How does broadcasting someone else’s work promote creativity?

The law is there to protect creators and their work. But there are so many facets and so many gray areas that to make laws that address each case-by-case situation would be crazy, so they do the “blanket” thing.

And while you’re not necessarily making money with the licensed music you use in your videos, you are making a statement of some sort — a statement that the creators of those works might not wish to have associated with them.

Having worked in radio for several years, I’m pretty sensitive to both sides of the argument… Yeah, the laws may be kinda dumb, but they are what they are, and they protect guys like me from having our stuff used where and how we don’t want it to be… There’s a GREAT article from Radio and Production magazine which a colleague of mine wrote on the subject, and it has since become the most-requested back article in the magazine’s history.

http://www.rapmag.com/PayThePiper.html

My philosophy on the matter stems from YouTube’s slogan, “Broadcast yourself.” 1) Broadcast — “the laws” (inane as some may find them) say if you’re broadcasting ANYthing, you need to obtain the permission of whomever created it and/or pay your necessary fees to do so. 2) Yourself — not someone else. To me, it’s more fun to make my own music and videos anyway… Why rent from someone else when you can make your own for nothing and keep it and have it be protected?

And as far as who they go after for infringement? Look at it like ants in your house: You know you can’t get ‘em all, but that doesn’t mean you’re not gonna step on the ones you do see, right?

I’ll let evie tell you.
no.
Yes.
no you type.
No, you type!
no.
Oh, for god’s sake!

“the way i understand it is… during wwii and the cold war they created these canned-little-bigger-than-a-corner-grocery-stores; your iga’s, nationals, little a&p’s and such. the beatniks in the 60s found the type of foods these grocery store carried to be abhorrent, so they wrote poetry about it. howl, by alex ginsberg was really about an awful can of campbell’s pork n beans. artists, like andy warhol had a bad can of campbell’s tomato soup. maybe it had salmonella, i don’t know. anyway, the hippies came along and stopped eating that crap, because they were into el-na-tur-ral and all that be-here-now stuff and then they found yogis and gurus in india and they turned into vegetarians, which enlightened them to the dangers of pesticides, that evolved into organic foods, which was better eatins’, but it produced men with tofu breath who only brushed with raw carrots and french unshaven women who never wore deodorant, and they were endlessly mocked by the silent majority. so some of them shut up and went out into the wilderness while others started computer companies, got rich, went back to eating canned foods and invested in mega-canned-grocery-stores and just for old time’s sake they also invested in a few organic health food stores, but these stores were just for them and because of this, the silent majority would never let them forget their real roots, no matter how rich and mainstream they tried to become, they were quickly and forever labeled yuppies. meanwhile, the ones who went out into the wilderness, got lost so they came back and quietly settled naturally in local artist communities, which we all know are the dangerous and impoverished neighborhoods with no canned-mega-grocery-stores; just a few-canned-little-bigger-than-a-corner-grocery-stores, but those who were formerly-lost were poor and discovered that they were forced to eat the foods from the few-canned-little-bigger-than-a-corner-grocery-stores that were left, and they found this abhorrent. they missed the good and natural foods something awful and their bellies swelled and they spent many hours in the bathroom. then one day they suddenly remembered that they were still slightly radical, so they compromised and now the few-canned-little-bigger-than-a-corner-grocery-store also carries organic food next to the canned campbell’s pork n beans and tomatoe soup, as well as a ratty old couch on a braided rug, two beat up tables and two beat up chairs that hold two mixed matched chess set and a commodore 64 that is shackled to a giant 1960’s macrome peace symbol on the wall. so everyone is happy and that’s a canned-hippy-grocery-store. the end.”

I still don’t get it, what should I be doing when people, friends and strangers, come over for a party and I put the music on? Do I make them each buy the CD first or make them wear ear plugs?

And what if I want to play this copy written music and perform a creative dance at this party and everyone brings some chips and dip and tosses a couple of bucks in for snacks and beer. Do I have to document this and send it to the Record Label Company, just in case? And what if my friend in Italy, sitting next to a friend of his, who is a stranger to me, is on his computer during the party and we are tele-communicating visually on a web cam and he hears the music and sees the dancing and gets so excited he starts to dance with his friend who is a stranger to me, do I have to make him and the stranger to me pay royalties?

And what if I have a whole lot of friends who have friends that are strangers to me who want to see this creative dance to copyrighted music at a different time because they have to work to pay their taxes so that the military can protect the freedom the record labels have to do business in MY COUNTRY!

The laws are ridiculous, and that’s putting it mildly. It stifles progress and creativity and until someone is turning a profit it should be fair use across the board, but I’m a reasonable person, 7 years max, then it’s public domain with credit forever, anything more is just immoral.

One more thing, just where do ideas come from? As a player in the human collective some how I and everyone else that ever lived inspired or inspires everyone else, it takes more than a few grains of sand to make a beach, as it takes a hell of a lot of civilization to create a person who can come up with an idea. Though some people, who have won awards for popular ideas, I’ve seen them on TV, thank Jesus or God for these incredible ideas and as far as I know, no record label has every give either one of those two guys a royalty check.

Uhm…I mean…yeah royalty music…is cool and all…