Digitisation And The Politics Of Copying in Popular Music Culture

Some Methodological Reflections from the early research on ‘Digitisation And The Politics Of Copying in Popular Music Culture’
–          Dr. Keith Negus (Goldsmiths, University of London)

These methodological reflections are tentative as we are currently (as of January 2014) only three months into a fifteen month project, with the title ‘Digitisation And The Politics Of Copying in Popular Music Culture’, a study being researched by myself, Prof. John Street (University of East Anglia) and Dr. Adam Behr (University of Edinburgh).

By way of providing some context, I’ll first say something about three key issues that inform our research and through which we are exploring a wider set of dynamics. First, the politics of copying. Second, digitisation as part of a longer history of technological change. Third, musicians as the focus of the study.

My first point concerns copying. There are two aspects to copying here, one is copying as part of the creative process; the second is copying for the circulation of finished products – the way that tracks, songs or instrumentals are copied and made available of others. With regard to the first of these issues, there is a long history of musicians copying from other musicians as part of the influence and inspiration through which music is made (there are similarities with the way fashion designers draw inspiration from pre-existing designs, as outlined by Angela McRobbie when discussing her team’s research). This practice can be found in a wide range of times and places, and in different genres of music – it’s a characteristic of blues and folk traditions, it’s integral commercial pop music, and it’s a practice with a long history in western art music. Beethoven copied (and modified) passages from Mozart when composing his own work; John Lennon copied (and modified) passages from Chuck Berry – Beethoven didn’t get hit with lawsuits, John Lennon did.

This practice has often been highlighted in legal disputes. Since the introduction of recording, there is a well-documented history of disputes involving allegations of musical plagiarism; many cases have been settled in court, but a huge number (maybe the majority) have been resolved through out of court settlements. So, for example, as a result of these disputes Neil Innes now appears on the songwriting credits for an Oasis song written by Noel Gallagher; John Denver appears on the credits for a New Order song; and Keith Jarrett appears on the credits for a Steely Dan song composed by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen … and so it goes on and on; just Google and you’ll find hundreds of examples.

Here a long history of musical creativity as a social and communal practice confronts modern laws about the individual ownership of ideas (sounds, words, melodies) and notions of originality. Our research is addressing some key questions about these dynamics: How does creative copying work today? Are there boundaries or limits? What is acceptable or unacceptable? Is formal copyright legislation perceived as a benefit or a hindrance? In what ways do musicians and other stakeholders experience copyright in action, as part of a creative process (not just as an abstract idea or concept)?

The second type of copying that we are interested in is copying for circulation – the varied ways that music is copied for circulation. There are some basic questions here about attitudes and approaches to circulation: Do musicians make recorded tracks available free, for circulation as part of a process of self promotion? Do they use creative commons licenses and if they do, do they allow or encourage their tracks to be modified or manipulated – and is this understood as part of a creative dialogue? Or, are the songs presented as definitive finished artefacts not to be tampered with or sampled or modified in any way?

Further questions concern how do musicians approach the idea of the album as a collection of conceptually sequenced tracks. What are the musicians’ attitudes to unbundled individual tracks being circulated, downloaded and shuffled?  What beliefs do musicians hold about streaming – what is their attitude to the idea that music is now accessed by subscription rather than purchased to be individually owned?

A key question also concerns how musicians and producers approach and use the work of others.  Anecdotal evidence suggests that there are tensions and contradictions between musicians as creators and musicians as consumers.  Musicians may spend a lot of time recording, mixing and sequencing songs onto albums, but they may adopt a very contrasting approach as consumers.  They may shuffle or choose specific tracks from albums by other artists.  They may purchase other musicians’ recordings or they may download tracks without paying for them through peer-to-peer or so-called pirate sites.  DJ producers may exert considerable control over how their own work is copied, sampled and circulated. But they might adopt a rather looser approach to using the work of others. Here we seek to explore the values and ethical dilemmas that might occur during copying.

