Transforming Freedom

A short history of Law and Media about the fugitive Conduct of Music in the time of its enhanced Ownability

Date: Freitag, 15.2.2008
Time: 7 PM
Location: Museumsquartier, Quarter for Digital Culture, Raum D /quartier 21

Today, any musical recordings is covered by several separate layers of immaterial rights. Uses of music are strictly regulated by copyright collectives, which have set fixed rates on how much music is worth and how a large part of the money should go to to different actors including record companies and music publishers. Other uses, like creating music out of samples, are practically banned or have to operate in a grey zone. How did we get here?

Copyright, and its philosophical foundation in the distinction between “ideas” and “expressions”, was once constructed only to cover written text. Soon, it expanded to written music. However, stretching copyright to covering the musical sounds as such is something completely different. It took a long time to develop, even after the advent of musical recording. Referring to his ongoing historical research, Rasmus Fleischer will show how this development began as a unionist struggle to resist the supposed `mechanization´ of music and defend live music against the economy of reproduction – but how the age of digitalization rather turned the result into the opposite.

His talk will include examples of the resistance against tape recorders, DJ:ing and synthesizers, as well as presenting audio-visual examples of how older and newer kinds of artistic practice are colliding with the established notion of musical copyright. What he will not present, however, is a recipe for the future.

Rasmus Fleischer is a musician, a historician and one of the co-founders of the Swedish Pirate Office. (Photo by Malin Arnesson, on the right: Markus Nieminen: source)