COPYWRONG

And so we must move on, onwards, upwards, sideways, anywhere but here, for this is copyright country. British copywright reminds me of Othello: a noble concept, but ultimately flawed and quashed by competitors. But enough of this pretentious drivel. I intend to talk a little but about what copyright is, why it is, how it is and what it shouldn't be. Are we all sitting comfortably? Sorry. No more silliness, I promise.

Copyright refers to an individual's rights over created property, like writing a song, a book or a play, or taking a photograph, or making a film. If you do any of these things, it stands to reason that you should have control over the use of this property. Copyright essentially stops people from saying that stuff you make is theirs, and by taking somebody's work without permission and using it, you break copywright and the law. It's a pretty logical idea, but on the web, things like copyright can get blurred - where does your property end and others' begin? Things like mash-ups, remixes and file sharing have all helped to confuse the lot of us by messing about with how copyright works.

To start with, let's take remixing and mash-ups. These are different things; remixing involves taking a motif or theme from a song and building a song around it, often involving new material. However, a mash-up doesn't use any new material, but instead you don't use any new material. See the difference? One of these is a remix and one is a mash-up.






Now the copyright issue here is that of derivative work. Under the copyright law in the UK, derivative work requires permission from the party whose property it is. It's a problem because mash-ups breach copyright, but sometimes remixes are considered far enough from the original to be considered "derivative work" and so it's technically possible to make a remix from a copyrighted song that doesn't actually breach copyright.

However, this isn't what I really want to talk about. What I think is the most interesting part of copyright in the UK is how it works and the illogicalities within. There are some sensible things - movie piracy is bad, so are file sharing sites like Limewire - but also some totally daft ones. For instance, if you have any old TV programmes recorded on VHS, you are likely to be breaking the law, because if you have kept the VHS for more than 30 days, that's considered breaking copyright law. There are other things,like how you're not allowed to put iTunes music on more than 5 devices (this is called DRM). Anyway, the point is that while we often are grateful to copyright, there's a great deal of unnecessary clutter in the law. What should we do about it? Well, the government hasn't been terribly good about enforcing the law and punishing people for flaunting it. We should be concentrating more on things like LimeWire. It seems silly to my mind to worry about whether someone's kept an episode of Antiques Roadshow from 1995 as opposed to cracking LimeWire, which lets people share music files and the like, which utterly breaks the law and robs musicians of royalties. We need to address this imbalance now, because more than half of all downloaded music is downloaded illegally, which will, if it continues, simply stop artists from making music. (I should stress at this point that bands do not make their money from albums, but from gigs, and it is the albums that get people to come to gigs, so really it all works out the same.) Read this article about how Radiohead completely changed music marketing. These just go to show how quaint the copyright laws and conventional pricing laws seem as a result of the blistering pace of advancing technology.

So what am I getting at? I suppose the answer is that copyright seems a little, well, silly in the state it's at at the moment. Most people would willingly break copyright even if they don't know the full extent of the law. We should feel obliged not to break copyright, but we don't. The government need to try and adapt copyright laws to be able to deal with the slipperiness of the digital age. How they do that I have no idea, but watching this already forlorn cabinet face up to this could be fun. Let's watch and laugh, children. Sorry. I know I promised not to be flippant, but it was just too easy...