The weather's starting to get a little worse down here now, the wind's picking up a bit. Taking your turn on the outside is starting to become more of a chore, especially on the windward side. Oh well, no matter, it's not usually for very long. Funny though, how no-one cheats, everyone takes his turn even when the weather gets REALLY bad. Well, except Havelock, but he would if we let him!
Talking of whingeing minnies yesterday made me go and look for a site that got taken down a long while ago - it's still not back up.
I assume that Stage6, a file sharing site for DivX movies, fell foul of the movie/DVD industry. Now I'm all in favour of copyright protection, I support the work that bodies like the Creators Rights Alliance, the Federation of Copyright Theft etc do. If I write something for money and sell it to someone on a 'one time only publish' arrangement, I don't expect them to go repurposing or syndicating that, and making money, without paying me - they're getting two things for the price of one. In the same way, if someone's sitting in a shed with banks of DVD burners (or in a big factory in China), ripping my latest movie and selling it down the pub for £5, I'd want them stopped.
But file sharing isn't like that, is it? The industry wants us to believe that money's being lost, profits are nosediving, jobs are disappearing. Sorry guys, the people who download this stuff wouldn't BUY it and just as importantly they're not selling it! They're happy to accept poorer quality from a free download because they either have more important things to spend money on (like food, rent, drugs etc) or they don't have the money. Remember 'home taping is killing music' from the seventies? It didn't and never could. The albums I taped were ones that were not so 'special' that I'd spend my hard earned cash on them.
If the industries would give us a 'sale model' we want, we'd happily pay for it. The success of the iTunes store is testament to that, at least with regard to music. Oh, and have they missed the advertising point (the porn industry certainly hasn't and where porn leads, the rest eventually follow). Of the stuff I downloaded from Stage6, I have bought a copy of everything that IS available - it was cheap enough and the quality is better. If I could have bought a copy of the video for Palmer's 'Addicted to Love' (Donovan), I would have, but I can't so I'll make do with a not so good copy ripped from MTV (the video has a certain resonance which has nothing to do with the actual content).
However that's really not the issue, they'll change or they won't.
What really got me was when they closed down OLGA (the site I went looking for - On Line Guitar Archive) for 'copyright infringement'. OLGA was a file sharing site for guitar tablature (tabs). For you non-guitarists, tabs are transcriptions of music but instead of having all those tadpoles hanging on fishing lines, the notes are displayed on a symbolic guitar. They tell you where to put which finger onto which string (of 6) to make the note and they do it in sequence. So if you follow it through you can clearly see how to play a piece of music without being able to read conventional notation.
Now by the letter of copyright law, it's an infringement, but in the spirit? It was a way of sharing knowledge about how to play guitar by people who were probably a lot better at playing than you and who didn't mind giving you 'guidance', much as a guitar tutor would, but without charging you! So, if I go to my guitar tutor and say "I'm having trouble working out the chord sequence for 'Tears in the rain' by Joe Satriani and my tutor listens to my BOUGHT copy of the track and says 'ah yes, you've missed the G7Dim5....THERE' that's ok, but if I, or anyone else actually writes it down and puts it up on the web, that's copyright infringement!
That closure so angered me (you can tell, can't you?). The real infringement occurs when I play it in public and I don't tell anybody it's by Joe and I don't pay Joe for performing it - ah but that's such a much more difficult target to hit, ay? And besides, am I taking revenue away from Joe? Who would the audience rather hear? Joe or my mangled version? No Contest.
At some point, the grasping fat cats will work out a way of making money out of file sharing and they will stop this pointless legal activity. Until then, only the lawyers win!
Wow. For a Penguin, that was a coherent, logical and cohesive post.
ReplyDeleteWell done!!
Goes to show that an angry man is a motivated one. Energy does somehow seem to clarify the issue.
I was trying to pretend to be human. Big mistake! :)
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, the penguin actually doesn't agree with file sharing of the 'bit torrent' variety AT ALL. It IS theft, the more it expands, the more small 'artists' get pushed to the periphery for lack of investment or a 'buying' public.
But the heavy handed way the industry deals with it just doesn't work. Everyone needs to sit down and work out a compromise. iTunes was a start. It needs to be built on.
Creative anything, whether writing, the visual arts, drama, music is under increasing attack from those who wish to reduce all of us to mindless peons. File sharing just adds to the onslaught!
Rant over.
I have to ask whether you are a musician. I hope you aren't too over the rant to answer.
ReplyDeleteIf you are, just take this as a surrender of my feigned omniscience. :)