| | |
|
JustinColanninoFirstPaper 18 - 26 Mar 2009 - Main.DanielHarris
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstPaper%25" |
|---|
Does Copyright Deter Social Movements? | | | Daniel, thanks for pointing out my factual inaccuracy. I clearly did not read the article well. I had found this, did a bit more research and seized on the visual of a song and dance. That was sloppy. However, I did get to link to a video of the Macarena, which was a plus. | |
<
< | On to your other two points. First, your McCain example is exactly the type of speech that I attempted to show concern with in the idea expression dichotomy section. If you check out the old and new versions of his attack on the media's love of Obamba at this link, you might agree that the value added to the political message by the recognizable tune is substantial. I argued that in certain political speech, expression is as important as idea -- McCain is no exception. | >
> | On to your other two points. First, your McCain example is exactly the type of speech that I attempted to show concern with in the idea expression dichotomy section. If you check out the old and new versions of his attack on the media's love of Obama at this link, you might agree that the value added to the political message by the recognizable tune is substantial. I argued that in certain political speech, expression is as important as idea -- McCain is no exception. | | | I think your second point finds what I think could be the weakest part of my argument: do the educational, not for profit and other fair use provisions do enough to allow people to come together to learn music and dance and build culture? Maybe they do, and maybe they don't. Remember, ASCAP still demanded payment from Girl Scouts to sing This Land Is Your Land, despite my bungling of the facts. The threat of lawsuit can chill speech. But I do think you make a good point. | | | -- JustinColannino - 20 Mar 2009 | |
>
> |
Justin,
The end of my third paragraph was responding to Dana's characterization--thanks for clarifying the separation. I read your title as "...Deter [the creation/existence of] Social Movements," but perhaps it should be better read as "...Make Social Movements Less Effective."
I got the implied threat to meatspace protests under infringement law (rather than by impoverishment of public memory) from the combination of "making it impossible ... to sing their own songs" and "copyright puts a burden on social organizers to limit their musical expression to newly created or very old songs."
I get the invocation of protests better now--I just don't really buy the argument that it's hard (or going to become hard) for songs to catch on. Of course, it would be easier for songs to catch on without copyright (assuming the Net does its part and they still get distributed as widely), but currently the vested interests of rightsholders in popularizing their work seem to be doing well enough. I pointed out a couple examples where copyright law has (so far) completely failed to make songs hard to catch on. I have a hard time imagining a copyright owner, even one represented by the RIAA, who would want to prosecute copyright infringement in a way extreme enough to significantly retard uptake of the song into the collective consumer conscious (although here again term extension is meddlesome, as commercial incentives for song uptake may deteriorate somewhat over the copyright term). I worried about DRM's potential anti-viral properties, but that seems to be on its way out.
I didn't really see an idea-expression merger in the McCain ad. Sure, more people liked the infringing-barring-fair-use form. However, if we remove the leftover lyrics in the video, is it actually impossible (or even significantly harder) to get this idea across without using that particular copyrighted work? We Shall Overcome has, to raid trademark, a secondary meaning, but the idea that the media was in love with candidate Obama wasn't wedded to the Valli track.
-- DanielHarris - 26 Mar 2009 | | |
\ No newline at end of file |
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |