MIDI hobbyists face harsh reality

The development of cheap sound cards for personal computers opened up new worlds for hobbyist musicians. Amateurs could now record multi-part ensemble pieces, or even fully-orchestrated instrumental music, using the MIDI music standards adopted in the 1980s.

MIDI lovers, like many hobbyists in general, saw the internet as a great way to link up with one another. A number of folks gathered around the America Online MIDI forum, several newsgroups, and a host of personal websites devoted to MIDI music. We saw it as a kind of electronic "open mike", where we could share arrangement ideas, MIDI techniques, and maybe do some un-realtime electronic jamming together.

Like amateur realtime musicians, many MIDI arrangers and sequencers do "covers" of copyrighted popular tunes. Playing such music informally, in private, is OK ... the private enjoyment of copyrighted works is one of the few priveleges still reserved for the public. Problems arise when the covers are published or performed in public. And the current interpretation of copyright law is that anything on the internet is considered to be published.

Most folks didn't realize that what we were doing online was technically in violation of the copyright statutes. We in the MIDI community didn't consider ourselves as pirates; we weren't selling the MIDI files or attempting to profit from our hobby. We didn't feel that our activity was causing any harm to the artists; rather, most MIDI arrangers considered that doing a cover arrangement was a tribute to the original artist.

Things changed drastically in the later 1990s when the internet was privatized, and rebuilt as a commercial medium. Existing copyright owners took steps to ensure that their rights were preserved in cyberspace.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) launched its crusade against Napster, MP3.com, and all the folks swapping MP3 files online. And there were a great many lower-profile campaigns, by rights owners, against unlicensed content online .

The Harry Fox Agency, the licensing enforcement arm of the National Music Publishers Association, took an extremely hard line against any websites or online services containing MIDI files or other forms of copyrighted music. They are responsible for the closing of the America Online MIDI forum, the International Lyrics Server, the Online Guitar Archive, and even personal websites and homepages.

What can we do?

To stay on the sunny side of the law, we would have to obtain licenses for our websites. This could cost us over a thousand dollars per year. Unfortunately, the same restrictions apply to both non-commercial personal homepages and the giant dot-coms overflowing with cash from over-inflated IPOs. This is simply beyond the means of most amateur, hobbyist musicians and website operators, and many have shut down their sites.

Some of us -- MIDI musicians, website operators, and MIDI music lovers -- have joined together to attempt to save our sites. What we want are reasonable, affordable licensing fees, or some slack in the copyright statutes for non-profit, personal websites ... possibly an extension of the "fair use" doctrine to include not-for-profit, personal online uses of copyrighted content.

Broader issues, it seems

Our first reaction to the copyright crackdown was "how can we keep playing in our sandbox?". We knew music and computers, but didn't know squat about copyright. As we plunged into the dark and murky world of intellectual property law, the problems magnified, and we saw much broader implications for the internet and society in general.

Our founding fathers devised copyright, and intellectual property law generally, as a balance of rights between creators and the public. Their goal was to promote the public enjoyment of artistic and scientific creations. Creators and authors were given limited, temporary rights to profit from their works, as an incentive for them to produce the works, so that the public and society in general might benefit.

Since then, unfortunately, copyright law gets crafted and tweaked at meetings and conferences where the rights owners are all sitting around the table, but nobody is sitting as advocate for the rights reserved to the public. So the laws more and more favor the owners, at the expense of society at large.

We quickly realized that we didn't exactly have a budget for lobbyists to buttonhole members of the Judiciary Committee. The lobby for bars, clubs, and restaurants succeeded in getting an exemption from paying royalties in "small" establishments. And Disney succeeded in getting an extension to the copyright term (the length of time before a work goes into the public domain). So in Washington, money talks ... the "concerned citizen" is lucky to get a form letter. Without money, we would have to get lots of folks to make lots of noise.

Further, lobbying Congress to liberalize U.S. laws would not be enough. Efforts to normalize trade internationally, like the goals of the World Trade Organization, also aim for uniform intellectual property laws across the globe. And it seems that organizations like the WTO act much more in the interests of multinational corporations than the public interest.

Finally, the internet is coming to be known as a place to make lots of money. In only a few years, the term "dot-com" became synonymous with the internet. The old democratic ideals -- that it should be accessible to all, for free expression, and sharing information -- are rapidly dying. In older electronic media, the FCC must at least make token gestures to the public interest. But who is looking out for the public interest in cyberspace?

interesting times

We find ourselves at an interesting point in our history. The online world is becoming more than just new media ... soon a large portion of human culture will be only found on the net. Should our cultural heritage be private property, or does it belong to everyone? Who files the rights infringement lawsuits over content in the public domain?

So large public policy issues loom ahead. Will this new world be one giant cyber-mall, dominated by the same multinational corporations that now dominate older electronic media? Will there be an online equivalent to public TV and radio?

It may be some time before we can legally, affordably publish MIDI covers online ... in the meantime, there are larger questions we need to address. At this point, let me mention some good folks who are working hard for the public interest in cyberspace (see sidebar). There are many issues:

Finally, I'd like to talk about an idea from the good folks at the Berkman Center: the Digital Commons.

This idea attempts to extrapolate from the idea of open-source software, born in the GNU/Linux community. A programmer creates a work, and places it under the GNU Public License ... anyone can freely copy and distribute the work, or create derivative works based on it, provided that the copies or derivative works also carry the GNU Public License. This means that no person or corporation can claim ownership of that work, or the future works that flow from it ... software by the people, and for the people.

The Digital Commons extends this idea to all creative content: art, music, writing, and so on. So the Digital Commons is a place in cyberspace, protected from the commercial dot-coms, where everyone can use what they need, contribute what they can, or just generally kibbitz in the process.

Nice vision; I like that.