Petar Petrov :: home blog

Today is the last chance of president Bush to veto the wicked DRM (Digital Restriction Media) RIAA-profit laws. I am a supporter since day one of www.defectivebydesign.org. It is a non-gov organization defending the basic freedom rights of artists in the USA. What made me write this post is the “Last Chance: Tell Bush to veto the RIAA/MPAA Enforcement Bill“.

Please visit the web page for more action and what you can do if you are a US citizen. I am not going to try to give you a indepth overview of the issues surrounding copyright, DRM and the ‘protectionism’ for intellectual property. Which is advocated as sole purpose of the series of legislations which in affect strip basic rights from the creators them self in favor of big-time $ corporations, i.e. oligarchies.

Instead I will give you a comment of an independent artists (music producer) who shared his opinion in 2 parts, in a public forum. He rejects the notion of current copyright laws and give a strong link to DRM too! Read IT! below…

The clear alternative to any kind of artist to license its creation is the CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE. I might give a dedicated post to the subject in near future…

QUOTE ” Part 1: Indie artists’ creating a buzz with free tracks is a time-tested strategy, proven once again with the success of sites like Myspace. This is especially true for the type of music I write and produce; it’s meant to be DJ-mixed/remixed/arranged/etc. The more people who hear it, and the more ways it’s remixed, the better for everyone involved. Win-win. Creative Commons licenses let me specify up front that such uses can happen with my blessing. Standard copyright doesn’t technically specify this, and DRM kills it altogether.

Part 2: Naturally, I own sole distribution rights to all my tracks along with owning their copyrights. Creative Commons licenses supply the language needed to make my distribution choices legally binding when I decide to allow or disallow certain conditions. Legally binding unless, apparently, you’re Microsoft. History shows that it’s easier to defend rights you have than to regain rights you’ve surrendered. In this case, MS clearly disregards my rights to dictate distribution conditions as the owner of these tracks! This type of callous disregard could set a scary precedent for indie-artists without the backing of some multimedia conglomerate for years to come. And these conglomerates will become less and less relevent within the music-distribution system as technology continues to develop and niche markets grow (which is currently happening). This will leave little protection for the growing number of indie musicians increasingly at the mercy of heavy-handed DRM systems like the one in Zune. Scary precedent indeed!

Microsoft should have just continued writing code and avoided getting into the music biz. I was much happier with MS before I understood what all the haters were talking about! Music is not code, and musicians are a totally different breed than your standard computer geeks. I really don’t think MS knows what their doing here… ” QUOTE END

Why should you care?

Even if you are not an active independent artist, or not US citizen, the laws taking place now will affect tremendously the quantity, quality and availability of intellectual work in near future. YOU as a person will starve for ART, literally ….

~ by spesho on October 1, 2008.