The Erosion of Fair Use

This morning at work, someone passed around an article from PC Magazine online about Sumner Redstone’s attitudes and opinions towards file-sharing on the internet. The article talks about SR’s keynote speech to the Seoul Digital Forum in Korea last week, wherein he made his stance clear that all file-sharing – including short clips posted to YouTube – is piracy and should be treated as such.

The woman who sent the article around – to me and a few of my colleagues and bosses – did not comment on the article, except to say that she thought it was “interesting”. Towards the end of the day, one of my bosses sent a response which only said “It’s about money – not philosophy”. While this statement is ostensibly true, it’s mind-boggling to me that anyone can think of the current battle raging over creative license to be only “about money”. Certainly, to the media giants it’s all about protecting what they see as “their property” – even though our culture has been built upon “using” the works of others to make something new, or to comment about culture, society, the world. “Borrowing” has been a part of the artistic process throughout history. Was Shakespeare a “pirate”? Most of his plot lines were borrowed from other works. Disney’s first Mickey Mouse film, Steamboat Willie, was directly lifted from the Buster Keaton film, Steamboat Bill, Jr. There are as many examples as there are artists.

Not to say that this is all about “making art”. It’s not. Most of what’s posted on YouTube isn’t a creative mashup, but a “hey, look what I found! In’t this cool??” For the first time, we have a way to actually engage with our media, and the content creators want to kill that impulse to interact with their brand? To quote the article, Redstone’s attitude is that:

As a fan, your job is to watch a few ads (or buy a ticket), enjoy the show, tell your friends about it, and get out of the way.

Not only is this just insulting, it’s just plain wrong. As my friend Bex said after reading the article: “frakking Redstone DOES. NOT. GROK.” As fans, our job is love the content, bitch about it, pass it on, remix – to PLAY. This is a privilege that we will not allow to be taken away, try as the dinosaurs might to rain on our parade.

My knee-jerk response to my colleague’s terse “money” argument was “well, sure – to corporations it’s always about money. But so was a lot of evil: The Iraq War, The Holocaust…. ” But to people who think, and care about maintaining a free and open culture it’s about more than that. It’s about how we keep concepts like “fair use” alive in a society that wants to “own”, and how we will allow the new creative tools available to us to empower the artist in each and every one of us.

Tagged as: fair use, Sumner Redstone, YouTube