The term ‘politics’ is in our title, and this is the second key theme that I am highlighting today. If we can assume that politics is basically about struggles over resources, values and practices, and takes in the way we are regulated and participate in regulating our own behaviour, then we are interested in two aspects – what we are calling the macro or formal, and the micro or informal.  We’re interested in how musicians negotiate and deal with the laws that shape and inform the practises of copying, the institutional politics of copying and copyright. We also want to consider the everyday, less formal ways that musicians negotiate with other musicians; with people from the music industry and various other interested parties and stakeholders. This might include how the values and beliefs of consumers or fans impact on musician’s attitudes and practices when it comes to copying. The knowledge, opinions and attitudes of fans is now very visible to musicians (on various fora and social media) – how does this impact on the moral, ethical and creative practices of musicians? So, at the macro level we are researching the consequences of an institutional politics of regulation, and at the more micro level we are exploring the influence of a more informal everyday politics of human interaction.

Much has been written about digitisation. Digitalisation has clearly had a significant impact on the production and circulation of music. Apart from providing a range of new instrumental, recording and editing technologies, it has impacted on the creative process by making it much easier and quicker to copy by sampling other musicians’ recordings and to manipulate those recordings when creating new sounds and songs. Digitisation has also had an economic impact in on revenues and revenue streams.  Income from sales of recordings to consumers has declined; revenues have increased from the licensing of recordings and synchronisation into films, adverts, televisions, ringtones and games. When the so-called crisis of the music industry is often discussed it’s usually reported in terms of the declining revenues from sales of recordings to consumers, a story that neglects the revenues generated from live events or from licensing and synchronisation.

As I have already implied, digitisation has made it much easier and quicker to circulate recordings without needing to manufacture artefacts; without the need to put physical recordings in warehouses and then ship them around the world in trucks, ships and planes.  Digitisation has facilitated new outlets for circulating and hearing music, most notably social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube). These have put discussion about music on the same platform as the music itself. Listeners, whether or not they are musicians, are aware of more music and are able to spot similarities that were not so apparent before digitalisation – particularly across territories, or internationally; if someone is deemed to have stolen a riff, lyric or sample it is easier to spot it and to become aware of it due to the way people start discussing such issues through social media. Digitalisation has led to the production of huge amounts of data; analytics about consumers and information about music is stored in the same way as the music, and this frequently occupies then same platform as the music. Hence, our research suggests that musicians work with an awareness of greater public knowledge of copying and the debates about copying.

We are also approaching digital practices as part of a much longer history. So, we are concerned with more than contemporary sampling and digital rights management – we want to locate our findings within the legacies and resonances of history, so we have spoken with UK musicians active in the 1960s and 1970s who were using US r’n’b/ blues riffs when creating new material, and sought the views of established songwriters who have used existing songs as models or templates. We are interested in continuities and changes, or to put it bluntly: Does sampling technology actually represent a new set of issues and debates about ideas of originality and plagiarism?

The third main issue concerns musicians. Professional musicians are the focus of our study; musicians who make some part of their living through music. Clearly there is what Ruth Finnegan once called ‘an amateur-professional continuum’, but in this project we are not concerned with amateur musicians but those musicians making some sort of living and who have music in the public domain and who have to deal with the issues that I have just been outlining.

Previous reports and business research on copying and copyright have tended to present the issues from the perspective of the music industry, foregrounding piracy, and theft and revenue loss. There is an assumption, made by many people in the industry, that musicians are not going to be motivated to create if their work is circulated without any financial return. Yet, anecdotal evidence suggests that musicians are motivated by far more than money. So, we are interested in focusing on the views, the beliefs, the values and the practices of musicians. We do know what some prominent musicians think of certain aspects of copying and copyright. For example, we know what Metallica thought of Napster and we know what Cliff Richard thought of copyright extension and why there was eventually a ‘Cliff’s law’ extending the mechanical rights in sound recordings by a further twenty years from 2014. And, we know what Thom Yorke has said about Spotify. These musician’s views have been extensively reported. But these are partial perspectives, voiced by very wealthy practitioners. We don’t know much about how the vast majority of working musicians approach copying in their daily working practices and their beliefs and values with regard to copying. So, our aim is to speak with a range of musicians, and to get a sense of tensions, differences, and variations.

