Copyright

The question I am going to address is:

What are the challenges faced by artists in the digital age when it comes to the ownership and sustainability of art?

There are many challenges faced by artists in the digital age when it comes to the ownership and sustainability of their art. Let's use music as a focus to answer this question. First, let's look at the 3 stages of copydom: perfection, freeness, and liquidity. Perfection is seen in both the analog and digital age. This perfection did not create too many challenges for artists as the perfection was solely used to design the modern world and make music modern. Freeness is when the challenges started coming in. Freeness made napster possible which made a music revolution possible; consumer were able to download music in mind-boggling numbers, but the real question is: what did they do with this music once they downloaded it? We can fool ourselves by thinking that all they did was listen to the music, however, the third stage of copydom came in to play: liquidity. Once music becomes digitized (freeness, napster), it becomes liquid. Once music becomes liquid, it can be morphed, migrated, flexed and linked, and from here you can filter it, archive it, rearrange it, and remix it. Thus, if consumer can manipulate music in all these ways, especially rearrange and remix it, then they can inevitably make it their own. This new creation from prior work is what we today call a Mash-Up. Many artists hate mash-ups because they feel that consumers can claim copyright over creations that have been influenced from prior works, but with digitization, music went from being a noun to a verb.

Music is becoming a commodity that is traded, co-created, and co-produced by a networked audience. This poses challenges for musicians because they are no longer in control, thus, copyright issues arise. Most of the music that consumer are manipulating come from online sources where there is a lack of enforcement of intellectual property laws. When someone is online at home sitting behind a computer, downloading various musical tracks, who is there to arrest them? What if the copyright laws where the artist resides or has created the music does not apply to the consumer downloading and manipulating because they reside in a different country? These are just a few of the many challanges faced by artists when it comes to their work.

signed,

g.i.a.c.w.