In this comment on Brett’s post, Joe Pribek sent a chill down my spine:
Personally, I would not release a cover song for free over the internet. The nature of the digital world is that data doesn’t disappear. Over a period of time, even at a couple hundred a year, the downloads would add up and at some point the copyright owner could demand the mechanical royalty for each download.
Ok, so you bang out “Proud Mary” on the acoustic, put it up on Blogger and forget about it. Ten years later a bill arrives to remind you that the page is still there and that you have been accumulating debt the entire time.
This is why I want to be “over on the lagging edge with Pirate Bay”, as you said in a later post, uploading torrents.
If I can get away with pirating music on it, then I can get away with releasing any music I should happen to make. Even if it’s a transformative work based on something I’m not supposed to transform.
This is why the world of piracy is more interesting to me than the world of Creative Commons. In the former, there are NO legally imposed artistic limitations. In fact, Creative Commons is worse than standard copyright, because there’s community pressure to obey the restrictions (contrast with the custom of unauthorized sampling in underground industrial music, for example).
You quoted someone more recently who described plunderphonics as “quaint”. Well, good luck finding something CC-licensed that resonates with the public the way U2 and Casey Kasem did in 1991. As long as there’s stuff in popular culture that’s copyrighted, we have an artistic Gordian knot that nothing but piracy will cut. That’s why groups like The Pirate Bay, for defending our right to copy, have my full support.
BTW, your blog is interesting and I’ll probably keep reading.
Great comment, even though I submit that it is ultimately pussy to go along with a way of doing things that makes your own music piratical. Letting other people do that to you is ridiculous. The CC world is like straight edge. It takes control of the situation via complete rejection.
But what do I know? I am obviously wrong in any way that you could measure with popularity of music.