Copyright Extremism

Copyright laws have been a hot issue over the last decade, mainly due to file sharing technology, and nobody has been affected by this more than the music industry. But what’s just as important as copyright infringement is how the industry deals with it.

In the TED.com video “Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity” Larry Lessig, a lawyer and Harvard professor, argues that copyrighted content should be freely available for non-commercial artistic use. Lessig claims that extremism on both sides of the copyright war are creating corrosive situation in which younger generations are put in a position where they knowingly operate outside the law without doing any real harm. It seems that he would agree with me this is counterproductive. On one side there are those who believe that no copyrighted work should be used for any purpose without paying for that use and there are the other extremists who believe in operating outside of copyright laws whenever they can get away with it whether it be by illegal downloading, plagiarism, etc. But, there is a middle ground.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/larry_lessig_says_the_law_is_strangling_creativity.html

This all ties back to the major record labels fighting change. Rather than accept the inevitable change and adapt to the new market, they would rather go down with the ship. That’s all good and fine but it’s not stopping there. The major labels are angry that industry is changing and they want revenge. They are taking as many people as they can down with them through lawsuits, criminal charges, injunction, etc. The biggest problem with this isn’t that they don’t have the legal right to these actions. The problem is how these actions affect the consumer’s perception of the music industry as a whole. It’s easy for people to justify stealing music when the companies they are stealing from sue teenagers for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Who’s side do you think the average consumer is on?

I’m not suggesting people be allowed to download music for free. I’m merely pointing out that how the problem is being dealt with is only hurting the industry’s relationship to its’ customers. As Lessig said,  “Extremism begets extremism”.