End music copyright

We need to end music copyright. I have written about this before but following many debates with people I have written a full list of the reasons why we must end music copyright and why downloading unlicensed music should be allowed.

Downloading music is not the same as stealing. One has to concede that although there are similarities it is fundamentally different from stealing. If I steal your car you no longer have your car. If I download music, I have the music and so does the original bearer. I concede that this would mean the original bearer holds something potentially worth less since there are more copies but please read on.

It is perfectly easy to understand that if someone downloads music it does not mean that if they didn't have the means to download it they would have bought it instead.

Record companies and musicians are very violent. They lobby our government to take people from their homes, kidnap them in state prisons, and sanction stealing your property or money in compensation for their alleged possible loss. This is unacceptable.

The ability to upload and download music across the Internet has radically changed the music reproduction industry. Change is change. Change does not necessarily mean that something has to be reversed. The music industry as it stands will likely be damaged but that is no justification to continue as we are. Things change. A lot of people would have jobs digging our roads but no longer do it because mechanical diggers were invented.

Let's be clear about exactly what we mean by music. Only in the last few decades has music also meant something entirely different than its meaning through all of history. Music is the sound of people singing or playing instruments. This has always been true and is still true. Today it also covers the results of audio reproduction.

Governments shouldn't play such a key role in creating so many millionaires. Inequality exists elsewhere in society but is not so reliant on government.

Changing copyright law does not in anyway affect the ability of a musician to make an excellent living given they can charge money for live concerts. It's up to you how you get into a secured music venue but buying a ticket is the easiest. I've already covered that musicians can already make a lot more money charging for concerts if they charge the optimum price using an online auction in this post on ticket touts and gig ticket prices.

Music celebrities are rarely good role models. Need I say more? We don't need to make immoral people so powerful.

Intellectual property is a difficult subject. It's a lot easier to justify allowing inventors to reap the rewards of their technological inventions through patents considering what they have given society. It's not so easy to justify it for music which is highly subjective.

There are other ways for musicians to make money. Let's not pretend music is some sacred art and consider placing sponsored adverts into the lyrics. It's how others earn a living.

The vast majority of music is simply a rehash of other music that went before anyway. The lines of who really deserves the rewards for a lot of music are extremely blurred. It's a huge grey area.

It's a strange concept to create enforceable rights simply for the reason that it is a creation of a human. New words, sometimes slang, are creations of people yet we do not create enforceable rights based on these.

Record companies are always clear that the cost of a CD is for the actual content yet have offered no concessions to people who already own the content in another format.

What's really ridiculous is that a lot of these millionaire musicians are still not happy even with the existing laws! They want an extension to the 50-year royalties period to make even more money! Unbelievable.

After all this, music fans are dedicated people and they know they can get the music for free if they want it yet they seem to be happy to give musicians money on a voluntary basis.

Record companies use unfair practices to distort the free market by lobbying government to ban parallel imports. My post on parallel importing of CDs goes into more detail on this travesty.

If there was ever a case for wage controls it would be definitely be for a cap on extortionate wages in an industry that the government created. It would make more sense to me using a moral argument that music copyright should be there to offer musicians and the industry figures at least a guaranteed living wage but this just isn't the argument.

Intellectual property is already covered effectively under private property. If you want to keep your intellectual property under your own physical control then do just that. Your private space and possessions are already protected.

Copyright rules can still be enforced between complicit parties without laws. Musicians and other parties can still agree contracts regulated by 3rd parties to manage disputes and infringements. For example, rival broadcasters could agree to enforce copyright between themselves.

All this keeps the money in the pockets of the people who can spend it to create more justifiable parts of an economy. There is no danger of music being harmed by the end of music copyright. Some people's careers will be ended by this but that starts the story in the middle and these rules should never have been created or enforced in the first place. Some people's careers will be created by the end of music copyright.