Atoms For Peace’s Nigel Godrich has taken to Tumblr to respond to a recent pro-file-sharing study done by the London School Of Economics called “Copyright & Creation: A Case For Promoting Inclusive Online Sharing.” Setting up the post like the paper itself, Godrich titled his “Copyright & Creation much?” and responded to their thesis, written below in his own words.

The authors of the LSE paper chose to publish their report under the terms of the “Creative Commons licence”. There on page 2 under the acknowledgments section it says..
Creative Commons license, Attribution – Non-Commercial.

The licence lets others remix, tweak and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

The Creative Commons Licence was itself created by a man called Lawrence Lessig, who believes that copyright is restrictive and that the world would be a better place if all content – music, tv and film and books – were freely available.

Godrich believes the authors do not understand the music industry and how a lack of copyright is detrimental to one’s career. Both Godrich and Thom Yorke, the other half of Atoms For Peace, have spoken out previously about how music-streaming services are bad for new music and unfairly compensate artists.

Obviously the authors of this report are believers in this free content concept, and they appear to have set out to try and prove that it is right at the expense of any relation to the world that we actually live in. This explains why the report is so mystifyingly off the mark to anyone who works in the music industry. The intellectuals at the London School of Economics are trying to evangelise these ideals but appear to have no real grasp on the actual situations to which they are referring.

The report is called “Copyright & Creation” and claims to be acting in the interests of copyright creators, but the bulk of their argument is based on the fact that in spite of copyrights being breached, money is made in other ways and thus there is no need for copyright law to be fixed or enforced. They argue that the music industry is in a stable healthy condition, and point to revenue collected on concert ticket sales and merchandise. They do not point out that these revenues are being generated solely by larger already established artists who can set very high prices for their tickets and t-shirts to make up for their lost other revenue. Smaller artists who are not in the position to charge anything like the Rolling Stones or Madonna are not the ones benefit from these new incomes, and yet these are the very people who’s interest the report is claiming to serve.

Read the rest of his post here.