We are interested in possible generational differences – do musicians of different ages and experiences have different approaches to the issues? Do ideas about copying vary by genre – rock, and electronic dance music/ DJ producers, acoustic singer songwriters? The project is also open to exploring other possible differences – is gender significant, for example? That’s an open question that we will be exploring.

In practical terms, the research entails looking at a range of existing sources – writings, documents, and reported interviews. And, conducting interviews with musicians – this is at the centre of the study. We hope the research will reveal a series of more subtle aesthetic and political values and working practices, and highlight different view points, those that are often less visible and audible in the debates about copyright. Despite continual modifications to copyright legislation, musicians continue to go to court to defend themselves or accuse others of misconduct. Our project aims to illuminate how and why this is an issue for musicians. One of the criticisms of copyright legislation, and the problems posed by enforcement, has been that it has failed to reflect the realities of the creative process. Our research is designed to explore in more detail how that ideas of copying and originality operate in practice.

As I mentioned at the start of this presentation, we are only three months into the project; we’ve completed six interviews and we’ve begun sifting through a lot of secondary material. At this stage I’ll offer one tentative finding and reflections on three methodological issues. 

Tentative finding: Musicians tend not to think about questions of plagiarism, copying, or copyright theft prior to or during the process of creating.  They may be aware that they are using the work of other musicians, they may be very conscious of it by overtly sampling or by basing a song on someone else’s song structure as a template, or by using an existing melody in a quite casual or a knowing and calculated way, or by using specific lyrics as John Lennon did constantly when writing songs.  Musicians may be aware or they may be unconscious of these influences, but this tends to occur in a kind of ad hoc, practical and pragmatic manner.  It is only usually after the event, if and when it becomes an issue, that they will deal with the issues in any formal way or systematic manner.  So musicians create before they worry about copyright – that’s a working finding from our research so far.

There are two caveats to that statement, or two issues that complicate it.  One is that, following my previous comments about digitisation, recordings from different times and places are becoming much more available and there is a greater awareness amongst musicians and listeners about where music and ideas have been copied or sourced from (we’re not far enough into the research to tell just how much this is changing the practice of creating music, but we suspect that it is).  A further caveat is that approaches to copying vary according to the scale of a project. If a musician is working on a project with obvious commercial possibilities, or with potentially wide public or media reach, or if they have been commissioned for an overtly commercial project, then legal considerations about copyright will be considered much earlier in the project (or will be identified earlier). The musicians will be aware that that their music is going to definitely enter the public domain, so if they are copying or using a sample there will be much greater awareness of the need to deal with the formal process of copyright.

Three methodological issues. This first issue is very similar to a point made by Angela McRobbie as it relates to her point about respondents cancelling interviews at the last minute.  Trying to arrange interviews and get them scheduled for suitable times is time consuming. We notice a tension between the time frame in which creative musicians work compared with the time frame within which we as CREATe researchers must work and complete our project.

A second issue concerns the challenge of asking musicians to reflect upon creative practice. It is not easy to get musicians to reflect on creative practice. In our study we are asking musicians to talk about something that they take for granted and which they do intuitively – even though they have clearly spent a long time learning their craft and acquiring the skills that allow them to get to the point where it feels instinct and intuitive.  It’s not that they’re pretending that they haven’t learnt how to do this, but it’s a practice that feels natural, even though it’s learnt. It’s like all things we do without thinking about them even though we know we’ve learnt them (riding a bicycle, or walking).  We also suspect that there is desire to protect the natural feeling qualities, to preserve the special quality of creating music and to not analyse it away – a fear that analysing will lead to a loss of the special creative experience. There is also a practical aspect to the way musicians reflect on issues; one respondent spoke of how she worked on a session in a natural way and then, only after the session, had to think about formal issues of ownership, and possible royalties that might arise from her contribution – illustrating the separation of the moment of music making and subsequent reflection or analysis.

