Thursday, March 19, 2015

Copyright Globally

It’s easy to forget about cultures other than our own. Knowing something exists and being aware or its existence are sometimes two different things. Something that struck me about Good Copy, Bad Copy was that it framed the issues of copyright, piracy, intellectual property, and creation in relation to other countries and societies outside of America. Being surrounded by American culture coming at us from all directions it is easy to become inadvertently walled off from any in depth, meaningful knowledge of other cultures/societies. This also can sometimes make it difficult to imagine how other societies opinions differ from our own. Pirating and copyright infringement have always been relayed in such a clear cut right and wrong way that it was interesting to see the ways that other countries feel and deal with it.

                The part about Pirate Bay (16:00) was eye opening because what they are doing is considered illegal in the US but not in Sweden, which by itself raises a lot of questions, but it also shows the lack of control to punish piracy on a global scale. The fact that the reach of US jurisdiction is limited was less surprising then the fact that it isn't illegal in Sweden. It was also interesting how in America it is more often than not referred to as piracy while in other places they called it file sharing which also tells a lot about the tone surrounding it in different places. The only reason Pirate Bay experienced any sort of difficulties was because of American pressure and persuasion.
                At 23 minutes the differences between treatments of text versus other formats is discussed. The way we are encouraged to interact with texts is starkly different than with music. Students are encouraged to read, react, critique, re-imagine, and make connections with any and everything we read. Theme is stressed in literature to a point that sometimes it can feel like we are reaching or putting wording into the author’s mouth. Inspiration from reading one thing can be used to create something new but similar at the same time. Literature is always alluding to something else. Arthur and Guinevere have similarities to Tristan and Isolde and spawned countless other stories. Fifty shades of Grey is Twilight fan fiction, which then brings up the rabbit hole that is fan fiction. Yet with ownership in music is stressed in a way that doesn't exist in literature.

                Techno Brega is introduced to us at around 40 minutes into the film and is just remixing and recycling music previously created. The result is something new that is also familiar. The focus of this part of the movie was not on how it is wrong to use other people’s work, it was about the way their creation is circulated. The way Techno Brega is circulated and made profitable is very different from what we are used to in the US. They operate on a more give and take scale while America does not want to give anything. The producers that remix will not make any money off of CD sales. The CD venders make all the money. The cds act as promotion and marketing, which is free for the producers. This then drums up interest and attention that sell tickets for live shows and recorded live performances, which is where they make their money. This sort of business model could be successful in America if there was a shift in the attitudes about the scale of profit that is expected. 

3 comments:

  1. Hello,


    The film had discussed the role of file sharing in the music and film industry, along with its effects on sampling. I would counter that file sharing has had a negative effect on the music and film industry, out of the fact that it is not creating anything new. Carolyn R Miller said in her work 'Genre as Social Action' that "if genre represents action, it must involve situation and motive, because human action, whether symbolic or otherwise, is interpretable only against a context of situation and through the attributing of motives." (Miller 152). File sharing is simply the sharing of music and films; nothing new is created. Since nothing new is created for the context, few people view it-and remixes-as relevant, which bring down the opinion of remixes and sharing in general. It puts more concentration on piracy and borrowing, meaning that courts will repress anything that they view as piracy, even ones that are not (16:19).

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  2. It's really interesting how you talk about the differences between music and text. It makes me wonder if there are websites where remixing music is encourage. I know there are places like Soundcloud that allow you to make your own music and upload it and obviously youtube where covers can always be uploaded. However, I wonder if there are specific places where remixes can be appreciated. The control over music is really fascinating. There are ways to use other people's writing in your writing and be politically correct about it, so what would happen if we had that freedom in our art? I used a pop song in a performance piece I made and when I uploaded it to youtube, the website censored my video and cut all sound from the clip that had the pop song in it. Why isn't there just a way for me to cite my source in my art?

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  3. I would counter that ownership in literature is stressed almost as much in literature as it is in music. Having owned a kindle for quite sometime, I have noticed the incredible amount of DRM locks on an amount of text. File sharing in regards to e-books is more heavily "policed" than any amount of file-sharing for music than I have ever experienced! However, do I think that in some respect, there is more awareness to the heteroglossia of text than there is in music. Music is considered more of an "individual talent" than the act of writing is. The music industry is an incredibly individualistic micro-economy that runs on the notion that the individual is the only person that can bring their text to life in that specific way; in text, because texts normally deal with such a broad spectrum of things and use a huge broad spectrum of tools and take on many different shapes and forms of their own, it is more widely inspected as a collaborative work towards art than the music industry.

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