The Death Of Copyright?
Jackie Hayden looks back on a year of exciting new music from emerging Irish artists, amid conflicting views about a number of key issues that will continue to provoke debate in 2012.
Jackie Hayden, 11 Jan 2012
Over the past few years I’ve taken part in numerous radio discussions on the issues of copyright and legal and illegal downloading. My position has been to unequivocally defend the rights of songwriters and musicians not to have their work stolen. On one or two heated occasions I’ve even suggested those who support illegal downloading should give out their addresses so that musicians can nip around to their gaffs and steal their stuff. Like, fair’s fair, innit?
Several of these appearances provoked a flurry of emails, a mixed bag of encouragement, criticism and downright hostile, if hilariously illiterate, abuse. The general tenor of those responses from emerging musicians, as well as face-to-face meetings with them, suggested that I was out of line with their thinking, which could be surmised as either “music should be free and not a commercial entity” or “even if it’s illegal or immoral, you can’t hold back the future”. That some of these comments came, and still come, from musicians claiming to be IMRO members, makes it all the more provocative.
More recently I was on Radio Nova in Dublin talking to Carol Dooley and Marty Miller about Pete Townshend’s inaugural John Peel lecture during which he referred to iTunes as “digital vampires” and suggested Apple could help new artists by giving a bunch of them some new equipment as part of their contribution to their development.
That too provoked the usual response, but this time almost overwhelmingly negative. The general tone of the comments I received was basically that me and my “mate” Pete needed to face the reality and accept the fact that copyright was either dead or dying. One correspondent, calling himself Terry, cited David Bowie who had made comments on the matter that coincided with his own.
Indeed, Bowie was interviewed by an American magazine and said: “The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing... Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. On the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not – it’s what’s going to happen.”
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