In the year 2002 David Bowie told the New York Times: "The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing".

The engine for this revolution, the death of the record industry and the dissolution of copyright law, was to be the internet. And the concept has been taken seriously by the record industry, which has claimed to have lost billions of dollars through illegal downloads - on the unlikely assumption that every teenager who downloads a song from the internet would otherwise buy the song in a shop. In truth MP3s, like radio plays, advertise the music and spread the word. Each download is as likely to promote a future sale as it is to lose one. The song that is played on the radio waves is as easy to copy as the song that is stored on a file-sharing network.

The music industry is suffering loss of sales because of its short termism, and fixation on manufactured pop, not because teenagers are downloading MP3s or Ogg Vorbis files. We can speculate that the icons of past and present decades, the likes of Dylan, Zappa or Tom Waits, probably wouldn't find a record deal in the current climate - the risk would be too great, the artists too maverick, the returns too slow, and the management too shortsighted.

The same principles apply to the software industry. The countless "pirated" copies of Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop have served to promote the dominance of these products in the market place, not the opposite, as Bill Gates understood when he told students at Washington University: "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

Who owns music?
The music industry assumes that it owns the right to music and how it is played. But the music industry is a twentieth century creation that arose from the invention of the phonograph and the shellac record. Like water, music finds its own level and its own outlets, and isn't going to go away. If the music industry dies tomorrow, music will continue by other means.

John Lennon once said: "Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." He should have known. The Beatles may well have been the most successful band ever, and Lennon and McCartney the most successful composers, but their songs were signed away early to Northern Songs (and later became the property of Michael Jackson). Ever since, the surviving Beatles have fought hard to prevent their music from being exploited or commoditised for commercial interests - the most famous instance being the use of the Lennon and McCartney song Revolution by Nike. But Lennon was speaking a wider truth, that music belongs to all of us, and was not invented by the recent titans of the music industry.

The oldest known musical instrument, assumed to be of Neanderthal origin, is a flute that was found in the Mousterian cave deposits at Divje Babe, Slovenia, and is over 30,000 years old. Excavations at an early Neolithic site in Henan Province, China, have produced six complete (and playable) flutes which are dated to the period between 7000BC and 5700BC. Who knows what tunes were played on these instruments, and what songs were heard?

Since time began, wherever people have gathered they have found things to bash, strings to pluck and and reeds to blow, in celebration or in regret, in praise of gods or leaders of men, or to forget the world in which they live. Music springs eternal, and there have never been any rules except those imposed by local conventions. Olivier Messiaen (1908-92) wrote his most famous piece, the "Quartet for the End of Time" when interned in a German prison camp, where he had to write for the musicians and instruments available to him, a piano, clarinet, violin and violoncello. The resulting piece has a haunting sense of peace and melancholy. The music could not have provided escape or relief from the horrors of the camp, but at least it gave the players a purpose in their daily fight for survival.

Like all art forms, every piece of music is a stage in the evolution of a form, or as Schwarz and Hillel put it in 'The culture of the copy: Striking likenesses, Unreasonable facsimiles', 1996: "The history of art is the history of copy rites, of transformations that take place during acts of copying." The folk musics that have sprung from all corners of the world can sound surprisingly similar. There are modern country songs that have direct roots in Scottish folk songs of the sixteenth century. The songs have travelled through time, through the Appalachian mountains and into the current etymology, but are often attributed on the record labels to the artist at hand. Many classical composers based their great symphonies on adaptions of traditional folk melodies. Conversely, a great proportion of Geordie folk songs that are claimed as part of the tradition were composed by one of the two great nineteenth century balladeers, Joe Wilson or Tommy Armstrong, who wrote the songs to perform in their own music halls that have since passed into the commonweal.

Of its nature music is both ephemeral and eternal, transient yet permanently etched into our memories - which is not to say that musicians shouldn't have the right to their performances, or composers control over the exploitation of their creations. The internet is an opportunity, not a threat. The revolution offered by the internet is as profound as the invention of the phonograph, and can expand the potential for both the musician and the audience, just as the phonograph transformed the possibilities for music in an earlier age. And this revolution owes nothing to the music industry or its formats. The internet appeals to the user's desire to be free, and to exploit the potential of that freedom. The medium appeals to the artist because it offers direct communication with the audience, and a means of sidestepping the middleman and the record company. For all the huffing and puffing, neither the content nor the software industries can disinvent the technologies of the last few years.

