Alpine wrote:baudtack wrote:How is it making money "off of them" if it's your work? The idea that you should some how own the vibrations of the air is crazy to me. Recordings? Yes. Written scores? Yes. If you say that no one can make a cover without my permission, where does it end? What about a chord progression that I write? Do you owe me money for that?
I mean qpb's already summed up what I was going to say, but I'll say it anyway. There's a difference between using a chord progression and releasing something that someone else has made using that chord progression. We all know that the dude from Oasis gets hella narked about anyone using the same progression, but he can't do anything about it. However, if I was going to do a cover of Wonderwall and sell it for money, then he has every right to be angry. It's fine to use elements of someone else's music in your own, but at least do something creative with it, Greenday's Basket Case is one of my favourite songs, and even though the chord progression is pretty much ripped straight from Pachelbel's Canon, there's enough of a difference in the tracks to say that it isn't a cover or remix.
Having a right to be angry, which I disagree that he does frankly, isn't the same as should be able to hold copyright on. I mean chord progressions as ridiculous extreme.
The rational behind behind copyright is to give a content creator limited term rights over a work so that they are incentivized monetarily to create the work in the first place, but still limited so that society as a whole can benefit from building off their work. Without getting into the insanity that is the infinitely renewable copyright (I'm looking at you Mickey and George Lucas), having a copyright over recordings does exactly that thing. Going beyond that to have the copyright include the song itself goes far beyond, imho, the point of copyright law. It in fact, does some of the opposite by stiffing the creativity of others. Unless you have money, which I suppose is about par for the course.
EDIT: To address what you said about doing something creative, I completely agree. I just don't think we should have to legislate that. There is a chiptune artist that I won't mention, that kind of bugs me because the covers they create are just flat xerox's of the original songs. I don't like that. I just don't think they should be stopped from doing that because they lack the funds to pay for it.