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.