be having a pretty good run.
However, I agree with him on the absurdity of many musical copyright claims and the abuse of the legal system.
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Boing Boing is spot on in this case. Ever since the Turtles vs De La Soul case, this kind of abuse became inevitable. The industry’s greed turned them into an IP Ouroboros.
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I do wonder how much of this goes back to the rise of hip-hop (which made copious use of sampling) and punk (which did end-runs around the mainstream industry with tape sharing and alternative institutional structures)…?
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The draconian part of the music industry regarding copyright is on the sampling/actual sound recording side, not the songwriting rights side, which has been pretty consistent on what is and is not copyright-able, until the jury in the Blurred Lines case threw all that away.
If you can get millions from the “feel” of a song being copied, then anything is fair game for a lawsuit. Might as well try, and probably get a settlement because you have no idea what a jury is going to do.
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See also “look and feel,” with computer user interfaces. The copyright maximalists have been striving to kill the idea/expression divide almost as hard as they have tried to eliminate the “first sale,” doctrine. Basically, they have been trying to make copyright as powerful as patents, but keep them as simple to get and nigh permanent as copyrights.
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Ed Sheeran seems like the kind of person who’d be happy doing private gigs for law firms, so maybe. But when I hear Neil Young or Deborah Harry spouting corporate IP talking points, I have to wonder if they do understand which side they’re on, or if they’re suffering from some kind of music-industry Stockholm syndrome.
We hear a lot of musicians complaining about vexatious lawsuits, or home taping, or Spotify, but I bet if you made a pie chart of who has historically cheated artists out of the most money, it would be a circle labelled “the music industry”.
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I wish Weird Al would write a song “Oh Hi!” on the subject.
Hey that Sesame Street song is better than the original! James Blunt has maybe been off the mark in some other respects and ambitions, I’m not really paying that much attention to him, but frankly I still really like his music in a weird Rick Astley kind of way.
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“Oh,hi, oh”
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The recording industry and other creative industries invented this dichotomy of “creators” and “consumers”. Creators create and copyright exists to grant them complete and utter control over their works, and consumers consume and their role is to spend and anything that disrupts that arrangement is immoral and illegal.
Of course that dichotomy is a bunch of crap. Artists are also consumers and their work is influenced by what they consumed - or in the case of covers, mashups, sampling, remixes etc. their work may explicitly contain the work of others. But that’s a poor fit with the copyright regime the industry has long advocated for, which does not leave any space for consumers to create.
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Except really, the whole system was created to benefit the corporations that sell albums, not the creators.
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Which is why the record companies have pressed HARD to get all songs recognized as “works made for hire,” which turns the corporations rather than the writers and performers into the “authors” under copyright law.
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The corporations had control from the start, as the song writers were hired to write FOR the recording companies. And with regards to folk music (blues, folk, country, etc), the performer would record their music, get paid for the performance, and that was it - all proceeds went to the recording company…
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This report covered how the lawsuits have changed - and how they are perceived as right or wrong:
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The status of musical compositions and performances as “works made for hire,” is not yet settled law, no matter how much the entertainment lawyers want it to be. Unlike actual employees working within the scope of their employment, most music is “specially commissioned,” and that can only be made a WMfH if it is one of the specified types of work listed in the law:
1 as a contribution to a collective work,
2 as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work,
3 as a translation,
4 as a supplementary work,
5 as a compilation,
6 as an instructional text,
7 as a test,
8 as answer material for a test, or
9 as an atlas,
Certainly the contract can specify that the copyright is assigned exclusively to the record company, but difference effects the term of the copyright and the ability of the creator to terminate the assignment after 35 years.
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Okay. Since you have no interest in what I actually said, vs. what you believe I said, I’ll bow out.
Have a nice day.
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George Clinton would like a word with you both.
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