"How long will it take to clean this shirt?"
"Three hours"
"But it says 59 minute clean on the door"
"59 minute clean….that’s just the name of the shop"

- The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band

My least favourite genre of music in the entire world, even more so than opera, techno scratty music, or indie pop wuss music (with which it bears a certain degree of resemblance) is that peculiar self-pitying angst riddled singer songwriter bullshit which reached it’s peak in 1974, the twilight of cool. You know, James Taylor, Crosby Stills and Nash (Graham Nash: "being in the Hollies stunted my artistic growth" FUCK OFF!). Sitting round in mansions writing songs about how we’ve got to get back to the land, shagging other mewling singy-songwriters and oh how awful it is being a whinging self pitying git making lots of dosh singing about how awful it is being a whinging self pitying git. My least favourite song in the entire world, boys and girls, happens to be an example of this latter genre. And the winner is… FOR FREE by Joni Mitchell!

That there song appears on one of those 70s Joni Mitchell albums. "Ladies Of The Canyon", I even looked on a Joni Mitchell website to find that out… see the sacrifices I make for you? I had to stop looking because it was giving me a stomach ache, so I can’t tell you what else is on there.

What happens in this song that so invites my ire is this: La Mitchell is walking down a street and she espies a man playing solo clarinet "for free". Some say 'twas possibly the fine improv soprano saxophonist Lol Coxhill. She is rather impressed by his playing and speculates briefly about going over and "putting on a har-mon-eeeee" but then the lights turn green and she is off, back to the swish hotel from which she went shopping for jooo-ew-els.

I hate this song because it is just about as hypocritically self-pitying as a song can get. She goes for a walk, sees a guy playing free, and she reflects briefly on her position as a commodity in the music biz marketplace. Thus, in this dismal song, Mitchell uses the fact of a fellow playing rather splendidly in the street as a vehicle for her own sellable self-pity, a means by which to make much more of the money she is moaning about. And did she speak to the fellow? Did she invite him to play on the record? Nope….

But the thing is, awful folky black hole of self pity romantic bullshit though it is, "For Free" actually begs a question about the artist’s relation to the means of production and all that Ben Watson type of crap. In Mitchell’s time, the record companies’ control of the means of production was well-nigh absolute, to such an extent they could even distort sales figures, (such as the well known case of Trout Mask Replica which has actually sold millions).

At the heart of Mitchell’s song is the assumption that the dissemination of music by such capitalists, who care not a jot for art, is somehow less noble than giving it away directly to the public. This was bound up with fashionable romantic notions of bohemianism. It buttered no parsnips back then whether you agreed or disagreed with these platitudes, because in those days the mechanism was not in place to disseminate music for free. Pressing costs, manufacturing sleeves with those Joni Mitchell paintings on (and whoever told her she could paint?) etc.

Now, we find that the mechanism actually does exist to bypass all those manufacturing/distribution costs. This here Internet device, which you are looking at, possesses the capability of distributing music, For Free, JUST LIKE JONI WOULD WANT US TO! Hark, what is that I hear? It is the silence from la Mitchell over Napster and their scrap with Metallica. Where are you Joni? JONI!? SPEAK TO ME!

And she’s not the only one! What about all those Anarchist bands that came in the wake of punk? By now you would have thought that there would be squillions of sites put up by Anarchist bands, saying "come get our music, we believe in no possessions, here it is, for you to download". But no, again the silence is deafening. The words "shit" "or", and "get off the pan" spring readily to mind, rather as they do when I hear Morrissey contemplating suicide in song.

A recap apropos Napster/Metallica: American "medium metal" pop group Metallica have been complaining that some people have been using the internet to infringe on their "rights" concerning Intellectual Property, by allowing people to download Metallica music for free.

As we have seen, the notion of giving one’s music away being innately noble is simply a point of view, albeit in the case of proponents such as Joni Mitchell, Anarchy bands etc, it appears to have been "just the name of the shop" (see header).

Logic dictates that if the notion of giving music away as it’s own reward is just a point of view, it surely must follow that the notion that one should be paid for one’s music is, equally, merely a point of view.

Some people who call themselves anarchists and talk loudly in libraries dispute the very existence of property. Surely then, the existence of Intellectual Property, which rather like the Holy Ghost or the Tooth Fairy, cannot be discerned with the five senses, comes doubly into dispute.

Indeed there is something in this: intellectual property exists only by consensus. It is not alone in this. Much of what we deem morality exists only by consensus. Homosexuality was largely deemed immoral until 1967, when the sterling efforts of our local Gwent MP Leo Abse forced a change in the law, since when some progress has been made in the area (note: Mr Abse has recently married, so that should at last still those wagging tongues). Also, any nation, at any time, exists only by consensus. Even Wales.

Also to be taken into account is the Special Position Of The Artist, which dictates that certain creative people (painters, songwriters, authors, playwrights) are held in esteem and rewarded for their efforts. Curiously certain others, such as people who give each other recipes or make up tasteless jokes after disasters happen, are not afforded such a special position, go oft unrecognised, and their labours are unrewarded.

