Hello, everyone. I haven’t been by in a long time, but today I stumbled upon something I’m trying very hard to share with others, and I think it might interest the ILP crowd even more than the average person.
While classical musical compositions generally exist in the public domain, the age of the music itself (ie. sheet music) has no bearing on the copyright status of any recording. Because of this, there are many great works long out of copyright that are still without publicly accessible recordings. The goal of online music library Musopen is to provide such recordings, for free use: personal listening, remixing/sampling, and use in any other conceivable context. They make purchases of existing recordings, accept donated recordings from copyright holders, and hire paid and volunteer orchestras to do new recordings. For more information, you can visit the project’s website, linked above. As a summary, here is the text that appears on their “About” page:
Recently, the organization began a fundraiser for their most ambitious project yet: “to hire an internationally renowned orchestra to record and release the rights to: the Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky symphonies.” According to their Kickstarter donation page, they “have price quotes from several orchestras and are ready to hire one, pending the funds”. This morning, this fundraiser event was submitted to tech news forum Slashdot.org, which is what brought it to the attention of myself and, apparently, many generous others. They’ve currently received pledges totalling over $30,000 (well exceeding their original $11,000 goal). But in addition to presenting the topic for discussion, I’m going to also do my best to tempt you to add to the pile.
This project has an incredible amount of momentum right now, and there are only about 48 hours remaining for supporters to pledge their donations. Additional donations will be used to create additional recordings. According to Musopen’s founder, Aaron Dunn, “[e]very $1000 buys a complete set of Mozart violin sonatas, or all of Chopin’s mazurkas, ballades, or nocturnes… a little money buys a LOT of music”. Musopen, given your support and promotion, could make an incredible expansion to their existing library of free classical music recordings. Besides the public value of those recordings themselves, the more music they release, the greater of a splash this event can cause, and a highly publicized reception will do a lot to further the free culture movement of which they are a perfect exemplification.
I’ve always been an enthusiastic proponent of free culture, which in essence is for the celebration and support of our rights as participants in culture to enjoy, learn from, adapt, and share the products of human creativity. Free culture is the spirit that drives projects like, for example, Wikipedia. If you are sympathetic to this spirit of liberty in art and information, I think Musopen would be an excellent target of your charity. But for everyone reading this, I’d like to start a dialogue about free culture in modern society.
So, for those of you interested in learning (or doing!) more:
- Visit the website for Free Culture by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig. The site features several resources on the history, nature, and benefits of free culture, including the full text of the book itself.
- Poke through Free Software, Free Society, a collection of essays by Richard Stallman. Stallman created the Free Software movement, generally regarded as the precursor and inspiration of the modern free culture movement.
- Read an explanation and endorsement of Musopen by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a volunteer legal organization dedicated to “defending your rights in the digital world”.
- You can find an official summary of the selected Creative Commons license, CC-0, here (full legal text: here)
- You can donate via Kickstarter here
- You can vote for Musopen to win sponsorship from the PepsiRefresh program here
While I think that the project is one of noble aim and very real benefit, people have already raised a number of problems with Musopen, such as the limited value of a single “interpretation” (ie. performance) of a musical score, the potential “offensive” or “leeching” use of these recordings for explicitly commercial purposes (like a movie soundtrack), etc. Of course, permissive or sharing-oriented copyright licenses do not exist just for instances of old public domain work. Some contemporary creators release their music, images, writing, and software under licenses that allow others to freely expand upon their work. Other licenses (“copyleft”) require that any derivative work maintain the license, ensuring that every iteration of the work is equally accessible. Others require attribution, or explicitly bar commercial work. What do kind of licensing do you think is appropriate for the creative products of contemporary society? Are other licenses functionally or morally inferior?