I see this question almost as a biological one. If not entirely.
The thing about this parallel that you’ve estabilished is that the two are too diferent to compare. They’re not on the same level.

Long before making money with it, Man was making music.
Not because they thought it could possibly, in a distant future, be profitable, but because they had to.
Because there was a reason for music (as I could say painting or any ancient cultural manifestations that evolved to what they are now) to exist, and I don’t know if It may come as an offense to someone but I think of art as a religion. No association with any particular deity, no image to pray upon, just an inexplicable drive to engage in such kind of creative or representative act.
I guess that’s just how lots of people start playing music. Because it feels so good. Because it unites in pleasure (a little bit over the top?).
It’s a part of something larger than people.

Culture in general is larger than life. Consequentially, larger than any tipe of right or royalty.
Should the recent and still emergent crisis strike down on the music industry (hope not) in a way that it could no longer stand, I’m preety sure we’d still be hearing music all over. Even if all the musicians on earth had “day jobs”. There’s no stopping it.

Of course it would be nice to score some royalties, but even if there are none, some of us will still make music. And it will still make someone happy, or sad, or something…

I’ll take a cue from Lessig and differentiate between non-commercial and commercial derivative work. To the extent that it is non-commercial, derivative work can be a stimulating creative exercise. However, as long as it remains uncommercial (and in the nature of an educational exercise), there is no need or call for it to be published (and everything you post on the net is publishing of a kind). If you don’t publish, you usually won’t have a problem (I don’t think anyone cares about me working out commercially-released songs as part of ear-training, for myself and in the privacy of my own home). If you chose to publish, whatever the terms, you should be aware of the legal context and undertake all necessary steps to secure your position as publisher. (This sounds heavy, but basically means: think before you post something on the Internet.)

I have a much bigger problem with commercial derivative works, for mostly the same reason as Tonsotunez. Chosing to do a straight derivative (as opposed to inspired) work is a creative cop-out. In a commercial context, it is risk-minimisation and an attempt to grab a slice of the pie someone else has baked. Notice that most sampled works primarily make use of the hooks in the original piece and retain little (if any) of its flavour. This, I’m afraid to say, is especially true of hip-hop, where any artistic value in the original (especially lyrics-wise) is usually replaced by the worst kind of easy-to-sell dross you can imagine. This is fine, I suppose, if we do accept some form of cultural relativism (to the extent that if it’s popular, it’s good), but if we claim that some things are simply better than others, this is exactly the sort of thing we should fight.

Having said that, the people who make the aforementioned recordings usually have enough industry backing to secure the necessary clearances. Nonetheless, it is a practice that, in my opinion, should not be encouraged. If copyright laws make it hard for you to use other people’s work directly, you may decide to write something of your own that explores the same sonic spaces, but isn’t an infringement. To me, that is a much more valuable form of creativity and one which offers greater scope for cultural evolution.

Everything that is happened in this age has happened contingent to the cultural weapons of the time. I see the dawn of an evolving industry, getting us back to a surplus of financial success. We are reaching an event horizon of cultural chaos. The upcoming artist and creators will emerge to take advantage of the musical immersion that is happening; when that happens… it will be cool!

I haven’t read the other replies yet, but it’s difficult to see how valid this question really is because…… is it really progress? The reason I say that is that it seems to me that music has been devalued. People have a zillion tracks, and especially the kids, don’t even know who the artist is half the time. I think they went into a frenzy early on and started grabbing anything they could swipe off the p2p sites. Now they just say, I like track 13. A real problem is that there is so much “music” everywhere all the time, on cell phones, TV, booming down your street, on all the media, even in greeting cards, it’s overload. As a musician in clubs, I see that people have a much shorter attention span for music than they used to. I think a major problem is that if you own a digital song, meaning if you have it in your possession, you really have nothing. I think about a ton of files I have on my computer, and how often do I go listen to them? Even with CDs….somehow they’ve never seemed that valuable, though I don’t want anyone stealing them. But with the old LPs, as imperfect an art form as they may have been (in some opinions) sound-quality wise…when you have an LP in your hand, you’ve invested in something, and to this day, they feel valuable. More importantly, they’re fun, they’re tangible and because of the size, they look a lot better, let’s face it. (another art form that became lost because of size is the daily comic strip. They are so small now that the artist can barely do anything to convey the point of the strip, and as a result, are not enjoyable to look at. This is a related point because if something is not FUN, people won’t be bothered to do it very much)

It sounds like I’m off topic, but what I’m trying to point out is that, while it may be a cultural phenomenon that people have been able to get vast unknown amounts of free music, does it even mean anything to them? It’s just not interesting to open a file on a computer or ipod and listen to it. So in that respect it seems to me that maybe all this free access to music isn’t a positive impact on society. People don’t really respect music or musicians like they used to. The entire perspective of the value of music has been warped. People really think, as a result of the prevailing attitude in the early 90s, that musicians shouldn’t worry about money. But it’s a simple fact that you respect something more if you have to pay for it, or if you have to work to get it. Human nature.

Everything will level out in it’s own good time, though it’s hard to see how at this point. When radio was first introduced, the money people weren’t interested because they couldn’t understand how money could be made off of it since it was floating out there for free. But radio was unstoppable, and here we are. We’re at that crossroads again, and we have to worry more about how to make sure artists still get paid for their work than whether we’re going to plug up progress, because you might as well try to stop time if you are going to try to stop change, so why worry about that aspect of it?

