ASCAP Raises Funds to Fight Copyright Control for Creators

First of all, if you haven’t heard or read this yet, poke on over to a copy of the actual letter sent to ASCAP which you can find here and here.

Many forces including Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation and technology companies with deep pockets are mobilizing to promote “Copyleft” in order to undermine our “Copyright.”

Well that was a stab in the dark to integrate music & political sentiment if I’ve ever seen one. Alright, I’ll bite. What exactly are we talking about here?

They say they are advocates of consumer rights, but the truth is these groups simply do not want to pay for the use of our music. Their mission is to spread the word that our music should be free.

I’m going to set aside Public Knowledge & Electronic Frontier Foundation for the moment and focus on Creative Commons, as I am most familiar with them. It sounds here like ASCAP is advocating against a music distributor who refuses to pay legally-mandated royalties, not a non-profit organization who facilitates more flexible copyright enforcement for creators who desire it. Lets take a look at CreativeCommons.org to verify that -

Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright and the public domain. From all rights reserved to no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while allowing certain uses of your work — a “some rights reserved” copyright.

Doesn’t really seem to match up, does it? Lets see what else ASCAP has to say in their cry for support -

We all know what whill happen next: the music will dry up, and the ultimate loser will be the music consumer.  - ASCAP

Are you kidding me? This is just absurd. Even if Creative Commons was secretly an organization trying to abolish copyright (instead of working in tandem with it, as they are), people wouldn’t stop creating music. Nobody makes good music because they’re happy with US Copyright Law. Most creators I know are extremely unsatisfied with it, and welcome any assistance that organizations like Creative Commons bring to mend a broken system.

I mean, we could also talk about the long and shady past of ASCAP, the fact that they’re a privately held organization who doesn’t publish financial statements (meaning nobody knows how much money they collect on behalf of artists, or how much they keep for themselves), and even that fact that services like Creative Commons licenses which puts Copyright restriction control back into the hands of creators could stand to lose them a lot of money (and probably is : universally mandated copyright = more royalty collection for ASCAP). But I don’t want to get too negative here…

What is a Locavore?

Local food (also regional food or food patriotism) or the local food movement is a “collaborative effort to build more locally based, self-reliant food economies - one in which sustainable food production, processing, distribution, and consumption is integrated to enhance the economic, environmental and social health of a particular place”^[1] and is considered to be a part of the broader sustainability movement.

“Locavore” was coined by Jessica Prentice from the San Francisco Bay Area on the occasion of the 2005 World Environment Day to describe and promote the practice of eating a diet consisting of food harvested from within an area most commonly bound by a 100-mile (160 km) radius. “Localvore” is sometimes also used.

- Wikipedia

Some other good basic articles on the subject -

The Savvy Shopper’s Guide to the Farmers’ Market

5 Reasons Why Farmers Markets Are Good For You