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Is music property? Under what circumstances can music be stolen?
Such questions lie at the heart of Joanna Demers's timely look at
how overzealous intellectual property (IP) litigation both stifles
and stimulates musical creativity. A musicologist, industry
consultant, and musician, Demers dissects works that have brought
IP issues into the mainstream culture, such as DJ Danger Mouse's
""Grey Album"" and Mike Batt's homage-gone-wrong to John Cage's
silent composition ""4'33."" Demers also discusses such artists as
Ice Cube, DJ Spooky, and John Oswald, whose creativity is sparked
by their defiant circumvention of licensing and copyright issues.
Demers is concerned about the fate of transformative appropriation
- the creative process by which artists and composers borrow from,
and respond to, other musical works. In the United States, only two
elements of music are eligible for copyright protection: the master
recording and the composition (lyrics and melody) itself. Harmony,
rhythm, timbre, and other qualities that make a piece distinctive
are virtually unregulated. This two-tiered system had long
facilitated transformative appropriation while prohibiting blatant
forms of theft. The advent of digital file sharing and the specter
of global piracy changed everything, says Demers. Now, record
labels and publishers are broadening the scope of IP
""infringement"" to include allusive borrowing in all forms:
sampling, celebrity impersonation - even Girl Scout campfire
sing-alongs. Paying exorbitant licensing fees or risking even
harsher penalties for unauthorized borrowing has become the only
options for some musicians. Others, however, creatively sidestep
not only the law but also the very infrastructure of the music
industry. Moving easily between techno and classical, between
corporate boardrooms and basement recording studios, Demers gives
us new ways to look at the tension between IP law, musical meaning
and appropriation, and artistic freedom.
Dynamic Fair Dealing argues that only a dynamic, flexible, and
equitable approach to cultural ownership can accommodate the
astonishing range of ways that we create, circulate, manage,
attribute, and make use of digital cultural objects. The Canadian
legal tradition strives to balance the rights of copyright holders
with public needs to engage with copyright protected material, but
there is now a substantial gap between what people actually do with
cultural forms and how the law understands those practices. Digital
technologies continue to shape new forms of cultural production,
circulation, and distribution that challenge both the practicality
and the desirability of Canada's fair dealing provisions. Dynamic
Fair Dealing presents a range of insightful and provocative essays
that rethink our relationship to Canadian fair dealing policy. With
contributions from scholars, activists, and artists from across
disciplines, professions, and creative practices, this book
explores the extent to which copyright has expanded into every
facet of society and reveals how our capacities to actually deal
fairly with cultural goods has suffered in the process. In order to
drive conversations about the cultural worlds Canadians imagine,
and the policy reforms we need to realize these visions, we need
Dynamic Fair Dealing.
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