Steve Jobs recently made the case for releasing intellectual property controls on digital music, www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/. The same day the Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro brought that to my attention, the March 2007 issue of Vanity Fair arrived. There, Steven Daly talks about Pirate Bay, who make copywritten video (think Hollywood movies and mainstream television) available over the web http://www.vanityfair.com/ontheweb/features/2007/03/piratebay200703.
Both pieces got me thinking about copyright and the music and film industries (increasingly the same corporations). The "Industry" (for want of a better term) would have you think that downloading or sharing a song or movie is depriving Norah Jones and Brad Pitt of their livelihoods. They're right, file sharing is not getting an infinitesimal residual to the performers and directors. The big sufferers, however, are the entertainment conglomerates. Steve Jobs makes clear in his piece that almost all music you're going to be able to hear is sold by four companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI. I have a hard time crying for these guys. Not only are they big corporations (always an easy target), but they're the folks who've tried to sell me the same content five times in my not-so-long life: on LP, 8-track, cassette tape, CD, and downloaded. They're willing to force technology changes on the market, but are quick to scream foul when technologists outwit them for a few years (tape dubs, MP3 sharing). They remind me angrily of the VHS library I dutifully and expensively collected and then abandoned.
Think about visual artists. We produce a graphic design in paint, collage, pixels, or clay, and frequently and happily see it transformed into a mass-marketed image. No one will complain when I rip Annie Leibovitz's photo of Jake Gyllenhal out of the same Vanity Fair and post it on my fridge, or scan it for a joke e-mail, or make a color copy to send Peg in Nashville. As long as I'm not making money off it, this is fair game. Is this "fair use"? Probably not, but the art/publishing industry has long made peace with the reality of technological duplication. Collectors, artists, galleries, and the lawyers who represent them know that Ms Leibovitz's hand-developed print is worth more than the one I ripped from the mag, and act accordingly.
The fuss seems to be an issue of corporations fighting to keep control over assets they never created (okay, I'm willing to give them The Archies, Milli Vanilli, and The Cheetah Girls). Would I steal a Liebovitz photo? Heck no, she deserves fair price for her work. Conde Nast doesn't expect me to pay more to keep Jake around, and neither does Ms L. The Sonys and Warners are trying to get law to do what they cannot do themselves: hold back technology until they personally find a way to benefit from it.
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