... but I do question the "Copyright is old-hat in the music industry - it's been destroyed by MP3 and P2P"
Its policing might have been seriously undermined by these things, and like any scheme dreamt up by humans, it's not exactly flawless anyway, but surely the basic requirement that it fulfills, as I understand it - the licensing of intellectual property rights, a method by which one can figure out who gets paid what for their effort, and who doesn't get paid for stealing those efforts - still exists?
Yes you're right; intellectual property right do still exist. I imagine artists are still paid for the work that they do according to their contracts.
What does not still exist is any respect for copyright laws from the general public. Nowadays only a tiny percentage of songs are purchased legally (although it is rising apparently). Digital music is DIGITAL and thus can be copied, shared, reproduced, remixed, tweaked, changed and stolen by almost anybody with a computer. It is human nature to do this. It's human nature to want to get things for free and it's human nature to try to share things with others. The fact that it's so easy to do and that it's so difficult to police means that obviously it's become the norm.
If record labels and artists want to bitch and whine about copyright infringement then they should have thought about that before making their material so damn easy to manipulate.
I know this has strayed a long way from the original point, but if artists want to make money they are going to have to offer something tangible that can't be digitalized.
Master Tapes are not going to make any money :P but they would be nice to have, and should therefore be shared; why not?
they might inspire other artists to cut and paste and remix and remaster old material and do something new with it in ways that couldn't be done before, and that's got to be a good thing.
