#25: Internet Piracy

Burned a CD. I must admit I've done it one or twice before. I use iTunes to catch podcast feeds from several poetry sites and occasionally burn a CD's worth of readings/interviews from those sessions.



I still do use CDs but only because I've yet to invest in an mp3 player for myself. My daughter has an iPod and she's shown me a thing or two.



As to file sharing, I'm a writer and my gut-level, first-instinct is to rant about intellectual property rights and the bloodsweatandsnot of the artist's soul being ripped from her/his chest by the xerox machine, youtube, and napster yaddayaddayadda, but the fact is that we all buy books, fall in love with them and lend them to friends so they can fall in love with them too. When some one sells his/her books at half price books and the store resells them the writer does not get an another royalty check.

Copyrights are a fairly new phenomena and on many levels make little sense. My bottom line is this: once I have paid for something it is mine to do with what I will (within reason). There should be no problem with me sharing legally purchased copies with my friends and family. The thing is that the line between sharing and distributing is real blurry on the internet.


Question: Do you think music and musicians benefit more from strict copyright protections online or free and open sharing?

I don't think there is any doubt that music benefits from the wide-open exchange of ideas that the internet and file sharing engender.

Whether or not musicians benefit is less certain. It's a pretty basic tenet of economics that s/he who controls the means of production is the one who gets paid. But the means of production are splintered on the internet; control devolves to anybody who cares to re-produce a song or performance which by any objective standard does not belong to them.

All I can tell you is what I see and I see a lot of musicians embracing the 'net and file sharing in a big way. As with all things the internet touches, the paradigms are shifting. revenue streams are drying up in one area and digging in in others. Record labels will become less and less viable, while DIY distribution will blossom. I think the ideas behind Creative Commons are the wave of the future. Letting the artist determine fair use for his product.