Full Fat, Semi-skimmed or No Milk Today - Creative Commons Licences and English Folk Music

摘要

Considerable portions of Lessig's writing concern the relationship between intellectual property regimes and music. In Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity he reviews the unequal use of copyright in the reward for writing and performance of music on the radio. In The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World he argues that intellectual property regimes need not be 'full on' (full fat) or 'full off' but partial (semi-skimmed). These ideas have found form in a more flexible regime of copyright through a series of alternative licensing contracts usually referred to as the Creative Commons licences. After reviewing what is considered to be folk music this paper will analyse the extent to which developments in the English law of copyright are stifling the folk music tradition and consider the extent to which the mechanisms proposed by the Creative Commons licences and the open source movement offer better solutions more suited to the needs of this tradition.