There exists a certain kind of person who will think that when you do something with computers, you are some kind of genius and a genius is almost a wizard if not a warlock or something. It might SOUND like awe but you can hear them linking it with witchcraft and selling your sole for a demonbuggering you.
Sometimes, praises ain't praises at all. Googlers are smart guys sounds a bit to much like Jews are really good with money, White people got all the jobs and Blacks sure got rhythm. Quick personality test, which of these made your blood boil? Mmm, interesting...
But where your grandmothers world views might be relatively harmless (where was she during the holocaust or lynchings etc etc) this guy uses it to put the blame for all his whoes on another group of people. Consider this: You can blame your high fuel prices on the oil companies, big money, Illuminati etc etc. This is straightforward blaming (and usually gets racist sooner or later). OR you can say, those motor company guys are smart guys and they can build a fuel efficient 3 ton SUV for you to drive alone... AND the unvoiced part here IS: but they ain't, so those guys must be in cohoots with the former guys who are controlling the entire world.
In short, this praise of googlers is NOT praise but saying really: They could fix it if they wanted to but they don't want to.
Pretty nice since this needly sidesteps the challenge of proving it can be done. Simply, they are smart, they can do it, if they wanted to and they must.
The problem this guy, Ari Emanuel faces is that he can't deal with the idea that world changes. Not just faster computers, bigger SUV's etc etc but that our culture, our idea of who we are, what we value, how we live, how we entertain ourselves, our morals, EVERYTHING changes over time. Copyright as it exists now, did NOT always exist in its current form. It was introduced quite recently and then it was introduced because tech (printing and music recording) were changing the world.
BUT that is just the shallow end of the changes made a hundred or so years ago. How many of you got an instrument you play with regulatory for your enjoyment? Wink wink, nudge nudge know what I mean
What I mean of course is that the sale of musical instruments has plummeted, once if you wanted to listen to music, you made it yourself. For hundreds, no thousands of years. Long before any copyright existed to "protect" music. In fact copyright was not introduced to protect musicians or even song writers but to protect music PUBLISHERS. Recorded music, first pianola, later wax cylinders etc changed all this. But it changed far more then just how music made its way around. How many in your youth went to a disco... okay, wrong place to ask BUT think about this, going to a disco or dance is basically the same thing but how normal do you find it have LIVE music playing? When there was no recorded music, far more people played to entertain others outside the home. Now only a few even play inside the home.
Recorded music has been killing MUSIC!
And yet, we SURVIVED!!! Society did NOT collapse. This was feared every time culture changed, the end of theater because of the movies, the end of the movies because of TV, the end of TV because of the VCR.
Culture survived! Might it also survive a new change? An era in which entertainment is once again produced differently? Think about cover bands. They are NOT a new thing but with recorded music, people for the first time had an idea of how the original sounded. Cover bands just USED to play popular music they heard in one place in another by just listening and changing it ever so slightly. That is how many a folklore story got changed and yet remained the same. (Yes, that too is part of mass media entertainment, just a different era). The idea that ONE company, one performer can now set how ALL other performers of a similar product are judged against the "original" is quite new. Quick, Snowwhite, the little mermain, picture them. If you can't help but see the Disney version in your mind as the true version and would be thinking "this is not right" if you watched another version, then you proven my point. And yet, culture survives!
The problem currently with copyright is that its laws are just to easily circumvented...
Not, this ain't right. The PROBLEM with copyright with its laws is currently going straight against the flow of our culture. People have ALWAYS re-used existing content in new ways and now it has become ever easier and we have a huge desire to copy. I don't just mean copyright infringement by making a digital copy. Once if you heard a musician playing and you wanted to play it at home, you had one listening before taking out your instrument at home and giving it a go.
Now, you can have the sheet music in front of you, tracks with your part taken out and play along with the music slowed down until you gotten better. But OOPS! That is STEALING! Even singing along is STEALING! People must have been copying music from each other for ages, how else did folk music survive, but only now has they idea come into being that this is WRONG! That such music belongs to one person and not to any who hears it and reproduces it.
Now, try to think of a place where still to this day, the unlicensed performance of a composers work is done on a routine basis every weekend... That's right, sport stadiums and religious buildings all over the world. The national anthem and gospel songs are performed without the performers paying a royalty! Without being payed themselves! No, I am NOT just talking about the choir and whatever 15 minute celeb has been chosen to sing the Anthem badly. I am talking about ALL the members in the audience singing along. ONE GIGANTIC EVER REPEATING COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT!
Yes, those composers are long death, a fitting sentence for their crimes, but another song, happy birthday, that in some of its forms IS STILL UNDER COPYRIGHT and Air Emanuel and his chums want paying for it.
Every time someone makes a home video with some music in the background, they want paying. When someone records natural bird song, they want paying.
But this goes beyond greed, it goes as a direct attack on OUR culture. Music and other forms of Entertainment are OUR, all of us, culture, they make us who we are just as much as Pyramids made the Egyptians and gladiators made the Romans who and what they were. (From historical evidence it seems gladiators held a similar role as modern entertainers, both revered and reviled at the same time)
I remember when I was very young that at sports meets, they used to play Star Wars music during the award ceremonies. That music had become PART of culture and was being used in it. Does that mean George Lucas deserves payment everytime goes "The rant is strong in this one", yeah, just like you thought right now.
Deserves? Maybe. Can he have it? No. This ain't about right and wrong, moral and amoral. It just isn't possible to police 6-7 billion people everytime they might be copying or re-using something someone else has created. When youtube adds an insane amount of content per second, who can check if someone didn't leave their radio on while taping their cat and recording it too.
This is not about information wanting to be free or artist deserving to be paid, this is about what we can and cannot enforce with laws in our society. Ari Emanuel takes it for granted that big content needs to be produced with big budgets and consumed and payed for in big amounts... he is right... it must. He is WRONG in thinking that it is without question that our society will continue to do that. What he can't even think off is that all this might just have to collapse that with the impossibility to stop copyright infringement because of how we can and do consume entertainment, that how content is produced, might just have to change.
We no longer grow our own food. This is the way things are. Once it was very different. Things changed, the world changed, we adapted. And now we are adapting again by some starting to grow it again and all the time nobody grew food anymore little parcels of lands we handed down in big cities were people grew food. No new agers, you are doing nothing new. Allotments, very old hat.
My point? Yes, I know, I am ranting BUT my point needs a bit of a setup because to a LOT of people, it goes against the way they understand the world.
Payed for entertainment might die off, every single artist in the world could starve tomorrow and everything would be just fine. I am saying this is not about how much Madonna deserves to make but that her very existence is irrelevant to human beings. Someone, somewhere, somehow will produce music and it will be our new culture. Maybe that person will be payed, maybe not. Art survives. If it can survive cultural revolutions and holocausts it can survive the dead of copyright.
The media industry might die but this will not be the end of entertainment. It just will be different.
We got two choices, either put a massive and as yet non-existing brake on our culture to keep the mass media alive OR let it go and see what evolves from it.
I say, let it go. Yes, this will mean a huge shift. Or it might not. But the idea that some smart googlers will just come up with a method to fundamentally change our consumption and use of culture and the facilitation of that consumption is just silly.
But hey, so is the war on drugs or the war on porn. So why not war on piracy. I predict it will be just as successful... well, it is not like it could possibly be a bigger failure.