Dear reader,
What does it mean to own something?
We talk as if we own things all the time: My friend. My book. My hometown. I myself call the books on the bookshelves above my head my books, but possessive usage notwithstanding, they are not really mine. I can’t for example go make a copy of my copy – yes, my copy – of “The Left Hand of Darkness” and hawk the replicas on the street.
But a student here at the University once asked me: What if we could? He wanted to know what would happen if we got rid of copyright.
Now, I’m a writer. I like copyright. It guarantees me compensation for my product. But at the same time, I found it an interesting debate. He pointed out cases of artists and authors who have released their works free of charge and still manage to live well off of donations.
I don’t think I could personally work under such a system, but then again I distrust ideas based off pure good intentions as much as I distrust ideas based off pure rationalism. Still, it makes me wonder: Do we as a society put a bit too much emphasis on the idea of owning ideas?
I ask this because we live in the Internet generation: If something exists in digital form, then it’s somewhere out there on the information superhighway. Hit movies can be found online only hours after release, whole books are scanned in and shared freely, songs are traded like baseball cards. And try as they might, the legal arms of the various media publishing companies can’t keep these things in check. They can prosecute as many people as they like: The files will still be out there on a P2P server waiting for someone to download them.
Part of my mind is simply cynical about Internet piracy: I hear about people illegally downloading redundant pop songs or barely coherent rap, and I can’t understand why anyone would want to listen to that at all, let alone go through the trouble of pirating it.
But the other part of me is grateful to the Internet pirates: Without them I might not have found some of the beautiful things that I have.
I’m using the term “pirates” loosely here. I detest people who go around sharing music – since music is the predominant example – not because they can’t pay but because they don’t want to pay. The pirates I do like are those who take advantage of the Internet’s currently relaxed ideas of ownership, sharing and original work to make tributes to artists they love and songs that tickle their fancy.
In my wanderings around YouTube and Newgrounds, I’ve found videos and animations that used music from Weird Al, Smash Mouth, Fall Out Boy and even a Finnish vocal group called Loituma, and I liked them so much that I – yes I, that guy who only buys CDs if the composer has been dead for 100 years or more – have been wanting to go to the store and buy their songs.
Some still decry the practice of using copyrighted materials in any way, shape or form, but I cannot understand why. Some argue that by listening to the songs for free, we’re lowering the profits of the publisher and artist: The idea being if we hadn’t heard it online, we would have heard it by buying the CD and thus adding to the bottom line of the creators. But for most of the songs, we wouldn’t even have known of their existence, or at least we wouldn’t have cared, until we heard them online.
And some argue that the Internet will turn casual listeners into full-fledged pirates, but there has always been technology available to beat the system. If the Internet disappeared and no one could download their preferred songs, they would just tape them off the radio. Thieves have always been around, but so long as there is still that urge for ownership, that urge to have “my CD,” the creators need not worry that people will pay.
Besides, making music, or books, or movies or anything else just for profit devalues the actual meaning of the art – the emotions and feelings it generates within us. That’s not to say that artists shouldn’t profit from what they do, but I don’t want to listen to music that’s based just around making a profit any more than you, reader, would want to read an column in the Emerald written just to make the grade.
If I did, I’d just go listen to Britney Spears.
[email protected]