The U.S. Supreme Court began hearing arguments Wednesday in Golan v. Holder, which argues against action taken by Congress to move thousands of works from the public domain back under copyright restrictions. It's not small beer in the copyright world. Google supports the challenge. The New York Times, Washington Post and others ran stories today.

Rich Bailey interviewed the plaintiff, conductor Lawrence Golan, for Question Copyright.  (Some of Golan's comments to us are similar to what's in the New York Times piece "Will Copyright Stifle Hollywood?" by Peter Decherney, an associate professor of film studies at the University of Pennsylvania.)

Here is a lightly edited transcript of Lawrence Golan's remarks:

We were simply overjoyed yesterday to learn about The Future of Music Coalition's Money From Music survey, which is part of their Artists Revenue Streams project. QuestionCopyright.Org challenges the industry line that states that strong copyright restrictions are in place in order to secure an important revenue stream for musicians and that peer to peer sharing has made it next to impossible for musician's to make a living. We have long suspected that while an entire industry grew up around it, album revenue has long been only a small part of artists' actual income, and according to Director of Programs of The Future of Music Coalition Jean Cook there are actually at least 40 different revenue streams for musicians. With this survey, they aim to find out which revenue streams are the most prevalent and also pinpoint emerging trends. We at QCO are eagerly awaiting the results. The survey runs from September 6, 2011 to October 28, 2011, please encourage every musician you know (including yourself!) to take the survey!

In addition to the survey, the foundation will be hosting artist workshops to educate artists about various revenue streams available to them and how to develop their professional careers; click here for more info.