Music copyright is a very hot issue at the moment, and so Lost in CCI recommends a recently published and highly topical special issue of the journal Information, Communication and Society (Vol 12.2) edited by CMCI’s Professor Andy Pratt with Martin Kretschmer.
The article is titled: ‘ Copyright, and the Production of Music’, and here is a web cast of Martin and Andy in a discussion at the Oxford Internet Institute accessible from the journal web page, http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g910534795
Martin and Andy’s editorial is ‘LEGAL FORM AND CULTURAL SYMBOL: Music, copyright, and information and communications studies’. In it they argue that writers in information and communication studies often assume the stability of objects under investigation: network nodes, databases, information. Legal writers in the intellectual property tradition often assume that cultural artefacts exist as objects prior to being governed by copyright law. Both assumptions are fallacious.
Their introduction conceptualizes the relationship of legal form and cultural symbol. Starting from an understanding of copyright law as part of systems of cultural production, it is argued that copyright law constructs the artefacts it seeks to regulate as objects that can be bought and sold. In doing so, the legal and aesthetic logic of cultural symbols may clash, as in the case of digital music (the central focus of this special issue).
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