This morning, a link to this fantastic article about copyright by Courtney Love popped up in my Facebook feed. It was published back in 2000, at a time before iTunes, when Metallica was fighting to destroy Napster, and yet it appears to be one of the most sobering, informative and logical contributions to the argument about copyright.
Love breaks down the process of earning money as a musician, before rallying against the RIAA and hoping for a better solution for artists to both sell and communicate with their fans. Remember, this was written in 2000, before the world had a simple, legitimate way of buying music on the internet.
“It’s not piracy when kids swap music over the Internet using Napster or Gnutella or Freenet or iMesh or beaming their CDs into a My.MP3.com or MyPlay.com music locker. It’s piracy when those guys that run those companies make side deals with the cartel lawyers and label heads so that they can be “the labels’ friend,” and not the artists’.”
But the real question here is why, over a decade later, the issue of copyright for music is still being driven by representatives from the music industry lobbying US government officials to make even more draconian copyright laws?
With things like SOPA and PIPA becoming public issues, it would be nice for the world to maybe listen to what Courtney Love had to say.
And that’s not something I ever thought I’d write…
[Salon]
Image: Wikipedia
Steven Wright
Monday, January 23, 2012 at 10:58 AMThis page is doing the rounds, but now with a social network to help distribute it.
In addition, this has also popped up: David Bowie in 2002 – http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/01/10/david-bowies-2002-predictions-about-the-future-of-music-were-pretty-close/ Think there might be a few ‘hate to say I told you so’…
Leo
Monday, January 23, 2012 at 11:37 AMDude – this article made my day. Courtney Love (and David Bowie in the first comment) are amazingly insightful. Just fantastic.
MotorMouth
Monday, January 23, 2012 at 12:06 PMFor a perspective not clouded by personal greed or self-interest, I think The Cure’s Robert Smith has a much more realistic view on the whole thing – http://www.thecure.com/blog/default.aspx?nid=21082
What he has to say is completely valid – its not the big, successful artists who are being hurt, it is those on the next several rungs down the ladder.
It is easy to blame the major record companies but they have become what they had to in order to survive. There was a time the majors were great at nurturing talent and looking after artists across a diverse range of genres. The result was what we saw in the 1980s and 90s – a rich, diverse musical culture where anyone with real creative talent could earn a decent living. Where bands like Devo and Wall of Voodoo could share the top 10 with the likes of Madonna and Rick Astley. Where groups like U2 or Talking Heads could take the time to grow into the global juggernauts their 5th and 9th albums, respectively, turned them into. All that is gone now and we are left with cookie-cutter garbage from every angle.
Its probably OK if you see music as a commodity but if you see it as a creative art, it is so sad. I’ve tried to embrace the so-called “digital revolution” (although that happened 25 years ago with CDs, long before the internet) but it is such a hollow, empty experience that I invariably end up buying the CD as well as the digital download. I’ve decided there will be no more mp3 downloads for me, it is a waste of time, money and bandwidth.
Sam
Monday, January 23, 2012 at 12:48 PMThe part that really surprises me here is that Courtney Love’s use of grammer (see original article link) has left Robert Smith’s use of the English language for dead (see MotorMouth’s link).
Who saw that coming?
LadyDi
Monday, January 23, 2012 at 3:58 PMShe didn’t write that anyway. Sam. You’re old enough to know about editors and copywriters. And speech writers! Give me a break! She no more wrote that than my goldfish did! Lol!
dainbramage
Monday, January 23, 2012 at 1:34 PMOh Courtney Love isn’t half as bad as people want her to be. She has had a hard life and her actions are how anyone would act if they had been what she has.
Azza
Monday, January 23, 2012 at 1:45 PMYou’re kiddng right? She’s a crazy psycho who is especially aggro when she starts drinking.
Bigb.
Monday, January 23, 2012 at 3:55 PMActually, she’s far worse! Basket-case, paranoid freak. Very self absorbed. Non-stop motor-mouth. Very mean streak.
monkeymind
Monday, January 23, 2012 at 9:49 PMSo, you & Azza know all this from meeting her many times over several years?
You wouldn’t be repeating hearsay. That would be silly.
lolwut
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 11:37 AMYou may give courtney love a lot of trashtalk, and i dont know much about her, what i do know is she has said something tenfold orders of magnitude smarter than the sour grapes you happened to spread on the internets.