From: Barry Schrader (ls@barryschrader.com)
Date: Thu Sep 30 2010 - 15:42:00 EDT
Under U.S. law, if you write a commercially published book or article, you are required to get permission to quote material from pre-existing sources. <http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html>. The concept of "fair use" does exist <http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html>, but none of the examples given deal with quotations from musical or sound file sources. Even with this understanding, many academic institutions advise getting permission as is demonstrated by this form from UCSB <http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JOreYsGyZCwJ:www.sc.edu/beaufort/library/pages/forms/student.doc+copyright+permission+form&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
If you are a professor in the U.S., you are (or should be) keenly aware of copyright law and careful not to infringe on the rights of others. When we prepare "readers" for publication at such places like University Readers <http://www.universityreaders.com/>, we depend on these companies to obtain all necessary permissions for the materials you've assembled. The same is true for any online audio files you may create for your classes, usually through library services.
For most composers and musicians, making money in today's world is very difficult <http://www.creativedeconstruction.com/2010/06/what-does-it-take-to-earn-a-living-with-digital-music/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+CreativeDeconstruction+%28creative+deconstruction%29ll necessar±
Young people seem to feel that because a lot of material can be stolen, they have a right to it <http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/07/jason-robert-brown-debates-rationalization-of-theft/>, <http://nymusigal.blogspot.com/2009/05/this-issue-of-piracy.html>.
Many think that all of this is leading to less commercial (creative) production <http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/content_display/industry/e3ic193b6eacf48409b52f1ab027d2d2b6c>.
In my experience, people, like other animals, are often quite willing to give away what isn't theirs while taking whatever they can from others. (I doubt that Bernie Madoff had too many sleepless nights about what he was doing to others, but would certainly have been unhappy had someone tried to steal money from him.) Humans created civilization and law as a way to deal with this. While things haven't been perfect, and there are always inequities, it's worked relatively well except for periods where things collapse (see Jarred Diamond's books.)
What I find infuriating in people, at any age, is the solipsistic attitude that "What I believe is true because I believe it (or want it to be so)." This condition may be natural with very young children, but seems certainly inappropriate in adults, and especially inappropriate, but, unfortunately, not rare, in academicians and other honored professionals. There's a concept in psychology called "cognitive dissonance" which indicates the problems one has in dealing with data that doesn't fit one's belief systems. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance> Eventually, most people handle this through some sort of rationalization process that allows one to ignore what might be reality, such as copyright law.
On Sep 30, 2010, at 8:57 AM, Markus Lake wrote:
> I've been thinking about this myself, can't help but to be a little bit reductionist and put forth this question:
>
> What is the difference (besides forms of media) between quoting a book in an essay and giving proper citation, and 'sampling' someone's work in an artistic work, and giving proper attribution?
>
> Nobody expects anyone to call up Penguin Books everytime you want to quote something. In fact I believe Penguin Books would be quite annoyed by this.
>
> I think that this is because almost everyone CAN write, and is EXPECTED to write, and it's this ability and access that makes 'sampling' in your writing something that is so easy. I think we're on our way down this road w/ other forms of media as well... as ability and access to "new" forms of media increases it will become (i hope), simply less and less practical to 'police' this. I believe (re: hope) that a similiar system of proper and accurate attribution will replace the need for lawsuits.
>
> If you wrote a book and didn't want anyone to quote from it [for whatever reason], don't publish it. Ever.
> If you don't want someone to sample your work, don't release it. Ever.
>
> I know their are problems [Will composers go out of business because you can just get stuff for free? / How much of a work can be sampled? What falls into 'fair use' w/r/t musical ideas... can you take under 100ms w/o attribution?etc..) between the parallel I've drawn, but I'm totally open to hear and discuss.
>
> I'm not perfect.
>
>
> Markus L. Lake
>
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 11:09 AM, Kevin Austin <kevin.austin@videotron.ca> wrote:
> Thank you Peter. I probably should have said, "It's the same, only different."
>
>
> Kevin
>
>
>
> On 2010, Sep 30, at 9:20 AM, Peter Castine wrote:
>
> > On 30-Sep-2010, at 14:17, Kevin Austin wrote:
> >
> >> As I understand it, fair use is not a concept in Canadian copyright law.
> >
> > You misunderstand. The concept exists in Canadian copyright law, it's just called something else.
> >
>
>
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