Good Old Fashioned Rant On Overbearing Copyright Holders
from the who-said-what-now? dept
A bunch of folks have been submitting stories about the ongoing fight between multimillionaire artist Damien Hirst and a teenager he had arrested. If you don't recall, the kid had created some collages, where some of them included an image of a jewel-encrusted skull that Hirst supposedly made and sold for insane amounts of money (reports put it at £50 million). Hirst, apparently got so upset by a 16-year-old kid using the image in his own artwork, that he threatened to sue the kid, and forced the kid to hand over the artwork and to pay £200 to Hirst. A bunch of other artists started creating more artwork using Hirst's skull in protest. But the whole thing got more bizarre lately, after the teen stopped by a Hirst exhibit and took a box of pencils that were in one of the "sculptures" and left a "ransom note" demanding his own artwork back. Except, the police have valued that box of pencils at £500,000 and arrested the kid. Yikes.I wasn't sure I was going to write about it, but then a lot more of you also pointed to this beautiful old-fashioned rant by Charlie Brooker where he does a lovely job tying the "Damien Hirst puts a kid in jail" story to the new effort to kick file sharers offline in the UK. Basically, they're both stories about huge, ridiculous wealthy copyright holders totally overreacting to a rather minor inconsequential infringement. The whole thing is good, but here's a taste:
The vast majority of people who illegally download music from the internet do so because they bloody love music. They're resorting to theft because they're either too skint to afford 79p per track (often because they're students), or because what they're looking for is too obscure to find by commercial means, or because it's been leaked and isn't officially available and they're just too damn excited to wait. In the main, these are dedicated fans: precisely the same audience who in days of yore would've filled C90 cassettes with songs taped off the radio. In its heyday, the Radio 1 Sunday evening Top 40 countdown constituted the biggest file-sharing portal in British history, with millions of users hooked up simultaneously, mercilessly downloading content to their tape decks.
The government and the music industry should cheerfully view these people as eager young addicts. Let them have their illicit free samples because once they're hooked, they'll cough up later: when they've got more money, when the tracks are easier to find via legitimate means, or when they go to see an act they only discovered via free illegal downloads play live (and pay £30 for a ticket, £30 for drinks, and £30 for a poster and T-shirt).
Filed Under: charlie booker, copyright, damien hirst, three strikes
