It's Natural To Freak Out Over Someone Copying Your Stuff... But It Doesn't Make It Rational
from the getting-past-the-oh-shit-moment dept
Owen Kelly has a nice post up, where he basically admits that, even though he's not against copying, he had an initial visceral bad reaction when he recently saw his own work copied, but after taking a step back and thinking about it rationally, he realized it wasn't so bad. The problem is that most people, when they see their own work copied, never take that second step. They see it, they freak out and go negative (or, worse, call in the lawyers). But if you take a step back, you can ask yourself (1) if the copying really matters one way or another and (2) if there's any way to use that copying to your advantage, rather than freaking out about it. That's the point we've been trying to make for years. In most cases, freaking out isn't going to make the situation any better (and it has a better than even chance of making it worse). But embracing it, and figuring out ways to use the copying to your own benefit can be tremendously rewarding.But, of course, that doesn't mean we don't recognize that normal impulse reaction. It's entirely natural, even if it's irrational. So, we're not necessarily surprised when people overreact to such things -- even if we think it's not a particularly smart long-term strategy. But, hopefully, as more and more people show how allowing more widespread copying helped rather than harmed them, this won't seem so counterintuitive to so many people.
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Corporations
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Re: Corporations
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Re: Corporations
Combine the fact that they not only can't control digital outlets as effectively, but also just don't understand digital technology as they do physical media, that's where you get the freak-outs. The lawyers just do the bidding of the corporate heads, and don't really care whether they do the right thing for the company as long as they can bill for their time.
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The Law
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Re: The Law
That's incorrect. For trademarks it's almost true, but not at all true for copyright or patents. Even for trademarks there are some limitations on that.
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Re: The Law
Oh and thanks for the link Mike, woke up to a nice surprise in my RSS reader with this post.
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Are we just trained?
Maybe the copyright insanity going on is just an unintended side effect of the formalization of education that we've seen in the past 100 years? Maybe, just to brainstorm, greater focus on teamwork and collaborative assignments might reverse the trend?
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Re: Are we just trained?
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Nevertheless, the above means that our FIRST reaction will always be "STEALING!" because, well, it LOOKS like stealing. Lizard brain doesn't know copying, and mammalian brain has to correct it.
To bad that RIAA is run by people who don't have mammalian brain.
I, for one, welcome our lizard overlords.
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If giving away your work for free is such a good strategy, you have to wonder why all the major artists aren’t doing it. Don’t the big record companies have any economists working for them? Or is it possible that the people with advanced degrees in business and economics know more about business and economics than the people downloading music with one hand, while masturbating furiously with the other, and wishing they had a tail to hold the bong? - Scott Adams
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Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it. - John Lennon
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....wow!
Question: exactly how much time passed between John making that statement and some "lone nut" putting a couple of bullets in him?
Just saying...
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But to respond to Adams' point (which we did when he first made it as well), more and more artists are going that way and have realized that it makes them more money. But no one expects everyone to figure this out overnight. These things take time.
And I love the fact that "because everyone's not doing" somehow means "it can't work" when the actual evidence of looking at those who HAVE DONE IT shows that it does work.
Thank goodness most people recognize this basic economic fact. Otherwise, we'd be hearing about how automobiles were a failure because some people still bought horse carriages.
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