CCDL

Copyright in the Changing Digital Landscape (CCDL)

A session in Music Research in the Digital Age, a joint congress of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres IIAML) and the International Musicological Society (IMS)

Place and Date: New York, the Juilliard School, 21-26 June 2015

This three-hour session, presented in two parts by the IMS Programme Committee, will occur on Thursday, June 25, 2015. Details of the order of speakers will be posted here.

Session I: 9:00-10:30 (Clarida, Harbeson, Tsui) Session II: 11:00-12:30 (Miller, Chesser, Riva)

Chair (introduction): Eleanor Selfridge-Field

Speakers:

• Robert Clarida
• Eric Harbeson
• Nicholas Tsui
• Derek Miller
• Richard Chesser

Respondent: Federica Riva

This session considers popular and classical music; scores and audio; and past, present, and future concepts of music as intellectual property.

Formal description

The technology-driven explosion of methods for creating, storing, searching, and sharing music continues to create an aura of uncertainty for scholars and librarians. What used to be clear is now often murky. Imponderable questions appear much faster than the laws of any country evolve. Extrinsic considerations—when and how a piece of music may be used—remain largely fixed but also easily verified. Although not always easily enforced, the law is clear on the traditional sequence of events: create, publish, perform, and record. Every step in this sequence now may be digital, which means that there is no longer a necessary starting or ending point, nor is there necessarily an instantiation of the work in “fixed form” (a hallowed requirement for copyright protection in the US). Some differences in the duration of copyright from country to country occur and remain the subject of vigorous debate. Within many music enclaves, an increasing number of new works, and new ways of composing, fall outside the boundaries of protection. Intrinsic factors—themes, melodies, voicing and orchestration— issuing from the music itself can be expected to play an increasing role in discussions of music as intellectual property as our ability to create, control, alter, and search digital musical content improves. Will the role of arbitrary analogies in legal judgments decline? Judges and advocates may be uncomfortable talking about music per se. It is far too soon to say whether digital tools to evaluate musical similarity electronically will be trusted sufficiently.

Meanwhile, the day-to-day fabric of decision-making required of librarians and scholars launching projects is constantly battered by recurrent questions concerning access and fair use, particularly to musical arts of the past century—recordings in general, film scores (both recorded and improvised), background music, and much else, by ambiguities of fair use, uncertainties concerning performing rights, and many grey areas resulting from a multiplicity of new media contexts. Yet a growing acknowledgment of the importance of intellectual-property questions has prompted a number of recent studies on historical models of copyright protection with musicology and adjacent disciplines.

This panel examines a selection of these issues with the intent of viewing them in diverse musical and historical contexts. The larger issues of improved international understandings of music copyright remains one of central concern, but here the IMS can happily rely on the extensive work of IAML’s copyright committee to keep us current.

Speaker Biographies

Eleanor Selfridge-Field (former Co-Chair, IMS Study Group on Digital Musicology; Consulting Professor of Music, Symbolic Systems, Stanford University, Stanford, California; digital data specialist)

Robert Clarida (Attorney, former Trustee, Copyright Society of the USA; Partner at Reitler, Kailas and Rosenblatt, LLC, New York City, New York)

Eric Harbeson (Librarian, College of Music, University of Colorado at Boulder; Chair, Legislative Committee of the Music Library Association)

Nicholas Tsui (Attorney, Alston & Bird LLC, a firm specializing in intellectual property; former member of Technology Law Review’s Editorial Board, Stanford University)

Derek Miller (Assistant Professor of English, Harvard University; )

Richard Chesser (Head of Music, British Library, London; Chair, RISM UK Trust; former Chair, IAML copyright committee)

Respondent: Federica Riva (Music Librarian, Conservatorio Statale di Musica “Luigi Cherubini,” Florence, Italy); former Chair, IAML copyright committee; Head, IAML/Italy)