Ringing Freedom
I am horribly overdue for my next cellphone upgrade. I mean after a while one gets tired telling people in social situations that you are going retro and that’s why you have that old brick in your hand. And I am not over-exaggerating- in an unfortunate turn of events my previous phone became one with the wall and lost all of if telecommunication prowess, so I had to reach for the vault and dust of one of the old emergency phones that just happens to be a Nokia 6110. I wasn’t kidding when I said retro.
I have already decided what I want my next ring tone to be, and that is Offspring’s – Intermission. Quite fitting for when you are interrupted with a call mid conversation. But here’s the thing, not that it might necessarily prevent me from doing it but, I wonder if it is legal. If I own the original album, ripped the tune and placed it on my phone as a ring tone, am I violating local copyright law?
You see, when I look on the cover of my CD’s or the labels on the disc it states that “All rights of the record producer and the owner of the work reproduced reserved. Copying, public performance, broadcasting and hiring out directly or indirectly of this recording is prohibited.”
To me that seems rather strict so I went down the rabbit hole a bit further and found this in the Copyright Amendment Act:
9. Nature of copyright in sound recordings
Copyright in a sound recording vests the exclusive right to do or to authorize the doing of any of the following acts in the Republic:
- Making, directly or indirectly, a record embodying the sound recording;
- letting, or offering or exposing for hire by way of trade, directly or indirectly, a reproduction of the sound recording;
- broadcasting the sound recording;
- causing the sound recording to be transmitted in a diffusion service, unless that service transmits a lawful broadcast, including the sound recording, and is operated by the original broadcaster;
- communicating the sound recording to the public.
Eish, that’s what curiosity gets you. If I understand this correctly it means that if I did change my ring tone to the aforementioned track I would be breaking two laws: firstly, by copying it to my phone (apparently no fair use principle exists in South Africa) and secondly, by publicly performing the tune every time someone decides to give me a tinkle. Not only that, but if the above is true the use of iPods or any MP3 device to privately listen to or backup my CD collection can then be considered illegal. How many music loving South Africans are violating copyright law right now despite being the proud owners of the originals? This all seems rather absurd. If I don’t spread it over the internet or sell copies of it on the streets, I should be free to use it privately in any form as I see fit because I paid for the content not just the medium.
What do you think? Should we all start feeling like criminals and relook our digital lifestyles or am I overlooking something important?
On a different note, I would like to point out that this blog turned 2 years old on the 18th of April. You’ve come a long way baby.
UPDATE:
I wasn’t really comfortable with the conclusions this post came to, so I continued the search for more knowledge. It seems that South Africa has a principle called “fair dealings,” which allows some exceptions in using copyrighted literary and musical work:
12. (1) Copyright shall not be infringed by any fair dealing with a literary or musical work—
(a) for the purposes of research or private study by, or the personal or private use of, the person using the
work;
As South Africa is a signatory of the Berne Convention, our national copyright legislation is bound to its framework that sets out certain general exceptions which is included in section 12 of the original copyright act.
While I believe this covers copying your personal music collection to portable audio devices for personal use, what constitutes as fair dealing does not seem to be very clear and it was the original motive for writing this. Is it considered fair dealing to publicly and consistently perform the same musical work, by way of a ring tone or beach party, without asking permission or paying royalties to the original author? It seems like a rather trivial matter, but an interesting thought exercise in differentiating when an artist is exploited or not. With the advent of the digital age and file sharing, much debate is going on about the philosophy of copyright and its net benefit to society.
See also:
Fair Dealing - Darlo
Philosophy of copyright
South African Copyright Act
May 2nd, 2007 at 10:27 am
I think this sucks, can you imagine arresting each person that plays a song they have ripped! You would have cops arresting people in Gyms permanently!
May 2nd, 2007 at 11:13 am
I think you are right in that it would be difficult to enforce. Similarly the RIAA and MPAA are trying to curb illegal file sharing in the USA, but because so many people are doing it world-wide it is difficult to tell if they are actually succeeding. On the other hand it would be against the industry’s best interest to do something like that here with people ripping CD’s they bought legally as Sony owns a record label here (Sony BMG) and manufactures portable audio devices globally (Walkman), so they would want you to rip your CD’s and use their devices to listen to your music.
May 3rd, 2007 at 1:22 am
Hectic, this means that the only legit way is to purchase the music online and then put it on you ipod?
Anyway kewl idea for a ringtone Shodan.
havent been here in awhile but as always really kewl posts!
May 3rd, 2007 at 8:55 am
Afflict, if no such thing as fair dealing existed that would definitely be the case. But I found out that the Berne Convention, that we are a signatory of, does allow for exceptions such as ripping you own CD’s to your iPod. Check out my update on this post.
Thanks for visiting!
May 14th, 2007 at 9:49 am
Interesting post. I love using popular quotes from published poets and authors in formal presentations or just in ever day conversations. I hardly ever acknowledge the author in conversations - does this intimate that I infringe copyright? (technically)
May 14th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
This is quite a tricky subject T-bird. For my assignments at college I am forced to sign a “Statement and Confirmation of Own Work” and follow a strict Harvard reference format. This is of course to avoid plagiarism by giving credit to the originator of the work, to show that I have done research and tell the reader where they can find further information. If you don’t diminish the market value of a certain work (by only reproducing a small portion of it) and give credit where credit is due, I believe that it could be considered as “fair trading” so you should be OK (bar libel). Unfortunately people forget and in private conversations it is easier to remember a popular quote (or a cliché) than the author, but as I am sure you can imagine it is not practical to enforce copyright infringement in daily conversations. On a grander scale no art can be considered truly original, every idea is a derivation of others and this makes the philosophy of copyright a hotly debated one.
Here is an interesting article on quoting.
July 10th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
This is a bit off topic, but still apply in some way or another. I thought about this article when I encountered the software on the net.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolith_%28computer_program%29
July 23rd, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Corical, I remember seeing Monolith a few months back- it certainly raises an interesting argument. Thanks for sharing!