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by nathanielksmith
5692 days ago
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I am curious to hear the opinions of some of the people in this comment thread regarding the downloading of copyrighted music, torrenting copyrighted films, downloading copyrighted books, or otherwise illegally using copyrighted content. I'm not defending this woman as she did do something wrong. However, I think it's distressing that people are celebrating her "defeat," especially as (I would guess) most of her critics are avid supporters of pirated content. Isn't there some statistic about how every American violates some copyright law just about every day? Cooks Source was a small, free, regional publication--the kind you ignore at the dentist's. This doesn't excuse Cooks Source and doesn't mean that Monica shouldn't have taken issue like she did. But in the end, I just don't see a david vs. goliath story: I just see a bunch of people ganging up on one person. |
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Copyright survives precisely because it is not enforced 100% - if it was followed by the letter, everybody would very soon see that it's not a good idea, crippling culture and turning the participation in public discourse on its head. This is also why there are rules like Fair Use - to acknowledge that there is an area where copyright is just not producing any net worth for society.
That said, you cannot then go on and follow that because it is rarely followed to the letter by regular people, the whole system isn't working. I see the recent "liberal" approach to cultural content as a plain opposite and equal reaction to the decades of capitalizing on culture. The media industry had their way for a good while and very nearly fully commercialized it (which is why, even today, you see people arguing that artists wouldn't produce art if they weren't paid for it) and now that the sole purpose of their existence (distribution of cultural content) is done better, cheaper and more efficient by regular people do they circle around themselves eating their own young.
I see the Cooks Source incident as a very weird example of a regular person behaving as entitled as the big media corporations do (or compare, for instance, the various Timbaland "situations" we've had over the years) - she is not in a position where she can act like that, but others clearly CAN.
These are all symptoms of a change that is clearly happening, but the outcome will not consist of those symptoms. Or at least I hope that it does not.