Phil Graham on 28 Jul 2000 14:45:49 -0000 |
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Re: <nettime> intellectual property, Hollywood style |
Yeah ... the severity of that clause is fairly typical now. Contracts have been moving in this direction for a long while, really quickly for about the last 10 years. That sort of thing was not considered legally binding from about the 70s until the late 80s after many people who got suckered through the sixties with similar contracts sued successfully. That's what annoys me about all this "free" shit. The fact is that distributors, producers, broadcasters, etc are now far more easily able to extort work from artists, far more cheaply than ever, and for *forever* - that's the ultimate in alienation: "the products of your imaginings are now mine forever, just sign here". A far worse aspect is how it's done. A lot of work in music is done on speculation (at least in Australia, I understand that US industry is actually more insistent on this aspect, although it's hard to imagine how). That is, a producer (or whoever) will say: "I have this movie/documentary/advertisement, why don't you try your hand at scoring it". Ten years ago, there was a 50-50 chance at getting fees for such an exercise. The odds are much lower now. By the time an artist or artists finishes a track, which, contrary to popular belief, takes a hell of a long time (roughly 5 days per 30 seconds for decent quality music), they are already heavily invested in many ways. Then comes the contract saying "no further claim until the end of time ... sign here". There's not much choice at that point. I remain fairly unimpressed with all the whingeing by people about Napster being closed down, but perhaps the net does hold out some hope for artists (though I doubt that that will prove to be the case in the long run). The question should probably be, not whether intellectual property rights should exist or not, but who should be able to claim them. For me it comes back to the insane right at law that corporations have to be treated as persons, like you or I, whilst managing to evade any personal responsibility whatsoever. Whereas I might die and my copyright become public domain after 50 years or whatever it is now, corporations do not, it seems, die all that easily or quickly. It is all too clear that face no responsibility for past actions (cf IG Farben, Deutsche Bank, etc etc etc). But that's corporatism for you, I suppose. I will never forget the look on an EMI exec's face after he had just bought the rights to "happy birthday" from an old scottish lady. There is not a single space - social, electronic, abstract, or geographical - that we have ever had which has not been enclosed and (eventually) filled with the organs of capital. I do not see the internet being any different in the long term. regards, Phil At 05:43 PM 27/07/00 -0700, Lev Manovich wrote: >Do you think that after the Net, memes, open source and other similar >phenomenons/concepts/movements, the issues of copyright and intelectual >property belong to the twentieth century? > >Not quite yet. <...> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net