2024-12-07 14:44:56
Celebrity Deathmatch Uncategorized

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | Film piracy: Is it theft?:

In the blue corner: Dan Glickman, President of the Motion Picture Association of America, the body that wields the collective political and legal muscle of the Hollywood studios.In the red corner: John Perry Barlow, lyricist in the US band The Grateful Dead. More pertinently, he went on to co-found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the pressure group that’s placed itself centre-stage in the fight to keep the digital copyright cops at bay.

The fascinating thing is how Dan Glickman talks about the “products” their “consumers” “buy”. Just as if he was selling toilet paper. And he uses FMCG analogies. What he will never understand (and it is not because he was old when internet came as JPB suggests) is that what muvie and music industries produce is not another goods to be sold on the market. It is culture.
If you think about culture as toilet paper you will never  be able to understand why people want to share it. Or why people want to download it even if their reservation price is lower then the market price. “Consuming” culture is being part of it.

US consumer good firms were very successful constructing brands that promise the same stuff. If you buy this brand of jeans you will be part of that and that family, tribe, identity, community, whatsoever. But unlike manufactured identity, cultural goods are identity themselves. If you really like it, you want to share it.

There is no word for describing that in the dumb corporate boardroom  vocabulary. It is a shame.

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