You Wouldn't Steal a Handbag (from a billion dollar multi national corporation that own 20% of the worlds media)
Friday, October 9, 2009 by ng
In my opinion the most striking element of the ethics of privacy debate is the stance that the multi-national media corporations have taken. They behave like arms dealers, or conservatives racists who feel threatened by revolution and equality. Freedom to share and explore art is now possible without the middle men who clip the ticket. This is important because the real owners of the art are the people who “add honest labour to nature.” (Yar: 611) They are simply forced to give up their rights in order to sell their work due to the forces of the large corporations who have a stranglehold on the market. Therefore I would argue that an inequality in the capitalist system is being eradicated, and freedom from the ‘music industry’ is finally being realized. Maybe people will start listening to music that was made from the souls of artists, not to music that was designed by a computer and sold for two weeks before moving over for the next money making hit.
A group called the ‘big six’ controls the vast majority of media in the world, including music labels. They take a significant percentage of the profits of a record in comparison to the artists, who as Yar points out make most of their money via concerts. Therefore it is the shareholders and thus the large corporations that are hurt the most. But I think that the general public takes a negative view towards these conglomerates due to the widely held belief that they use the withholding of information and political ties to skew and bias a supposedly neutral media. Basically, we are quite happy to watch a large, corrupt corporation fall to the power of the people. It was interesting to watch the interview with the student who was fined $600,000 for pirating. The anchor was a white, upper class baby boom generation man who in this instance represents the large media company he works for and the class that holds economic and political power over the students who threaten the established status quo. He attempted to paint the student as a stupid, ignorant boy who broke the law, yet my personal reaction was one of seething anger, the blatantly biased depiction could not be hidden. There is little wonder that we see corporations as evil is there?
A group called the ‘big six’ controls the vast majority of media in the world, including music labels. They take a significant percentage of the profits of a record in comparison to the artists, who as Yar points out make most of their money via concerts. Therefore it is the shareholders and thus the large corporations that are hurt the most. But I think that the general public takes a negative view towards these conglomerates due to the widely held belief that they use the withholding of information and political ties to skew and bias a supposedly neutral media. Basically, we are quite happy to watch a large, corrupt corporation fall to the power of the people. It was interesting to watch the interview with the student who was fined $600,000 for pirating. The anchor was a white, upper class baby boom generation man who in this instance represents the large media company he works for and the class that holds economic and political power over the students who threaten the established status quo. He attempted to paint the student as a stupid, ignorant boy who broke the law, yet my personal reaction was one of seething anger, the blatantly biased depiction could not be hidden. There is little wonder that we see corporations as evil is there?