Dear Steve Albini,
I’m writing as a recording artist, musician, and activist with c3, the Content Creators Coalition, a working-artist-run organization dedicated to economic justice in the digital domain.
In a recent Billboard article you referred to copyright as an "expired concept.”
You further stated that: “… the intellectual construct of copyright and intellectual property ownership is not realistic…That old copyright model of the person who wrote something down owns it and anyone else who wants to use it or see it has to pay him, I think that model has expired."
If you truly believe that "Ideas, once expressed, become part of the common mentality. And music, once expressed, becomes part of the common environment…", are you willing to sign a Creative Commons license placing your entire catalog in the public domain?
Or are you just another lousy hypocrite shilling for Google and other huge tech corporations who have made billions in ad-based profits while using our work, often without paying us or asking our permission, as click bait to increase their advertising rates?
Working artists and musicians, at least those of us who can’t afford to make another record unless the last one paid its production costs, await your response.
Sincerely,
Marc Ribot