My third methodological reflection here concerns the emphasis we are placing on the interview with an individual (much like many other research studies in the CREATe programme and elsewhere). Our team has had some discussion about this, and we wonder if there is an overemphasis on the interview – even a fetishisation of the interview as a source of insight and knowledge. And, related to this, I wonder about the over-emphasis on the self – the assumptions that we as researchers are making about individual subjects as coherent entities and unities able to reflect on his or her own values, beliefs and practices. There are some big philosophical questions lurking within this brief observation and they concern how we know ourselves as individuals, and how we are able to rationalise, explain and convey this to others. It’s not simply a question about truth because we know that all interviews provide only a partial perspective, instead it’s about how reliable or useful it is to focus on individual experiences and perceptions. 

In practical terms, in this research, our question here can be stated thus: Is the interview with the creative practitioner the best way to get an insight into the dynamics of creativity and copying that we are interested in? Would it be more instructive, for example, to look at the records of court cases, or – if possible – to get access to the legal and artistic correspondence relating to cases of musical plagiarism? Legal disputes may give an insight into the values, judgements and arguments – the disputes about creativity and copying and how they are articulated.

We are currently planning to talk to expert witnesses (themselves trained musicians) that have been called in court cases. Again, this will still be an interview, but, it will not be so dependent upon the individual reflecting on his or her own creative practice. We will be trying to get a broader sense of the arguments, the debates, and the issues from the perspective of someone who was called in as an external expert. So, perhaps our final methodological question here: What is the place and value of the musician’s voice and reflections in our study of musicians?

 

Response by Prof. Lilian Edwards (Strathclyde University):

Okay, I’ll maybe start with methodological comments. I agree that a dependence on objective self reflection in interviews is dubious as the sole source for robust research findings. In CREATe UEA, we have a file sharing project based upon a systemic review of several hundred studies and reports on file sharing behaviour and attitudes, where an early finding is that that reports and studies being analysed are almost entirely reliant on self reported behaviour and not at all on observed behaviour.  And although we take this for granted in the music field, every three weeks it’s 90% of file sharers say they don’t give a damn about the profits of the music industry blah blah blah. In other fields this is completely not taken for granted for example in privacy where I work there’s a really substantial body of behaviour now which is about observing what people actually do, what steps they take to protect their privacy, whether they pay more for privacy rather than just people saying well I’m very concerned about my privacy because it’s well known there’s something called the ‘Privacy Paradox’ that the more people say they’re concerned about their privacy the less they actually do about it. So even though sometimes it has to be artificial simulated observation of behaviour in very acute made up observations I think that is a very important point to go.

 

I’m not saying in any way that the interviews aren’t important but as supplementary or reinforcing or validating evidence, for example from observing the behaviour of my lodger who I now have on Facebook, I observe him and his music pals, his in Industrial Music, apparently he’s got an album in the German Industrial Music charts so I’m very curious where he fits in your professional music category because he doesn’t make any money at all as far as I can tell which I’ll come back to but he has got an album in the charts. The point is that I have observed just in the last six months of having him around that the musicians do nothing but talk about their copying and remix practices, at least in his field in Industrial Music, even on Facebook let alone on the dedicated music forums etc. and it seems to be there could be some very useful scraping and discourse analysis there. I’m not exactly sure but there’s this enormous amount of found evidence of what people actually say and do with their peers on social media.  And since these are typically young people they typically don’t ‘privacy protect’ it either much to my amazement.

 

Another thought is services such as Twitter. I have seen and I’m sure you have too there was some experiment wasn’t there where they asked young artists whether they were in favour of copying or not and they just asked them to tweet with a hashtag like #procopying #anticopying. Obviously again this is not self-reflective but there are all these other sources of information so it’s just throwing out ideas.  Another one in the paper I don’t think you had time to mention it while you were speaking but you mentioned looking at the amount of creative commons licence material that is out there because you can now put out your music with a creative commons attribution remix allowed, no commercial uses licence say and it struck me that that could be followed up, again it’s interviews but it’s slightly different empirically focused interviews to sort of find out where that music was put out like that maybe you could interview the person who put it out, you could interview the re-mixers and then go back and find out what they each thought of each other.  And then it struck me, sorry there’s a whole chain of not very linear ideas here, that you could then do that with non-creative commons licence music and simply find a piece of music that has in some way been remixed or reused elsewhere and ask the two people on either side what they thought of it.

