1. Copyright is not optimized to foster musical creativity. Discuss this statement with reference to examples.
The mechanism of copyright control can pose significant threat to innovation and creativity in the music industry, because the copyright can fail to sufficiently recognize the relevance of uses of the musical piece as a creative force. Innovation in music, for example, has been performed in many scenarios by creators taking the creative risks by using existing materials in such a manner that does not fit effectively within the assumptions of the dominant copyright about creativity. Creators that operate within such paradigms of creativity can expose themselves to legal risks due to the copyright protected material. Copyright discourse might benefit from increased attention given to potential dangers, which copyright frameworks can pose for innovation and creativity. In addition, greater consideration needs be provided to the level to which risks undertaken in the creative process are evident in activities such as improvisation (Arewa, 2013, p. 1830-1842).
The impact copyright has on the production and utilization of musical works and creativity, in more general terms, is multifaceted. Creativity is a metric of potential by which artistic innovation can be measured. However, the conceptions of creativity under the law remain vague and in several instances highly incompatible with the actual creative practices compared in the varied contexts. Also, for many what to include as creativity can be subjective and depends upon a significant level on the individual judging the scenario. This happens because certain types of creativity are often disfavored by the legal frameworks that incorporates the ideas about creativity based on the conceptions of the autonomous romantic author, which do not consider the inherently collaborative creative nature in the wide range of contexts. Thus, leaving a major section of creativity in music out of the protection of the copyright (Arewa, 2013, p. 1830-1842).
2. Copyright is increasingly more concerned with preserving business models than prevention of piracy. Discuss this statement with reference to examples.
Copyrights are designed to protect the business ideas and models for others to replicate the model and develop their copy. In the music industry, copyrights help to protect artist content from others to make economic benefit from. Copyrights works as a shield for musicians and protects their right of making money from their art. Without copyrights, artists would not be able to protect their music and anyone can copy their music and sell it. But, copyrights are not the best to prevent privacy as piracy is still active all over the world and contraband music is on sale in several markets all over the world. Therefore, the copyrights are simply designed for the preservation of business models such as collaborations between music groups and music efforts of artists, but in terms of maintaining the privacy of content they are not the most effective mode available to musicians.
Therefore, any form of privacy concept in the copyright, would be somewhat of a misnomer. At a technical level, any sort of tension between a privacy and copyright automatically end up becoming acute. Music tracks and videos that aren’t physically protected by tamper resistant tokens can easily be copied and shared in principle, or getting traded informally over the internet through P2P sites designed to provide easy access to potential customers or street based vendors through pirated DVDs burned after illegal downloads. The problem for artists who develop the music is that in such cases, they cannot stop their work getting traded through different mediums and others making money on art they developed.
The existence of traceless communications is helping to make such trades possible that violates the privacy of musical artists, despite them owning the copyright to the music (Barlow, n.d.).
In such cases, the enforcement efforts to follow copyrights become futile as there are no ways to manage the privacy of every single copy of downloaded music. Apart from that, a number of presently available and proposed EDS (electronic distribution systems) makes encrypted content available for free: to decrypt the music, the user needs to contact a server and purchase a key—which requires users to provide their user name and share their email address. This means the system developed has a significant amount of information exhaust that ensures even copyrights are not protected. This means, a central license server has knowledge of the customer that has bought the music and marketers consider such model as magnificent. But, the same models leave the privacy advocates appalled and frustrated with the inability to protect copyrights (Barlow, n.d.).
References
Arewa, O. B. (2013). CREATIVITY, IMPROVISATION, AND RISK: COPYRIGHT AND MUSICAL INNOVATION. Notre Dame Law Review, 86(5), 1830-1842.
Barlow, J. P. (n.d.). Chapter 20: Copyright and Privacy Protection. Retrieved January 15, 2017, from https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/SE-20.pdf
