I Found It, How Can I Use It?" - Dealing With the Ethical and Legal Constraints of Information Access

It is very easy to find music on the Internet today, but how it may be used is the source of considerable conflict, front-page news stories, and increasingly of scholarly reflection. One of the frustrations for libraries, archives, and patrons alike is the gulf between the information about a holding and actual access to it. But users are not the only ones to have an opinion about free access. Local musicians feel that everyone profits from their cultural heritage but them; researchers find themselves held responsible for research recordings made decades earlier and largely forgotten; and some communities seek to protect music that was never meant to be commercialized, and is considered to be secret or divine. Caught in the middle between angry patrons, angry companies, and angry artists, what are music librarians and archivists supposed to do? Using his own experience as a researcher, archivist, and record producer, the author discusses the issues and makes some suggestions that can help those who wish to use the music they can so easily find out about. It is a great honor to be with you at the ISMIR 2003. I have devoted much of my life to making information available for eventual retrieval, and it is nice to be among specialists in doing just that. As a researcher, I have made field recordings among indigenous peoples in remote jungles of Brazil. As the director of an audiovisual archive I wanted to make available as much information as possible about the collections by publishing printed catalogs, entering collection-level information on OCLC, creating in-house databases, and revising depositors’ contracts. As a record company director I have produced hundreds of CDs with extensive liner notes, maintained a vast back catalog in print, and moved early to supplying information on the Internet. As the archival consultant to the Smithsonian Institution's GlobalSound Internet music project, I have continued to search for new ways to make information about music, and music itself, available to as wide a public as we can reach. A huge amount of music is available on the Internet today, and even more music is signaled in myriad archives catalogues. More will music will certainly become available. One problem we face is finding what is there (and also what isn’t). Another problem is finding out how we may use it. The short summary of my talk would be: although you can find it, a variety of forces (not all of them related to greed) shape the way music should be used. As specialists in information retrieval, we must also become specialists in helping others learn not only the techniques of finding music, but also the ethics of using it.