Are we all pirates?

“You wouldn’t steal a car?” A lot of people have seen this slogan in a trailer before the start of a movie in the cinemas. A slogan invented by the American organization, MPAA, in the fight against movie-pirates. The trailer is one of many campaigns by big corporations like MPAA, RIAA and various other anti-piracy organizations around the world in the battle against the pirating of intellectual property, that spread like wildfire with applications like Napster and Torrent-sites in the 90s and into the new century.

A lot of these anti-piracy organizations used questionable methods in the fight against piracy, which involved methods such as raiding private homes and suing underage kids. (RIAA attacks 10 year old, Boing Boing).

By running these campaigns and suing people for, the anti-piracy organizations were devaluating the ‘pirates’ (Martin, Moore and Salter, 2010).

This did not only affect the people illegally downloading movies and music, but also the creative artists trying to produce new content to share with the world.

As example of this, is “The Grey Album” by DJ Danger Mouse, aka Brian Burton. (Martin, Moore and Salter, 2010).

The album was banned by the EMI, which caused an uprising, that lead to “Grey Tuesday”, where the album was made online on several websites for the public to download. (Martin, Moore and Salter, 2010).

The Grey Album, courtesy of Mixstream.com

As Mr Burton later on became successful working with other projects including Gorillaz, Gnarls Barkley and The Black Keys, we can say that the whole incident had a happy ending.

The same cannot be said for a lot of other artists still struggling with strict laws to protect the artists and the intellectual property. Artists should be credited for their work, but how can we encourage creativity when the copyright-laws are to strict?


References:


‘RIAA attacks 10 year old”, Boing Boing, March 25, 2007: http://boingboing.net/2007/03/25/riaa-attacks-10yrold.html

Martin, B, Moore, C and Salter, C, 2010, ‘Sharing music files: tactics of a challenge to the industry’, First Monday, vol. 15, no. 12

"The Grey Album", http://static.mixstream.com/mixstream/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/GreyAlbum-1.jpg