michael robertson – friend or foe to artists?
Chuck D sums it up with this: “It’s real funny because the majors, at the end of the day, they just want too be in the same position that they’ve always been in. A lot of the record companies own the copyrights from the last century. It’s easy to look at a scapegoat excuse – ‘oh yeah, we’re looking out for artists’ . . . It’s never been about the music over the last couple of years; it’s about figuring out ways that they can squeeze the consumer dollar.”
“I don’t think artists are in the position of being risk-takers like that,” Vidich (vp warner music) said. “They would rather get a big advance.” — this is from a disheartening article in yesterday’s nytimes. now, view the industry’s fud in light of the recent copyright developments (and vs. copyright’s original intent).
… This shift may effectively end even the possibility of legal unlicensed uses of copyrighted materials — especially since Congress continues to extend the period of copyright protection whenever it looks like Disney’s first Mickey Mouse cartoon, “Steamboat Willie” (1928), might enter the public domain…
as booboo said: no more wearing the man’s clothes, no more speaking the man’s language.
Congress, she said, “is firmly in the pocket of the content industries, and there’s not much hope that that’s going to change anytime soon.” An attempt to rewrite the law now “would be an exercise in tilting at windmills,” she said.
She was slightly less pessimistic about the prospect that the courts might construe the existing law — the original Copyright Act, plus the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which added the anticircumvention provisions — “in a way we could live with.” But that won’t happen, she said, until courts cease to regard anyone who’s interested in enabling people to overcome those technological roadblocks as a presumptive “pirate.” The “demonization” of those who engage in what were once understood to be lawful (although unlicensed) copying of copyrighted works has to end.
Her audience had gotten pretty gloomy at this point. One individual stood up and asked her how, if Congress couldn’t be reached, and the courts were biased in favor of the copyright holders, the rest of us might be able to change the law. And this was when she unleashed her final shocking bolt.
“Oddly enough,” Litman said, “I’m coming around to the view that the best ray of hope, at least in the United States, lies in widespread noncompliance.”
emphasis mine. go ahead, read the whole article. it’s worth it.