It’s been over a week
when Megaupload was crushed. All internetz rushed to express their fury and
bewilderment. The whole world united to show that such action and proposed bill
of SOPA in US Congress is a threat to the free internet. SOPA was postponed.
Then, we all tried to alert everyone about ACTA, but sadly, I didn’t see as
many ‘fighters’ as it was with SOPA (protests in some countries were admirable, but still too little). Meaning – Americans got way too ignorant
about the threat and sat down complacent about their own asses. They simply labeled
ACTA as ‘European thingy’. Which shows they clearly can’t either read or get
the map. Since when Japan
and Korea are inside the Europe? Oh that’s good, it means I’m closer to grabbing
some than I previously thought. What a relief.
I’m not going to talk
about ACTA here, or even its offspring – Pacific Treaty that is apparently one
bitch from hell. No, I’m just here to highlight few overlooked details in this
whole war. There is a quite big now thread on ongoing situation on some forum, my
friend wrote a thorough
article on technical aspects of filesharing so I advise you all to read
that one.
We (the whole world of normal
users) pointed out seemingly rational arguments that are perfectly clear to us,
but some people in high places can’t seem to grasp the idea.
First of all – surveys and
experts say that piracy, filesharing, you name it, doesn’t cause ‘job losses’,
or profit losses for big companies. Why? It’s simple. Fandoms. Fan will buy
anything that he/she loves. I am no exception. But here comes the trick that is
painfully obvious to us all – how the hell we might now what to buy? We need
to, no, we have to listen to it first. Usually, with American or European music
(hell, even some ethnic as well), there is a solution to it – you can go to the
music store and ask workers there to put the CD into testing booth. Fine, you
listen to CD, you like it, you buy it. Or if you really love some artist, you can
buy all albums one by one during sales (yes, I’m sometimes that clever) without
checking them, basing this on sheer fact you love the artist. And the fact you
just started another diet.
How we, people who are
into Asian entertainment, are supposed to act then? There are no ie. DBSK
albums in any store. We listen to the song via Youtube, official, fansite or
any other place, we like it – we buy it to support company and pretend we
support the artists. I checked SMEnt website and those graphics there showed me
an interesting fact – sales and profit respectively have gone up significantly
last 2 years. So this particular agency didn’t go bankrupt just because few
thousands of fans downloaded SuJu horrible fifth album. Other thousands of
loyal fans bought the album. Math is simple, no?
What about those people
who can’t afford albums or DVDs. I know it’s hard to believe for those who
never had to wear the same coat for 4 years, but there are such people. Rich
and ignorant think the whole world is made of rich and ignorant, plus their housekeepers.
When people have the choice – food for a week or DVD, they don’t choose the
latter. It reminds me the situation when Marie Antoinette was given the report
that people are hungry and have no bread. She responded: “Let
them eat cake.” This is exactly the same situation now.
Buying an album or DVD
with Asian content is firstly – expensive, secondly – spiked with horror
thoughts (what about subtitles, will that play on my PC?). It may seem trivial,
but people don’t own dozens of players to choose from to play this DVD or that
one. Usually we have one PC and (if we’re lucky) TV. World is divided into DVD
regions which I find utterly idiotic. People responsible for that are too
obtuse to see how the world is changing, I guess. People travel, you know? I
have some DVDs I’d bought in US and now I can’t play them because it’s a different
region. Yes, they look nice on my shelf. Where is the problem to make a DVD
multi-regional or region-free so that the whole world could enjoy?
The price of such sets
is another case. Each set of Queen
Seondeok was around 150$. Few of them, as drama had 62 episodes. You do the
math.
They repeat it like a boring
mantra that ACTA’s main target is to destroy pirates and circulation of
counterfeited goods. This is such a nonsense. We will be invigilated, we will
be controlled, our emails read, our google searches analyzed. Am I panicking? I
don’t think so. This is all in the actual body of text. Companies and
corporations have artists and their rights up their asses. All they care is
just money. That’s all, dirty and mundane as it is.
