. “The United States has an unfulfilled obligation to credit Black people properly for their intellectual property.”
“If we were going to do reparations,” says Greene, “one of the easier spaces to do it would be in the music space.”back to the Black barbershops of the Bronx, where his extended family lived, and New Cassel, Long Island, where he grew up. “I remember hearing the barbers and my uncles talk about the treatment of African-American artists, and even though they didn’t understand copyright law, they understood that there were massive compensation issues,” he says.
“A key component in developing ‘copynorms’ is atonement for the mass appropriation of intellectual property rights for African-American artists,” Greene wrote. “An atonement model of redress, drawn from scholarship on African-American reparations, can provide needed compensation, healing, and closure to a dark chapter in American history.
Citing his colleague Roy Brooks, Greene believes that any meaningful form of redress or reparations in the music industry must begin with an apology. In addition to more obvious institutions like major labels, Greene is particularly interested in the role of the United States Copyright Office, and believes that an apology or acknowledgement from the office of the role American copyright law has played in the unequal treatment of Black musicians could be transformative.