Читать книгу Sonic Boom: Napster, P2P and the Battle for the Future of Music - John Alderman - Страница 5

BY EVAN I. SCHWARTZ

My first epiphany over MP3, Napster, and the like happened in the Bulldog Café, a smoky bar-cum-Internet joint on Amsterdam’s Leidesplein. I had deposited six guilders into the machine and was deleting spam and trading dotcom stocks when a young British bloke pulled up next to me. We got to talking about the Net, and the guy, named Darren, told me that he has six gigabytes of music files on his hard drive at home. I was instantly impressed.

Turns out, Darren was a drummer in an indie rock band, and this is how he exposes himself to new music, especially tunes from his favorite band, The Presidents of the United States of America, a Seattle trio that he feels has a particularly amusing song called “Peaches.” Just then, his buddy, the guitarist and singer in his band, stepped forward and joined him, harmonizing with their authentic English rock accents: “Moving to the country, gonna eat a lot of peaches. Moving to the country, gonna eat a lot of peaches.”

The two also use the Net to distribute and promote their own music. As a result, they have developed a modest following around their hometown in Devon, in the southwest of England, and have used their online status to get gigs, including one playing at the Cavern Club.

“The Cavern Club?” I asked, “Isn’t that the place in Hamburg where the Beatles got their start?”

“No, no,” said Darren, “The original Cavern Club was in Liverpool. Now we have one near us.” The guitarist nodded his head in agreement.

“I thought it was in Hamburg,” I said. “Why don’t we just look it up online?”

Not sure where to start, I just typed in www.beatles.com. Up came a notice that this site was reserved for future use by Apple Corps, Ltd.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s interesting.”

“Apple?” said Darren. “What does a computer company have to do with the Beatles?” The guitarist had a similarly puzzled expression.

“You guys can’t be serious,” I said. “You’re musicians from England, and you don’t know the relationship between Apple and the Beatles?”

Now, I’m not one of those 1960s guys. I was swishing around in a uterus somewhere when the Beatles played Ed Sullivan. But I am old enough to have spent a part of my youth watching apples spinning around turntables while memorizing the lyrics to Sgt. Pepper’s. Even my Beatle CDs have the little Apple logo on it. But then it struck me: Not only have these guys never probably owned an album, but they probably don’t even think in terms of CDs or albums. Songs to them are listed on screens, then downloaded and played. It was different than what I was used to. And when I ran this theory by them, they agreed that while they are keenly interested in music, they weren’t much interested in knowing which song was on which album or about record labels at all. They had a new way of thinking about music.

This, to me, was an even bigger revelation than the news nearly a year earlier that one of my favorite bands in the world, They Might Be Giants, would post MP3 files on Yahoo and thus become the first major label band to offer a new album for initial release on the Internet. Like everyone else, my question was: How are they going to make money from this?

But since then, I’ve concluded that such artists are probably going to gain more from these new online and wireless formats than they will lose due to so-called copyright infringement. Listening to the new TMBG songs only made me want to go see the band play those songs.

Then it occurred to me that what is just as valuable as copyright—if not more so—is an artist’s trademark. They Might Be Giants was savvy enough to file for a trademark on their name, protecting the identity of their performance services, way back in 1990, around the time of their classic CD release, Flood. The Beatles, by contrast, didn’t have their first U.S. trademark registered until 1993. (It was filed, incidentally, by Apple Corps, Ltd.) Anyone can check whether favorite artists have filed for trademarks, simply by searching the official trademark database at www.uspto.gov.

My point is this: Artists who grumble about copyright infringement but fail to trademark their own names don’t know the value of their own work.

If you want to understand the rising importance of trademarks and the sinking importance of copyright, just talk to William R. Bradley, a partner with Glankler Brown, the Memphis law firm that represents Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc., which was created by the late singer’s estate to make money from his intellectual property. “The Net poses a real challenge to copyright,” Bradley says. “The rights to protect against unauthorized reproduction are simply too hard to enforce. You’ll be chasing everybody.”

To better protect and serve Elvis, the estate in recent years has been on a trademark tear. It first trademarked the name Elvis Presley and his Graceland mansion in the mid-1980s. Then the company moved to trademark Elvis’s hit songs, even though Elvis didn’t actually write any of them. In the mid-1990s, the company trademarked “Heartbreak Hotel” for a licensed restaurant chain, then for use on pants, shorts, shirts, sweatshirts, jackets, hats, and socks, and then on shot glasses, martini glasses, goblets, and tumblers. Turns out, there is money to be made in such officially licensed stuff.

So now, the estate is moving to trademark “All Shook Up” for use on key chains, cigarette lighters, Christmas tree ornaments, float pens, and snow globes. Also in the works are “Love Me Tender” spoons, bumper stickers, and golf balls, as well as trademarks for merchandise bearing the marks “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Hound Dog,” “Jail-house Rock,” and of course “Blue Suede Shoes,” which alas may eventually be used to brand everything except navy leather footwear.

All this has symbolic significance because copyright law affords no protection whatsoever to song titles, album titles, book titles, or movie titles. Remember, a copyright simply protects a unique expression. I can release an album tomorrow called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I can market a movie called Gone with the Wind. I can publish a book called Harry Potter. And I can record a song called “Margaritaville.” As long as I’m not copying someone else’s unique expression, no one can stop me. However, if I wanted to make Sgt. Pepper’s cocktail sauce, Gone with the Wind foot powder, a Harry Potter magic wand, or “Margaritaville” brand tequila, I may encounter some serious legal turbulence.

More importantly, if I wanted to advertise my performance services—give a Harry Potter reading or a Sgt. Pepper’s concert—I’d probably also encounter some legal roadblocks. This is how trademarks can work to protect copyrights and extract additional value from them. And this is why trademarks are so important to artists, writers, musicians, and other producers of intellectual property, even though most are only now coming to realize this. Sgt. Pepper’s was never trademarked by the Beatles, but Harry Potter is vigorously trademarked in several categories of goods and services. And Jimmy Buffett is already kicking back and collecting royalties from officially licensed tequila. Nowadays, trademarks are simply much easier to enforce than are copyrights.

Once you begin to feel the power of trademarks, you’ll see that something like Napster can actually help generate income. If you’re an artist whose intellectual property is being swapped around for free online, then every download can potentially enhance the awareness of your trademarks, including your name and the titles of your works. This is precisely why so many unestablished artists are fully supportive of Napster. They know that any increased awareness of their songs might lead to interest not only in purchasing their CDs but in their trademarked performance services, their brand.

A former Grateful Dead lyricist, John Perry Barlow, likes to say that intellectual property is a misnomer, that it’s not really property at all, but should be thought of more as an intellectual relationship between the artist and the audience. As a writer, I don’t think I’d go so far as to renounce all of my property rights. But I do believe strongly in the relationship thing. And I believe the two can coexist.

And so John Alderman’s book couldn’t have arrived at a better time. In addition to being a great story in itself, Sonic Boom details the new rebellion in rock, defines the raging conflicts posed by new technology, and points the way toward striking a new balance between property and relationships. Hopefully, established artists will be able to adapt to this new music environment. The up-and-coming ones already seem to be well on their way. Those blokes from Devon, wherever they may be right now, are recording and have already played at their local Cavern Club. Maybe they’ll even make it to the original one—in Liverpool.