I was watching a 20-minute video documentary over at YouTube and I found it rather interesting; it was about a beat called the ‘Amen break’.

It is a 6-second drum loop and is arguably the most important 6 seconds in contemporary music. To summarize the doc, these 6 seconds have been used as-is, modified, disassembled and recomposited into hundreds if not thousands of other songs. Whole music genres have been based on those short 6 seconds: Jungle and Drum n Bass. The beat has penetrated mainstream pop-culture and has been used in TV commercials, hiphop and even pop music. How much money did the Winstons (the original creators) make off it? Nada and zilch.

Seeing there was some cash to be made, Zero-G Sounds has apparently appropriated the beat a few years ago. Now this raises a few important issues:

• How were they able to appropriate some sound samples that were either in the public domain or otherwise widely available for at least 15+ years?
• Who actually owns the copyright for the sound? The owner of the rights to the original song (from 1969) or Zero-G?
• Can we copyright a subset of something not ours and make it our own?

I won’t be able to answer those questions and depending on whose lawyer we talk to, we’d get some legalese mumbo-jumbo interspersed with ‘i own you’, ‘pay me’ and ‘i’ll sue your bum’. What I’m interested in discussing instead are the repercussions occuring if Zero-G had a time-travelling machine:

Imagine they went back to 1969 and copyrighted those 6 seconds. Would Jungle and Drum and Bass have happened? Would this beat be in popular culture as it is now? I can answer that, and the answer is ‘probably not’. A whole underground sub-culture flourished from this blatant copyright violation, culminating with the Britney-Spears-kind-of music engineers going to the next level and using the coveted beat.

People stole these 6 seconds from the Winstons. Big Deal. Studios have been booked, CD’s have been pressed, records have been sold. At the end of the day, the record companies were laughing all the way to the bank. In effect, money has been made with something similar to open source in spirit. Result of the rip-off: the world has become a culturally richer place and some individuals actually got fatter in the wallet!

Although copyright is VERY important, Amen break is the living example of how open source WILL make the world a better place.

Some companies like ID Software have been notorious in offering their code to the public a couple of years after their games have been shipped. The internet is based off open source software. The list goes on with examples that open source things CAN make money.
Other companies should take note, especially publishers, record labels and the like; if they try to ignore their instinctive greediness (geekiness: by greedy i mean the algorithm family) they could actually walk away quite a lot heavier in bills if they’re smart (Novell & Red Hat are good candidates). After all, greedy algorithms do not return the most optimal solutions in most cases.

On your next fun project (be it music, pictures or code), you can share your stuff while still protecting yourself using the creative commons. Open source is good, open source is fun.
Amen, brother!

Saturday, June 3rd, 2006 @ 11:08 pm business
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