Blog Five: Lessig's Piracy in America

After watching the video in class regarding piracy in our music industry, I agree that it is wrong for music artists to use copyrighted material for their own profit schemes. On the other hand, if one’s usage of copyrighted material does not garner them any monetary benefits, what’s the big deal? Lawrence Lessig discusses these issues and how ideas about piracy have changed over the years. Lessig notes that piracy has now gone past the physical stealing of copyrighted material. While this is an important issue in and of itself, piracy taking place through other avenues besides physical stores that sell copyrighted material that one physically grabs is left up for debate. Of course the recording labels and the movie industry advertise against this “new age” piracy, while others do not find a problem with it. The MPAA has an advertisement on many DVDs that explains “you wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn’t steal a handbag, you wouldn’t steal a movie”, so why isn’t it ok to download copyrighted material? They say “downloading pirated films is stealing.”

Even Jack Black, a famous actor, pleads for piracy to stop.

But will it stop?

Lessig argues that international piracy could provide benefits for American companies. He argues that Chinese consumers who steal Mircosoft’s Windows program will eventually have the means to buy the program later on as China’s wealth improves. Although this could happen, most companies or rightful owners of copyrighted material are not worth billions of dollars like Mircosoft and cannot afford for piracy like this to take place. Lessig also contends that piracy does have its place in society. He writes, “…even if some piracy is plainly wrong, not all ‘piracy’ is. Or at least, not all ‘piracy’ is wrong if that term is understood in the way it is increasingly used today. Many kinds of ‘piracy’ are useful and productive, to produce either new content or new ways of doing business. Neither our tradition nor any tradition has ever banned all ‘piracy’ in that sense of the term.” The remix artist Girl Talk is a great example of this accepted piracy. Girl Talk has became famous for his mash-up style of music. His songs rely solely on copyrighted music samples. Never once has he gotten permission from any of the artists’ samples used in his remixes. He posts his remixes online free of charge on his illegal art record label website.

However, Girl Talk has concerts all across the country for which he is paid for using these samples. Girl Talk even had a concert here at Lawrence University in May of 2009 for which he was compensated for.

One could provide the argument that Girl Talk has re-popularized some of the songs he has sampled as it is easy to find which songs are used in his remixes online.