The United Kingdom Government is moving forward with plans to attract more companies to the region through changes in copyright law that would allow developers to train it for the content of artists online – without permission or payment – unless the creators proactive “will not choose”. Not everyone is marching in the same beat, however.
On Monday, a group of 1,000 musicians released a “silent album”, protesting the planned changes. Album – titled “Is this what we want?” – Presents songs from Kate Bush, Imogen Heap and classical contemporary composers Max Richter and Thomas Hewitt Jones, among other things. It also contains co-writing loans from hundreds of others, including big names like Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn, Billy Ocean, The Clash, Mystery Jets, Yusuf / Cat Stevens, Riz Ahmed, Tori Amos, and Hans Zimmer.
But this is not a band AID part 2. And it’s not a musical collection. On the contrary, artists have joined the recordings of empty studios and performance spaces – a symbolic representation of what they believe will be the impact of the planned copyright changes.
“You can hear my cats moving,” is how Hewitt Jones described his contribution to the album. “I have two cats in my studio who bother me all day when I’m working.”
To set an even more open point, the titles of the 12 songs that make up the album pronounce a message: “The British government should not legalize the theft of music to benefit it.”
The album is just the latest measure in the UK to bring attention to the issue of how copyright is being treated in training. Similar protests are taking place in other markets, such as SH.BA, emphasizing a global concern among artists.
Ed Newton-Rex, who organized the project, at the same time led a larger campaign against him without licensing. A petition he began now has been signed by more than 47,000 writers, visual artists, actors and others in the creative industries, with nearly 10,000 of them enrolling in the last five weeks since the United Kingdom Government announced the strategy of her big one.
Newton-Rex said he has also been “running a nonprofit in his last year, where we have been certifying companies that essentially do not destroy and train for great work without permission.”
Newton-Rex came to advocate for artists after trying for both sides. Classically trained as a composer, he later built a platform of musical composition based on the one called Jedeck that allows people to bypass using copyright protected works by creating himself. Her attractive field, where he retired and withdrew in the virtues of using him to write music, won the Battlefield Techcrunch Battlefield competition in 2015. Judeck was finally purchased by Tiktok, where he worked for some time in music services.
After a few years in other technology companies such as SNAP and Stability, Newton-Rex has returned to consider how to build the future without burning the past. He is thinking that idea from a very interesting point: he now lives in the bay area with his wife Alice Newton-Rex, the product VP on WhatsApp.
The release of the album comes shortly before the planned changes to the copyright law in the UK, which will force artists who do not want their work to be used for training purposes to “give up” proactive.
Newton-Rex thinks that this effectively creates a lost situation for artists as there is no method of choice, or any clear way to be able to track what specific material is fed in any system.
“We know that the choice schemes are just not taken,” he said. “This will give 90% (for) 95% of people’s work for companies. This is no doubt.”
The solution, say artists, is to produce jobs in other markets where there can be better protection for it. Hewitt Jones who threw a work keyboard in a port in Kent in a protest within people not long ago (he fished him, broken, then)-he says he is considering markets as Switzerland for distributing music music him in the future.
But the rock and the difficult place of a port in Kent are nothing compared to the wild west of the Internet.
“We have been told for decades to share our online work because it is good for exposure. But now he’s companies and, too much, governments are returning and saying: ‘Well, you put it on free internet …” said Newton-Rex. “So now artists are just stopping to do and share their work. A number of artists have contacted me to say that this is what they are doing.”
The album will be widely posted on the music platforms somewhere on Tuesday, the organizers said, and any donation or revenue from playing will go to charity to help musicians.
