Good ol'e fashioned greed

[eumelia]

The greed of the media companies is one of the more disgusting things plaguing our culture today.

Not to mention stifling it completely.

The public domain, as it currently stands, is in danger of being eaten away by the greed of corporate giants who could give a flying fuck about how art and dialogue are created and expressed.

When you deny new artists from being inspired and actually using the art, texts and music and images that have come before, you deny artists the right to actually create.

Not to mention that one of the points of copyright is to make sure the creators and artists are protected from intellectual property theft, such as it is. The whole point of taking things out of the public domain and licensing them is to make a profit out of them, which the original creator can no longer have a piece of.

Once again, corporate giants behaving like avaricious disgusting spoiled children.

When you think of platforms like Megaupload, which has been shut down, you can't help but wonder why the media moguls don't adopt that style of economy. I'd pay, I'm willing to pay a fee for a certain amount of downloads if the price is fair. People would rather pay a reasonable price than commit piracy. But you know, paying 20$ for a season in a DVD boxset, when I 20$ for a filesharing website gives me unlimited download ability - I know what I and millions of others, chose - if the moguls actually took into account the fact the internet has changed the way content is distributed and didn't see as a threat and rather an opportunity we would be seeing SOPA, PIPA, Copyright extension, etc. Well, they'd be making so much money they'd be thinking how they can more content distributed to more people with easier access.

But hey, what do I know. I'm just the consumer.

Speaking of Megaupload, this is absolutely sickening.

h/t to amethystfirefly for the links.

Comments

[glinda]

Once again, corporate giants behaving like avaricious disgusting spoiled children.

This is ridiculously true. For a while in 2010/2011 I was working as a researcher doing copyright clearance for a museum - so you know attempting to pay actual money for licensing media if on a limited budget - and dealing with various corporate and public bodies trying to license stuff. Obscene amount of our budgets went to copyright clearance every time. The sheer greed (most especially amongst the music industry but also football, and frankly big publishing houses aren't far behind) was ridiculous and really depressing. Grown men having toddler style tantrams over the phone...

Made worse by the fact that if you actually got to speak to the actual creators themselves they were often lovely and would bend over backwards to help you out.

[eumelia]

Oh wow, that sounds terrible.

Creators tend to be better at sharing and distributing their material because they want as many people as possible to be exposed and read/see their stuff.

There's a big problem with a conflict of interests going on there, which the current economic model doesn't seem to be able to, you know, fix.

[amethystfirefly]

Made worse by the fact that if you actually got to speak to the actual creators themselves they were often lovely and would bend over backwards to help you out.

And they were probably also getting a pittance when someone paid royalties due to them.

[amethystfirefly]

Can I just say that I'm really, really fucking tired of the corporations and moneyed interests just completely tromping over people's rights? -sighs-

This is not the America I dreamed about growing up.

[eumelia]

To me this looks like another kind of US modern economic imperialism, an attempt to control any and all forms of media and art, even when it was never owned by "anyone".

[amethystfirefly]

Yup, basically. -sighs-

[amadi]

The big problem is the system of copyrights and licensing, which was designed in a time before there were even VCRs, and has never been looked at to be updated and especially not globalized.

So now we live in a world which has become tiny, thanks to the internet, and people expect the internet to be free of national boundaries, and the world of copyrights and licensing is all about national boundaries and instead of making efforts to bring it into the present, legislators are trying to reify the old system which never worked well to begin with.

And then we let special interest groups from the industry, like RIAA and MPAA, try to further entrench the old, broken system and we let them set the terms of the debate, with words like piracy (suggesting that someone was forcibly denied of their own property) and dollar figure estimates of "loss" that have never, ever been substantiated, and can't be, because we can't know how much of something people didn't buy. Worse, a lot of the "piracy" estimates are based on counterfeiting, which is just fine by the RIAA/MPAA types, as they see dl's as counterfeit product, but it doesn't work financially, because we're not buying dl's, it's not like the actual bootleg CDs and DVDs that people sell on street corners.

Long story short: none of this changes until there are new international treaties on copyright and media licensing. And who's trying to create them right now? No one.

[eumelia]

I don't even have a proper reply, because yea THAT!

[lilacsigil]

Unfortunately for Megaupload, they had some servers in the US (though the bulk were indeed overseas, as were the people running it) and this gave the FBI jurisdiction. It's still disgusting but it does have some legal basis.

[eumelia]

Legal =/= ethical, but yes, I get it :(

[lilacsigil]

Ha, yes, I'm certainly not saying it's ethical! Or that it should be legal!

[silveradept]

The idea of copyright was for a limited monopoly on a work, for someone to make money off of it, and then the work would pass to the public domain, where it could be used, built upon, and contribute to the storehouse of knowledge and culture of the society.

Now it's being seen as a vehicle for money and to stifle innovation. It's been perverted from its original purpose and is now used as a corporate tool.