Copyright
Monday, October 12, 2009 by Dominey Flores
Judging by the reaction from some of the people in today’s tutorial, the issue of copyright laws is quite controversial...The views that were presented revealed the complexity of the notions behind intellectual property ownership and rights. I found it very interesting that some people discriminated against the piracy of music from local NZ artists as ‘not okay’; and the piracy of big-name US music artists such as Britney Spears as ‘okay’. Arguably, the rationale behind this was that local artists have more to lose in terms of money/royalties than artists like Britney Spears who have amassed tons of money from a larger fan base...Therefore, by physically buying the albums of local musicians one is showing a sign of ‘support’ through the ‘legit’ purchase of their work (at least this was what I gathered from the discussion thread). Could this possibly indicate the use of piracy (by some people) as a kind of ‘up-yours’ gesture to dominant music industries/corporations (i.e. in the US)? Could this also indicate how the very concept of ‘piracy’ is viewed on different ‘levels’ of ‘wrongness’ (i.e. some piracy is good and others bad)???...I DON’T KNOW...With regards to Yar’s article – a lot of what was discussed in today’s tutorial touched on his main arguments. A large majority of people don’t really give a crap about copyright laws. Personally, as a uni student if I could save myself twenty bucks from ‘legitimately’ buying the new Muse album then SWEET...Of course, that’s not to say that downloading is necessarily ‘right’ or that not giving a crap about copyright laws is ‘good’ either...but like what Yar discussed in his article and what a great majority of the people in my class argued – downloading digital info and media is just not the same as stealing a handbag (like what those anti-piracy ads are trying to make out). I suppose it’s tied up with the whole distinction between the ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’. When we download music or whatever from the internet that we haven’t paid for – the people who ‘created’ or ‘own’ the product haven’t exactly been dispossessed of a physical item. They do still own the original – that can still be reproduced over and over again and sold over and over again (as Yar argues). Another argument was that Copyright laws and its introduction into the education of younger generations are largely driven by corporate interests (at least in the sense that businesses/individuals would want to reserve as much right to make money out of their ‘original work’). I personally think that downloading music or whatever to share is vastly different from downloading music to sell and actually profit from (this could possibly tie in with the whole ‘good’ piracy ‘bad’ piracy??). My mate is a photographer and she has a blog in which she posts all her photographs. She reckons that it’s all good if people use her pictures as desktop backgrounds, or print them out and hang them on the wall – but she would be seriously ticked off if she found out that someone had been using them to make money. There was one case where a very well known fashion blogger/illustrator had her drawings used by the women’s clothing store Valley Girl as a print for one of their t-shirts. The blogger took them to court (I think) and posted on her blog that what pissed her off was how Valley Girl had used her drawings without her consent, and that they had imitated them poorly, and was essentially making money out of her ‘original’ work. Which leads me to question...would I be equally as pissed off if someone had taken one of my drawings and used it to make money? I think in the end, a large aspect of the copyright debate boils down to that...I think that there are so many gray areas too and opposing perspectives regarding ownership and property rights...