Undoing Property
Eileen Simpson and Ben White (Open Music Archive) propose the distribution of a collection of 20 new releases for Undoing Property. The project presents a series of pre-release leaks assembled for the present legal reality. Recordings containing copyright-controlled lyrics or melody will be manipulated using digital processing techniques ported from contemporary music production and accompanied by cover artwork - featuring archive graphic fragments, lyrics, titles and other elements assembled from original archive sources. The focus of the featured collection is material gleaned from the edges of the public domain – specifically material with a split in ownership between lyrics and musical composition. New sonic sequences are generated from recordings that have been edited, redacted, cut-up and processed to suppress copyright- secured elements thus enabling the release of public domain layers from the proprietary control of commercial publishers.
This timely and urgent project will see public domain layers of compositions that are due to return to proprietary ownership freed, prior to an upcoming legal enclosure taking effect across Europe in 2013 – the result of aggressive lobbying by private interests. In response to this moment we approach the book format as a 'record shop catalogue', featuring the identity for each individual release and with links to wider distribution. This collection of newly processed recordings will be distributed online and freely published before new IP frameworks lock them down again (November 2013 in the UK).
Metadata (recording, songwriter info and dates of copyright expiry) plus QR Code and URL provide a direct link to the online location of the digitally processed file. A preamble sketching out the shifting legal context, projecting forward to future public domain release dates, will accompany the releases. See here
Example track metadata:
Golden Days
performed by Mario Lanza
recorded 1954 © expired 2005
music by Sigmund Romberg (died 1951) © expires 2022 lyrics by Dorothy Donnelly (died 1928) © expired 1999 pre-release by Open Music Archive (cc) by-sa 3.0 2012
www.openmusicarchive.org/p7ah
