Meet Ramona DeSalvo, Professor and Mentor to Musicians
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 by Patrick Ross
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If you’re a music student at Middle Tennessee State University you are required to take – and pass – a course on your rights as an artist, namely Copyright Law. And Ramona DeSalvo, an IP attorney and assistant professor at MTSU, is going to make sure you “get” how important your rights are to you.
Ramona is our latest addition to Creators Across America; you can see her video on our Tennessee page. She’s an articulate advocate of artists’ rights and a veteran of Nashville’s Music Row. It’s also interesting to compare her – trained in IP law but educating artists – to some Ivy League law professors who may never have had a potential professional artist ever sit in their lecture hall, but always have classrooms full of consumers of creative content. Could that be part of the reason why so many Free Culture law professors out there propose flipping the rights model away from creators?
Ramona makes clear to her students how important it is to protect their rights, so they can find ways to support themselves as artists. She says “free” is not a business model, but acknowledges it can be a marketing model. She also notes that giving a work away is the artist’s choice; no one else should choose that for the artist, including their “fans.”
One of the most amusing parts of the video is when she shares that she opens her first day of class by asking students to self-identify as “pirates.” She then tells them that she will “cure” them of it by the end of the semester, and see sees the transformation with her students as they begin to understand what their rights mean to them.
The interview was conducted by our own Lucinda Dugger, while visiting the MTSU campus in January. You may have seen another video she produced, one of death metal musicians Clint Gee and James Oliva. Fans of them and their band, The Castle is a Tomb, will be pleased to see them make a cameo in this video! (By the way, Clint doesn’t look very much like an intimidating death metal rocker when he gives a friendly smile to the camera. Sorry Clint!)
May 27th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
I’m a teenager who is dreaming of making a living as a games programmer. I respect copyright laws because without them I would have to try make a future living on donations (all other buisness models are undermined by piracy, if you can call donations a buisness model). Something wich would be very difficult, and simply not worth the effort of all that education and work that it takes to get there.
Since copyright laws (in practice) are only getting weaker and more anti-creator every day I am really concerned about my future.
I am not going to study programming for years and spend additional months making a game, just to se my game “shared” on file-sharing sites hours after the release. That’s just a waste of my time, time I could have spent studying for another job where I actually have rights over what I produce.
What suprises me is that some of my friends are also interested in working in the copyright industries, yet tehy don’t share my worries.
My best friend makes his own music (using pirated software, ofcourse…) and have dreams of becoming a musician in the future. But he still pirate all of his music, movies and games, undermining his own future. Can’t he see the link between consumers paying for music and musicians geting paid for making music the way I see a link between consumer paying for games and game programmers getting payed for them?
That’s why I am suprised to hear that educating music students can have such a positive effect. How does she do that? I would really like to learn how to debate and educate like that.