[LINK] "The Interstellar Contract": Alex Ross on copyright and the Voyager Golden Record

[rfmcdonald]

I just came across The New Yorker's Alex Ross' delightful article about the complexities of universal copyright in the context of the Voyager Golden Record.

Last September, the Times reported that Voyager 1, the hardy spacecraft launched in 1977, had exited the solar system and entered the interstellar void. Whenever stories about Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 appear in the papers, I read every word, transfixed: I was nine years old when the vessels began their journeys outward, and avidly followed news of their early progress. When, in 1981, I changed schools, a favorite teacher gave me a copy of Carl Sagan’s book “Murmurs of Earth,” which describes the Golden Record affixed to both Voyagers—a disk containing greetings, natural sounds, pictures, and music, intended to document human civilization for the possible benefit of extraterrestrial beings. To hear that Voyager 1 is now nineteen billion kilometres from Earth is a precise indicator of the aging process. At the same time, the craft’s longevity—it is expected to continue sending data until 2025—is vaguely encouraging. May we all transmit so reliably.

Recently, the composer Raphael Mostel told me that one of his colleagues, the composer, musician, and software engineer Laurie Spiegel, has intimate knowledge of the Golden Record and of the curious legal issues it raised. For a section of the disk entitled “Sounds of Earth,” Sagan’s sonic team had chosen Spiegel’s piece “Harmonices Mundi.” Spiegel was given a contract to sign, a copy of which she kept in her files. When I asked about it, she kindly sent me a scan of the document, which will be of interest to specialists in the obscure and complex field of Space Copyright Law, and possibly a few connoisseurs of avant-garde legal language.

“Harmonices Mundi,” or “Harmony of the World,” is a realization of Johannes Kepler’s hypothesis that the motion of the planets can be translated into a “never-ending polyphonic music.” Using the GROOVE system (Generated Real-time Output Operations on Voltage-controlled Equipment), at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Spiegel converted orbital data into musical material, choosing the six planets known to Kepler: Mercury occupies the highest frequencies, Jupiter the lowest. In theory, the piece can go on indefinitely, but the Voyager cut lasts thirty-seven seconds. A ten-minute-and-forty-second version can be heard on Spiegel’s 1980 LP “The Expanding Universe,” which was reissued in 2012.

[. . .]

Spiegel, when confronted by these sweeping phrases [of the copyright agreement], decided that she wasn’t quite ready to surrender rights in the entirety of the known physical universe. Before signing, she crossed out the phrase “throughout the world and.” Therefore, to receive earthly permission for the excerpt above, I needed merely to ask Spiegel herself, and not the rights department at NASA. In any case, as a 2008 paper by J.A.L. Sterling demonstrates, the legal definition of extraterrestrial rights is far from clear. The Economist recently explored the question in relation to Chris Hadfield’s performance of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on board the International Space Station last year.