We hope this tutorial helped you gain a better understanding of copyright law. While it is important to understand the law, it is also important to understand how, as a matter of policy, copyright law affects you.
Copyright law gives you valuable rights. It creates a legal framework which ensures that you get compensated when your music is used. And you should do everything in your power to secure and safeguard these rights. However, we believe that the current copyright regime has lost sight of the balance between the rights of the musicians and the rights of the public. Copyright law has been and continues to be amended to accommodate the interest of large corporate copyright owners like the major record labels. These developments are not good for the public and neither are they good for all but perhaps the wealthiest musicians.
Technological Locks Give Copyright Owners Greater Rights Than Copyright Law Permits and Anger and Frustrate Music Fans
Technological locks assume that all consumers are pirates and will steal music if they could. As a result they create restrictions on access greater than what copyright law permits. For example some CDs can only be played on CD players and not on computers. Copyright law does not tell audiences how many times they can listen to a song. But technological locks make this restriction possible. To the extent that artists often need to study certain works over and over again, excerpt, modify and transform pieces of work, and play them on different devices, technological locks make this not only harder, but also in some cases illegal.
In addition, as the Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal illustrates, technological locks can actually harm consumers. Sony BMG included copy protection technology on several albums sold on CDs. The software used in this technology interfered with the normal working of certain computers and allowed viruses to break in. Sony had to eventually recall its CDs.
Peer To Peer Technology is Not Evil
It is true that the Napster and Grokster networks were used to share music and often the artists and the record labels were not compensated. But it is also true that some copyright holders use P2P networks to sell their works. Peer-to-peer technologies might enable smaller users to reach their audiences in ways they could not otherwise reach them. They do not have to overcome hurdles created by gatekeepers such as record labels or major broadcasters. Besides, studies suggest that P2P users actually buy more music than the average consumer. For many of these users, P2P allows them to decide what music they want to buy. So, destroying the technology is not the answer to problems faced by copyright owners. A more sensible approach would be to work to find a way to compensate artists rather than to destroy the technology.
Digital Delivery and Transmission of Music Gives All Musicians a Greater Audience
Digital technology enables musicians whose music is not considered “main stream”, or those who do not want to sign on to major record labels to sell their music online . Internet radio, unlike traditional mass radio stations, is known to transmit all kinds of music. But current laws and practices discriminate between digital music and analog music. Digital deliveries and transmissions are charged higher royalty rates. Bills like the SIRA and Perform Act would require technological protection measures to limit what consumers can do with music transmitted digitally. Services that do not want to install these measures will have to pay very high royalties for the music they transmit or may be completely denied permission to transmit. This only makes these services expensive and unpopular. Charging more for digital music cannot be good for artists because this is the medium that gives you maximum exposure.