What is it that Metallica are saying has been stolen? In essence, nothing has been stolen. A sequence of ones and zeroes have been copied off one computer by another computer. This is not theft in any real sense, no one has been deprived of any object which is discernible by the five senses such as a spatula or a bicycle. To an outside observer, a space alien for instance, the notion that this is theft may well appear as foolish as the belief (said to be held by certain primitive tribes) that photography steals your soul. (Me I think the acoustic guitar steals your soul but I digress…)

One has to subscribe to the notion of Intellectual Property in order to believe that something has been stolen from Metallica. In the olden days, before the Internet, the people who wished us to believe in Intellectual Property controlled the means of production and had the whip hand. You or I could refuse to subscribe to the notion of intellectual property till we were blue in the face for all the good it would do us!

Now the boot is on the other shoe. Despite the deafening silence from the anarchists and faux-bohemians, people are choosing to demonstrate their lack of respect for the Special Position Of The Artist by swapping music willy-nilly here in cyberspace. You don’t need me to point out that if enough people withhold said respect, the consensus in fact shifts and such notions as Intellectual Property and respecting The Special Position Of The Artist will, as Charlie said, cease to exist. I’ll try and let you know when this happens.

Copyright is fast becoming an unworkable notion: footballers are attempting to claim fees for TV repeat shots of goals they have scored. Does the goalie also get a repeat fee for having missed and therefore contributed to the moment? Do the crowd behind get paid? Not as far-fetched as it sounds: pedestrians in Paris recently successfully claimed money for appearing on TV news footage. Where does it all stop? By this logic, anyone’s image, disseminated by any medium anywhere becomes copyrightable, even that of a serial murderer or Phil Collins. Perhaps it would be better to scrap the whole thing, and use the arts not for money but for self-improvement like Picard said on Star Trek: The Next Generation that time.

But let us suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Intellectual Property is a real thing, and not something Mrs Thatcher or one of those mad bastards made up. Perhaps the way to consider Intellectual Property would be to view the "intellectual" part as "of the mind", and the "property" part as in "Private Property Keep Off". Imagine if you will, the Metallica album Enter The Sandman as a model village, and the songs are houses in the model village. Maybe the bass is a stream running through it and the drums are some shrubbery, and some of the big houses are the good tracks and the little houses are the not so good tracks. When you purchase said Metallica LP, you don’t merely buy the album, the sleeve with pictures of Metallica on, etc. Oh no. A proportion of the money you spend goes towards rewarding Metallica for their part in constructing the imaginary model village, the Intellectual Property that is Enter The Sandman, even for their construction of their own surly bemuscled image. Thus you are buying, in a sense, An Intellectual Season Ticket which entitles you to visit this Intellectual Model Village at will.

Downloading Metallica tracks off Napster allows people to visit the model village that is Enter The Sandman without license, ignoring the metaphorical "private property keep off" law that is the copyright law. Metallica claim that this deprives them of income, though as we have seen this is in any physical sense unprovable. Nothing has been physically stolen, we have no way of knowing if the people doing the downloading of MP3s would have in fact bought the records. MP3s are not a media renowned for fidelity, so it is possible that if someone likes a Metallica mp3 going on about the strong surviving and stuff, they will want to go out to buy and cherish Metallica CDs and various other Metallica goodies.

Suppose you manage somehow to metaphorically steal into the Metallica village without paying, by downloading Metallica MP3s. You would then be trespassing onto Intellectual Private Property that belongs to Metallica. You have a good look round, find it a bit dull, and bugger off. THAT is how Metallica (and everyone else too, but it was Metallica who started this so there) would lose sales… through loss of impulse buys, less people parting with their hard-earned cash on whims and fads such as Techno, Boy Bands, Suede and the like. Curiously, they never seem to use that as a defence…

Interestingly enough, William Hague, leader of the UK Tory Party, has recently come out in defence of a man who shot dead a youth who was trespassing on his private property. Even more recently the UK Tory Party has used, without permission, the music of Massive Attack to help promote the idea that we shouldn't have to pay tax or care about the sick. Hague’s own logic dictates, therefore, that Massive Attack's Daddy G and 3D should have the right to shoot all members of the Tory Party dead for trespassing on their intellectual property. Either Intellectual Property doesn’t exist, or they have that right. Hague can’t have it both ways (well he can, but that’s another story entirely).

NB I know what you’re all saying - you’re saying "that Colin B Morton, does he give his cartoons away for free?" Nope. Nor do I go on about Anarchy (because like Joyce Grenfell I simply cannot work out who will look after the drains) or write cartoons about giving cartoons away for free. I’ve written this column and given it to you for free, so there… but I further intend to start the ball rolling by giving away some songs, as performed by my exciting blues band, the Devil’s Music, for nothing. And I’m not even an anarchist or a hippy, so them bastards got NO EXCUSE now!

You can download some of Colin's tunes at his website.