As noted here before, there was a consultation by the EU Commission on the topic of copyright collecting societies, which resulted in 97 public answers.
Ross Anderson of the Foundation for Information Policy Research has written a paper in answer to the Commission's call.
His focus is on folk music, since he is playing the "Great Highland Bagpipe" and the "Scottish smallpipes", having paid his way through university by working as a street musician.
He describes the tradition of bag pipe folk music as driven not by profit, but by love of music and other community-based motives. The "Piobaireachd" publisher for pipe music is a non-profit organization.
He then goes on to describe a number of chilling effects excessive copyright enforcement has on this tradition.
The problem with collecting societies seems to be that they treat every work in the same way. You either participate in the system and have your copyright radically enforced even against street musicians and high school bands, or you don't and receive no revenue for commercial use on whatever scale. That uniform system is unable to deal with individual creators' "some rights reserved" preferences as expressed in Creative Commons licenses.
Anderson also suggests creating a new Creative Commons license type that would allow for small scale commercial use, as in the case of street musicians.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at July 13, 2004 11:08 AM | TrackBack