Singer Garth Brooks got some attention for sorta kinda unretiring, and in answering some questions he made some bizarre comments about how the government doesn’t protect musicians from piracy:

“Our government’s not doing anything about piracy. Until we can hear what a day of radio is like with no music, until this place sits silent because the music creators and the artists and copyright (holders) are not happy because they’re not being protected like everyone else is, then, yeah, I would like that power myself. It has to be placed in the right hands, so it can’t be one person, but a board that represents music, its creators and its content owners. I think that’d be more than fair to stand up and say, ‘Look, you’ve ignored us, because there’s 50,000 of us and 300 million voters. You’ve ignored us, and now to show you, we would like to just simply stop for a day,’ and see how dry this world gets.”

Really? This is the same government that has only increased copyright protections over time and never decreased them (never). This is the same government that has both Republicans and Democrats repeating the RIAA’s bogus stats on piracy. This is the same government that allows the RIAA unprecedented access in terms of setting the copyright agenda of the nation. It’s hard to see anything that the government has done that “ignores” artists in favor of the rights of the rest of the country. I can’t name a single thing.

And I’m curious as to what he means by “they’re not being protected like everyone else is.” That’s also not true. Copyright has been twisted to grant more rights than everyone else, in that it allows copyright holders to control what happens to works after they’re sold. In many ways they get extra protection from folks in any other line of work.

Finally, he seems to assume that the only reason people create music is because of these protections — and yet, as piracy has increased, so has the number of musicians and albums being produced. So, if he wants to create some sort of union that goes on “strike” for a day, I would imagine that there would be a massive influx of indie musicians (I guess they’d be “scabs”) more than willing to get their music on the radio instead.

The problem is that for the vast majority of musicians who are not Garth Brooks, the bigger issue is obscurity, not piracy. Having those big name musicians take themselves out of the competition for even a day would thrill plenty of smart musicians, giving them a chance to get attention normally reserved for the Garth Brooks’ of the world.

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