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.

By the way Nate Harrison (the uncredited author of the video essay) actually has a website with other videos: http://nkhstudio.com/#.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNXarXVYSMM

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.

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!