Depressing: Ed Sheeren Films Songwriting Sessions Due To All The Copyright Suits

from the video-saved-the-radio-star dept

Ed Sheeren has made it onto Techdirt’s radar many, many times. What started as his reasonable views on how “piracy” actually kickstarted his career has unfortunately turned into several posts on how he’s been targeted himself or sticking up for others in copyright disputes. While Sheeren has settled such disputes out of court before, he recently successfully defended himself in court and then put out a fantastic statement on the problem copyright law is creating in hampering creativity. At the end of that statement, he said:

Me, Johnny, and Steve, are very grateful for all the support sent to us by fellow songwriters over the last few weeks. Hopefully, we can all get back to writing songs, rather than having to prove that we can write them. Thank you.

I kept that penultimate sentence bolded from the last post for a reason: Sheeren is apparently not willing to take the chance that the world will be more sane. Instead, in a move that feels more like PTSD from these lawsuits than anything reasonable, Sheeren now records all of his writing sessions on video in order to prove in future disputes how he came up with his songs and lyrics.

Speaking further on both claims, Sheeran adds, “I just film everything, everything’s on film and we’ve had claims come through and we go, ‘well here’s the footage and you can watch and you’ll see that there’s nothing there’.” He also revealed how he didn’t play Photograph for a long while following the first claim, stating it made him “feel dirty”, and that he personally regrets paying settlement after being advised to do so.

That’s right. Thanks to the ridiculous levels of copyright protection and entitlement due to ownership culture, one of the top recording artists in the world has to film his creative sessions just to help protect against future accusations of copyright infringement. One has to wonder aloud whether this practice of putting cameras in the room hampers the creative process. It sure would for me. Or change it at the very least.

Which means that the end result is that copyright may actually be tamping down the creative output of an artist in this case. You know, the exact opposite effect desired by the originators of copyright laws. Not to mention how completely depressing it is that Sheeren feels he has to do this.

Filed Under: copyright, ed sheeran, songwriting, surveillance