Daily Question Copy into any AI

Discuss: Richard Ashcroft wrote Bitter Sweet Symphony, but because the recording used an orchestral sample derived from the Rolling Stones’ The Last Time, the machinery of copyright swallowed much of the song’s commercial value. The rights around that sample were controlled through ABKCO, the company associated with the Stones’ former manager Allen Klein. Jagger and Richards received songwriting credit and, for years, Ashcroft lost the publishing royalties from one of the defining songs of his career. Whatever the legal justification at the time, the cultural reality was stranger: the person who created the song people actually loved could become economically secondary to the ownership structure surrounding a fragment embedded inside it.

The irony is almost too perfect. Bitter Sweet Symphony is itself a song about being trapped inside a life organised around money, and then the song was trapped inside a commercial system that redirected its value through ownership and contract. That is exactly the territory The Picasso Manifesto keeps returning to: the difference between meaning and possession, between creating value and legally controlling it, and the point at which systems designed to protect creativity begin choking the very human thing they claim to protect. If a song about the tyranny of money can itself be captured by the machinery of money, then what exactly are we protecting when ownership becomes more powerful than authorship?