One of the great things about Vimeo is that it feels like a big university campus, off the main street and away from regular commercial business. On Vimeo you can usually let your creativity go unfettered by copyright concerns, advertising banners and troll comments. Quite different from YouTube.
Unfortunately I recently had a take down notice on my Philip Bloom London Meet-up video because the record company behind the sound track for A Clockwork Orange threatened Vimeo and asked for the video to be removed. I didn’t really mind too much – because to the music industry’s credit, the corporate attitude of days-gone-by does seem to be changing and their understanding of the internet is growing.
Also, so far this thing has been very rare on Vimeo and this is the first time in my long history ‘stealing’ of music that this has happened!
However there are still some opportunistic companies that do not understand the internet, nor what makes the university campus that is Vimeo so productive and valuable.
I believe my video encouraged people in their thousands to buy Wendy Carlos’s CD or download her MP3s, because her music is amazing. But the record label just chose to see it as stealing and profiting from copyrighted material. This is very short sighted.
I believe non-profit creative endeavours should be especially immune. Ironically, if Wendy Carlos herself could not have used the work of others in her own projects, A Clockwork Orange’s sound track would not exist – being based heavily as it is on Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. So it’s particularly ironic that her or the record label appear to take such a miserly view of other people using her work as the inspiration for their creative projects. Serendip LLC do not even allow Apple to sell the sound track for A Clockwork Orange on iTunes!
If Wendy Carlos was interested in allowing as many people as possible access to her incredible work, would she not choose a different label? Is she jealously guarding her work and did the droogs send her mad? I have no idea. I love her music, it’s such a shame this happened.
Moby recently set up a website providing royalty free music to pre-moderated filmmakers and projects throughout the world to go off and use, without having to pay for it. This is a great initiative but it shouldn’t even be necessary.
Vimeo and the internet as a whole is like a huge advertising campaign for music. Everywhere you look, there are artists to be discovered and a huge number of my own iTunes purchases have come from hearing something either on Vimeo, YouTube or internet radio. Why does Wendy Carlos want to block her work off from such exciting new business models with a reach numbered in the hundreds of millions?
All artists deserve to profit from their talent – that is for sure! To have millions of people listening to their work via the medium of online video is like having a huge advertising campaign go out on TV, or a huge army of music video directors doing work for free just through the enjoyment of listening to their work.
Quite apart from the hard business logic, I believe that when an artist becomes successful, morally they owe something back to the community. After all, it was other people’s work that helped influence them and shape their success, not just talent and hard work. It strikes me as being very snide that a millionaire can look down on fellow artists trying to climb up to the first rung of the ladder and purposefully choosing to hinder them and threaten them with legal action.
Using music in films and creative video projects is entirely different to pirating an entire album and selling it over the web, or putting stuff online as a free download. It would be a shame if filmmakers could no longer choose any music they liked for their projects – whether they be for profit or not. Because in the end, if all the material (both the video and the audio) is as good as the sound track for A Clockwork Orange, it benefits everyone involved that as many people as possible consume it and like it.
I believe the attitude to copyright needs to change dramatically, because the alternative is – there is no alternative. In the digital age everything is reproducible at the touch of a button online, and once it’s out there and in the internet food chain, it’s impossible to stop people consuming it – and why would you want to?
As an artist I exist so that others can experience my work. A filmmaker without an audience is nothing.
It seems really unartistic to deny that fundamental human communication for the sake of a misunderstanding of how copyright should be enforced on the internet. Serendip LLC, please educate yourself!
To give Wendy Carlos the benefit of the doubt of course there is always the separate issue of pride and artistic integrity, and it may have nothing to do with money. Should I find some of my footage being used without permission with a different audio track on it – I wouldn’t mind should it be respectful and credit me. But I could see in some cases, it might upset me. I think it depends how skilful the artist is and what it’s being used for.
Someone passing my stuff off as his own? Unacceptable of course, but artists cannot jealously guard their work and not expect people to mould their own projects with what you’ve made or be influenced by what you created.
Surely that is the biggest credit an artist can have?
Wise up to the DSLR video revolution, music industry…
This article is a personal view, not affiliated with Philip Bloom or Vimeo!