Let me shed some light
on copyrights protection in motion. I bet everyone here wrote in his/her life
some report, thesis or maybe even article. See, funny thing is, they always,
always teach us how to QUOTE properly. Meaning – how to respect someone else’s
work before us. I will speak from my own perspective, if you forgive me that. Here,
at my Uni we have anti-plagiarism policy. That is there is a program that
checks for… wait for it… copyrights infringement in the text. Usual it is used
to check bachelor and master thesis of students. Because students got lazy
nowadays and they copy-paste stuff from wikipedia. Regardless of those
brainless idiots, there is a proper way to avoid that. QUOTES. Research papers,
articles etc. have one solution to that. We quote and put a footnote. And even
if it’s not a direct quote but interpolation of it, we also give footnote and
write the name of the author, his/her work, place of publishing and a year. Simple,
right? Copyrights protected? Protected.
 |
| Pic from here. |
Some may argue that it’s
easy with written text. No, it’s not easy. Blogs are full of rip-offs and some
of their authors don’t care to give proper credits. It’s one thing if a quote
is well known and it circulates among people for decades, it is then seen as
common knowledge, yet we should give the name of the author of it. Everyone
heard probably “One for all, all for one”? Good, but when writing some article,
we should mention it was Dumas who wrote that. Not a big deal, right?
How then the rules of
quoting may apply to downloading albums or movies?
Very easy, and it’s
already done – no one removes the credits from DVD rips that are floating
everywhere, right? We know who make the movie, its title, year of production
and actors. We can buy the damn thing if we like it. But here comes a minor
problem, usually overlooked. Hollywood
produces such incredible amount of crap (pardon my language) and they expect us
to buy a ticket to watch it and then buy a DVD of some shitty, horribly acted
story? Hell no. Most of the recent ‘made in Hollywood’ movies are not even bearable to
watch it once, not to mention owning a DVD and re-watching it once a month
during some ritual. But if we like something, and we can spare some money, trust
me, every fan will buy a DVD.
There are also other
solutions easy to see and put into use, for them, read the article under the
link I gave earlier, my friend is more knowledgeable in this matter than me.
How about streaming
sites? I don’t mind paying for it but under one condition – the service must me
good. Which means – no ads, no lagging and decent subtitles. This way, dramas
could get revenue from the whole fucking world. They could even provide
download service for a reasonable price. So yes, the solution (or dozens of
them) is actually at hand. It’s the lack of good will and cooperation that is
blocking those big shots from implementing new technology into their business.
Hello, we are living in
times where artists are born via YouTube! If it wasn’t for that, Kpop would
never, ever achieve such popularity now (whether it’s a fad or more stable
wave, we have to wait another 10 years).
Internet is the only
place to express your thoughts freely, to interact with other people, to get to
know others, different cultures and aspects of those. It is chaotic, it is a
place with many rogue individuals, it can be a nasty place for criminals and
offenders, that’s true. But for the tumblr’s sake, it’s also a place of fun, of
joy and of knowledge. It’s the course of history. Medieval people had richly
ornamented tympana of cathedrals, songs and legends, we have internet. We both
share the same media culture aspects. They can’t take that from us. And for Korea – that would
be Hallyu suicide.
Why ACTA is truly terrifying
thing it’s not because of its ‘mission to protect the poor artists’, but
because it tightens the grip on societies. Those in high places want to rule
people in almost a dictatorship-like fashion. Dictatorships don’t last long,
people can revolt. And when they do, the heads will roll (also the title of Echo
and the Bunnymen’s song, honorable mention).
I know this article
doesn’t actually give anything new to the ongoing farce that the situation has
become. But I find it as my duty to write this. To express I’m not pleased (oh
euphemism, I love thee so) with politicians’ plans to rule us all, (…) to
bring us all and in the darkness bind us. (changed after: J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the
Rings, Harper Collins, 1994).
* "Sounds an awful lot like a dictatorship to me". - Padme Amidala, Attack of the Crap Clones.
