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Disney's Anti-File Swapping Cartoon
LordXarph writes: "Newsforge has a story about Disney's anti-file swapping episode of their cartoon "Proud Family." The synopsis is simply hysterical; I'm waiting for someone to write a gnutella servent called EZ-Jackster."
I mean, from the "spent $125 on cd's from her $.05 salary" and "the girl was arrested by the police who showed up at her door" and calling the artist "Sir-Paid-A-Lot"???!?!? This is almost word-for-word what I would have done if I was *parodying* propaganda....
Next up, hunters using "Bambi" as material for showing why hunting is great.
While it's not technically 'stealing'...neither is time shifting or are fair use backups, but Disney characterizes them as 'stealing'.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
hmmmm... sound familiar?
Remember back in the 80's when we as children were all assaulted with those terrible anti-drug ads from the mind of Nancy Reagan? The "this is your brain on drugs" ad being singled out as the possibly least effective ad of all time? Now, after seeing our favorite cartoon characters turn down drugs and tell us how "bad" they were... what effect did it have?
Most of us got to college (maybe even high school), opened our minds, tried some pot, maybe liked it, and have a pretty non-chalant view of things... maybe even smoking up every now and then. Those who don't do drugs do so for their own reasons, not because Arnold on "Diff'rent Strokes" told them not to. So the effect on today's kids will be exactly zero. If anything, they'll realize the lame "do-gooder" condescending attitude, and another piece of tripe will become unpopular and get cancelled.
btw: have you written your representives about the SSSCA yet? i have!
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
Wow. This is the first time I've seen the airing of a piece of blatant, unapologetic propaganda directed at children since the World War 2 era. Sure, it's been around to a certain extent since then, but always in a very underhanded, not-so-easy-to-detect form. You've got to hand it to the content-direction people at Disney, they must have balls the size of tank bearings to pull a stunt like this. I honestly don't know whether to be appalled or impressed.
You said that "[w]holesale copying of music against the permission of its creators is wrong," but I've got to take issue with this.
It's not wrong.
People copy music wholesale without the permission of the creators ALL THE TIME. Indeed, Disney is known for this. They have two entire movies, their "Fantasia" series, which liberally copy music without permission from the creators. (many of whom were long dead)
And if the copyright scheme in this country were like that of the early Republic, copying music would be perfectly allright, and not a copyright violation at all. A lot later and you'd merely have to wait for the copyright to expire -- which wouldn't take terribly long.
It's about as wrong as installing a picket fence at your house that doesn't comply with zoning regulations, in many cases. Reasonable people are not only perfectly capable of arguing over whether some particular act ought to be infringement, and even whether we ought to have copyrights at all. (which are not mandated)
You don't give children much credit either. They are often pretty capable of calling a spade a spade. (c.f. "The Emperor's New Clothes")
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Reducing the value of something to its intrinsic worth is not "stealing". Stealing is the deprivation of property from a victim. Copying music does not deprive the writer of the music; it can only arguably deprive him/her of the money he/she might have made --and that is highly debateable, since artists see little to none of the money made by labels selling the music.
The whole concept of "Stealing" is a wordfuck, a lie, a purposeful confusion of concepts to create a false fact, ie copying music=stealing the music.
The only possible crime is unauthorized distribution, which is a COMMERCIAL, CIVIL, offense. Or at least used to be, before the wordfuck of "Steal" began.
Well, I didn't mean that I meant it was universally wrong, but in the common sense that I meant it -- taking recently recorded music that you know the creator wants to be paid for, just so that you can hear it without having to pay -- it's still my opinion that this is wrong.
And of a number of people here, to whom the comment was really addressed. Yes, clearly if you don't buy the concept of copyright at all, you're going to think the cartoon's message is wrong in every way.
But there are many who, like me, have said "what many users are doing with Napster/Gnutella/MusicCity/Freenet/etc. is wrong, but writing file sharing tools is not wrong."
If you don't agree with that, then of course you won't buy what I said. If you do agree with that you may feel, as I wrote, that the right course is to teach our children what's right and wrong, not because of what the law or technology will allow you to do or forbid you to do, but because of a moral system you have.
While many point out that making a copy doesn't physically deprive the creator of anything, they misunderstand what IP is when they say this. IP isn't really about owning particular sets of bits.
IP is about the question of whether a creator can have control over their creation. When you copy, you appropriate that control.
Curiously, the most physical of properties, real estate, is also entirely about control, even in things that don't deprive the landowner of anything physical.
I own land, and I have the power to tell you not to walk on it, even though if you walk on it when I'm not there, you've had insignificant physical effect on me.
Now you might argue that control of creations is bad if it means controlling who can make copies. But that is what IP is, for better or worse.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation