What Music is Original in the Digital Age?

Contemporary technology has transformed many processes related to music, including its composition, digitization, usage, distribution, and protection. Digital recording technology enables musicians to incorporate easily portions of other artists’ musical recordings into their own “new” recordings.

Technology now affords more control over the recording and performing process than ever before, including pitch correction technology and software that can compose music based on musical rules. Some of the technologies that enhance creative possibilities can also enable individuals to disguise the unauthorized use of samples.

The internet has further fueled the ease with which music data can be transferred through file sharing, ring tones, and social networking. The music industry now faces its greatest challenge to date: the concept that paying for recordings is entirely optional.

Judith Finell will discuss ways in which contemporary technology poses challenges and risks for composers and producers in film, TV, recording, advertising, toy, machine, media and video game businesses. She will also discuss the issues arising from the blurring of lines between musical creators, performers, and producers, as well as some of the legal, forensic, and business strategies that have evolved to address this new reality. Musical examples from copyright cases and other musical matters will be played.

About the speaker,  Judith Finell, Judith Finell Musicservices, Inc.

Judith Finell is a musicologist who specializes in issues involving music as intellectual property. Her arena is the intersection of music, law, and technology. She formed her consulting firm in New York over 20 years ago to serve copyright and entertainment attorneys, and clients in the music, entertainment, media, technology, and advertising fields.

She has testified as an expert witness and served as a consultant in cases involving Michael Jackson, the Beastie Boys, Mary J. Blige, Igor Stravinsky, and Bruce Springsteen.

Her work has always included issues related to misappropriation of musical IP. However, the manner in which this might be done has evolved dramatically due to the sophisticated tools available to composers and producers as well as to the general public.

Ms. Finell appears as a guest speaker at law schools and conferences regarding music, copyright and the law, and has given seminars to copyright law departments, advertising and entertainment firms, in order to heighten awareness of copyright issues and to prevent litigation whenever possible.

Judith has been a trustee of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., and has guest lectured at Columbia and Fordham law schools in New York, as well as in Nashville, Chicago, Washington, DC, and throughout the US. She has also spoken on music, technology, and the law before the Association of Independent Music Publishers, the New York Women in Film and Television, and the American Intellectual Property Law Association, and serves on the steering committee of the Association of Media and Entertainment Counsel.

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