On 27/02/2011 01:59, John Hammaren wrote:
I guess this topic gets my ire up, since although I have the utmost respect for the work and creations of others, the current state of intellectual property law is a freaking mess IMHO.
As ever, the law is driven by those who can afford to drive it.
I’m not a lawyer, but it hardly takes one to realize this.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I do have a Masters in Law and part of that took in the subject of copyright, designs and patents.
Throw in the current software patent nonsense and we have a bigger mess.
Interesting side note: you cannot patent software. It's specifically excluded from patent. You can copyright it, but since
ideas cannot be copyrighted then it means algorithms cannot be copyrighted either. If you had the means you could make a functional close of (say) Microsoft Windows and Bill Gates could not touch you for it. Why? The source code would be different. The code is your work of 'art' and hence falls into the territory of copyright, not patent. Unless you have copied large parts of it
verbatim then you will be okay.
Pretty soon we will be able to copyright the timbre of our God given voices the way things are going.
You can. One firm (in 1987) tried to copyright a single
letter which was associated with their name. IBM tried the same thing with their abbreviated name and also failed. (Narrowly) This veers into the territory of trade marks, where a visual identifier is associated with name or product.
This says 'IBM' whereas the same thing in copperplate script does not. If a visual aid works then why not an audio one? If someone has a very distinctive voice (I'm thinking in terms of scale like
Diamanda Galas here) then why not? I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but I am saying that it's evidently possible.
My favourite ever sampling story has to be the one about David Bowie's track 'Lets Dance'. It was very popular back in the day and that was oput down to the drum timbres. The kick drum and snare from the opening sequence were sampled
to shreds and were featured on dozens of other contemporary tunes, thanks to the Fairlight CMI. Bowie;s production team made litigious noises, but it all came to nothing.
Why? Because both were sampled from 'Moby Dick'.
--
Mike Dickson, Edinburgh
Free Music Project: http://www.mikedickson.org.uk/
Or http://www.last.fm/music/Mike+Dickson
Or http://soundcloud.com/mikedickson
Or http://www.planetmellotron.com/revd4.htm#mikedickson
Or http://www.myspace.com/mellotronworks