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  • From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed AT reed.com>
  • To: Joe Plotkin <heyjoe AT bway.net>
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  • Subject: [Community_studios] Re: Checking out rumors
  • Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 15:05:07 -0400

From the viewpoint of somebody who merely enjoys music, among family and friends who enjoy making it, this conversation sounds like it comes from another planet.

It's always seemed odd to me that the word "music" is confused with the word "recording", as if the recording was the music.

By presuming that the recording is the music, you buy into the idea that the recording industry is coterminous with the music industry.

Music is the recording no more or less than music is the "sheet music".

We can all obsess all we want about copyright law and its impact on music, but by presuming that music = recording (or worse, the "rights" to the recording, performance, mechanical, ...) you bend music into a shape that it doesn't fit, playing into the hands of those lawyers who play the game of expanding the scope of copyright to cover anything they can bring into the courts under any pretense they can construct by misusing language and logic.

If you want to remake the laws to fit music and allow music to be free, you must first stop presuming and allowing others to presume that music and recordings are equivalent and interchangeable, that recording is the center, the base and the ancestor of all musical activity.

Can you imagine a Jazz trumpeter seeking to clear the rights for every phrase they quote? Jazz is music. Copyright would kill it.




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