The content providers are always telling us what a genuine threat to society copyright infrigement is. The MPAA says, on its anti-piracy page:
Movie pirates are thieves, plain and simple. Piracy is the unauthorized taking, copying or use of copyrighted materials without permission. It is no different from stealing another person’s shoes or stereo, except sometimes it can be a lot more damaging.
Rubbish. The technology being used by the MPAA to peddle this nonsense wouldn’t have existed if people hadn’t shared or ‘borrowed’ ideas from others. In fact, a lot of movies the MPAA claims to be protecting from copyright infringement seem to have copied ideas from others. Look at Finding Nemo - this was soon followed by rather rubbish clones such as Ice Age, Over the Hedge and others. Eragon seems to be an amalgamation of The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and with a handsome, hunky lead character thrown in to attract the ladies (although, to be fair, it was adapted from a book). The film, in recent years, seems to have become something of a box-ticking exercise.
Intellectual property abuse has made headlines on this blog, and I doubt that is the only time it will. I mean, the ridiculous way people can be sued just for playing music or a video beggars me beyond belief.
The thing is, it seems not to be the artistes or the film-makers who demand all this DRM and protection of their work. In fact, they recieve relatively little money compared to the directors of the big companies who distribute the work. This is why some musicians dump the record labels and start distributing their songs themselves. They often find that, while only distributing around one tenth of the CDs, they make more than ten times the profit they made from the songs when they were at the record company.
Also, quite often, the artistes will not care much for copyright. Take Michael Moore, director of Farenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine and the excellent Sicko. He was quoted by MTV as saying:
I’m just happy that people get to see my movies…I’m not a big supporter of copyright laws in this country…I don’t understand filmmakers…who oppose sharing, having their work being shared by people, because it only increases your fanbase…I’ve always been happy in the past when teenagers have downloaded pirated copies of my movies…They’ve been downloading them and they’ve been sharing them, and I think that’s great.
In my opinion, there needs to be a change of ethos in the recording industry. People seem to see artistic works as money-spinning opportunities. Mr Moore (and many others) see them as what they are - work they’ve put their heart and souls into.
I myself would be more happy if I made a film that I didn’t make a penny out of, but all five million people who saw it loved it, than if I’d made a film that I could retire thanks to but was overall generally dull and boring.
And again, I come back to the fact that most of the profit from these films, books, songs and software programs seems to go straight into the company director’s pocket. It’s insane.
