Capitalism, Copyright and Equality

Capitalism is the economic system that we currently use. It is a system of governance whereby companies are privately owned and in it to make a profit. In that companies are unlikely to be willing to share for free in the same way as the internet. This sharing for free would inhibit them from making a profit.

At the moment, the majority of governments have a system in place whereby companies own any ideas that they come up with, this is copyright (in this I am including a copyright spectrum, including patents). This is a very complex because to own a thought is to own something that does not in fact physically exist (an abstract idea). It is assumed that this encourages creativity because it allows the producers (in a capitalist system) to gain (often monetary) from their work by limiting what other people can do using their work (to grant someone license to use their idea, usually money is the gain).

This system of copyright is fine when you have a large number of people who have equal power to enforce their copyright (as should technically be possible in a democratic and free society), however, in our current society it has been weighted in favour of the richer producers, as they are the ones who can afford to pursue the people who have violated their copyright. This causes an inequality which means that essentially copyright only exists for those who can afford to maintain their copyright on an object, and normally results in a one way street in terms of free movement of intellectual goods.

There are however areas where creativity is stifled by copyright law. I feel one area that is affected massively is music. Music is, at the moment at least, controlled by record labels who are out to make money hand over fist. This is of course normal in a capitalist society, profit before anything else. Unfortunately this means that anything that can be grabbed onto as theirs will be and they will attempt to profit from it. Now, as we know, music is funny as it has a profound effect on humans emotionally and physically. We also know that music has been around since time in memorial, this means that really the ideas behind music have to have been around a long time before we “discovered” them. The unfortunate thing about this is that how music evolved was something to the tune of (pardon the pun) person creates song, person sings song to group, group learns how to sing song, song gets changed due to both intentional interference and Chinese-whisper effects, song gets changed (mixed in with other songs) but passed down indefinitely. This is essentially what we would now refer to as sampling, ie. using a musical pattern/idea in one song and playing with it to make a new song. We have never in history (until the practice of copyrighting became mainstream in the US in 1790 when the US government instated a copyright law) had a scenario where people were actively stopped from improving upon other people’s works. Now, I’m not debating here about “illegally” downloading files, just sampling but I feel that preventing people from taking musical ideas is all out bad.

Here’s a song written by a YouTube user roughly on this topic: