Tribute and comment a.k.a stealing?

VIDEO: Sally Gross, professor of Music Media Business on the conflict between old and new art

READ : Fans are falling foul of copyright law when they pay tribute to music, art and artists.

Fans paying tribute to their favourite artists online are being told they’re breaking the law and are being banned from video sharing sites for copyright infringement.

I didn’t consider what I was doing as illegal,” says Thomas Risell aka MarloweDK, who has had his YouTube account suspended for copyright violation. “I just thought I was ‘spreading the word’ on great music.”

Thomas’ home videos had him practicing and playing bass on his favourite songs. “The playalongs helped a lot of people to learn or get inspired by my renditions of the particular songs. Many of my viewers have bought the originals after hearing my work,” he adds.

According to YouTomb, an MIT research initiative tracking videos being taken down from the video sharing sites, over 19,000 of the 362,939 videos being monitored had been taken down (till July 2009) for alleged copyright violation.

Many of these videos include remixes, covers by bedroom artists, mash-ups or parodies.

Living Room Rock Gods, a group of amateur guitarists playing non commercial covers of their favourite songs, have objected to the “abuse” of copyright law that they say “[prevents] us playing our instruments, using our cameras, in our homes, sharing our skills and our techniques with our friends.”

Tribute or plagiarism?

Under current intellectual property laws, any digital information published online is automatically under copyright laws. So if a fan puts up a movie still found on Google Image search on a blog post about how much ‘I LOVE the new Harry Potter movie,’ they are technically violating copyright.

Artists are finding a way around this by licensing their works under the Creative Copyright license. With this, they are effectively implying that their fans, obsessive or otherwise, have as important a role to play in transfer of information as the original author.

“There are two types of fans,” says Kerrin. “The traditional fan that enjoys the music, tells all their friends and forces it upon them in their car and house, and then there’s the fan that takes advantage of the CC license.

“They use whatever skills they have to add art to the music, whether that is a video, remix, a cover, or even just art inspired by the music.”

Copyright law on ‘fair use’ protects the use of copyright material for purposes such as critique, parody, satire and education in many countries. However simple tributes by fans are not covered under this provision.

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