Prompted by a series of high-profile copyright infringement lawsuits and new technological models for the distribution of recorded music, entanglements between music and legal institutions have become a subject of renewed disciplinary interest in recent years. As with previous musicological engagements with legal topics, work in this area has tended to privilege Western copyright concepts, particularly as they intersect with and come into friction with past and present musicking practices. Yet music and sound-making practices have long implicated not only copyright law, but a wider array of legal considerations, from policing and sovereignty to contract law and technological regulation. Drawing on a variety of case studies, this cross-disciplinary roundtable builds upon the critical thrust of previous musicological engagements with copyright law, while clearing space for a more capacious approach to the intersections between legality and musical or auditory knowledge. Each presenter challenges restrictive assumptions about the purchase of legal debates and histories for musicological inquiry, showing, variously, how they offer new archives or methodological attunements for music studies.
This roundtable features six short position papers followed by a response by Patrick Nickleson and a moderated discussion. Audrey Amsellem presents work co-written with students incarcerated on Rikers Island exploring the recent dispute between Drake and Kendrick Lamar. Derek Baron considers how music mediates the legal-historical violences of settler colonialism through an intertextual reading of three works implicating northeastern Oklahoma’s fraught geopolitics. Breana McCullough reflects on the ways that law, policy, and archive management have worked to prevent Tribal Nations members from accessing their traditional forms of musical knowledge. Taking up the perspective of voice and sound studies, Matthew Mendez advocates for shifting the scholarly emphasis away from authors’ works and towards histories of uncopyrightable but nonetheless legally protectable “ideas." Ana María Ochoa probes the relationship between ambient sound and legal concepts of territory and sovereignty in Colombian indigenous documentary practices. Finally, Martin Scherzinger addresses the discourse surrounding the nonconsensual use of musical works to train artificial intelligence models, indicating that it reflects a shift among progressive thinkers over the past two decades from opening the public domain to curtailing it.