Alex Feerst is a fellow at Stanford Law School, specializing in intellectual property and the Internet.
Of course, there are free, legal options for Eleanor - she could check Brown's music out of the library, for example. "But musical theater doesn't quite work in that way."
Jason bourne soundtrack piano sheet music for free#
"The argument that Trent Reznor makes is, 'Well, all right, you can all have my music for free - I'll just do more concerts and sell more T-shirts,' " Brown says. It's a position that a lot of rock bands - among them Nine Inch Nails - have adopted. But, since I was able to get it, how much more money was made? This isn't just a fluke thing. Now, if I hadn't been able to get the sheet music for free, I would have probably done a different song. He also tells his friend Sally about it, and they decide to go and see the show together the next time it comes around. Bill goes home that night and downloads the entire Songs for a New World album off iTunes. He listens and decides that he really likes the song. I slate saying, 'Hi, I'm Eleanor and I will be performing "Stars and the Moon" from Songs for a New World by Jason Robert Brown.' Bill, having never heard of this composer, doesn't know the song or the show. "Let's say Person A has never heard of 'The Great Jason Robert Brown.' Let's name Person A 'Bill.' Let's say I find the sheet music to 'Stars and the Moon" online, and, since I was able to find that music, I was able to perform that song for a talent show. Brown learned that her real name is Eleanor, and he was not comfortable with putting us in touch with her.
That 15-year-old girl touched on some genuine hot-button issues about copyright and digital technology. While many wrote to support him, Brown also caught a lot of flak. When Brown published the exchange, his website, which normally gets about 500 hits a day, was suddenly overwhelmed with 150,000 hits in a single week. You can read Brown's exchange with Eleanor, as posted on his blog, here. "And I thought, 'Well, 4,000 people is an epidemic!' That's an enormous amount of possible sales that I'm losing." "I typed in my name and I got 4,000 people, 4,000 individual users who were all saying, 'We have music of Jason Robert Brown and we will trade it,' " he says. He says he had heard about websites where sheet music is shared, without any payment, and decided to check one of them out. And, he estimates, about one-third of his income comes from the sale of sheet music.
Brown makes a healthy upper-middle-class living from a variety of sources - he gets royalties from productions of his shows, and he teaches and performs. When he published correspondence about the issue between a teenage fan and himself on his blog, he unleashed what he has called a "firestorm" of responses.Īs a theater songwriter, Brown may not be as well-known as Stephen Sondheim or Stephen Schwartz, but his finely crafted songs have been performed on and off Broadway. And, as Tony Award-winning songwriter Jason Robert Brown discovered recently, even sheet music isn't immune. But, as with audio or video files, these documents are easy to pass around online.ĭigital technology has made it possible for users to share perfect copies of audio and video files over the Internet, skirting copyright laws.