Okay, I'll talk about copyright for a second

I have so far largely avoided talking about one of my pet issues on this blog, namely the tangle of thorns known as the current take on copyright law in the U.S. I've avoided it mostly so I wouldn't end up writing only about this topic, though I have mentioned it on occasion, because in my experience people hate this issue and find it incredibly boring. I'd like to tackle it at some point, though, and try to make it interesting to people, and try to make it matter to them. I think fixing our broken copyright system matters a great deal and gets to the very heart of our democracy, our First Amendment right to free speech.

Today, though, I just wanted to mention a very specific case. Back in February, I wrote about the Oscars which had just been handed out. At the time, I embedded a YouTube clip from the broadcast of a skit performed by Seth Rogen and James Franco as their Pineapple Express characters. It was a hilarious skit, one of the (few) highlights of the telecast and, after watching PE again the other night, I wanted to watch the skit again.

Alas, when I went to my post to watch the embedded clip, I clicked on it and got this message instead: "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by AMPAS Oscars." In other words, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hands out the Oscars and produces the awards show, did not authorize that clip to be shown on YouTube. I'd like to point out a few things about this:

First, if you followed the above link back to that post, you'll notice I have reembedded the clip from a different website. AMPAS's takedown request was completely useless, even though it seems to have been effective with regard to YouTube, because there are hundreds of other video sharing sites on the Web and once a popular clip has been passed around it's as near to impossible as makes no difference to take it down. The fast Google search I performed to find the clip somewhere other than YouTube yielded dozens of sites on the first results page. Bottom line: this brand of corporate censorship - oh, what? you think that's not the right word? you want me to grab a dictionary? - literally does not work.

Second, I'd like to know by what reasonable calculation the Academy loses one stinking dime by allowing fans to share a clip like this. I don't see it on their website. I don't see it exclusively licensed to another site, like Funny or Die. Is AMPAS going to release the clip in some other form, for instance, an Oscar highlights DVD? Maybe they will - and if that's the plan, would someone walk me through how leaving the clip up on YouTube fucks up that plan? Maybe you think that the argument is that no one would buy the DVD, or download, or whatever, if the clip was available for free. Really? How do you know that? How do you know that the kind of person who would actually buy such a DVD even knows that YouTube exists? How do you know that, even if they know the clip is on YouTube, that they wouldn't buy the DVD for the far superior quality and for all the other clips that such a DVD would theoretically contain? The truth is, no one has any idea but I would suggest that the tiny little market for such a DVD would not be hurt - in fact, with the right kind of promotion, it could be helped - by allowing that clip to be seen online.

Third, fuck AMPAS and its cadre of overpaid lawyers, billing hours just to justify their retainers. This is the kind of reflexive, thoughtless, overzealous, anti-consumer, anti-fan copyright protectionism that we, the people, need to crush like a mob hit in a trash compactor. This is the toughest aspect of the problem, though - getting "the people" to care about any of this. Much in the same way that some people are not in favor of taxing the wealthiest Americans a bit more to provide important services for poorer people because they think they themselves are going to be rich someday, even though there is almost no chance of that (amidst many other, much better arguments for the stupidity of their position), other folks think that the draconian copyright protections lobbied for and won by the media corporations might help them out when they create valuable content one day. Which they almost certainly will not. The "common sense" argument, that, well, of course AMPAS should take down the content, because it's their property, deserves a longer dissection than I feel like doing right now, but I will come back to it.

Fourth, and finally, at some point a different kind of common sense will have to prevail, by which media corporations will realize that they aren't getting anywhere with this type of behavior. Like the political argument that says the war on terror has ended up creating more terrorists, the war on "piracy" will only create more pirates. That is, when I hear that some mom in the Midwest - whatever her true motives - did some minor music sharing and so now has to fork over a million bucks to the recording industry, it makes me want to steal music and give it away to everyone I know. Ah, but will I actually do so? So, my hating the industry for being total dicks, so long as I don't steal anything, is of no concern?