I received a violation on a video I uploaded. It was of a neighborhood bicycle parade held on the 4th of July. Unfortunately for me, included in the parade was a boombox playing Stars and Stripes Forever in the background, so guess what? Youtube copyright violation. There's no way to remove just the music, so essentially I can't post the video. I don't think this is what our country's founders had in mind.
1) The government should never have SOLD the spectrum. It should always be leased and for a fairly short term, say 5 years. That would give the FCC the leverage they need to bring the carriers in line.
This made me think of a new business model for music...It would be similar to equities investments. 'Investors' would buy 'shares' in a song, the proceeds going to the artist. Subsequent sales and royalties from the song would be paid to the investors as dividends based on some formula. It could even evolve into a common market similar to mutual funds. Just a thought...
I'm, too, am not surprised by the outcome of this, but it raises questions for me.
What if I'm in really good Beatles cover band and we get so good that it is not possible for a human to tell the difference between our recording and the original. Are we violating copyright?
Now, what if I analyze the acoustic characteristics of a band and encode that in an application that, given the musical notation and words can replicate the song. How does this electronic cover band differ from the human cover band?
Since the songs are digitized, they are just one long number. You can't copyright the number 2, you can't copyright the number 1,234,567,890,234,345,345,345, so why can anyone legally prevent the sharing of the large number that is any digital file?
What if I share a file containing a number that when multiplied by the number in another file shared by someone else yields a close approximation of the number that in mp3-land yields a copyrighted song. Does my file violate copyright?
What if there are 10 files to multiply, and in the end must be multiplied by 2 to yield the song. Does the file containing the number 2 violate copyright? The possibilities are endless.
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