Pirates, Google and DMCA…
on October 19th, 2010Independent filmmaker Ellen Seidler posted an instructional video about how her work is pirated tens of thousands of times a day on illegal sites around the world, and how she deals with it. The DMCA takedown notice time sink is daunting. Of course, you can hire people to do that for you, but few independent creators have the dough to afford this support service.
Many pirate advocates promote the idea that if you allow your work to remain online illegally, you give pirates tacit permission. The circular reasoning goes on:if you really care about your art, you won’t waste the precious hours of your production time issuing takedown notices.
Danged if you do, danged if you don’t.
This stuff depresses me all to hell. Being a viewer is not being an owner.
related: I just want to bring this to your attention.
http://www.cracked.com/article_18817_5-reasons-future-will-be-ruled-by-b.s..html
@ Arlnee: That Cracked article is awesome.
I think it’s funny that one of the commentators complains that our economy is based on “arbitrary worth”.
Apparently, any imposition of worth, like copyright laws, and laws against stealing, are some kind of affront to human nature.
If the consumer gets to determine value at every turn, with the producer not being able to set value based on their investment, we are in for a world of hurt.
Oh, wait…
That’s a good article and a depressing vid. The same thing is what makes eBay not really care about creative rights: they’d be losing out on their biggest revenues if they were to actually shut down all those pirated goods accounts. So creative rights only exist in eBay-land if you’re registered to their special little program and have the patience to go through all the paperwork and the weeks/months of waiting. Maybe.
I know it’s total hippy-talk but I’d still like a revolution, plz, that would make money obsolete. Oh and give everyone sufficient concusions so that they wouldn’t be envious or greedy.
Now that I see it spelled out, it seems like sort of a tall order.