Intellectual Property as a Concept

A recent blog post I read concerned the concept of intellectual property and pointed out that the very concept of property is an intellectual construct. This got me thinking about how the music industry is always crying poor about people 'stealing' music. I find it no surprise that they are the ones crying the loudest about it, and they are the ones who reap (or perhaps we should say 'rape'...) the most profits from it. If artists truly were being harmed (as the music industry claims), wouldn't the artists themselves be up in arms? After all, there are a lot more artists (with many of them being celebrities) than there are industry representatives. One would think that if so many artists were concerned about their revenues, they'd be working a lot harder than they currently are.

With rare exceptions, most of the artists who have spoken out against filesharing being used to download music are those artists who are spoiled on their own success and don't have to worry about money (think Metallica, and 3 Doors Down) or have been out of the loop of success for a long time (Terry Kelly, Tracey Chapman). Many 'moderately' successful artists are pro-filesharing, and understand the opressive role of the music industry. It seems to me that those artists who have spoken out against music sharing are in a position to really not care all that much. Considering the cut of a CD cover price that the artists actually get, I wouldn't care whether a teenager in his mom's basement downloads my latest album either.

Even in Canada, the laws concerning music are stupid. The industry protests against piracy, yet they have a not-insignificant levy on every CD blank sold (which in some ways is a free license to copy), but the revenues from that levy are distributed according to airtime play and not whose music is actually pirated (which, I'll admit, is somewhat harder to gauge). Even if you hold the copyright to your own music, recorded, mastered, and played a CD of it (that you burned or otherwise produced yourself) in public, you'll probably get a threatening letter from SOCAN stating that you have to pay them money. Don't ask me about the logic of the whole situation: no doubt they'd sue street musicians who perform their own stuff if they could.