Monday, March 4, 2002 |
17:03 - Corporate Backstabbings A-Plenty
http://www.appleturns.com/episode/?id=3601
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The third article on AtAT today nicely pulls together the strings of the brewing music-piracy war that seems to be developing with the record labels (and Disney) on one side, and Apple on the other. Apparently, Michael Eisner just went on record as claiming that Apple's very marketing slogans ("Rip. Mix. Burn.") specifically condone and enable music theft. And, oddly, Intel is defending Apple against the Mouse.
It's one of those "read between the lines and the meaning becomes reversed" things:
A sane and sober Disney CEO might have opted instead to interpret Apple's ads as selling a means for good little consumers to enjoy their legally-purchased music in perfectly innocent ways, such as burning a compilation disc full of "Music To Sharpen Pencils By." For one thing, doesn't "rip" imply that a source CD is present before the "mixing" and "burning" can commence? Maybe if Apple's commercial had said "Download. Mix. Burn." we'd be a little more sympathetic to Eisner's insane ramblings, but it didn't, so we're not.
Exactly-- it's really easy to tar any slogan that has the violent, mean, nasty words "rip" and "burn" in them with the brush of "Illegal and evil!"... but in fact they imply exactly the opposite: making single copies of music you already own on CD. It's low-volume copying, like duplicating a videotape or dubbing a CD onto a cassette. That kind of thing is specifically protected by law now, but it has names like dubbing rather than ripping and burning, so people don't go nuts over it. Whereas the high-volume, ubiquitous-availability stuff that they do have a right to be worried about tends to escape the terminology trap-- what do we call it these days? "Downloading"? "Sharing"? Nice friendly words.
So maybe what we need is a terminology overhaul. Copying tracks from a CD can be called, oh, I don't know-- "importing"; and copying them onto a CD or a portable player can be called "exporting" or "replaying" or something. And sharing files through P2P apps can be called "broadcasting" or "reposting" or "carpet-bombing" or "anthrax-mailing"-- something with negative connotations.
I'm only being partly facetious here. Because right now all the words in the issue give exactly the wrong meanings, and unless we do something about it, we'll be stripped of our rights to copy CDs for our own use while P2P sharing continues to flourish unabated.
Oh wait-- that's already happening. Right.
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