Nothing left to lose
The much-used aphorism that "information wants to be free" is usually attributed to Stewart Brand, best known as one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. At the first Hackers' Conference in Autumn 1984 he remarked: "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." (Whole Earth Review, May 1985).

He later elaborated on his initial observation: "Information wants to be free (because of the new ease of copying and reshaping and casual distribution), and information wants to be expensive (it's the prime economic event in an information age)... and technology is constantly making the tension worse. If you cling blindly to the expensive part of the paradox, you miss all the action going on in the free part. The pressure of the paradox forces information to explore incessantly. Smart marketers and inventors quietly follow - and I might add, so do smart computer security people."

He later added that the tension between freedom and cost "leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property' and the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."

These statements, made 20 years ago, seem remarkably prescient in the light of current events. The Internet is a liberating force. Anything you can reach by typing a search string into Google is open to you, wherever you are in the world. The technology that makes the Internet possible is free and open to anyone. But free is a word with many meanings, some of which may conflict with one another.

Richard Stallman, the founder of the free software movement, eloborates: "I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By 'free' I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one's own uses ... When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving."

Donald Duck and Goofy
The philosophy of freedom that underpins the free software movement also informs the internet. Most of the technologies that make the internet and the World Wide Web possible were given away free. If not for the altruism of countless individuals, education and research establishments, these technologies would not exist. The purpose of the World Wide Web was, in Tim Berners-Lee's words, to create "a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information."

Counter to free software and the idealism of the internet has been the corporate obsession with "intellectual property", the appropriation of things as disparate as human genes and species of plants, to the ownership of artistic concepts and ideas. The means for extending ownership over everything and anything has been a judicial bending of patent and copyright law, and the willingness of governments to bend over to the corporate will.

Authorial copyrights in the US have been extended to 70 years after the author's death. The law that made this possible, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, was passed in 1998, and is commonly known as the Mickey Mouse law, because it was passed to protect Disney's interest in the early cartoons of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy, and is of no value either to the original creators of artefacts or to the consumer. The value, almost inevitably, is to the corporate copyright holder. But the classics that once would have been made available cheaply to school children, aren't any more.

Patent law, meanwhile, has reached the heights of absurdity. A not untypical example is the patenting in 1986 of the Amazonian hallucinogenic plant, ayahuasca, meaning "vine of the soul", which led to a South American tribal council, representing more than 400 tribes and indigenous groups, visiting the United States 10 years later to protest against the decision. Antonio Jacanamijoy, a spokesmen for the Indians, observed that "our ancestors learned the knowledge of this medicine and we are the owners of this knowledge", but made little impact on the patenting authorities, for the plant had been "discovered" by US business interests.

On Brick Lane
This is not an isolated case. Many more such patents pass unnoticed and can't be challenged because the cost is prohibitive and the protesters have no sentimental appeal. Examples include the patent No.5663484, granted to RiceTec, a Texas-based firm, on basmati rice, and another granted on turmeric, both of which have long been staples from Brick Lane to Bangalore. The term biopiracy has emerged to describe the actions of those who (often unknowingly) infringe patents on plants and genes. Software patents have become a routine method for large corporations to raise revenue and suppress competition and innovation, and are an absurd transgression of common sense.

Nonetheless, patent and copyright law have not been sufficient to the purposes of the content and software industries. Concurrent with the steady extension of patent and copyright law to include everything, has been the adoption of laws, in both the US and in Europe, that infringe the rights of technologists to freely develop and interoperate with proprietary technologies. Particularly aggressive in the pursuit of the dubious precepts of "intellectual property rights" have been the software industry - as a means of countering the free software movement and other emergent technologies - and the entertainment industries, who are scared silly by file sharing and the free exchange of information on the Internet.

These laws are designed to be an impediment to free expression and competition - and the mantra of "Free Trade" and the instruments of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are being used to prise the developing world into the same mind-set, where everything on earth is something that can be owned and sold, what Herb Schiller calls "the corporate takeover of public expression", where the software companies own the programmer's right to code, and the entertainment industries own the musician's right to play...

Doing the math
The World Wide Web is a threat to the way that the entertainment industries relate to their artists and consumers. The traditional relationship between the industry and the artist has been abusive, as described succinctly by Courtney Love in her speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference, given in New York on May 16, 2000, entitled: "Courtney Love does the math". Curiously, those that benefit from the millions that pour into the tills of the fame industries, are seldom the original artists. The famous few make the millions. The others fall by the wayside. The huge "advances" are swallowed up by the record company's expenses and the victims are chucked out onto the street - their leftover artefacts are kept as useful earners for the record company in the future. All that is left is the memory of the 15 minutes of fame and the illusion of success.

