By now you may have heard of a website called Muxtape. In a way, I’m surprised it hasn’t been shut down already. It’s probably the most blatantly illegal website since YouTube. Technically, I guess, you’re meant to own the copyright to everything you upload to the service. But of course that’s not what most people use it for.

Muxtape is an enticingly simple website that lets you make a little playlist of tunes, a bit like a mixtape. Webware jokes, as if you would remember mixtapes! Meanwhile, David Title ponders if you have to be between the ages of 29-45 for the mixtape to mean anything to you!

I’m 22 (almost typed 21 there… can’t bear the adulthood), and I love the romance of mixtapes. It is like instant nostalgia. Cassettes are meant to be naff, and they are to an extent. But holding a tape is quite special, like holding a past future in your hands. Defects such as tape hiss, wow and flutter are as acceptable as surface noise. They add to the quaint beauty of the cassette.

And here is the thing. I used to make mixtapes. Then one day I decided to “upgrade” to CD-Rs. The CD-Rs would surely be more reliable and durable, right? Pah. The CD-Rs I bought were defective. For some reason iTunes (or the CD-R, I don’t know which) was making the audio of each track start two seconds before the access points. I wasted 4 CD-Rs trying to fix it, to no avail. Then it was reported to me that the CD-R wouldn’t even play! Annoying or what? The packet of faulty CD-Rs still sits beside me unused.

For all of their faults, cassettes are at least more reliable in the medium term than this. I have come to the decision that CD mixes are a bit like sending someone a letter but typing it out rather than handwriting it. You still put in the hard graft constructing it, but it is still somehow less personal, less human.

Of course, Muxtape is nothing like a mixtape. Indeed, it is probably even worse than a CD. As has been pointed out by David Title, a real mixtape is:

hours of love and care and cursing your slipping on the pause button. It’s recording little personal messages between the songs. It’s handwritting the titles and artists in painfully small print. It’s an act of love.

Muxtapes cannot even be personal. The terms (whatever they’re worth, given the dubious legality of the service) restrict you to one account only — and that’s a public account.

Nonetheless, that cute picture of the C90, the blocks of colours, the oh-so-fashionable massive Helvetica font (not that I’m guilty of that one) and the sheer simplicity of Muxtape is enough to reel you in and get you to make your own.

And make my own I did. Here is my Muxtape.

I should point out that if you like any of the tunes on my Muxtape, I think you should buy the album (the ‘Buy from Amazon’ link on Muxtape is a new addition today — a handy hint). I bought all of these. In the case of John Cage, I bought four different performances of it. In the case of Autechre, I bought the album twice.

Incidentally, there is an interesting take on the legality or otherwise of Muxtape at WebJam. The fact that Muxtape does not provide you with an easy method to download the music may be its saving grace. Besides, the cat is out of the bag. In the same way as shutting down Napster didn’t stop peer to peer filesharing, closing down Muxtape will only lead to several new clones of it.

On the simplicity of Muxtape, it is appealing — but it does make it rather light of features. There is no search function and even Google is blocked from indexing pages on Maxtape. Instead, you are presented with a random list of Muxtapes. Apart from that, you have to rely on word-of-mouth to find anyone’s Muxtape.

It’s just as well some clever fellow has created a smart Last.fm / Muxtape mashup (via Qwghlm). Enter in your Last.fm username and it will find Muxtapes containing artists that you like. Awesome.

In the meantime, it’s worth remembering that Last.fm itself has provided its own playlist service for years now, and it is on much more solid legal ground. There are some annoying restrictions — of course, you can only choose from the tracks that Last.fm has on its servers. Plus, perhaps even more frustratingly, the music is shuffled. This robs you of one of the joys of putting together a mixtape: getting the track order right. Catch my Last.fm playlist here.

There is a really interesting post about intellectual property and the woes facing the entertainment industry by James Graham. Given that I have been meaning to write about this issue for a long time, I may as well use this as the opportunity to finally get round to it.

But first, a couple of notes on copyrights and patents. James Graham says:

Both global patent and copyright laws have been extended in recent decades. The original idea behind such laws appears to have been forgotten and pure greed has taken its place. Globalisation means that the earnings potential from a new idea has massively increased; yet at the same time we’ve artificially increased it further still, and long lives will extend this still further. To take one example, J.K. Rowling, a rich woman who can afford the very best in healthcare, is likely to have a very long life. Let’s assume she lives to 100, in 2065. The copyright on her books will stay with her estate until 2135. That means that her great-great-great grandchildren will still be profiting from their ancestor’s books. Is there really any justification for that?

I quite agree. The traditional justification for strong copyright laws is to encourage innovation. You come up with a great idea, and we’ll make sure nobody else can profit from it.

