The CopyKat - prowling

In the wake of the jury’s verdict in the "Blurred Lines case", Marvin Gaye’s children have filed a new motion to list three record labels and rapper TI as responsible parties in the case – and thus also hold them accountable for the already decided copyright infringement by Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams. Gaye’s three children Nona, Frankie, and Marvin III, have also written and published an open letter, clarifying their motivations behind taking the copyright case to court on their father’s behalf. In the original trial, the jury exonerated TI and the recorded music labels and distributors Universal Music, Interscope Records and Williams’s Star Trak Entertainment of infringement. A second motions seeks to halt the sale and reproduction of Blurred Lines until both parties reach an agreement on how the Gayes “may share in the copyright and all future proceeds of Blurred Lines, as is their right”. More here.

Rapper and producer RZA says there should be a limit on how much an artist can recover if their songs are sampled without consent. Speaking at SXSW, the Wu-Tang Clan co-founder said that while artists who inspire should be paid, there should be a limit to how much they can demand, especially if the money isn't actually going to the artist: “Art is something that’s made to inspire the future," he said during his stay in Austin, according to the Daily Beast. "If you utilize somebody’s artistic expression blatantly, to [the point] where it’s an identifiable thing, then there should be some sort of compensation to the person who inspires you.” Arguing the sampling itself is creative and an art form, the Shaolin producer, known for crafting unexpected beats from esoteric samples, called for a 50% cap for retroactive payments of sampled material saying "There should be a cut off. Fifty percent is the most” commenting "The Greeks could come sue everybody because one generation teaches the other” and “When you hear an A chord to the D to the E, there are over one million songs with that same progression. And each one of their songs is identified as their own. The point being that art will continue to inspire the next generation, and we will find duplication” before going on to reveal "“I’ve been in situations where I’ve sampled something and the original copyright holder took 90 percent .... That means they ignored all the programming, drumming, keyboard playing I played on top of it, they ignored every lyric, every hook, everything that we built to make it a song. And we wound up selling more copies than the sample[d] version—but yet they took 90 percent of the song.”

And Grammy winner John Legend is also concerned that the Blurred Lines verdict could set a worying precedent for artists creating music inspired by others. The Grammy winner told the Associated Press he understands why people say Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke's 2013 hit sounds like Marvin Gaye's Got To Give It Up from 1977, adding: 'I said that when I first heard it, too.' But he said he doesn't agree with the jury that determined the performers actually copied elements of Marvin's work but said  "There's a lot of music out there, and there's a lot of things that feel like other things that are influenced by other things" adding "And you don't want to get into that thing where all of us are suing each other all the time because this and that song feels like another song.'"

More copyright, more "Quality Works"? Not quite but maybe, says a study of Italian opera before 1900. As Italy had a wide variety of copyright law provisions until  the late 1860s when Italy itself was finally unified, Stanford economists Petra Moser and Michela Giorcelli compared the varying degrees of copyright protection to the output of operas, compiling a database of more than 2,598 Italian operas written between 1770 and 1900 - and then looked at the longevity of each opera right up to how many recordings of any opera were available in 2014 on Amazon. Vox explains "Copyright laws seem to have created significantly more operas that also had staying power and were of higher quality" and details:  "States with copyrights ended up producing 2.68 additional operas per year, a 121 percent increase over states without copyrights. Historically popular operas (as measured by the 1978 publication, the Annales of Opera 1597-1940) grew by 47 percent, and durable operas [those available on Amazon in 2014] grew by 80 percent.”

Is copyright a human right? Well, the United Nations Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, Farida Shaheed, has presented the first of two consecutive studies, “Copyright Policy and the Right to Science and Culture,” at the 28th Session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva. Shaheed addressed copyright law and policy issues, examining how they may run counter to human rights. The second part of her report will be submitted to the UN General Assembly later this year addressing the connection between the right to science and culture and patent policy. More by Pauline Lee on the excellent Washington College of Law website here.

And finally, The Verge tells us that after pressure from campaigners, SpaceX has published a first batch of more than 100 photos on Flickr under a Creative Commons license. The decision gives the public the ability to download and remix the images freely (as long as they're attributed properly) and has been welcomed as a success for both space fans and copyright advocates. Unlike images of space published by NASA, SpaceX's photos do have some rights reserved, meaning they can't be used for commercial purposes. SpaceX "designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets."

"Won't deliver, doesn't deliver?" When it comes to evidence, can economists deliver?

In an era in which evidence-based law reform is the gold standard and pressure-groups are damned as practitioners of the dark art of lobbynomics, we are beginning to disbelieve a great deal of what we hear from groups and organisations which formerly were our main sources of information. It's therefore worth asking the question: "does the fact that the Alliance Against IP Theft is both pro-copyright and pro-enforcement undermine its objectivity when it comes to making pronouncements about the economic impact of copyright reform proposals?"  Arguably the answer is "no" when the opinion which it articulates comes from a respectable, objective and methodologically rigorous economics research body such as Oxford Economics.

According to the Alliance:

"Copyright reform won’t deliver predicted growth

The Alliance Against IP Theft has [on Wednesday] published an analysis from Oxford Economics of the Government’s Consultation on Copyright which found its economics seriously lacking. ...

The Government is looking to the recommendations in the Consultation to encourage economic growth and increase UK GDP. In this first detailed economic analysis of specific aspects of the Consultation, Oxford Economics finds that that the assumptions made are overly optimistic in a number of cases, lack economic rigour, and fail to adequately analyse of the harm they may cause to existing industries that rely on copyright.

The report found that:

• A number of the Consultation’s Economic Impact Assessments lack neutrality and fail to take the interests of producers of content sufficiently into account. Whilst time appears to have been taken attempting to quantify the benefits of reform, there has been little analysis of the costs associated with the reform.
• There is a lack of empirical evidence to suggest that copyright is economically inefficient to start with [interesting point: this blogger has been led to believe that economic inefficiency is a given in the case of every IP right, since it distorts market efficiency by its mere existence. Can we put economics to demonstrate empirical proof of the validity of their own discipline?].
• Several of the Impact Assessments fail to provide sufficient evidence to warrant changes to the copyright framework.
• The Consultation’s predictions regarding the growth that would accrue from changes to the copyright framework may be overly optimistic.

Commenting on the analysis, Susie Winter, Director General of the Alliance Against IP Theft said:

“Today’s analysis supports what we all instinctively knew – that a number of the Government’s proposals for reform are based on bad economics and won’t deliver anywhere near the predicted economic growth.

“We believe that copyright sectors can contribute to the UK’s economic growth, but the Consultation is looking in the wrong place to stimulate increased GDP. If these reforms go ahead they are likely to be damaging to our economy and simply siphon off money to global tech giants from our British creators.

We urge the Government to think again before ploughing ahead with its proposals”.

Given the tight time limits imposed on the UK's copyright reform exercise, it would be surprising if any cogent evidence in support or or against copyright reform could be obtained, analysed and integrated into a single picture. Even if it could, it would need to be separated out again since every market sector behaves differently while IP legislation is presumed to be enacted on the basis of one-size-fits-every-market.

Rather than keeping on taking short, staccato stabs at copyright reform, as the UK government has been doing on a regular basis over the past decade or so, wouldn't it have been better to let reform progress at a pace at which the competing voices of creators, consumers, performers, investors and carriers can be heard and properly understood?  The very worst that could have happened is that the current system would carry on until a replacement was devised to replace it.

You can read the Oxford Economics report in full here (thanks go to Amy Bourke for finding the link).