So, all in all, I really have no idea how to feel about copyright.  I like that, in theory, it protects individual content creators from having their work stolen from them, and ensures that they’ll receive compensation for their work. However, in practice, most of the time it’s being used by corporations to enclose old popular works and keep them from lapsing into the public domain so that the corporations can continue to profit on them.  On the other hand, I have little sympathy for artists like Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams, who didn’t really create anything new or different at all. Complicating matters further, though, I do feel sympathetic towards artists like NWA or Public Enemy, who sampled pieces of music they didn’t own.  Even though that is definitely outright theft of copyrighted material that they don’t own, they changed it, made it new and different, made it their own, transforming the sample into something much less like the original than the knock-offs created by Thicke and Williams, by Sam Smith, and even by George Harrison, whom I personally love.  I enjoy listening to My Sweet Lord, even knowing full well that it’s a rip-off of He’s So Fine, but I do agree that Harrison’s estate should be sharing the royalties with the Chiffons. I think in my ideal world, people would be able to sample music, but there’d be some sort of revenue-sharing system in place where the original content creator and the sampler could both claim some credit.  But, I’m not sure how I’d want to extend that courtesy to people who write songs that are clearly “inspired by” other songs to a greater or lesser extent.  Just changing the key and the tempo isn’t enough. Ideally, I’d want there to be some sort of rule that you have to have created something different in some meaningful way, but I have no idea how to measure that, and even if I did, ruling on that in a court of law would be nigh-impossible.

This class always asks more questions than it answers, and that can be frustrating.  However, my beliefs clearly aren’t really logically consistent in any meaningful way, and I need to figure out why that is.