About the book: This is the open access, full-color, second edition of Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture, an introduction to the fascinating story of the legal, economic, aesthetic, and technological forces that shape the music we love. It can be read by anyone who is interested in that story or used as a textbook in classes ranging from undergraduate to law school. It is freely available to non-commercially share, copy, and even modify under a Creative Commons license and has no connection to Oxford University Press, which published the first edition. The author, Jennifer Jenkins, has taught Music Copyright at Duke Law School since 2007. She is the Director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. *******The book has an innovative design, combining accessible prose with timelines, infographics, flowcharts, and excerpts from a graphic novel. Through a series of chapters that take readers step by step through the fundamentals of copyright and creativity, Jenkins clarifies basic concepts, lays out an engaging history, points out cultural effects of legal rules, and tells scores of stories of great musical controversies, past and present. The book is paired with an audio companion so that readers can listen to the music being discussed. The end result is neither dry nor obscure. And this is as it should be, because the legal rules surrounding our musical culture are both important and captivating.You have probably heard stories where one musician is accused of copying another’s song. By the time you finish reading this book, you know what the law might say about it. You will have explored how a society even comes to think of music as something that can be owned: the cultural, technological, economic, and legal prerequisites of the system. You will have traced out the history of the great technologies that affected music, from musical notation―the invention of writing, musically speaking―through to the printing press, the player piano and phonograph, the radio, the internet, and generative AI. You will have thought through how we set up incentives to make, and to distribute, the music all of us love. How can society ensure that the next great composer or performer devotes her time and talent to that task instead of something else? How can we set up a system that gives creators control of their work, and yet still leaves free the genres, styles, techniques, and other building blocks that make up the musical commons, upon which all artists draw?Along the way, you will get to think about the law, culture, aesthetics, and economics of an art form that touches us more profoundly than we know. One benefit of this book is that it will show you the master patterns repeated again and again in the history of music. To paraphrase an old saying: history doesn’t repeat, but it does harmonize.The second edition is now in full color. It also offers a number of updates.Case updates include in-depth explanations of new cases dealing with artists such as Ed Sheeran, Dua Lipa, Bad Bunny, and Miley Cyrus. Has the tide of infringement suits turned since the "Blurred Lines" decision? The answer turns out to be perhaps, but important questions remain.The book explores the changes and questions that generative AI may bring throughout the music ecosystem – from whether training an AI system on copyrighted music is fair use, to how music gets made and how we find it, to the changing economic effects on the music marketplace, and even the social meaning of what music is to humans and whether machines can make that.There are clear explanations of recent changes in the law, such as the Supreme Court’s decision on secondary liability in Cox v. Sony.
