What would copyright designed by artists look like ?

Copyright as we know it originated in the English printing industry of the 16^th century. Since then, British writers have monopoly copy-rights they can sell to printers, who are, as we all know, the only people capable of reproducing books. This applied to printed music, and today, it also applies to recorded music and all other expressions of creativity that can be bound to tangible media. This is a nice, working system as long as printers (record companies) are the only ones capable of reproducing a work, and pay the artist adequately for the multiplication, which they fully control.

It should be obvious to anyone with the technology to access this blog that record companies (and publishing companies...) are no longer the only people capable of copying music (or printed works). Since copyright law and copyright contracts are still stuck in the Cold War era, which is exactly where the record companies want them, this is kind of a problem.

All this is no new argument, and some people are fighting against the situation: Some independent artists are going the way of the GNU, but they are few. Some have founded Pirate Parties, but most of them aren't artists, and they are realistically almost irrelevant. Now, there might be a new player around: On Saturday, October 4, British musicians united to create the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC).

I'm not sure what to think of this. While the Süddeutsche Zeitung jokes about it being a union of super-rich non-working-class pop stars that want more money (like all unions) on the front page of today's paper, I'm sceptical mostly because I don't know what they'll actually do, and what will effectively happen.

Their charter is directed at artist-company deals: they don't want to sell their rights. I fully agree with this; I actually don't think artists should be able the legal construction that is copyright completely: IF there is copyright at all, the originator should always have it. This, along with the demands for transparency, is important, and the most prominent part of the campaign, but I think another part is a lot more important:

Copyright owners to be obliged to follow a ‘use it or lose it’ approach to the copyrights they control. Despite new technology, many copyright owners fail to release recordings to the public. As a result many artists lose out and fans can only access such material illegally. A ‘use it or lose it’ contractual provision should automatically apply so that an artists’ work is always available for legal purchase by the public, digitally and physically.

While the solution they half-propose might not change a lot (we might see some day), the train of thought is an important one (see Lessig, Free Culture, ch. 5 Piracy) Might this get the ball rolling ?

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