Copying, copyright and originality: imitation, transformation and popular musicians.

With copyright becoming ever more important for business and government, this article argues for a more nuanced understanding of the practices and values associated with copying in popular music culture and advocates a more critical approach to notions of originality. Drawing from interviews with working musicians, this article challenges the approaches to copying and popular music that pitch corporate notions of piracy against creative sharing by citizens. It explores differing approaches to the circulation of recordings and identifies three distinct types of creative copying: (1) learning through imitation, (2) copying as transformation and (3) copying for commercial opportunity. This article then considers how copying is caught between a commercial necessity for familiar musical products that must conform to existing expectations and a copyright legislative rationale requiring original sounds with individual owners. This article highlights how legacies from a long history of human copying as a means of acquiring knowledge and skills lead to a collision of creative musical practices, commercial imperatives and copyright regulation and result in a series of unavoidable tensions around originality and copying that are a central characteristic of cultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]