Today, the 6.14-ians realised how singers feel when their work is pirated.
And I was ready to castrate the chap, or maybe just take him off his testosterone supplements.
But honestly, we live in a meritocratic, NOT a communist one, for goodness sake. Work for what you want.
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July 27, 2007 at 3:42 am
Sarah
Hello! A random person here! I was just googling for the lyrics of “There is a Hope so sure”, to put into the Order of Service for my wedding, and your blog came up!
Just wanted to say that you sound like such a gorgeous person from what you’ve written!!! If I knew you, I would feel privelleged to be your friend!!
If you wanna know who on earth I am, search for “sarah myerson” on facebook.com
Sarah, London,uk
July 27, 2007 at 6:04 pm
~autolycus
Eh, gorgeous person, let the banal pirates of the world sink into the slough of their own despond. Keep being gorgeous. Ignore the evil for they shall receive their just reward, unless it be your calling to deliver that reward. In which case, strike true and let the hierarchs know. *grin*
July 27, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Jiesheng
That’s very poetic
July 28, 2007 at 8:02 am
becktan
Hi, Sarah. I’m flattered, but I don’t think that I’m half as gorgeous as you seem to think I am. By the way, all the best for your wedding. :)
Auto, the confusion is cleared. The pirate was a pirate and the other story was speculation and embroidery of the truth.
July 28, 2007 at 11:06 am
dil
HELLO GORGE-OUS!
TEEEHEEE
July 28, 2007 at 11:43 am
Kia Hua
haha just give it to them la, may they have fun with it. It hardly hurts us to share, and it’s a backhanded compliment to our class’ writing skills. Pity we had to pay 50c more though. Which part was speculation and which part was truth though, I’d like to know.
August 1, 2007 at 8:44 pm
kentay
you guys wanted to pirate my Disabled LWT i think =P
August 1, 2007 at 9:32 pm
galoisien
I am highly suspicious of the term “meritocracy”. The word was supposed to be a pejorative one, not a compliment.
I admit I have a very socialist (and at the same time, very libertarian) streak. And even many right libertarians (who I often have insane disagreements with) would agree with me that current intellectual property laws are not working, not just in effectiveness, but in their very nature themselves. See for example, The Legal Janitor.
Especially since it’s the recording label that often feels the pinch, and steal so much from their artists anyway. Where the artists benefit from the increased publicity, it’s the labels do not. And it is the actions of the RIAA which has driven an increased amount of artists to pursue independent labels independent all of its ugly politicking.
Current copyright laws, even with all the recent updates by the USC on parody and fair use, have often sacrificed freedom of speech and freedom of thought in the name of “intellectual property” (a type of property whose nature is vastly different from general material property). The fact that sometimes you need to hire the expense of an IP lawyer to decide whether your work qualifies under fair use worries me. It can in fact, discourage innovation in its own right, especially for derivative works. The stuff we hear can become so ingratiated into the public consciousness that the public feels like it should at least have significant rights of use to distribute and comment on it (far more than current fair use would allow). It is the very essence of freedom of speech: we hear a fiery demagogue talking. He owns his speech, but it has riled up the public so much (or the public identifies with it so much) that the public comes to think it owns the content of the speech. It wants to propagate it, distribute it, modify it, make it better, criticise it, rebut it to pieces, quote it in other works (perhaps well beyond the current limit of fair use).
Information yearns to be free. The powers that allow the government to cage it up as form of “intellectual property” also eventually allow the government to cage up other forms of thought. Intellectual works must be regarded as something beyond mere “property”; yes, we must credit the author for his work, generously even, but we must think of something beyond “owning” an idea.
August 1, 2007 at 9:58 pm
galoisien
Think of this. We hear artists’ songs over the radio, played by our friends, etc. every day. A hit suddenly becomes part of the public consciousness. You may hear it in shopping malls, played on TV, etc. etc. The only thing you “steal” by downloading it is the right to play it at your own convenience. But the fact is, you could already enjoy the artists’ work without ever paying him. Perhaps you can’t enjoy it at your own convenience, but the fact that you can enjoy it nevertheless seems to undermine the very nature of “intellectual property” somewhat. The fact that an artist has no right to dictate whether radio stations can play his hits (although they must pay him royalties, oh wait, I mean, the pay the record label) further undermines this. In fact, the song you want to download may be already echoing inside your head. It is circulating, spawning thoughts, haunting you. And of course, you want some restimulation to restore the “song” in your head to its original quality, since it’s not 100% vivid in your mind.
But still, pirating a song at 4 kbs (a very highly compressed song — is that even possible?) — comparable to say, the quality that would be circulating in your mind, is still seen as just as equal a crime to pirating a song at full quality. But yet, you have come to feel you have the rights to hear the song, because it has become ingratiated with your thoughts! And after all, sometimes (am I alone?) we hear a haunting melody from a piece the title of which we have since long forgotten, but we come to feel we “own” that melody, or perhaps that riff, as much as anyone else. So perhaps you arrange some chords, or add words, or do anything that effectively makes it a derivative work, because while the mind is incapable of duplicating an mp3 to exact precision, it is definitely capable of duplicating the concept of “notes”. And one fine day, the author of the melody whose title you had forgotten sues you for copyright infringement.
Music can be considered a form of thought, or something that inspires thought. Our very brains are pirating machines. Do we not constantly “borrow” other people’s ideas each day, sometimes forgetting to credit them? And when we’re reminded, we’re like “oh sorry, I forgot”, but no harm done, the credit is paid. A musical work or an mp3 is no more intellectual or more propertyish than a book.
Should the authors of the books Daryl acquired from his teachers sue Daryl because his teachers have read the work, gaining the “intellectual property” from it, and have paid for this intellectual property, while Daryl paid the authors nothing? And yet now he enjoys the fruits of their labour! Perhaps in the future, he may pass the books along to someone else (if he would ever consider such a thing, seeing how many bookcases he has bought) — and they will not pay the authors of the books a single cent. Rudimentary “file-sharing” if you will. Libraries are in fact, entire buildings dedicated to file-sharing of books.
Downloading an mp3 constitutes no more moral infringement than letting a friend borrow your book.
Of course, the record labels are upset, because when record discs were material, rather than electronic bits in a data stream, that was the semblance of “property” that they owned, that allowed them to control the data flow, and therefore make money off of it! They had come to profit from the work by relying on credit from the medium, NOT the work itself.
When Xerox rolled around, publishing companies got frightened because now the common consumer had the means of duplicating whole printed works himself, bypassing the publisher. The publisher feared for his incomes.
The consumer tape recorder upset the record industry because it threatened the monopoly they had over the medium. For once, the common consumer had the power to actually broadcast with his own medium, not needing giant large equipment to make record discs, not needing to patronise a large corporation.
Now, we have CD burning and the internet — these are things which have allowed common citizens to broadcast BACK information, rather than merely receive it. Forms of media are getting more and more democratic. This of course, threatens the power of the gatekeepers of information. The monks of the monastaries were very upset at the invention of the printing press. Why? Because for centuries they had been relied on the fact that only THEY could copy Bibles, all of them hand-crafted. Naturally, this made bibles so expensive most peasants did not own one. The monks’ sources of income suddenly became threatened with the arrival of the mass-printed Bible.
The arguments the RIAA are using today, rather remind me of these monks.