Questions/hypotheticals for 16 February 2012

  1. Should music be treated like parking spaces from which snow has been removed by an individual?
    1. What are the similarities?
    2. What are the differences?
    3. Should rights in music (sticks in the bundle) be the same as those in shovelled parking spaces, including:
      1. the right to use?
      2. the right to exclude?
      3. the right to transfer (alienate)?
      4. the right to subdivide spatially and temporally?
      5. the right to improve?
      6. the right to destroy?
      7. limited duration?
  2. Should music be completely free, on the grounds that the building blocks are in the public domain?
    1. How much would be produced?
    2. How would consumers find it?
  3. If music can be owned, i.e. if it is eligible to be property,
    1. How would you mark the boundaries of the units of ownership?
    2. How would a person establish ownership of a unit?
  4. What is the problem that artists and the major record labels confront? Why do they believe the problem requires a legal solution?
  5. Imagine you’re the new President of Afghanistan, and suppose Afghanistan has a folk music tradition, in which village-based minstrels perform at weddings and other social gatherings, building their music on what they have heard from others, adapted according to their creativity and what the audience asks for. You want to develop a distinctive Afghani presence in the World market and export Afghani music. What are your options?
  1. If the Afghani folk tradition is not enough to ensure adequate production or distribution, design from scratch a property regime for music, brick by brick (or stick by stick) (explicitly reference to the generally recognized sticks in bundle constituting “property” in the Anglo/American tradition)