 

I think within the paper that I got to look at which was very good there was a suggestion that if interviews as a self-reflective entity are unreliable narratives then you said perhaps it would be better to look at litigated disputes and that takes you into this idea of talking to experts and so forth. Now I think that’s very interesting evidence but I think it’s a wholly different set of evidence.  In the history of socio-legal work there was a very strong backlash against the idea of using reported cases as a guide to anything because they’re always regarded as the pathological top of the iceberg.  The general lawyer’s line is if it’s got to court then it’s already a failure so three thousand percent of your cases will either not get to court at all and be sorted out informally or if they do get as far as lawyers they will be settled and it will be this tiny 0.01% that actually gets as far even as pleadings so to base evidence on that seems to me to be very pathological but interesting. So if you did get that evidence again it would be useful but it would have to be used within its own constraints rather as I think Angela was saying to try and discover which disputes are so embedded and appalling that people will not settle but it isn’t evidence of ordinary practice.

 

Last point a Cri de Coeur (French for “a cry from the heart”) is should we be thinking in advance about what policy recommendations would result from the questions you’re asking and the evidence you’re gathering.  And this is a point that was brought up I think actually by an intervention by the music industry itself recently. In a state of nature we’d like to be social scientists that just go out and observe the world and gather all the data there is but that’s a kind of idealised world. Should we be pointing towards what policy interventions we might be thinking about recommending?  So to give a silly example supposing you found that there was a gender difference, supposing you found that girl musicians were more in favour of remixing than boy musicians, would that point to any useful policy intervention?  Law is meant to be universalist, we couldn’t ever recommend a remix right for girls and not boys, or we couldn’t recommend or could we a remix right for jazz and electronica but not for pop and classical.  So this is one of the things I was thinking about was whether we need to think before we formulate our questions and I don’t know actually.

Questions and comments:

Dr Emily Laidlaw (University of East Anglia): My question is related to my own CREATe project. How you’re carrying out these types of interviews or doing it more as workshops where you’re interviewing groups of musicians, panel discussions or round tables or individually, passing out surveys online for example?  And whether one’s more effective than the other and what problems you’ve had?

 

Dr Melanie Selfe (University of Glasgow): I guess it’s an observation about both of the last papers but highlighted by Keith’s noting of the wider availability of the means with which to note and see referencing within musical works. Are the same things true within fashion works through digital availability?  We’ve always elite within both fashion and within music consumption of people who could see the references and there’s always been a pleasure of performing your knowledge of oh that’s just this added and this extra. As that becomes democratised does the knowledge of these things become devalued and therefore is that part of the climate in which it then turns back on the creators and the artists as opposed to it being enjoyed as a secret pleasure, as a secret knowledge of the few?

 

Dr Smita Kheria (University of Edinburgh): Yeah, I have a quick observation, the point Lillian made about not looking at court cases. I think it is quite interesting because a lot of IP enforcement takes place in the shadow of the law and the amount of settlement that takes place, and I think that the projects within CREATe which are looking at the practice of the IP practitioners for example Jane’s project and I think there’s a similar project looking at practitioner in England, I think perhaps there is something about having a correlation there, where they’ll be speaking to IP practitioners and then asking about how the process is negotiated but perhaps there is a connection in then finding out who are those clients?  Why do they settle and why do they not settle?  So I think that’s equally an interesting data if you want to look at attitudes towards copying, what does or does not happen because I do think that I we just restrict ourselves to the cases that went to court and have been reported or settled then it’s false.

