GENEVA (dpa) – The music composer who once sat in a quiet room, bent over a piano and a pile of sheet music and musical scores is light-years removed from the composers of the 21st Century.
Whereas Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart first thought out his music scores and then, having put the music to paper, had to find an orchestra in order to hear what he had thought up, today’s composers need only a keyboard and a computer. With a few clicks of the mouse, they can even launch the worldwide marketing of their work from home.Many people regard this as presenting a huge opportunity, but experts at WIPO, the international organisation for the protection of intellectual property in Geneva, see this as the beginning of the end of the proper way of evaluating cultural creativity.The new technology with its home-based digital sound studio offers a heretofore unfathomed “talent pool”. But the other side of the coin goes by the name of pirating.“Anyone who voluntarily makes his own music composition accessible worldwide via the Internet should know the laws and be aware of the consequences,” says Jorgen Blomquist, director of WIPO’s department for copyright laws.While attending a WIPO exhibition devoted to “music in the digital age”, he warns that without a copyright, a creative work cannot be protected. The U.N. organisation can scarcely be expected to provide a just recognition of a work.Even more problems face those whose creations have been sent around the world and then copied for free by music lovers without their permission.Courts have not yet decided about the case of the music exchange “Napster”, whose Internet site is used by millions of mostly young fans to download an entire archive of music onto their hard discs.The operator of the site argue that all it is doing is to establish a link between owners of music pieces and those interested in them, while not marketing the products itself.Now, with the entry of the music publishing giant Bertelsmann, a stop is about to be put to the free trading of music. Nobody can now predict as to how many new trading exchanges will be established in the worldwide data network.Internet and music expert David Granite knows exactly how he can gain access to all the songs and videos of his favourite stars.“It is a bit frightening,” he admits as he makes a demonstration using a computer at the WIPO exhibition. Within seconds, he has set up direct links with almost 2,000 computers around the world and then is able to download for free their offerings of software, songs, pictures, games and texts.The software needed for this dubious practice goes by the name “gnutella” and drives copyright protection experts into a rage. Granite says that Internet surfers argue that “it’s all for free”.Nor is there scarcely any way to try to control the anonymous trading practices.“We must appeal to the young people to respect the creative achievements of others and to pay fairly for the use of them,” WIPO executive John Tarpey says, knowing that this goal has little chance of being attained.For one thing, it is not only young people who, according to Blomquist, are ignoring copyrights and market rules as pirates roaming the Internet’s seas.“In the United States, the commerce in patterns for cross-stitching has been considerably disrupted because the ladies are getting them from the Internet,” he points out.Blomquist feels that the hope for the future in trying to protect intellectual property rights will not be found in laws, but rather in technological developments which provide a genuine barrier against theft via the Internet.It is precisely this which the music industry now hopes to have – at least with regard to the new music data being released to the Internet by recording companies.At the recent music industry fair Midem, technologies were unveiled in which every individual piece of music is put into code and protected against unauthorised use. But those songs now already freely accessible will remain – for the foreseeable future – swirling around in the Internet.WIPO website listing laws on intellectual property rights:
http://www.wipo.int
