Tue, 10 Apr 2007
At the end of March, I wrote, for The Register,
Fighting
torture with copyright - Moral musos work to rule about the
idea first expressed by Clive Stafford Smith for musicians to use
copyright law to possibly achieve more for the human rights of many
than human right laws have so far. The story has been picked up
by others with a couple interesting twists.
Roger Parloff in the
Legal
Pad at CNN Money investigates whether torture is
fair use in the
context of copyright law. He takes at heart whether songwriters and
music publishers can increase their income thanks to the US army as
‘[m]usic-as-torture seems to offer rare growth potential in an industry
otherwise in distress’. Issues being explored include whether use of
music in
torture constitutes a
public
performance. For this entry, Parloff consulted William
Patry, Senior Copyright Counsel at Google and the author of a treatise
on
copyright law (and of the
The
Patry Copyright Blog), professor Jane Ginsburg of
Columbia Law School, and Fred Koenigsberg of White & Case and
ASCAP's general counsel.
Guillaume Champeau on French site
Ratiatum
asks what if the US army was to buy the music labels? It would solve
the copyright infringement issue (and the financial difficulties of
some labels). If
music is a weapon for war, then maybe it should
belong to the army.
So far I haven't heard of any concerned musician starting a legal
action against the US Government, but I did discover that the Society
for Ethnomusicology issued a
Position
Statement on Torture in which it ‘calls for full disclosure
of U.S. government-sanctioned and funded programs that design the means
of delivering music as torture; condemns the use of music as an
instrument of torture; and demands that the United States government
and its agencies cease using music as an instrument of physical and
psychological torture.’
In the same article, I also wrote about Mark Thomas' mass lone
demonstrations (MLD) to undermine
Section
132 of the Serious Organised
Crime and Police Act 2005 (SOCPA) that outlaws protests without police
permission in a designated area within a 1 km straight line from the
central part of Parliament Square. The day it was published happened to
be the third Wednesday of March and that evening I was in
Parliament
Square. ‘We understand from the
Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police that during the period 1 August
2005 to December 2006 1,379 demonstrations have taken place [in the
SOCPA zone] with an
authorisation’ according to the Home Office. On 2007-04-05, Mark Thomas
and a group of
regulars
at the MLD brought
1,184
requests for demonstrations to Charing Cross police station;
the demos will
take place on
Saturday
2007-04-21. The aim is for people to carry out 20 demos each
in the SOCPA zone in one day and to get as many people as possible to
do so. To participate, you have until 2007-04-15 10.30am to get your
forms in. The regular MLD scheduled for the
third
Wednesday of the month, is on 2007-04-18 this month.
As if Section 132 was not enough of a threat to anyone who wants to be
heard by his or her Member of Parliament and Lords, on
2007-05-012007-06-01
the
Palace
of Westminster and Portcullis House Site will be added among
the
new
sites designated under Section 128 (
offence
of trespassing on designated site) of the same SOCPA. Come
MayJune,
attending an event in a
Committee
Room
or meeting your
MP
in Portcullis House can land in you in jail for up to 51
weeks.
2007-04-28 EDITED TO ADD: The Morning Star picks up on the story and
Michal Boncza writes
The
new torture, published in the 2007-04-28 edition.
2007-04-10 EDITED TO CORRECT: different documents have different start
dates for the additions to S.128. It seems that June is the correct
commencement date.
2007-04-08 FIRST PUBLISHED
