Posted by Mister X aka Kim on July 14, 1999 at 08:53:33:

In Reply to: Re: Respect posted by Ming on July 14, 1999 at 07:31:40:

: : I think all of this is a cause of disrespecting
: : your fellow artists. Why would you like to rip
: : music and pretend it's yours? I really would
: : feel bad with the idea.

: So would I. But thruth is, there is the occational creep that would do it. Datīs the problem ya know.

Absolutely, if there were mutual respect for
everyone, there would be no need for Law
Enforcement at all. Problem is that there are
people with no respect for other people, or the
law, and in those cases *someone* has to set the
rules and enforce them.

: : Just as long as there are people who DON't care,
: : it's a matter of yourself. If you don't want your
: : music to be stolen, you could copyright it
: : yourself...

: All music, art or artistic text (books, lyrics) you write are by default copyright protected. To prove this is originally your stuff in a legal conflict is what is hard.

Right. Which I think is where ICOMM (or IADAP or
whatever) will really come in handy. However, as
Tracey has mentioned in her post to this board, it
will take a lot of time and effort to make the
organization successful. The way that I am seeing
things unfold, it looks as though ICOMM would be
sort of a "Supreme Court" in the matter of "Who's
Song Is It?" It can really get complicated.

So far, I see that ICOMM would need to:

1) Keep track of authors/songs.
2) Evaluate complaints against an author accused of stealing another's work. (I move that instead of calling this person a "Ripper", we refer to them as a "Carbonizer", just to avoid the confusion with sample ripping...) (c:
3) Follow-up on complaints that are found to have merit, and take appropriate action against the offender.

Personally, I am against the password-protection
of the MOD files. I know that there could be
multiple levels of passwords and such, but does
an artist really want to bother with sending the
username and password to everyone who wants a peek
at his samples? To avoid this, they will probably
put the password in the ZIP archive along with the
song, and then, what is the point?

I think that we should strive to keep the MOD file
formats "Open Source" - I think that many of us
learned how to track by examining the patterns in
tracks that we enjoyed, and by using samples that
we grabbed from this song and that one, and
playing around. We certainly do not want to take
that away from the newcomers to the scene.

What we need is to eliminate the fear of "Open
Source". Get the message out that these songs are free to listen to, free to distribute and
free to learn from, but that the listener is not
free to call it their own.

Sure, in a perfect world, there would be mutual
respect for everyone and an author would always
give the proper credit for the samples that s/he
used, and he would never simply change the info
in the song to his/her own. But, we have seen
that people are born Opportunists, and when they
see the chance to make easy money, they take it.

If we can nip this in the bud, and get the message
out about what our intentions for our music are,
perhaps there will not be another "DJ Carbon" to
deal with in the future.

Mister X aka Kim


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