I can hear you singing in my sleep
One of the many conversations I had with vileone on my recent trip (and similar to several I've had with sir_alf ) was regarding copyright, fair use, and fairness when it comes to mix tapes and CDs.
I'll start with a definition of copyright/intellectual property for the scope of these thoughts - the setting of artificial limitations on the use of non-corporeal concepts, created in order to provide a financial incentive to create such concepts. As someone who has worked for those creators in the music industry and is paid to create such concepts in the software industry (to the extend I create works for pay, not that anything I write gets released as a product), I am strongly in favour of such incentives (within reason). At the same time, I'm also strongly in favour of fair use, which leads me to a matter I've turned around in my head for some time.
The mix tape is a classic part of the lifestyle of just about everyone who might read this. There's a study that I've heard about but never managed to actual find that supposedly said that the time people are most likely to make mix tapes are at the start and end of a romantic relationship, and I can certainly believe it. But I've also made and been given them within the context of friends sharing interesting music.
It's technically illegal, but mix tapes (pre-affordable CDR) didn't give me that much of a problem intellectually. The sound quality of tapes is lacking and they are inconvenient - to find a specific song if you wanted to hear it out of context you would have to hunt and peck for it. In the best case, it created a demand for a legal copy of the music in order to get something that was high quality and/or easy to use.
There's also the quirk that the physical activity and time to create a mixtape was considerably higher than what it takes to make a burned mix CD - the creator had to make a somewhat significant investment to creating the object, which to me does affect the overall "fairness" of it.
Mix CDs on the other hand, don't have either of the major mixtape problems. Not only is the quality high and the individual songs easy to access, it's also trivial to move individual tracks into your personal library. I'm sure that mix CDs do still cause people to go out and buy copies of the full CD, but with the advent of legal per-track purchasing, if someone decides they only happen to like that one song, they have much less inclination of purchasing even that $1 product.
At the same time, as vileone reminded me, a mix tape is itself a form of art. I recall an interview years ago with Sasha of KMFDM saying that the ordering of songs on their CDs was as important to him as the songs themselves. There is a strong question in my mind of how much art there is per say - compared to a collage that combines multiple things into a single one, a basic mixtape simply orders a number of sub-works.
It is now possible to make legal mix CDs and I have done so. However, at $0.89 per track and copy, it gets expensive to do so, particularly if it is a gift between friends who may listen to it a time or two. (Compared to a lover who might listen to it again and again, which to me would be an easy investment to make.)
And so I ponder ways I can spread the news about bands I love without compromising their ability to make a living. The first thought I had years ago was that I could aritifically lower the quality of the music. And then I remembered that most people are far less picky when it comes to audio quality than I am. So I moved onto the idea of making one single track with all of the music embedded into it. It retains the art form of carefully and cleverly arranging the music, while providing enough incentive to get a separate copy. (Yes, people _could_ extract the track through editing, but you can never close _every_ hole.)
I still haven't entirely sold myself on the idea but I think I'm close.
I'll start with a definition of copyright/intellectual property for the scope of these thoughts - the setting of artificial limitations on the use of non-corporeal concepts, created in order to provide a financial incentive to create such concepts. As someone who has worked for those creators in the music industry and is paid to create such concepts in the software industry (to the extend I create works for pay, not that anything I write gets released as a product), I am strongly in favour of such incentives (within reason). At the same time, I'm also strongly in favour of fair use, which leads me to a matter I've turned around in my head for some time.
The mix tape is a classic part of the lifestyle of just about everyone who might read this. There's a study that I've heard about but never managed to actual find that supposedly said that the time people are most likely to make mix tapes are at the start and end of a romantic relationship, and I can certainly believe it. But I've also made and been given them within the context of friends sharing interesting music.
It's technically illegal, but mix tapes (pre-affordable CDR) didn't give me that much of a problem intellectually. The sound quality of tapes is lacking and they are inconvenient - to find a specific song if you wanted to hear it out of context you would have to hunt and peck for it. In the best case, it created a demand for a legal copy of the music in order to get something that was high quality and/or easy to use.
There's also the quirk that the physical activity and time to create a mixtape was considerably higher than what it takes to make a burned mix CD - the creator had to make a somewhat significant investment to creating the object, which to me does affect the overall "fairness" of it.
Mix CDs on the other hand, don't have either of the major mixtape problems. Not only is the quality high and the individual songs easy to access, it's also trivial to move individual tracks into your personal library. I'm sure that mix CDs do still cause people to go out and buy copies of the full CD, but with the advent of legal per-track purchasing, if someone decides they only happen to like that one song, they have much less inclination of purchasing even that $1 product.
At the same time, as vileone reminded me, a mix tape is itself a form of art. I recall an interview years ago with Sasha of KMFDM saying that the ordering of songs on their CDs was as important to him as the songs themselves. There is a strong question in my mind of how much art there is per say - compared to a collage that combines multiple things into a single one, a basic mixtape simply orders a number of sub-works.
It is now possible to make legal mix CDs and I have done so. However, at $0.89 per track and copy, it gets expensive to do so, particularly if it is a gift between friends who may listen to it a time or two. (Compared to a lover who might listen to it again and again, which to me would be an easy investment to make.)
And so I ponder ways I can spread the news about bands I love without compromising their ability to make a living. The first thought I had years ago was that I could aritifically lower the quality of the music. And then I remembered that most people are far less picky when it comes to audio quality than I am. So I moved onto the idea of making one single track with all of the music embedded into it. It retains the art form of carefully and cleverly arranging the music, while providing enough incentive to get a separate copy. (Yes, people _could_ extract the track through editing, but you can never close _every_ hole.)
I still haven't entirely sold myself on the idea but I think I'm close.