Continued from part 1.

But there is going to be bloodshed in the streets of Hollywood. A lot of people are going to lose a lot of power and hopefully their jobs and homes in the process. Because face it, if anyone with a reasonably up-to-date computer can replace your million dollar studio and the army of coffee-serving, bagel-fetching cronies you systematically underpay, what makes you think you or company has any right of existence, especially when considering the spilling overkill of substandard pop products your kind has been polluting our brains with for decades. The public may not necessarily be intelligent or educated, but everybody can tell the difference between shit and chocolate, and hopefully that means that somewhere in the foreseeable future this industry of excess is going to get stuck with a giant steaming, fly-buzzing pile of crap they’ll have no way of selling.

In any case, you can rest assured that the moguls of content won’t go down without a fight. The question that remains is: how are they going to try to save their sharkskin suits? So far, we can thank a hopelessly outdated tangle of international law for keeping us safe from Walt Disney’s SWAT-teams kicking down our doors and raiding our homes for computers, external hard drives and USB-drives (When was the last time you even took the physical effort of copying a cd?). We can thank the system for its inherent counter productiveness. So far, they still seem to be thinking that they can turn this thing around and get everybody to pay again. Mainly because there are still some people who haven’t figured out how to download whatever they require for free, but that last string is going to snap when all those people’s kids decide to explain a few things.

While researching this stuff, we came across a speech by Larry Lessig, copyright expert/attorney and founding board member of the Creative Commons project. Lessig holds a lot of experience in the field and has an excellent knowledge of the legal aspect of this whole thing. His speech (which you can find on TED) elucidates a lot of obscure aspects and offers some apt illustrations of how laws & reality have an ever-growing abyss gaping between them. He especially seems determined to defend what he refers to as the Read-Write culture, in which consumers and creators are constantly interacting and exchanging ideas, creating more varied content every day. Which is a beautiful thing and a great way of sharing and improving existing ideas to create new ones. At one point Lessig uses a ‘cure for cancer’ analogy, stating that copyright law is actually an obstacle to evolution rather than an effective way of protecting a person’s creation.

A lot can be said for his arguments, but we still think it is a slightly romanticized view of what is going on in reality. Because frankly, we don’t believe that the majority of downloaded megabytes is being used to create something new. We’re not being overly conservative or defending the cultural industry for pointing its bony finger at modern consumers, but we just don’t believe that the majority of users download whatever they download in order to create something new. Sure, some people do, and we enjoy watching Alice and the Cheshire Cat perform 3-6 Mafia’s Smoking On The Dro as much as anybody else, but let’s be honest; these are exceptions. Almost all downloaded materials are used for what they are. And that is completely natural. But at the same time, a lot of the people that are creating all those materials have to take a second job so the rest of the world can enjoy free entertainment. And something about that just seems really, really unfair.

Besides, if you are planning to bring the (albeit very beautiful but also utopic) read-write argument to the table, you are providing your opponents with the perfect shield to counter you. Because as far as we can tell, the creative use of downloaded content (with the exception of software that is specifically aimed at creating these materials) is not nearly widespread enough to justify a perpetual free lunch.

Continued & Concluded next week on Monday, April 26th.

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