Copyright Information

Ever since the Internet became the black market for the illegal music downloads, the music copyright law has been subjected to public scrutiny, as well as extensive revisions and additional definitions. The Napster case started it all, the publicity attracted the TV camera hungry legislators and dozens of legislative measures were taken. From the relatively easy understandable copyright law, empowering the composer to control his work is a whole far-reaching law construed with bylaws and paragraphs to make the best lawyer dizzy. Was this really necessary? There has always been and will always be pirates selling illegal copies of music recordings. Back in the days, when there were no CDs, the records were still on vinyl and tape cassettes, we all made tapes of our favorite music and nobody got jailed for that. Today, if you make a copy of your own original CD, you may get prosecuted, if you download one song from the net, you may get a fine ranging from anywhere around ten thousand dollars to up to unlimited, depending how large the lawyer's fee is this week. It just happened that the IFPI, which is the primary organization hunting the pirates, chooses to focus on underage teenagers and grandmothers (both cases which ended in favor of the record companies, subjecting the poor people who never sold one song for own profit, but downloaded them for own enjoyment) and completely missing the big picture here. The teenager or the grandma wouldn't have bought the CD anyway. Other than Metallica and some other music stars, not many musicians actually pursued this hike against fans, some even used this distribution method to raise interest in their recording, like Radiohead, who released an album months in advance to the actual CD release, fueling immense interest which lead to the CD, right after issuance, to hit the top spot in the Billboard 200. But the ignorance of the industry behemoths and pursuance of copyright at any cost, even without the blessing of most copyright holders, lowered the actual sales of records, because the companies neglected to listen to the customer and pursued their own exploiting methods. The public listened to the music online and found out that most CDs were bad indeed and did not buy them for the just one hit song that was on them. Instead, legal online download facilities, like iTunes and the ones from Amazon.com and similar businesses took over. Nobody went to the CD stores anymore. These copyright laws brought nothing good for the musician or the customer. They just provided an excuse to the big record companies why their offered music got lousy and henceforth not bought.