BY ALTUĞ KARAKURT (EE/III)
altug.karakurt@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
Last year, in my series of columns on digitized music, I mentioned some of my reflections on the music licensing issue. However, I didn’t discuss this topic in sufficient detail or provide any philosophical arguments to support my point. In fact, I haven’t encountered many such articles by other writers, either. So in this column, I would like to talk about why I think licensing in music is currently not working and in fact can’t be implemented in a useful way.
I was inspired to write such a column by the comments Volkan Oransoy made on the topic. During a free software lecture series, he explained that he finds it very illogical that only the composers, performers and/or their representative companies own the license of a song, and neither those who influenced them nor the innovators who developed the tools that they used throughout the creation process are credited. At first, you might find this approach a little too picky, just as I did, but after going through a long train of thought on the topic, I decided that he had recognized a very fundamental problem concerning the way licensing works.
In essence, licensing an entity ensures that those who contributed to it are credited, and that their work won’t be profited from by others, or the data they obtained simply taken by others, at least not without their consent. There are many different styles of licensing in very different areas, but I think this observation captures the core of why a creator would want to license his/her work. Theoretically, such a guarantee seems very essential, and anybody would find such a request reasonable. However, I would question whether this is practical or even applicable to the real world.
From this point on, I will focus on music licensing to construct my arguments. However, I think similar discussions could take place regarding other areas that employ licensing, and the conclusions extended to any branch of art that has historical roots or influences and makes use of already existing methods or tools.
Other than some very exceptional sound sculpture projects, every musical creation is influenced to some extent by the previous works in its genre. In addition, every new musical movement is either influenced by or is a reaction to previous movements, and within each movement or genre, artists are inspired by each other’s work. This is very natural and doesn’t diminish the artistic value of a work or a movement. If one really wants to credit everyone who has contributed to the creation of a work, he has to iteratively include everyone the actual creator has been influenced by, both consciously and unconsciously, and then the influences on each of them, and so on. The list would have to go as far back as the prehistoric rhythmic experiments of the cavemen. Even listing only the most significant influences would end up being a similarly tiresome process, but it can easily be shown that leaving out even a few would make the purpose of licensing problematic. Thus, in terms of influences, it isn’t possible to actually credit each contributor of a work. You might wonder how significant influences are for a certain piece of music. The contribution of a historic musical figure to a work is quite likely to be as important as that of the actual composer. Would later classical music be the same without Chopin, or psychedelic rock without Jimi Hendrix, or blues without countless and anonymous slaves in America?
Most composers think in terms of notes, or at least communicate through them. Are they supposed to give credit to the creators of musical systems and notation? Similarly, compositions are constructed around the instruments available to the artist. If the aim of licensing is to reward and protect actual contributions and labor, aren’t the inventors of the electric guitar more significant than the majority of rock guitarists?
To summarize, I am trying to point out that it isn’t possible to trace the actual contributors of any artistic creation. Trying to label a piece of music as solely the work of a particular group of musicians would be ridiculously inaccurate. From this perspective, consider an electronic music song and think about how problematic it is not to credit the inventors of computers or the programmers of extremely complicated music synthesis and manipulation software, while claiming that the sole owner of the song is a single musician, who most probably has no idea about the phenomena that make up the system, except for a few buttons and sliders.
At this point, I think I need to clarify what I have just said. I am not trying to convince you that composers are incompetent or their musical creations worthless. In fact, I think the observations I have made are the consequence of how art naturally progresses. The artistic development of humankind shouldn’t be considered very differently from how scientific development is. Humanity’s improvements are cumulative and successive in nature. Every creation opens the way for the next and expands our horizons. Think about a world where a mathematician or a medical doctor wouldn’t let others make use of his discoveries. For some reason, we are keen to think that such behavior is heinous, while we accept a similar attitude when it comes to art.
Continuing from these arguments, I think that the natural and logical response of a musician whose songs are remixed or sampled shouldn’t be to file a copyright infringement lawsuit, but rather to be proud that his work has inspired others and he is appreciated by his colleagues. As I explained, every musician should be well aware of the extensive contributions of others to his work. Just as we do in the case of science, we must embrace the cumulative nature of art. In my opinion, claiming to be the sole owner of a piece of music is a very presumptive move, most probably based on extreme measures of egocentrism and ignorance, since it is equivalent to claiming to have rediscovered an entire branch (at least) of humanity’s musical heritage on one’s own.