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Hollywood's Foundations Rest on Piracy
enrico_suave writes "Wired Magazine had an interesting perspective on how Hollywood has 'pirate' roots in its history, as well as radio, cable TV, and the music industry. Is P2P any different (except for the fact that the industry being replaced has much more money and political sway than ever before)?"
Excerpted from Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, copyright (C) by Lawrence Lessig, to be published in March by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
I was weary about believing the stuff in this article before I saw who it was "owned" by.
It still reads like some sort of pro-piracy (current) crap. At least that's how I see it (and how some of the pirates out there will be fist pumping as well).
The Hollywood film industry was built by fleeing pirates. Creators and directors migrated from the East Coast to California in the early 20th century in part to escape controls that film patents granted the inventor Thomas Edison.
Oh please. Edison we don't have to go into again. Such a person. Insisted the very idea of motion pictures was his and patented, and his sending torpedoes around to harass cinema houses. Easily eclipses Amazon's One-Click.
The author goes on to say later on that Fox and Paramount could more or less frolic in California and pirate Edison's inventions. Oh please again. Cinema of today is about as much Edison's as alternating current is his and not Westinghouse's. And we don't want to get into that bag of beans again.
All this jackass Lessig writes is phrase after phrase about 'pirates' and 'piracy'. If there's any thief here, it is Lessig - stealing from Joe Goebbels's 'Big Lie' theory.
They won their independence with a brutal and bloody campaign of terror against the Brits and now they are at the receiving end and can't handle it either.