 

Dr Keith Negus (responding to above questions and comments):              Yes, we are looking at other sources, we’re trawling through all sorts of data looking at conversations about these issues. The reason we’re interested in expert witnesses is because they are trained musicians. Often they are musicologists, and sometimes a witness may be a well known composer who is called upon to testify. These legally recognised experts have an insight into the musicological or the musical, and the creative issues that come up.  And, we are hoping to get a sense of how musicians, songwriters and creators are called upon to defend themselves in musical terms;  how are they called into account for using that melodic phrase or that rhythm or that timbre?  But, we are not seeking to detach this aspect of the research from insights gained from interviews with the other musicians.

 

Briefly, a response to the point about policy intervention. Our point is that the music industry has not critically, independently and substantively considered the voices of musicians.  They have made all sorts of assumptions about how musicians work and their motivations in all their arguments and their reports about why copyright should be enforced in such and such a way. But our aim is to have some findings about musicians that we can feed back to the industry. But, at this stage we cannot judge the functional utility of this, and I have no idea whether it will be as specific as whether fifteen-year-old girls prefer sampling compared to fifteen-year-old boys (we are simply not at this stage of the research).

Response by Prof. Lilian Edwards (Strathclyde University):

I’ll start with methodological comments. I agree that a dependence on objective self reflection in interviews is dubious as the sole source for robust research findings. In CREATe UEA, we have a file sharing project based upon a systemic review of several hundred studies and reports on file sharing behaviour and attitudes, where an early finding is that that reports and studies being analysed are almost entirely reliant on self reported behaviour and not at all on observed behaviour. And although we take this for granted in the music field, every three weeks it’s 90% of file sharers say they don’t give a damn about the profits of the music industry blah blah blah. In other fields this is completely not taken for granted for example in privacy where I work there’s a really substantial body of behaviour now which is about observing what people actually do, what steps they take to protect their privacy, whether they pay more for privacy rather than just people saying well I’m very concerned about my privacy because it’s well known there’s something called the ‘Privacy Paradox’ that the more people say they’re concerned about their privacy the less they actually do about it. So even though sometimes it has to be artificial simulated observation of behaviour in very acute made up observations I think that is a very important point to go.

I’m not saying in any way that the interviews aren’t important but as supplementary or reinforcing or validating evidence, for example from observing the behaviour of my lodger who I now have on Facebook, I observe him and his music pals, his in Industrial Music, apparently he’s got an album in the German Industrial Music charts so I’m very curious where he fits in your professional music category because he doesn’t make any money at all as far as I can tell which I’ll come back to but he has got an album in the charts. The point is that I have observed just in the last six months of having him around that the musicians do nothing but talk about their copying and remix practices, at least in his field in Industrial Music, even on Facebook let alone on the dedicated music forums etc. and it seems to be there could be some very useful scraping and discourse analysis there. I’m not exactly sure but there’s this enormous amount of found evidence of what people actually say and do with their peers on social media. And since these are typically young people they typically don’t ‘privacy protect’ it either much to my amazement.

Another thought is services such as Twitter. I have seen and I’m sure you have too there was some experiment wasn’t there where they asked young artists whether they were in favour of copying or not and they just asked them to tweet with a hashtag like #procopying #anticopying. Obviously again this is not self-reflective but there are all these other sources of information so it’s just throwing out ideas. Another one in the paper I don’t think you had time to mention it while you were speaking but you mentioned looking at the amount of creative commons licence material that is out there because you can now put out your music with a creative commons attribution remix allowed, no commercial uses licence say and it struck me that that could be followed up, again it’s interviews but it’s slightly different empirically focused interviews to sort of find out where that music was put out like that maybe you could interview the person who put it out, you could interview the re-mixers and then go back and find out what they each thought of each other. And then it struck me, sorry there’s a whole chain of not very linear ideas here, that you could then do that with non-creative commons licence music and simply find a piece of music that has in some way been remixed or reused elsewhere and ask the two people on either side what they thought of it.

