This is a website dedicated to gathering resources, information, and opinion about debates in the broad field of music and copyright. It has grown out of Anthony McCann's work on Irish traditional music, music and copyright, and enclosure and the commons.

It is hoped that this site will serve those who wish to lobby for greater fairness and more accountability with regard to issues of music and copyright. This site is also to be a forum for alternative, resistant voices, drawing attention to many aspects of copyright thinking in musical contexts that simply don't make an awful lot of sense.

It is hoped that the site will eventually host a weblog or weblogs, article archives, forums, message boards, and other things to foster a wider community of discourse with relation to issues of music and copyright.

This website is not here to champion copyright in music. There are many other websites that do that, and many are listed in the resources below.

If you would like to contribute an article or an opinion to this site, or if you would simply like to use this site to raise awareness about music and copyright problems you have encountered, please contact me at songcraft [at] yahoo.com  

Resources

Copyright Bibliographies on the Web

General Music and Copyright links

General Music and Copyright bibliography
Hosted by the Popular Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Music and Fair Use links

Music and Fair Use bibliography

Anthony McCann's 2002 "Beyond the Commons" Ph.D. Dissertation
The Expansion of the Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO), the Elimination of Uncertainty, and the Politics of Enclosure.

Law in the Music School Setting
An article by A. J. Sciarrino, author of The Law and Rock 'n' Roll

Copyright, the Publican, and the Collectors
A 1996 article by Irish journalist and musician Fintan Vallely on IMRO and Irish Traditional Music (1996):

Bluegrass and Performing Rights
These pages were donated by champion banjo player Mike Allen after research he conducted in the early 1990s into music and copyright debates in the context of bluegrass performance in the United States.

All That Is Not Given is Lost: Irish Traditional Music, Copyright, and Common Property (PDF).
This paper was published in 2001 by Anthony McCann in the journal Ethnomusicology. A partial critique of this article can be found in Chapter 1 of McCann's Beyond the Commons dissertation (above)

Who Owns the Tunes?: An Exploration of Composition Ownership in Irish Traditional Music
This article was donated by Margaret Farrell and is in part a critical response to Anthony McCann's "All That is Given" article (above).

Irish Traditional Music and the Copyright Debate.
An article by Anthony McCann that summarizes some of the main issues of his Ph.D. disseration (above). This article was published in the annual magazine Irish Folk Festival (Petr Pandula, ed.) in September 2003.

Irische traditionelle Musik und die Diskussion über Urheberrechte.
The same article in German, translated by Petr Pandula.

Anthony McCann's Music and Copyright Syllabus 2004 (draft)

"It Seems to be Getting Worse" This is the powerpoint presentation of a talk entitled "“It seems to be getting worse”: Intellectual Property, Discursive Feedback, and the Commodification of Ethnomusicology," which Anthony McCann presented at the Society for Ethnomusicology annual conference in Tucson, Arizona, on November 6, 2004.

"Wer darf das Lied singen? Musikethnologische Anmerkungen zum rechtlichen Status traditioneller Musikkulturen"
"Who is Allowed to Sing the Ritual Chant: Notes on the Legal Status of Traditional Music."
These articles were written and donated by Marc-Antoine Camp. The second is a translation of the first.