Music Pool x HKW Community Evening: Rethinking Copyright

From GEMA-membership and royalty payments, to sampling-based production or being sampled by others, to the costs of access to music – being an artist means to be involved in the system of copyright and intellectual property in multiple ways. After the recently issued and hotly debated new EU-directive on regulating copyright, we have teamed up with Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) to invite musicians and others interested for a roundtable conversation on new ideas for the copyright system. Does it actually suit our practice, is it beneficial to our art, does it support our professional paths, does it contribute to our income?

Established in an era where music was published on sheets, music-copyright has since grown into a very complex and detailed system – organized through collecting societies, licensing deals, publishing companies etc. Questions about how to treat copyright in user generated content on platforms like Youtube, or how to adequately identify rightsholders in global digital networks give some ideas of current challenges. And is copyright still an incentive to create - considering that many artists have a low income despite copyright?

We would like to discuss with you – How should the structural conditions of creative production look like? Which existing models do we appreciate, and which do we think are a barrier? Are there technical and creative possibilities that we cannot explore in the current system? Do we need copyrights and intellectual property at all? Do we have ideas for alternative regulations that would better allow for artistic freedom and time to make art? And how could a new system work on a global and connected level?

This roundtable discussion feeds into the preparations of the upcoming HKW project RIGHT THE RIGHT, which focuses on the future of copyright and how new visions for the conditions of music and art production may look like. There are various ways for artists to get involved in RIGHT THE RIGHT, so for anyone with thoughts, ideas or creative works relevant to rethinking copyright, the roundtable is a great opportunity to join the conversation.

To start the discussion, we will have inputs from:

Dan Bodan is a musician, security guard and occasional writer living in Berlin. He has released music on DFA Records and Mangrove, toured internationally, produced copyleft music for google, and written for publications like Texte Zur Kunst, Flash International and Spike.

Aroma P. Schmidt – producer, DJ and label manager since 1994. Organized international events on technology as well as techno culture in Tel Aviv, Casablanca, Istanbul, Lissabon or Sweden. Was resident DJ in clubs like Ostgut or Ultraschall. Label manager for her own platform Aromamusic, as well as Ritter Butzke. Works for many years in the field of data protection, and advises on GDPR and data security.

Frédéric Döhl, musicologist and lawyer, works on Digital Humanities at the German National Library, and as research associate at TU Dortmund. He has published a book on mashups, sampling and copyright - "Mashup in der Musik. Fremdreferenzielles Komponieren, Sound Sampling und Urheberrecht" (transcript: Bielefeld 2016).

Holger Schwetter is a musicologist and media scholar. He carried out his doctoral research with a study on digital self management and the use of copyright by musicians in Germany and the USA. For six years he was a member of the board of the Cultural Commons Collecting Society (C3S). He was a researcher at the institute of sociology at the Technical University Dresden and lectured in music production at the H:G, University of applied sciences for Health & Sport, Technology & Art in Berlin. Currently he is a self-employed scientist and advisor, and prepares to start a record label again.

Music before and after the discussion by: Coco Maria

The last community evening as podcast as a warm up. Unfortunetaly it is in German only.