The record industry seldom works to the benefit of musicians, and the film industry does not benefit the creative film makers. The artist is too often expendable, and the difficult artist is ditched, however big the reputation. The instinct of the entertainment and software industries is to suppress competition and restrain the choice of consumers. Bruce Schneier, security and cryptography expert, and eloquent observer of the technological zeitgeist, notes: "If you think about it, the entertainment industry does not want people to have computers. They're too powerful, too flexible, and too extensible. They want people to have Internet Entertainment Platforms: televisions, VCRs, game consoles, etc."

In other words, the entertainment industry wants to limit technology outlets to formats over which the consumer has little control, and this despite the fact that it was sectors of the entertainment industry that gave us the cassette recorder, the video cassette recorder and the compact disc writer, in the first place. The genie is out of the bottle, and cannot be stuffed back in. Every home has its recording devices, and the technology cannot be unmade. The consumer, without thinking of the rights and wrongs of copyright law, will find a way to play that tune, or see that film, or use that piece of software, because "information wants to be free".

In the real world
The transformation that the internet promises for the consumer applies equally to the musician and the composer, and this is something the record industry doesn't want you to hear. Despite the screaming and crying about internet piracy the British record industry reported record sales last year. In January, the music industry claimed that it was winning the battle against online piracy and simultaneously revealed figures that showed that legal downloads had risen tenfold during the past year. "At long last the threat has become the opportunity," said John Kennedy, the CEO of the IFPI (the International Federation of Phonograph Industries).

But the real opportunity that the internet provides for musicians is the possibility of an escape from the suffocating embrace of the record industry. At least, that is the hope of many musicians, from Beck to Phish, who sell downloads of their concerts online, and have made millions in the process.

Some, like Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel, have threatened to put the idea into practice. Both Eno and Gabriel are long term survivors of the industry, and both are possessed of an independent streak. Gabriel has been a political activist, helped to found WOMAD and his own record company, Real World, and created the digital downloading service "On Demand Distribution" (OD2), which made downloading acceptable for the record industry. Eno has been a force of his own, making music in his own way, playing against the grain of the industry and its makers and shakers, with little compromise and a fair share of success.

Their initiative has been to talk about creating a new model, an online association of musicians, to transform musical creativity and digitally enhance the current state of music distribution, take the record labels out of the equation, and allow artists to become their own retailers and set their own prices. The alliance is to be called the "Magnificent Union of Digitally Downloading Artists", or MUDDA, a mutual organisation for the promotion and distriibution of music over the internet.

"This is a critical time where the music business is being transformed", Gabriel has said. "We feel that, unless musicians think about what's going on and how it could change their situation creatively and commercially, they will be at the end of the food chain as usual. MUDDA is coming from some idealistic hope that we can create a cooperatively owned artist entity to further artist interests and try to open the creative possibilities."

"There has to be a better way of going about things", he said. "The industry standard, for a long time, has been for labels to sign on for as little as possible, pay as little as possible, and recruit as often as possible. When we started, we considered it lucky to be getting a royalty at all. The model of the future needs to be one of partnership."

From the record companies' point of view: "There's a potential fear that we will help speed up the process through which record companies become redundant, [but] I think most executives see this as an opportunity that will encourage legal downloading and speed up the transformation for a new business to emerge," says Gabriel. "So far, I'm pretty confident we're going to have enough interest. Some artists, I'm sure, will do very well being independent of the record industry. But most would still think they need some help with marketing, accounting, possibly banking their projects, and would tend to look to people who have experience, which would look like, if not actually being, record companies."

Gabriel and Eno are not alone in searching for an alternative means of distribution that will have the effect of restructuring the record industry. Just as free software is revolutionising the software industry, creating new models of distribution and service, driven by the impulse towards free expression, so the internet is destined to shake up the record industry, driven by the demands of both artist and consumer. Change is inevitable.

Richard Hillesley

References
"Information wants to be free" http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/IWtbF.html
The problem with music - Steve Albini www.negativland.com/albini.html
Courtney Love does the math http://dir.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/index.html
Where does the lion sleep tonight? www.3rdearmusic.com/forum/mbube2.html
The economy of ideas - John Perry Barlow www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.03/economy.ideas_pr.html
Mapping the musical commons www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_9/progler/index.html#author
Magnatune www.magnatune.com
Magnificent Union of Digitally Downloading Artists www.mudda.org
The internet debacle - Janis Ian www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html