The dilemma of Copyright law, piracy and the Internet.

The dilemma of Copyright law, piracy and the Internet.

I came across a very good documentary called Steal This Film, which includes interviews with the MPAA, the Swedish folk who the controversial Pirate Bay.

The mainstream media industry has a new war on its hands and the World Wide Web is its enemy. For decades Hollywood and the music industry has enjoyed its undisputed position as the king of entertainment in the western world. There seems to be a force threatening its throne. With the emergence of new technology, it is undisputable that the laws protecting the media conglomerates are becoming increasingly vague and even harder to enforce. How can a company in LA file a lawsuit against a 14 year old kid in Holland for example? Unfortunately these industries are failing to adapt to this new era and are aggressively reacting the free distribution of its media products. We’ve seen musicians exploring the potential in this new market can be successful. Radiohead distributed their album In Rainbows digitally for free and welcomed donations from their fans. Nonetheless, the industry seems inept and has a model that is stuck in the past.

We’ve seen the problems with remixing content with powerful tools; any individual can acquire some of an artist’s music and alter it in any desired direction the mixer wants to. But isn’t this how culture has always worked? Taking ideas and different elements of cultures before and developing it with your own? I strongly believe that a society with free distribution of culture is a better one than one that isolates its cultures on the grounds of ‘intellectual property’ I would also agree with the point made about the same industry doing the same thing. The video link below shows us how the same 6 second music beat invented by The Winstons had been reused again and again for years and had became the base of the genre! In fact it raises the argument that some of these music labels had became successful on the back of flimsy copyright laws and yet wants to punish the new generation using new laws that would have prevented it from doing the exact same thing they had done 20 years ago!



The fact is, the music and film industry is losing itself millions dollars in advertising against piracy and criminalizing its own consumers with ridiculous witch hunts which is quite frankly like looking for a needle in a haystack. One of the interviewees in the Steal This Film documentary uses the great analogy of “It is as if though they decided to intimidate the village they would just chop off the head of the few villagers, mount those heads on pikes as a warning to everyone else”

If corporate media wants to survive the 21^st century with the privileges it had in the 20^th, it better stop resisting new technologies and instead recognize the power of consumer created content.