Copyright

Greenleaf has an interesting little piece/discussion about music in the digital age (as everyone likes to call it), which is fairly common. Dave Douglas is pretty clued in to what's going on in terms of digital distribution, and as a successful jazz artist has an audience probably comparable in size to many small to medium indie bands, albeit one that's much more devoted.

Although the article is a little rambling, or seems that way in my current state, the thing that I noticed about it was this comment:

"Is copyright protection really helping you as a composer/author all that much?"

It's an interesting thought. Copyright seems fair to most composers and authors, but I wonder whether its intuitive fairness masks its impracticality, at least in the 21st century. Royalties pay the bills for a lot of rock musicians, particularly when they get older and they stop appealing to such a mass audience. So it would be a big risk to give that up, despite the fact that most musicians will never see a cent from royalties in the first place.

I wonder, what would happen if I gave everything I wrote and recorded away for free, if everything was immediately public domain. I wouldn't be able to collect any royalties, but that would most likely only be a problem if I ever became famous enough to earn them in the first place. Barring the nasty possibility of someone else taking my work and copyrighting it for themselves - which I'm certain is an obstacle you could overcome - I wonder what the other issues might be.

I'd be interested to try it, but I don't know what the implications would be, even for a small work. Can I write a song, record it, host it here and on sites like myspace and just say "here it is world, do with it what you will. I require no reimbursement if you choose to cover this song, record it on your own album, put it on ads, play it on the radio, sample it, edit it, etc."?

To some extent, it seems like this is already implied in most freely downloadable tracks, but the author isn't really giving up total control. Presumably they would want to be reimbursed if someone decided to put it on an iPod ad, for instance. But who gets offered that anyway?