I think within the paper that I got to look at which was very good there was a suggestion that if interviews as a self-reflective entity are unreliable narratives then you said perhaps it would be better to look at litigated disputes and that takes you into this idea of talking to experts and so forth. Now I think that’s very interesting evidence but I think it’s a wholly different set of evidence. In the history of socio-legal work there was a very strong backlash against the idea of using reported cases as a guide to anything because they’re always regarded as the pathological top of the iceberg. The general lawyer’s line is if it’s got to court then it’s already a failure so three thousand percent of your cases will either not get to court at all and be sorted out informally or if they do get as far as lawyers they will be settled and it will be this tiny 0.01% that actually gets as far even as pleadings so to base evidence on that seems to me to be very pathological but interesting. So if you did get that evidence again it would be useful but it would have to be used within its own constraints rather as I think Angela was saying to try and discover which disputes are so embedded and appalling that people will not settle but it isn’t evidence of ordinary practice.

Last point a Cri de Coeur (French for “a cry from the heart”) is should we be thinking in advance about what policy recommendations would result from the questions you’re asking and the evidence you’re gathering. And this is a point that was brought up I think actually by an intervention by the music industry itself recently. In a state of nature we’d like to be social scientists that just go out and observe the world and gather all the data there is but that’s a kind of idealised world. Should we be pointing towards what policy interventions we might be thinking about recommending? So to give a silly example supposing you found that there was a gender difference, supposing you found that girl musicians were more in favour of remixing than boy musicians, would that point to any useful policy intervention? Law is meant to be universalist, we couldn’t ever recommend a remix right for girls and not boys, or we couldn’t recommend or could we a remix right for jazz and electronica but not for pop and classical. So this is one of the things I was thinking about was whether we need to think before we formulate our questions and I don’t know actually.

Questions and comments:

Dr Emily Laidlaw (University of East Anglia): My question is related to my own CREATe project. How you’re carrying out these types of interviews or doing it more as workshops where you’re interviewing groups of musicians, panel discussions or round tables or individually, passing out surveys online for example? And whether one’s more effective than the other and what problems you’ve had?

Dr Melanie Selfe (University of Glasgow): I guess it’s an observation about both of the last papers but highlighted by Keith’s noting of the wider availability of the means with which to note and see referencing within musical works. Are the same things true within fashion works through digital availability? We’ve always elite within both fashion and within music consumption of people who could see the references and there’s always been a pleasure of performing your knowledge of oh that’s just this added and this extra. As that becomes democratised does the knowledge of these things become devalued and therefore is that part of the climate in which it then turns back on the creators and the artists as opposed to it being enjoyed as a secret pleasure, as a secret knowledge of the few?

Dr Smita Kheria (University of Edinburgh): Yeah, I have a quick observation, the point Lillian made about not looking at court cases. I think it is quite interesting because a lot of IP enforcement takes place in the shadow of the law and the amount of settlement that takes place, and I think that the projects within CREATe which are looking at the practice of the IP practitioners for example Jane’s project and I think there’s a similar project looking at practitioner in England, I think perhaps there is something about having a correlation there, where they’ll be speaking to IP practitioners and then asking about how the process is negotiated but perhaps there is a connection in then finding out who are those clients? Why do they settle and why do they not settle? So I think that’s equally an interesting data if you want to look at attitudes towards copying, what does or does not happen because I do think that I we just restrict ourselves to the cases that went to court and have been reported or settled then it’s false.

Dr Keith Negus (responding to above questions and comments): Yes, we are looking at other sources, we’re trawling through all sorts of data looking at conversations about these issues. The reason we’re interested in expert witnesses is because they’re trained musicians and often they are prominent musicians who are called on, often they’re musicologists but some of them are well known composers who are called upon and they have an insight into the musicological or the musical, the creative issues that come up. How are the musicians and the creators called upon to defend themselves in musical terms? How are they called into account for using that melodic phrase or that rhythm or that timbre? But, not to detach that from the other interviews with musicians.

Finally, a point about policy intervention – the industry hasn’t looked at the voices of musicians. They’ve made all sorts of assumptions about how musicians work in all their arguments and their studies about why copyright should be enforced in such and such a away, but our aim is to have some finding that we can go and feed back to the industry on it but I don’t know whether it will be that fifteen year old girls prefer sampling compared to fifteen year old boys at this stage.

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