technoculture203-09

It's very important that all you pirates see this.



It's the official sequel to this 90s gem for those not in the know.

In reference to the copyright lecture, two things jumped into my head about copyrighting and piracy. What actually counts as piracy? On iTunes you can purchase music videos for around three dollars, this gets 'synced' on to your ipod when you connect it to your laptop/computer. Basically your paying money for a video that you can play on a tiny inch big screen or on your computer. But does recording a music video from the television, such as C4, and keeping the recording count as piracy? Does analog distribution still count as piracy these days with digital now in the vast majority?

My other point, or rather observation is that anti-piracy campaigns have taken a different approaches in their campaign to promote legitimate purchasing of films. The old "Downloading is stealing" adverts are being replaced by ones that talk, (using famous celebrities) about the effect of movie piracy on people in the film industry. Another approach they are taking is using and that I have seen on DVD's is one less moralistic and more based on the convinience of the viewers. For this advert they compare people who watch purchased movies to those who download them. Here is a link to the site about the new Hollywood anti-piracy campaign.


While I do enjoy the more recent adverts more than the older ones, I think it's slightly worrying that they had to change them from the more black and white depiction of "downloading is wrong"

Sergio's recent post on piracy and the way in which artists have thought of innovative ways of making a profit due to piracy, reminded me of Lily Allen's recent anti-piracy blog. Below is a parody of the issue by Dan Bull:

I have been feeling increasingly conflicted about my habit of downloading music. On one hand, a friend of mine works herself ragged to stay afloat in the music industry. She knows that people are going to download her songs without contributing to her paycheck. Does it make her feel any better to think that some of them wouldn't have been willing to pay even if they hadn't downloaded it? No, not really. It's disrespectful - in a way it's like walking away from a performance without clapping. (Not a perfect metaphor, I realise, but that's probably how it feels to some artists.)

And yet I'm not willing to stop downloading, because that would mean giving up my habit of sampling. I have a hard time finding anything I like on the radio, so every so often I browse around on music blogs, download a bunch of songs and albums, dump it onto one playlist on my ipod, and hit shuffle. Then it becomes like Survivor over the next few weeks as I weed out the songs I don't like. I've discovered artists and genres I never would've tried otherwise, and I have friends who come to me with usb sticks and ask for "just any music - and lots of it" so they, too, can sample. Then I buy the ones I like off iTunes, if they're available.

At the moment, there don't seem to be a lot of legal services that allow this kind of extended sampling. I've heard of a few that run on a subscription model - you subscribe and listen to as much music, as many times as you like - but they seem a bit obscure and still developing. As for the new models that are more widely known, iTunes and Amazon only give you a 30-second preview, while imeem doesn't allow for the music to be portable on other media devices. Until a service from a reliable company lets me sample music fully and legally without being tied to a computer, (one of my favourite activities for long plane rides to listen to all the artists on my ipod whose names I don't recognise) I'm just not ready to give up on downloading illegally.

A number of solutions to the problem of piracy faced by various industries were discussed in the lecture. I'd like to mention some methods which currently function primarily as a means of sustaining independent productions, but could be put to use by larger corporations.

Sites such as Kickstarter, ArtistShare and Fundable facilitate the funding of a product prior to its creation by interested members of the public. Piracy is impossible at this stage as there is nothing to pirate; the product will only come to exist if enough money is pledged to fund its creation. By the time piracy is possible (assuming the product gains sufficient support) production costs have been covered, often with added profit.

Products on these sites often offer incentives to make people pledge larger amounts of money. These incentives can include merchandise, playing a credited role in the product's development, or some sort of unique experience with the creators of the product.

Musician Josh Freese takes this a step further through offering some truly unique incentives to buy his album. One of the smaller incentives is a five minute phone call with Freese in exchange for a $50 contribution. On the other end of the scale, shelling out the ludicrous sum of $75,000 for Freese's album comes with the added bonuses of touring with Freese, receiving an EP by him about your life, getting one of his drumsets, having him play in your band for a full month (if you have one) and the option to take a flying trapeze lesson with him.

If these techniques (or variations on them) don't provide a means of recouping the alleged billions of dollars lost to piracy, I don't know what will.

The historical, cultural and politically contingency of the myths which Yar observes might not make any difference in application, as one could hardly imagine justifying human sacrifice by referring to the historical contingency of ethics!

Property as a natural right within Western society is a myth as any discourse is contingent on power relations. Just as our conception of ownership arises from the Western capitalist tradition, so do the media objects we are concerned with. One wonders how far Yar would go in his attempt to determine historically contingent rights of the individual as myths and hence irrelevant.

The industry may conceive the copying of a digital file as a lost sale, whereas Yar describes it as depriving someone of "possible opportunities to exploit proprietary control over forms of expression for commercial gain." This statement displays a particular preconception of Yar's, of the notion of authorship he subscribes to. Yar is not entirely justified in applying the work of Barthes and Foucault on authorship. Generalizing from accounts of the literary text, as informed by cultural and intertextual ideas, to how to assign monetary value to a media object seems fallacious. It is difficult to accept the idea that with the 'death of the Author' comes free usage and appropriation of their texts.

Yar is concerned with debunking the idea that without monetary incentive, people will not be encouraged to create art. Yar occupies a utopian position, ignoring social realities; a middle-class artist indulging as a hobby might be less concerned with illegal downloads than a poorer individual. This represents the idea that the 'harm' of piracy means different things depending on whose intellectual copyright is being infringed. The myth of harm can be seen to be concerned with an anti-capitalist prejudice against the large corporations involved in the music industry, whereas in a smaller genre with independent labels, the effects of piracy on the creator of the music can be more easily analysed.

... according to new UK research featured in today's Guardian. "The survey of 1,000 fans also shows that many14 to 18 year olds are now streaming music regularly online using services such as YouTube and Spotify."