Sound enough at first. But how long should this monopoly last? Is “life plus 70 years” or even “life plus 50 years” justified? Is 50 years even justified? Hardly.

Copyright was big(ish) news in the UK last year when there was a push by artists such as Cliff Richard, Paul McCartney and Bono (where’s his “altruism” now?) to get copyright extended from 50 years. Coincidentally (or not), Cliff Richard’s and Paul McCartney’s most successful recordings are soon to enter the public domain.

And let us bear in mind that this was for copyright on the recordings. So the copyright extension would have meant artists earning even more money from something that they did once, over 50 years ago, regardless of whether or not they even wrote the song. If only the rest of us could earn so much money for so long from doing a job just once!

So do strong copyright laws encourage innovation? It is difficult to imagine that Cliff Richard entered the recording booth in 1958 thinking about the money he’d be making from it in 2007. He will have been most concerned about the money he’d make from it in 1958 and a few years after that. Nobody but the most egotistical and talented musicians would imagine raking it in for any longer than 50 years.

Having copyright lasting “only” 50 years didn’t stifle innovation in the 1950s and 1960s — the rock n roll and beat music booms happened regardless. And looking at the subsequent careers of these early innovators of pop music, it is difficult to argue that these strong copyright laws have done anything but stifle innovation. After all, why would you bother to make more great music if you are still making money from 50-year-old music?

That makes sense when you think about it. Copyright laws essentially ensure that an artist has a monopoly. And monopolies are detested because of their effects on social welfare.

Cliff Richard isn’t concerned about innovation. His only incentive is to get his grubby hands on even more money. What a relief that the government rejected the proposal in the end.

So what is the optimal length of copyright? A paper by Rufus Pollock suggests that it is approximately 15 years. A far cry from the life plus 70 years for some works, or the 95 years that Cliff Richard called for.

It is a similar story with patents. The justification for patents is more or less the same as that for copyright laws. But research (PDF) by James Bessen and Eric Maskin (who I wrote about a couple of weeks ago) suggests that protection of intellectual property should be more “balanced”.

The ideal patent policy limits “knock-off” imitation, but allows developers who make similar, but potentially valuable complementary contributions.

Empirical evidence backs this up, as an extension of patent protection into the realm of software in the USA in the 1980s did not lead to an increase in innovation.

An interesting point about Rufus Pollock’s research is that he suggests that copyright laws should be weakened as the costs of production and reproduction decrease. And the past decade has seen a massive reduction in the costs of production due to advances in technology — particularly the internet.

And it is the entertainment industry’s complete inability to adapt to this reality that has left it in the mess it is currently in. That will be the subject of my next post in the series.

RIAA sues family that doesn’t own a PC:

A Rockmart family is being sued for illegal music file sharing, despite the fact that they don’t even own a computer.

Via Boing Boing, where Cory Doctorow says:

…this is probably more profitable in the long run than suing people who do share music, since those people are statistically more likely to spend money on CDs.

It’s the latest in a long line of music industry stupidity in the face of modern technology (or not, as the case may be). It must only be a matter of time before they start suing people for overhearing music from somebody else’s headphones or somesuch…

I saw this amusing comment by Fred Sanford by chance at del.icio.us:

You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning with a song in your head? That’s a copyright violation!

The greed of some record companies never ceases to amaze.

Surely the BBC offering — for a short period of time — free downloads of Beethoven’s symphonies must be a good thing?

Oh no. According to the record companies, “it is devaluing the perceived value of music.”

Actually, offering recordings of Beethoven’s symphonies is perfectly legal, because the music is a bit old now, so any copyright on Beethoven’s work expired long ago. And as mmChronic at New Links says:

Add that to the fact it was being played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra which if course we pay for via our licence fees. Then consider the fact that one of the underlying purposes of the BBC is to inform and educate the British public - I think giving away music by one of the greatest composers ever fits that purpose quite well.

Don’t forget that the music was originally available for “free” (as free as the MP3s were anyway), as they were all originally broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

Plenty of people must be put off classical music because of the ridiculous prices. And even when the prices of classical CDs aren’t bad, you know when you see one in the 99p shop that it’s going to be a duff recording. Making classical music more accessible to people is exactly the sort of thing the BBC should be doing. Offering Beethoven’s symphonies to download for free was a stroke of genius; the sort of thing the BBC should do more often. I wouldn’t buy Beethoven’s symphonies on CD. But I did download them, and now I can listen to them whenever the whim takes me.

Anyway, what about all those classical music CDs you get free with organs like The Daily Mail? Do they “devalue the perceived value of the music,” or is it okay because some record company fat cat gets some moolah from the deal?

Update: Cabalamat Journal with more on this.