Intellectual Property Blog
“In Defense of Piracy”
When does sharing become stealing? The difficulty of the piracy controversy comes from the ambiguity of this line. If you allow a friend to listen to your CD is that stealing, even if he doesn’t download it? Technically, the friend is listening to a song he did not pay for. The same is true for the baby dancing to Prince. If artists supposedly have the right to prohibit a use that he does not agree with, then Prince has a right to request the video be taken down. Maybe Prince does not want his name to be associated with dancing babies. But do artists have this right? Once the music is bought and paid for, a person should be able to do with it whatever they want, and they should be able to show it to other people. But it is not the artists that have a problem with dancing babies or remixes. It is the middlemen. The giant corporations are looking to squeeze every cent they can out of a creation, and the fact is that remixes are competition. If consumers like the remixes better, then they will buy the remixes and not the original song. Additionally, many remix artists offer their work for free, meaning they are NOT making any money off of their creation. Corporations fear that listeners will download the remix rather than pay money for the original. Is this wrong? Technically, the corporation and artist are losing money. But, the remixer is not making any money either. Lessig is right; the laws need to be updated. Technology has led to special situations that currently have no solution.
4 comments:
Basically, I had been writing the same idea all over again. I am definitely in the same view with Rachel that all the corporations have the same fear of losing money from the competition of their creation with other creation. So, this all come back to the basic that making money is the most important thing in the world. It is all about Capitalism, as I would conclude. See, I do not understand why do everyone wants to be selfish and greedy? I agree that we have to think for our own good but are being a powerful thing in the world living with other person that have no power at all make our life more meaningful or somewhat happy? Development would be slow, right? When we compare what benefit would we get when we share and not sharing, we can see that there are more benefits when we share. The objective of the copyright that is to motivate others to make new ideas is just an excuse for making money.
Sharing, in my eyes would never be stealing. If a friend had bought a cd and let me listen to it, why should I feel guilty for listening to something that my friend and I enjoy. I am talking about the kind of sharing that is where my friend listens to the cd, not burns it and takes the burnt cd. My recent experience with this kind of situation is when I purchased Microsoft Office 2007. I bought the product and found out that one can only upload the product to a computer three times. From a capitalism point of view this is a great concept, because if one did not put this boundary on the purchased product then everyone would just pass it on to their friends and Microsoft would suffer dramatic business sales. The listening to the cd situation and comparing that to stealing is like saying if someone used a Microsoft Office extension on my computer that it would be stealing. It would only be stealing if for some odd reason I could upload it to my friend's computer.
Speaking about piracy, Malaysia became a heaven for it, same goes to China. And I am not proud of it. What leads to piracy? For me, it is because the middleman, the big media companies that is leeching our money off. If they say it is the nature of capitalism, I say it is because of their lust, selfish and greed. If we were to have a direct link to our artists and their song, I believe such thing as piracy would cease.
By the way, sharing is caring. It is not supposed to be a form of profit making, as what the media company is making a fuss about at the court. They say that sharing the music violates the copyright. The artist, the true legal owner of the song does not bother if I would share a song with my friend, why should they bother?
And I believe, these sorts of problems could be corrected by Creative Commons, where some of the rights are reserved. This gives more freedom to us and the creator to expand our creative artworks together. No more piracy.
I think that it is harder to analyze the intellectual properties of musical recordings than it is any other IP of artistic craft. That is because music is so subjective. It depends on the lyrics, rhythm, sound, mood, and expressions of the songs and its performers. If I take a happy song, remix it, and turn it into a sad song, is it still the same song? I don’t know too much about the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), but it would benefit them to have lawmakers decide what the core parts of the song should constitute a violation if they are replicated by someone else? Obviously, I would think that lyrics would be considered a potentially-violated part of the song. But what about the rhythm and beat of the song, the instrumental? What if the instrumental were to be altered, along with fresh, new lyrics? These matters, in my opinion, are ambiguous. Down the road, each court ruling will play crucial factors in shaping the rights of the music industry.
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