JOHN OSWALD DEAD OR ALIVE (3)

BLANK TAPE IS DERIVATE, NOTHING OF ITSELF

Way back in 1976, ninety nine years after Edison went into the record business, the U.S. Copyright Act was revised to protect sound recordings in that country for the first time. Before this, only written music was considered eligible for protection. Forms of music that were not intelligible to the human eye were deemed ineligible. The traditional attitude was that recordings were not artistic creations, "but mere uses or applications of creative works in the form of physical objects."⁵

Some music oriented organizations still retain this 'view'. The current Canadian Act came into being in 1924, an electric eon later than the original U.S. Act of l909, and up here "copyright does subsist in records, perforated rolls and other contrivances by means of which sounds may be mechanically reproduced."

Of course the capabilities of mechanical contrivances are now more diverse than anyone back at the turn of the century forecasted, but now the real headache for the writers of copyright is the new electronic contrivances, including digital samplers of sound and their accountant cousins, computers. Among "the intimate cultural secretions of electronic, biological, and written communicative media"⁶ the electronic brain business is cultivating, by grace of its relative youth, pioneering creativity and a corresponding conniving ingenuity. The popular intrigue of computer theft has inspired cinematic and paperback thrillers while the robbery of music is restricted to elementary poaching and blundering innocence. The plots are trivial: Disney accuses Sony of conspiring with consumers to make unauthorized mice⁷. Former Beatle George Harrison is found guilty of an indiscretion in choosing a vaguely familiar sequence of pitches.⁸

The dubbing-in-the-privacy-of-your-own-home controversy is actually the tip of a hot iceberg of rudimentary creativity. After decades of being the passive recipients of music in packages, listeners now have the means to assemble their own choices, to separate pleasures from the filler. They are dubbing a variety of sounds from around the world, or at least from the breadth of their record collections, making compilations of a diversity unavailable from the music industry, with its circumscribed stables of artists, and an ever more pervasive policy of only supplying the common denominator.

The Chiffons/Harrison case, and the general accountability of melodic originality, indicates a continuing concern for what amounts to the equivalent of a squabble over the patents to the Edison cylinder.

Toronto, verano del 85