Rattle wrote:

] I think what NIN and Interscope is doing here is quite fair.
] They are reserving commercial usage of the track for
] themselves. Non-commercial usage is just fine with them. If
] you are making money, they are going to want a piece. Its
] their asset; they invested the money to have it created. You
] are using it.
]
] What really matters, is if you do have a commercial usage for
] the material they have released, how are they going to handle
] it? Repackaging in different forms is also an issue. Are
] they just going to flat out say 'no'? Or are they going to
] have unreasonable terms? These are very valid questions..
] However, if someone wants to reserve their right to profit
] from their works, that should be regarded as ok. Anything
] else is a form of extremism. Nothing about this closes the
] door to using it commercially, you just have to contact them.
] As it all stands right now, this is still an increase of the
] freedoms granted to the end user. No matter which way I look
] at it, its a step in the right direction.

I guess this is the heart of the matter right here. True that NIN invested in creating the piece and has a right to attempt to make a return on that investment (notice that I didn't say DESERVES to make a return, it's a free market!). But this gets to the ridiculousness of intellectual property. How can you copyright a sound? A drum hit? Or a guitar sound? I can understand that you can copyright a melody (since it's the arrangement of sounds in a particular order, producing a comprehensive product), but this is still in the grey area to some degree, as there is a finite set of combinations.

It's like saying that you can copyright hydrogen since it makes up a large portion of Kool-Aid. The idea that you can protect a specific set of sound waves (or pixels, or whatever) from being reused, repurposed, or manipulated is absurd. The whole notion smack of greed, not creativity, expression, or the concept of sharing for the benefit of all participants.

And this is what's turning this country into a legal mind field when it comes to ideas, innovation, and creativity. What counts is EXECUTION. If you truly believe in the free market system that capitalism is founded on, then you should also believe that ideas themselves are worthless. The only value is in the execution, and that the market determines not only which ideas live and die, but which execution supports the idea best. If content was closer to freely exchanged, then you'd have a larger funnel for ideas and concepts, more experimentation (particularly work built on the shoulders of others work) and hence, a larger 'gene pool' of potential to which the strongest concepts would get the strongest execution and development. And reap the largest rewards.

Imagine a world where radical thinking and innovation is promoted instead of stiffled because of IP laws barring you from experimenting, using previous work, or even developing something that's even been conceived previously. In all of human history, has there ever been a successful innovation or creative endeavor that was nurtured in a vacuum? Why are we going down this road? What positive effect can it possibly have?

RE: Boing Boing: NIN's Trent Reznor releases song as GarageBand file