11. Do you agree with the claims that piracy is hurting the music industry? I believe I touched on this item before in another question. But yes, I would say piracy is having an effect on the music industry. How big of an impact? I don’t know. And I’m willing to doubt the information and research the music industry is pushing forward on the matter. How can they know how many copies of a given album would sell if the Internet didn’t exist?
There are many reasons (and possibilities) why the music industry is hurting. One could be lack of good music, of course, everyone has a different idea of what good music is. And that’s one thing that could also be hurting the music industry: The glut of musicians. Back in “the day” there were fewer genres of music and the channels to get to that music was narrow as well. Everyone was listening to the same bands, so everyone bought the same records. You had Rock, Country (far different than the Country of today), Folk (which could be considered an offshoot of Country), R&B, Classical, and maybe a few others I can’t think of off the top of my head.
Today, just by looking at what I have on my shelf (I am an avid music lover and have over 200 CDs and I’ve not counted how much I have on vinyl) we have: Classic Rock, Contemporary Rock, Metal, Emo, Alternative, Trance, Video Game music, Eurobeat, J-Pop, Para Para, Canadian Folk, Finnish Prog Rock, American Prog Rock, Canadian Prog Rock, The Beatles (so good they have their own genre), Punk, Hardcore, Vocaloid, Surfer, Rap, R&B, Gangsta Rap, Screamo, Film soundtracks, Broadway play soundtracks, etc, and even some of those genres have subgenres that splinter infinitely.
So you see, a kind of splintering has occurred in music, we have more of it and getting more every day (or every Tuesday if you’re going by store release dates). I would love to see a study that seeks to see if this “hurting of the music industry” could be explained by this splintering. Bands aren’t selling millions of copies of albums anymore, but a few hundred thousand, if they’re lucky.
12. How do you view the current court cases of Joel Tenenbaum vs the RIAA and Jammie Thomas vs the RIAA? Thomas was the first person to be brought to trial for downloading music. She was brought to trial over 24 songs. The case kept being repealed and the amount of money figured for the settlement kept changing. At one trial she was told to pay $222,000. At another trial, $54,000. At a third trial, she was told to pay $1.5 million. At the $1.5 million dollar level, that amounts to $62,500 per song.
Per song?
Twenty-four songs, right? Okay, that’s around 2 CDs worth of music, give or take. What if she shoplifted this music instead? What if she shoplifted however many CDs she'd need to steal to come up with the 24 songs she was brought to trial over?
In Florida, if caught for shoplifting an item that costs less than $300 the maximum fine would be a fine of up to $500 and/or two months in jail for the first offense. Even the penalty for a 3rd offense isn't as severe as having to pay over a million dollars. In that case, the crime is upgraded to a felony, a fine of up to $5000 and/or five years in prison.[5]
That’s outrageous.
Not outrageous in the sense that Florida's fine and prison sentence is insane, it isn't. It's that the law in this country right now seems to think that if a computer was used in any way to commit a crime it makes it far more serious than if a computer was not used.
These were some great questions. Given that I’ve put these on the website (and this book) where anyone can read them now, I’d love to see some new questions from students.
Clearly there are far more ideas for this kind of thing than I have put forth. This is just a start.
This Gene Is Your Gene
Kembrew McLeod
“This gene is your gene,” sang Francis Collins, playfully reworking an old Woody Guthrie song, with electric guitar in hand. “This gene is my gene,” he continued, backed up by the lumbering roar of a middle-aged rock band. This was no ordinary club gig; he was singing at a post–press conference party for scientists. Collins was the man who headed up the Human Genome Project (HGP), funded by the National Institutes of Health, and he was trying to make an ethical and political point. Since the mid-1990s, Collins' HGP had raced against a private effort to map the human genome in order to make our genetic information freely accessible, not privately owned and patented by a handful of corporations. Any scientist could examine HGP’s genome map for free — unlike the Celera Genomics’ privately owned draft, which was published with strings attached.[1] Over the din, Collins chided his competitors in song by genetically modifying Guthrie’s lyrics:
Dr. Francis Collins reworked “This Land Is Your Land” to argue that genetic information should be freely available to the scientific community. However, his use of that Woody Guthrie song was sadly ironic, on multiple levels. “This Land Is Your Land” is a song written by an unabashed socialist as a paean to communal property: “This land was made for you and me.” Another key lyric goes, “A sign was painted ‘Private Property’ but on the backside it didn’t say nothin’.” The folk-song tradition from which Guthrie emerged valued the open borrowing of lyrics and melodies; culture was meant to be freely created and re-created in a democratic, participatory way.
If this was so, then why was Collins' use of “This Land Is Your Land” painfully ironic? Even though it was written over sixty years ago, the song is, to quote Woody Guthrie himself, still “private property.” Guthrie based the melody of “This Land Is Your Land” on the Carter Family’s 1928 recording “Little Darlin’ Pal of Mine,” which in turn was derived from a nineteenth-century gospel song, “Oh, My Loving Brother.”[2] This means that, in the twenty-first century, the publishing company that owns the late Guthrie’s music can earn money from a song about communal property, which was itself based on a tune that is over a century old. Far more disturbing, Guthrie’s publishing company prevents musicians from releasing altered, updated lyrical versions of that song. We won’t be hearing Collins' mutated “This Gene Is Your Gene” anytime soon.
What’s the connection, you might be wondering, between folk music and genetic research? Although obviously very different endeavors, the practitioners of both used to value the open sharing of information (i.e., melodies or scientific data). In these communities, “texts” were often considered common property, but today this concept has been fundamentally altered by the process of privatization , that is, the belief that shared public resources — sometimes referred to by economists and social scientists as the commons — can be better managed by private industries. And in recent years, there’s been a significant erosion of both the cultural commons and the genetic commons, resulting in a shrinking of the public domain. The fact that folk melodies and lyrics are now privately owned rather than shared resources is a depressing example of how our cultural commons is being fenced off. As for the genetic commons, the patenting of human and plant genes is but the furthest logical extension of privatization — taken at times to illogical lengths.
2
The offenders: Hank Thompson’s “Wild Side of Life”; the Carter Family’s “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes”; Roy Acuff ’s “Great Speckled Bird”; Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”; Reno and Smiley’s “I’m Using My Bible as a Roadmap”; and Townes Van Zant’s “Heavenly Houseboat Blues.”(I’ve since discovered many more.)