Excellent post Justin, way to sample a whole post. At ascap people would “joke” around that if blacks had started ascap instead of a bunch of jewish guys, rhythms and bass lines would be copyrightable instead of just melodies and lyrics. Though i dont think the drummer for the Winstons wrote that drum beat, did he? Wasn’t James Brown using that drum beat before 1969?
Anyways, the point is well taken, copyright is about making money, and music is about infringing copyrights. Amen to that.
As a computer dweeb, I have seen “copyleft”, GPL, and various other open source initiatives take flight over the last 15 years or so. This model is successful with software and Creative Commons is kind of in the spirit of it. But the concept is a lot harder to apply to creative work than it is to software, because firms can make money off open source by re-packaging it and selling you support and service. Red Hat Linux is a great example of this. It works, because software is brutally complex and needlessly obscure by its very nature, and specialists are needed to deploy and configure it. Often these specialists are consulting firms comprised of the very people who released their code as open source.
With open source and other public licensing schemes, the onus is on the creator of the intellectual property to make money off it by some means other than selling the IP itself. How a software developer can do this is pretty clear. How a musician can do this, I am not sure. I think this problem is one of the reasons that Creative Commons may not end up being as successful as other free IP initiatives. The only way I can think of to profit off this notion is to act as a collector/repository of public domain works, who could then sell access – not to the works themselves – but to the index of these works – to people who wanted them. If you can find them on your own, then fine – but if you want it all tied up with a nice little bow on it, then cha-ching!
I finally got to listen to this. Thanks. Nothing is new since we created fire…. hmm. I understand that the point is to illustrate how copyrighting has hurt us, in that corporations get the jump on us at least in reference to this particular piece of sampling. What baffles me is that, how the fuck can you OWN a rhythm that has likely been banged out for centuries by people all over the world? You cannot honestly say that the Amen beat was first created in 1969 can you? Maybe it was RECORDED, but wasn’t it appropriated from a long line of what would seem to be appropriations? I’m also fuzzy on how tempo plays a roll in this ownership of beats. So, help me out here. It is or it isn’t ok to appropriate? Maybe there is no definitive answer.
I’ve been battling with whether or not that was a totally stupid question I posed up there, but I cannot reason with myself to believe any differently. It doesn’t make sense to me how a beat or any other tiny string of sound from most instruments can be considered the first time ever played… If it were true, then all of the repetition that affords us life would be alot more exciting. Maybe I give too much credit to man. Maybe one of you brainiacs can explain it to me. Am I living completely out of context here?
I don’t think it’s so much the rhythm, but the actual sound recordings that he’s talking about. The recordings were sampled wholesale, chopped up and used in different combinations, and finally copyrighted by another entity altogether. I question whether the Winstons really own the copyright to those recordings, because usually the label owns those.
And to go further, no, a rhythm is not copyrightable, however, a melody is, but sometimes that copyright goes to the first one to claim it. Take for example the Case of “Wimoweh,” which is based on a South African song called “Mbube,” but the copyright–and all the money associated with that–went to Pete Seeger. You can read about it here. It’s a pretty long article, but very interesting.
Excellent post Justin, way to sample a whole post. At ascap people would “joke” around that if blacks had started ascap instead of a bunch of jewish guys, rhythms and bass lines would be copyrightable instead of just melodies and lyrics. Though i dont think the drummer for the Winstons wrote that drum beat, did he? Wasn’t James Brown using that drum beat before 1969?
Anyways, the point is well taken, copyright is about making money, and music is about infringing copyrights. Amen to that.
that was supercool. i love the dry presentation.
As a computer dweeb, I have seen “copyleft”, GPL, and various other open source initiatives take flight over the last 15 years or so. This model is successful with software and Creative Commons is kind of in the spirit of it. But the concept is a lot harder to apply to creative work than it is to software, because firms can make money off open source by re-packaging it and selling you support and service. Red Hat Linux is a great example of this. It works, because software is brutally complex and needlessly obscure by its very nature, and specialists are needed to deploy and configure it. Often these specialists are consulting firms comprised of the very people who released their code as open source.
With open source and other public licensing schemes, the onus is on the creator of the intellectual property to make money off it by some means other than selling the IP itself. How a software developer can do this is pretty clear. How a musician can do this, I am not sure. I think this problem is one of the reasons that Creative Commons may not end up being as successful as other free IP initiatives. The only way I can think of to profit off this notion is to act as a collector/repository of public domain works, who could then sell access – not to the works themselves – but to the index of these works – to people who wanted them. If you can find them on your own, then fine – but if you want it all tied up with a nice little bow on it, then cha-ching!
“the onus is on the creator of the intellectual property to make money off it by some means other than selling the IP itself”
This has been true for most musicians and probably always will be.
This is a great piece. I trust though that artists will continue to keep their eye on the art and not the copyright, or more pointedly the money.
Speaking of great break beats . . . you got to love some APACHE. Perk up your ears around 2:20 and soak up them drums.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNXarXVYSMM
hooray!
I don’t know what it is,
but I do love amen breaks,
jungle, dnb…
it is right up there with funky drummer…
Finally saw this. Brilliant!
By the way Nate Harrison (the uncredited author of the video essay) actually has a website with other videos: http://nkhstudio.com/#.
I’ve seen this many many times. If it wasn’t for this break, I wouldn’t have put down my guitar and taken up djing.
I finally got to listen to this. Thanks. Nothing is new since we created fire…. hmm. I understand that the point is to illustrate how copyrighting has hurt us, in that corporations get the jump on us at least in reference to this particular piece of sampling. What baffles me is that, how the fuck can you OWN a rhythm that has likely been banged out for centuries by people all over the world? You cannot honestly say that the Amen beat was first created in 1969 can you? Maybe it was RECORDED, but wasn’t it appropriated from a long line of what would seem to be appropriations? I’m also fuzzy on how tempo plays a roll in this ownership of beats. So, help me out here. It is or it isn’t ok to appropriate? Maybe there is no definitive answer.
I’ve been battling with whether or not that was a totally stupid question I posed up there, but I cannot reason with myself to believe any differently. It doesn’t make sense to me how a beat or any other tiny string of sound from most instruments can be considered the first time ever played… If it were true, then all of the repetition that affords us life would be alot more exciting. Maybe I give too much credit to man. Maybe one of you brainiacs can explain it to me. Am I living completely out of context here?
I don’t think it’s so much the rhythm, but the actual sound recordings that he’s talking about. The recordings were sampled wholesale, chopped up and used in different combinations, and finally copyrighted by another entity altogether. I question whether the Winstons really own the copyright to those recordings, because usually the label owns those.
And to go further, no, a rhythm is not copyrightable, however, a melody is, but sometimes that copyright goes to the first one to claim it. Take for example the Case of “Wimoweh,” which is based on a South African song called “Mbube,” but the copyright–and all the money associated with that–went to Pete Seeger. You can read about it here. It’s a pretty long article, but very interesting.
Thanks Justin.