This week I caught up on the material I missed out on in week 5 whilst I was overseas. Whilst wading through the relevant lecture and reading sources, I realised what the statement "Information wants to be free" really means. It is information that not only wants to be free of charge, but free of restriction and limitation.
I ended up being extremely amazed that the Happy Birthday song is actually owned by a company, and that filmmakers must pay to use it in their scenes. Could you imagine a family sitting around a table with a birthday cake and singing the song, only to have the Warner Police bust through their window and arrest the family for infringement?
I was also surprised that every single account in existence on World of Warcraft is owned by Blizzard. How is this possible? That hundreds of thousands of players have spent months, if not years, accumulating currency and character gear which is still not theirs. I think it's tricky of companies to include such statements in a way that is so visually unappealing to read, yet they can argue that its the only right and 'legal' way for them to distribute the EULA. I can confess that out of the hundreds of times I have opened the World of Warcraft client, I have never once read a word of their mandatory pre-game EULA.
I personally think more bands need to act as aggressively as Radiohead, who decided to slap a "Pay What You Want" option on their recent album In Rainbows in 2008. Although the stats say three fifths of their fanbase chose to pay nothing, their profits still exceeded those of their previous album. I admire Radiohead's ability to make bold moves like these - they chose to realise the magnitude of the copyright problem and embrace it rather than fight it. Although their success was mainly due to their pre-In_Rainbows large fan community (thus allowing them to gamble their money like this), it shows that true inspiration still exists, and not every intelligent-content producer is a smug caterpillar wrapped in a cocoon of copyright armour.
Thanks for the read and let me know what you think!
I think it's interesting too that Radiohead elected the 'Pay What You Want' motif. A traditional notion of human trust & cooperation applied to the Modernist music industry model. It's interesting that they made more profit than their previous album. What does this say about human nature and about our ideas of fairness and exchange?
ReplyDeleteI'm going to write a new happy birthday song. Its a copyright gold mine and if everyone's like me, they are sick to death of the old one. I, unlike Radiohead, will not adopt a "pay what you want" approach. I commend Radiohead for doing this and you are right, it succeeded in most part due to their already huge following. I found it fascinating that although three fifths of purchases were for free, the average amount of money paid still worked out to be roughly what they would have charged any way.
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