1.
Culture is always building on the past.
2.
Past always tries to control the future.
3.
Our future is becoming less free.
4.
To build free societies you must limit the control of the past.
The
past is working right now to control our future, and keep their large profits
as far into this future as possible. The largest companies in the country,
those same companies that hold so much money and therefore power and influence,
have made it their mission to protect those profits. Their weapons are their
enormous money reserves, and therefore the best lawyers money can buy. These
organizations have been using Congress and federal law to control the
activities of our people. We are not even dignified to be called people anymore;
we are simply consumers. The producers of consumption have perpetrated the myth
of intellectual property to the point that artists, and really everyone, are
constrained legally to only play by their rules, the rules of producer and
consumer. Why is this a bad thing?
The
irony of the arguments against free and fair use is that everybody borrows. The
very products, such as television, movies, and music, that organizations are
attempting to protect from theft, where created with borrowed elements. That is
how human creativity is able to function; we take in inspiration and ideas from
our environment and remix them into our own point of view. Art works the same
way, even the highly commercialized music and movie products of our modern day
society have been borrowed and advised by what came before. To say that all of
a sudden such activities are illegal and dangerous is a blatant attempt at fear
mongering. It is a way for the past to continue profiting as it has before.
In
RiP, the film discusses how Disney in particular used music and stories from
the past to create its shows and movies. How is it possible that even though
the company was built on the intellectual property of others, the law says that
they now have the right to sue whoever uses a Disney movie in a mashup? Well,
because the movie and music organizations influenced those laws into existence
in the first place, to support their profits. Now if an artist/consumer tries
to update those stories and make them relevant today in a way similar to
Disney, they are sued for copyright infringement.
As
Ani Difranco sings mockingly, "What's good for business is good for the
country. Our children still take that lie like communion." If you put the
societal costs of these copyright laws up against their economic gains, I am
fairly certain the moral right would be obvious. It would be a tragedy of human
evolution and creativity if the PTB where able to monopolize the internet the
same way they monopolized what is heard on radios or seen on televisions and
movie screens. The internet is an incredible tool because it can be a way of
bringing back the old folk mode of creation. The promise of the internet has to
be protected in the courts, or else it has no chance.
Since
there is no real way to kill copyright violations, everybody borrows in order
create, there is only the option to criminalize the act. RiP, "If this is
crime, we have a whole generation of criminals." Either we unite in
telling these companies to back off and allow us a reasonable amount of freedom
in the use of their products, or they will continue to constrain the
marketplace of ideas as long as legally possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment