Comment Re:Transacting the undefined (Score 2, Interesting) 324
Our categories such as "music", "noise", "data", "spam" are fundamentally perceptual definitions.
While I agree with your final point, I disagree with your reasoning. Take your example spam. While spam has yet to be defined clearly, it is not indefinable. One could, for example, say spam is any unsolicited email meant to profit the sender. This may not be the best possible definition, but once it is adopted by the law, precedence will alter the meaning into one that will hopefully make it more useful. But a base definition, like the above, is neither fundamentally perceptual nor difficult to come by.
Definitions are not so much factual things as they are agreed upon things. You can define cheese as milk and it will be true, that is the nature of language. The goal of a definition should be to have one that is useful, consistent, and fits current (local) public use as best as possible.
Music can also be defined, and that is exactly what this question asks. Not so much what a good human definition of music is, but what a good legal definition of music is. Obviously music is not yet rigidly defined and so it was a mistake to use it in compulsory licensing schemes, which is why your final point hits correct.
If I had to define music legally (which is not nearly as easy as spam), I would define it as any sound structured to be music purposefully. So yeah, by my definition it's a loophole to burn porn images into sound as long as the encryption algorithm has some kind of purposeful musical content to it. I guess they should change the system.
While I agree with your final point, I disagree with your reasoning. Take your example spam. While spam has yet to be defined clearly, it is not indefinable. One could, for example, say spam is any unsolicited email meant to profit the sender. This may not be the best possible definition, but once it is adopted by the law, precedence will alter the meaning into one that will hopefully make it more useful. But a base definition, like the above, is neither fundamentally perceptual nor difficult to come by.
Definitions are not so much factual things as they are agreed upon things. You can define cheese as milk and it will be true, that is the nature of language. The goal of a definition should be to have one that is useful, consistent, and fits current (local) public use as best as possible.
Music can also be defined, and that is exactly what this question asks. Not so much what a good human definition of music is, but what a good legal definition of music is. Obviously music is not yet rigidly defined and so it was a mistake to use it in compulsory licensing schemes, which is why your final point hits correct.
If I had to define music legally (which is not nearly as easy as spam), I would define it as any sound structured to be music purposefully. So yeah, by my definition it's a loophole to burn porn images into sound as long as the encryption algorithm has some kind of purposeful musical content to it. I guess they should change the system.
