THEFT! A History of Music
untitled 2018-04-09
Summary:
Subtitle
Professors James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins (Duke Law School) discuss Theft! A History of Music, their graphic novel about musical borrowing.
Teaser
Theft! A History of Music is a graphic novel laying out a 2000-year long history of musical borrowing from Plato to rap.
Parent Event
Berkman Klein Luncheon Series
Event Date
Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 12:00 pm Harvard Law School campus Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East A Room 2036, Second Floor RSVP required to attend in person Event will be live webcast at 12:00 pm
You can download the book here. Complimentary copies available at event!
This comic book lays out 2000 years of musical history. A neglected part of musical history. Again and again there have been attempts to police music; to restrict borrowing and cultural cross-fertilization. But music builds on itself. To those who think that mash-ups and sampling started with YouTube or the DJ’s turntables, it might be shocking to find that musicians have been borrowing—extensively borrowing—from each other since music began. Then why try to stop that process? The reasons varied. Philosophy, religion, politics, race—again and again, race—and law. And because music affects us so deeply, those struggles were passionate ones. They still are.
The history in this book runs from Plato to Blurred Lines and beyond. You will read about the Holy Roman Empire’s attempts to standardize religious music with the first great musical technology (notation) and the inevitable backfire of that attempt. You will read about troubadours and church composers, swapping tunes (and remarkably profane lyrics), changing both religion and music in the process. You will see diatribes against jazz for corrupting musical culture, against rock and roll for breaching the color-line. You will learn about the lawsuits that, surprisingly, shaped rap. You will read the story of some of music’s iconoclasts—from Handel and Beethoven to Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Ray Charles, the British Invasion and Public Enemy.
To understand this history fully, one has to roam wider still—into musical technologies from notation to the sample deck, aesthetics, the incentive systems that got musicians paid, and law’s 250 year struggle to assimilate music, without destroying it in the process. Would jazz, soul or rock and roll be legal if they were reinvented today? We are not sure and that seems... worrying. We look forward to playing you some of the music, showing the pictures and hearing your views.
About James
James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and the former Chairman of the Board of Creative Commons. He has written for The New York Times, The Financial Times, Newsweek and many other newspapers and magazines. His other books include The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society, and Bound By Law a comic book about fair use, copyright and