Technology and the cultural appropriation of music.

Technology, particularly recording technology, has for more than a century threatened the copyrights of composers, publishers and performers. Users armed with this technology have been given the means to record, copy and distribute the works of others. The response of rights holders has been to advocate the reiteration and expansion of their copyrights. The increased copyright regimes while going someway to protect the rights of composers, publishers and performers has also swept material from the public domain, so making it unavailable to other artists and follow-on creators. This process is referred to by Lessig as the locking down and appropriation of culture, a process that some argue will lead to a lack of diversity and choice. The folk song The Legend of Tom Dula (Dooley) is one of the best known examples of this appropriation. This song had been freely available to generations of folk singers until it was captured in a recording. The recording was transcribed and copyright was claimed, the song was no longer in the public domain. Whereas technology provides the reason to expand copyright, information technology and particularly the internet has spurned a number of initiatives that may lead to the freeing of content. The open source movement has been very successful in freeing and generating content; this movement has itself led to other related initiatives. One of these, the Creative Commons, provides a broad based solution which through a series of alternative licensing contracts allows rights holders to lessen their control on their content making it more available for others to use. This paper considers the interplay of music, technology and intellectual property. It considers how developments in information technology can now be used to offset the expansion of copyright. After reviewing some of these developments, particularly the Creative Commons, and considering evidence now analysed from a European wide survey of musicians and publishers completed in 2008, the paper concludes that these fixes, rooted in intellectual property, unfortunately offer little by way of solution. However technological solutions not so closely tied to intellectual property may offer more appropriate and workable solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]