As a photographer and musician. STOP PROTECT IP It will just punish you and me for the way we live and breathe in this digital age.
Shitty cell phone shots and in general piracy is not the problem, your inflated profit margin expectations are. Stop complaining about not being able to keep up with the world -- hello, it’s the future -- (youtube ‘jetwing’ for videos of a man flying a backpack jet). How many people are buying iPad movies? Shut up and get with it.
You’re scared to death of maybe not being able to cash in on one of the next Justin Biebers, a kid who hit the fame bullseye singing covers of pop music on youtube as a kid. You want to poke huge holes into the internet, the same way Iran, China, and other oppressive, censorial regimes do.
Entertainment industry, you are currently privileged, but that is a privilege, not a right. Human culture needs to share, it’s how we built the entire fucking past that you mine for the content of your product.
Because of Marquese NONSTOP Scott’s amazing dancing, I know about the musician Butch Clancy.
Because of Butch Clancy, I know about Foster the People, the chorus of which he sampled, illicitly, for this track, but produced a vastly different creative work. Foster the People use a song structure that was invented nearly 200 years ago, that in fact nearly the entire entertainment industry uses, that our current sonic culture is permeated with. The context of the lyrics of songs can all be traced back many hundreds of years. Fighting, fucking, fancy goods and booze, just new variations and recombinations of what has come before.
Should Butch Clancy pay Foster the People? Arguably, if he’s making money from it. What about Foster the People? They’re not the first to chant about people with hot shoes getting mugged for them. At least I think that’s what they’re talkin about, I assume pumped up kicks refer to Adidas(TM) Pumps(R) from the 90s, and outrun my guns means run away from a mugging with them.
Pablo Picasso said “Bad artists borrow, good artists steal.” And in fact, if Pumped Up Kicks is thematically related to gangster rap, those rappers all used samples from old records to get famous and make money.
Is Butch Clancy and the NONSTOP kid materially taking away from Foster The People. Am I not buying Foster The People’s music because of Butch Clancy and the NONSTOP kid? No, I’m not buying Foster The People because the original is deadly boring as far as I’m concerned. Butch Clancy isn’t making any cash as far as I know, at least from this track, because he’d be nuked by a legal team for not clearing the sample first. I assume if/when he gets signed he will try to clear the track and release it, and I’m sure everyone would be happy with that deal and the idea they’d make more money from it. But because he did this thing to get noticed to get signed to make money for record labels, without directly profiting financially, before he is/was signed, he is considered a terrorist by the entertainment industry until he is contractually obligated to them. He might find it hard to clear the samples without a significant upfront investment, especially on his own without representation, even though it costs a record company basically nothing to licence it for residuals [especially since he's already made it without any action on their part], because that’s how the entertainment industry works (or so I’ve read, in the Dance Music Manual).
And that’s okay. It’s fine to want to get paid. But it shouldn’t be a fucking felony, punishable by instant deletion from the internet of whoever happens to be rebroadcasting your pirate signal.
Sharing is human. We dominated the world with it, before the concept of copyright. Those who didn’t share lost their knowledge, significance, and memory to the sands of time. The secrets of the maker of the Antikythera mechanism died with them, presumably. A mechanical computer, over 2000 years old.
Imagine, just fucking IMAGINE what it might be like right now if humanity had started computing on a regular basis 2000 years ago.
You can’t.
We couldn’t imagine planetary computing 60 years ago when computing was just fumbling into being.
Now look.
{Article was updated to include the real name of the Antikythera mechanism, which was formerly noted as Kerkythea, which is a 3d rendering software. See what I mean about losing knowledge?}
Tags: censorship is bad, creative commons, i produce and share my content, share and attribute this rant