Intellectual Property, Copyright, Authorship, and Individuality in Music and Print Culture

Intellectual Property, Copyright, Authorship, and Individuality in Music and Print Culture

When the alphabet was invented, spoken epics could be converted into an abstract representation - writing. The experience of the spoken epic poem could be transformed into written format. Although books can be read aloud and therefore retain some similarity to the communal nature of the oral tradition, books can also be read silently in solitude, emphasizing the individual reader. Among the many functions that Roger Chartier has attributed to the figure of the author is not only the role of creator to the content, but also to appropriate ownership of that creation to whomever owns the property rights to that content (36). Copyright law protects the specific manifestations of ideas and facts, but not those ideas and facts themselves. When commemoration was no longer used to experience memory, individual authors came to be recognized as readers became less participatory in the process of getting meaning from the work. The author as creator became an individual who gave meaning to an audience fragmented by the ability of the written word to separate its readers from one another. The author serves as a meeting point for individual readers to receive meaning, whereas in pre-literate times, this meaning would have been constructed by a the entire group in the immediacy of the performance.

In terms of property ownership, one parallel in music was the development of an agreed upon system of notes, scales, and representations of musical sounds and timings. This musical alphabet was necessary to write down scores of music, whether the ancient Egyptian's "music of the spheres" or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It serves to organize noise into a format that is accepted as the creation of a musician. As Albert Borgmann writes, "The identity and integrity of a piece of music can be underwritten by a score only if there is a complete and authoritative score" (94). This means that a written account of a performed piece is only equal in validity to the performed piece if some amount of authority is granted the former. The composer/author of the piece serves as the source of this authority. However, if there is no score, the identity and integrity of the piece must lie in its performance. In this case, it is the performers of the actual song that constitute it's integrity, and this has implications that undermine the functions of the author.