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Recording Industry Doesn't Even Have To Sue To Carry Out Agenda
from the chilling-effects dept
Another scary story from Ed Felten: It seems a company developing a multi-player game killed a feature that would let characters create music, fearing reprisals from record labels over copyright infringement. This is what it has come to now: The litigious and chilling atmosphere created by the recording industry has led to situations where people are afraid to enable perfectly legal music-making out of the (not that unreasonable) fear of getting sued for their customers' possible making of copyrighted music. Felten highlights the slippery slope here with the analogy that these virtual instruments are basically the same as real-world synthesizers, which are widely used to play music both copyrighted and not. This gives me a great idea for dealing with the upstairs neighbor's annoying 80's-cover-band rehearsals. The next time he keeps us up with his repetitive synthesizer riffs, we'll just call the RIAA.
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Recording industry
Exactly. So, let us all rush out and copyright each and every twang that we can get out of our musical instruments. Then you just have to sit back and relax....and sue for royalty from anyone who reproduces THAT twang.
May be by 2010, we need to pay royalty to 20th century or oxford everytime we use a word other than a, an or the.
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music
Well if I was a maker of musical instruments, I would be scared as well, why I would get sued by RIAA because a drum I make can be used to create msuic that may be copyrighted...
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Copyrighting a single note
I don’t know much about American copyright law, but I was wondering: what if you wrote a song that had a single note, could you copyright it? If you could, could you then copyright a number of different songs, each one compsed with a single note? Then, theoretically, couldn’t you charge everyone in the world with copyright infringement?
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