DownhillBattle on Piracy
p2pnet.net News:- Big Music has been at pains to create the completely erroneous impression that people who share files online are crooks.
It does this by mentioning them in the same breath as the genuine, hard-core criminals who buy or steal software, music and movies CDs and DVDs and them duplicate them for re-sale as counterfeits or bootlegs.
The Big Five record labels like to refer both groups as pirates. And that’s about as accurate as the labels’ fluff that they have their customers’ best interests at heart.
Nor do they ever mention the fact that closely associated companies such as Sony, which is of course also one of the Big Five record labels, make and sell most of the equipment used to create the counterfeits about which they complain so bitterly.
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We are strongly opposed to piracy
DownhillBattle.org
It’s true. Downhill Battle is very concerned about the potentially disastrous effects of piracy on our global economy. We’re also extremely concerned about links between piracy and international terrorism. What’s prompted this sudden and surprising change of focus? An op-ed about piracy (the real kind) in today’s New York Times: read it.
Let’s talk about ‘piracy’: Propaganda campaigns are often undergirded by a dishonest use of language, and the RIAA’s PR campaign is no exception. The connection between actual piracy (as in, groups armed with machetes and submachine guns hijaking a boat, subdoing or killing crewmembers) and commercial copyright infringement was always tenuous and highly metaphorical. Music piracy resembles real piracy about as much as, say, character assasination resembles an actual assasination. But if you play along, the metaphor to commercial copyright infringement does sort of work out: pirates divert the profits of somebody else’s work, to themselves.
But when lobbyists and pundits make the leap to calling noncommercial infringement ‘piracy’, the metaphor – stretched too far – simply snaps. Imagine this headline: ‘Pirates board frieghter carrying CDs, lounge around on deck chairs for a few days listening to music, then leave. When ship reaches shore weeks later, some buy CDs. But fewer and different CDs than they would have bought.’
Those pirates would strike fear in the hearts of commercial navigators everywhere, wouldn’t they?
Words matter, and the next time you hear someone refer to ‘music piracy,’ remind them what piracy actually is. Finally, in the hierarchy of loaded and misleading terms, ‘music piracy’ is a lightweight. ‘Intellectual property,’ on the other hand, is one of the giants of the genre. How can we have a productive debate about whether art and ideas should be treated like physical property when the word we’re using for art and ideas (”intellectual property”) already implies one answer to that question? ‘Exactly,’ say record company lobbyists.
April 11th, 2004 at 6:14 am
yes, who says you gotta get paid for music?