I was reminded of how creative licensing affects creativity when watching the documentary, “The Remix Manifesto”. In my own life I am a producer and musician who very often runs into this problem of intellectual property. The idea that someone can own ideas or sound clips is a sad one that hits very close to home. The scene near the beginning of the film showing the producer juggling around audio clips from popular songs is a familiar position I find myself in often. The notion that if you use anything, even a sample of a bass drum kick and use it in a piece of your music and have to pay others for stealing is an absurd idea. This has gone to such an extreme that it is not even just samples and recordings that have been copyrighted. If there is even a similarity between songs there has been precedent for lawsuits, see (Asward 2019). This has the domino effect of someone claiming to own something as simple musical ideas such a chord progression heard since the time of Bach. A painter may as well claim to own the colour red, intact some have tried. But the mere fact that people and corporations are trying to profit off creativity and hold back anyone else from building upon what has come before has had the effect of making artists and creatives fearful to create. The most common thing that musicians such as Girl Talk encounter in more modern years is being flagged by algorithms and taken down immediately. If the artist themselves is not big enough there is no point of letting the new piece of music exist on the web. If the artist is big enough then the original creator, who’s work the new music was based can claim full royalties so they desire. The only way to legally go forward with creating or even covering a song is to get permission from the person or company that owns the recorded audio material or in the case of a cover, permission of the song writer. Just for fun recently, I took the liberty of remixing Taylor Swifts “Fifteen” off of one of her earlier albums (me being the giant fan I am). The audio stems that I used are owned by Big Machine Records and not Taylor Swift herself. Even though it was purely an homage and I was not charging for or claiming to own anything I remixed the song was immediately flagged within minutes and taken down off of instagram for violating copyright. This protectiveness of material has forced musicians and creators underground creating “bootleg remixes” much the same as Napster in the documentary. If creativity wants to be encouraged and cultivated a culture of quoting and saying where things are from must emerge. Laws will reach a breaking point and will soon shatter showing the need for reform in the copyright world. One music copyright lawyer recently created a computer algorithm to write all possible melodies in a single scale and proceeded to patent them all just to protect musicians from such a world where creativity is no longer valued. I hope that one day people are free to make art without fear of lawsuits and infringement.

Asward, Jem, 2019. Katy Perry’s ‘Dark Horse’ Case and Its Chilling Effect on Songwriting

https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/katy-perry-dark-horse-lawsuit-joyful-noise-chilling-effect-on-songwriting-1203292606/