An observation that may point to the future is this. People now, because of Karaoke and other things that have crept into our society, aren’t content to sit back and enjoy music as they used to. It’s revealing that the gaming industry is leaving the music industry in the dust. It’s hands-on, and people don’t want to sit and watch anymore, their egos are inflated now and they want to do things themselves. The cat is out of the bag, and nobody really cares about talent anymore, they want to do it themselves. Doesn’t it sound like the same thing is happening with sampling music and changing things around, etc? People want to do it themselves, and it’s another devaluing trend in a way, because with this attitude, they devalue talent. A lot of people who perhaps could have become great musicians have been content to rap rap rap, instead of learning to actually play something and have the musical confidence to do something truly creative instead of just derivative. (this has nothing to do with whether you like a music form, it’s just fact) So this whole thing becomes a much larger question than maybe was intended because, how much responsibility does the school system share since the decline of music education? Sports is crammed down everyone’s throats, and I’d love to see people sitting screaming at a television set over a music concert the way they do a sports broadcast. It goes on and on, sports bars vastly outnumber music bars now. I think the important question is how do we get people interested in MUSIC again? For it’s own sake.

One more note. Everything is affected by PERCEPTION. Prevailing attitudes have hurt the whole entertainment industry. We need some guitar heroes again, and I don’t mean the lame game. One seemingly small aspect of it is this. My friend Randy Wood told him that George Gruhn in Nashville told him that people have almost stopped buying vintage instruments now…because nobody in the last generation or so has had a guitar hero to emulate. That’s kind of scary when you think of the impact that Elvis and the Beatles had on music, BAM, Overnight, literally, a million music careers were launched. But now it’s a bunch of copycats, and the music corporations are responsible for that type of thinking. CREATIVITY isn’t rewarded, conformity and mediocrity is.

I’m sure it looks like I’m getting off the subject with this, but since you expressed concern about “the evolution of popular culture,” I’m trying to point out pieces of the puzzle that all tie together, and it shows the real problems we face. A lot of it is perception and attitude. Let evolution take care of itself and worry about how to get people’s minds back on track and excited about music. Maybe artists should just release their unmixed tracks to the public like Peter Gabriel did with Shock the Monkey. But I would be more interested in seeing people learn how to think for themselves, how to actually play and actually create. THAT is where the true strength of the music industry lies. DC

Copyright is designed to protect the expression of an idea – not the idea itself – thereby permitting the expansion of culture by allowing ideas to be built upon through their expression in many different ways by many different people. For example, there can be a thousand songs entitled, “I Love You” each expressing the basic idea in a unique way – each protected by copyright and each endowed with rights the creator can use, if the creator so desires, to generate income for his or her benefit.

99 per cent of the music that has been copied and pasted to advance the so called ‘new’ culture has been commercially successful. The products of Danger Mouse and Gregg Gillis have gained recognition only because the public has been made aware of the names of the commercially successful artists and songwriters whose music has been sampled. An album made up of samples of music contributed to the Creative Commons would be a commercial yawn because there would be nothing recognizable in the offering to attract a large audience. In other words, mash-ups are meaningless – and totally unhip – if there isn’t a huge pre-sold audience for the music the copy and paste technician has confiscated.

Now, let’s take a look at what is happening to the people who are actually advancing our culture – those who create the music the copy and paste technicians confiscate.

First of all, let’s dispel the false assumption that anybody and his brother can create music that will connect with the large segment of the public … We must stop using as the premise for discussion that it’s easy to write a song, to be a unique performing artist, to be a virtuoso musician, to produce a record and to market the results to the world. None of its easy … and even if all of the elements of greatness have been put together to create a spectacular recording there is no assurance that the public will give a damn. 90% of the recordings that are made available to the public in one way or another never connect with a large audience. Therefore, the music that does connect is truly ‘magical’ – truly unique – truly one of a kind – truly community building and truly culture enhancing.

It usually takes enormous amounts of sacrifice, endurance, disappointment, training and hard work for musically creative people to even reach the threshold of having an opportunity to become successful and feed their families via the financial fruits of their creative labors… Most who try – many with overwhelming talent and ability – are forced to give up when real life kicks in and they become obliged to abandon their dreams as they come face to face with reality.

It is those who make it that are the beacon for those who will follow. .. A beacon that creates a pool of enthusiastic, excited, dedicate, would-be professional creators – some of whom will advance culture to the next level and become the beacons for the next generation who will advance our culture even further.

The ever expanding notion that opportunity to built a life for ones self based on what ones mind can create from nothing is being snuffed by technology is dimming the beacon for those who would try in the future. When there is no hope, why endure the pain?

What we will be left with is what the so called ‘new culture’ is becoming… copy and paste scavengers picking over the bones of commercial creative triumphs past.

Certainly, there is a massive existing catalog of magnificent commercial material to confiscate well into the future, but without new underlying musical creativity coming on line to freshen the copy and paste offerings culture will stagnate and will become nothing more than a musical version of Bill Murray’s “Groundhog Day.”

I’m not, for a moment, suggesting that technology should be stifled – it should grow and prosper – but, so should those who actually DO create our culture – those who give technology something to do – those who create the music that is technologies life’s blood.

Kiss off the musically creative innovators and kiss our culture goodbye.

An analogous question might be the follow: “Did the historic value of the pyramids of ancient Egypt (and quite a few other great works from antiquity) justify the abuse and death of the countless thousands of slaves it took to build them?” Hmmmmmmm. At the same time, might not at least one of those slaves have had the intrinsic potential to have altered history to such a degree that the world would be vastly different than that which we know today, had he or she been properly nurtured? Perhaps human culture itself would be lightyears ahead of its present state of advancement.

The culture that tramples the rights to growth of its very constituents is ultimately the culture that dies!