Music, law & plagiarism. Simon Anderson & Guy Osborn explain why copyright compromises could promote harmony in the music industry
The issue of copying within the music industry is a longstanding one. ‘Home taping is killing music’ was a well-known refrain in the 1980s as part of a campaign to stop consumers using cassette recorders to make copies of albums. The issue became more pronounced with the rise of digitisation, and particularly the inception of file sharing and the use of torrents, culminating in a series of high profile legal challenges against Napster and Pirate Bay among others.
From a creative perspective copying has long been contentious, again exacerbated by the advent of digitisation, facilitating as it has, practices such as sound sampling, which have thrown issues of originality and creation into sharp relief. Yet there is a clear, and usually obvious distinction to be made between copying an entire musical work for personal consumption and copying part of a work for commercial gain. This piece focuses on the latter
