[LAU] ASCAP Assails Free-Culture, Digital-Rights Groups

[Hartmut Noack]

Am 06.07.2010 08:12, schrieb Louigi Verona:
> I have posted Paul Davis criticism of my article on my site and commented it
> a bit, though not very thoroughly yet.
>
> http://www.louigiverona.ru/?page=projects&s=writings&t=authorship&a=authorship_property_criticism
>
> In my opinion, this is a very useful turn of reasoning which allowed me to
> understand more in the relation of ideas, physical object and
> scarcity.

In your comments you discuss the question of scarcity of ideas and you 
compare ideas and physical objects. But I do not think, that we talk 
about ideas here.
We talk about manifestations of ideas in the form of compositions and 
recordings.

If someone says:

"Use all 12 tones available. Do not repeat a tone before you have 
written a basic line that contains all 12 tones. Do not write seqences."

Well: This is indeed, an idea and nothing more or less. And everybody 
can use it to write new music without even attribute it to Schönberg in 
any way.

But if someone samples a few minutes of "Moses and Aaron" to make a 
simple beat sound more interesting, the situation is different. It may 
have took Schönberg many years of thinking an studying to come up with 
Dodekaphonics but it took him only 10 minutes to write down the rules 
abovementioned. He should be attributed and praised for writing down the 
rules but he has never claimed a right to make money with these rules or 
even control their usage.
But "Moses and Aaron" took Schönberg months if not years to write and of 
course he claimed a right to be compensated for this work. Because he 
needed to: pay rent, buy food, having luxouriuos suits taylored, 
travelling the world etc etc etc.

One may philosophize all day and all of the night about how works of art 
are derived from traditions that belong to everyone or if maybe Shiva, 
Hekate or God himself or mother earth or whatever instance beyond our 
realm of economics and physical needs are to be attributed for 
inspiration. But nobody can ignore physical needs, at least not for long ;-)
It is a social issue: creators need food and shelter, they need a social 
status that is adeaquate to their work. The given system of ASCAP, 
entertainment industry, etc does this job. But it does it very bad. With 
a unacceptable level of control about the artists and their work and the 
usage of this work by the public. And with an unacceptable overhead that 
leaves only but a few percent of the money users pay for getting the 
works, for the artists.

So there should be a better system to make sure the work of artists will 
be compensated if you want fulltime artists.

And such work is scarce, because you need to have people working for 
months to get an album filled with ideas manifested in actual 
recordings. The ideas themselfs may be in the artists minds anyway, you 
do not need to rent a rehearsal room or to learn how to play an 
instrument or how to program a sequencer to have an idea. But you do 
have to do all these things to make an idea become something, you can 
actually share with others.

best regards
HZN

> Hope you guys also find it useful. Feel free to tackle the subject
> around.
>
> Louigi Verona.
>
>
>
>
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