Description
Scholars and musicians alike have grappled with the conceptual nature of music copyright law since its idealistic, utilitarian inception. However, due to the nature of copyright law, many musical traditions are left out of the discussion since there are specific requirements in the process of copyrighting, because of the necessities that the work must be in a fixed, tangible medium and have a definite author, or authors, in order to obtain legal protections of ownership. So, how do oral traditions and orality as a whole fit into the larger discussion of intellectual property in music and how does one parse out ownership of such? This paper serves to answer some of those questions and provides some of the arguments for either side of copyrighting oral traditions in hopes of an egalitarian distributionism to appropriately compensate communities of origin for their work—which has proven to be financially lucrative in terms of music consumption. While discussing some basic understandings of music copyright law and correcting false (and common) assertions, I also examine how these policies can shape our understanding of oral traditions with a methodology in both legal research and common pool resource management. When understanding oral traditions as a sort of “musical commons,”Eleanor Olstrom’s work in Governing the Commons can be invoked in understanding how resource management is closely related to managing the oral traditions of the affected communities. Several case studies are discussed in detail within this methodology, including: Charles Seeger and Alan Lomax’s collections of orally transferred music and Duke Ellington’s oral history within the Yale University Archive.
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