FA+
Shop
The 20th Century media doesn't want furry to exist
13 years ago
UPDATE: You've probably heard that SOPA/PIPA have been delayed, and therefore we "won." Nope, not yet. These things will come back, so stay on your guard. This is why:
Blah blah blah, SOPA, blah, I know. Everyone's been saying so much about it. But SOPA is just the latest in a 20-year battle against creativity. The media companies of last century do not want individual people to create their own artwork, their own stories, or their own popular culture — something like this furry community we have is absolutely abhorrent to them.
If you are an independent artist or creator, you may think that you have some common ground with Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, and the other companies sponsoring SOPA: when people download your work without paying you for it, it makes it difficult to make a living. But you do not have common ground. Big media does not want you, the small artist, to make a living selling your work. They want to destroy you, because you are a competitor.
And now, we're all artists. We make up our own characters, and invent our own ways of entertaining ourselves instead of sitting on the couch and watching television. Our mere existence is seen as a threat by Warner Bros. and Universal.
Please, I beg of you, as a fellow person with eyeballs and ears and a respiratory system, take fifteen minutes to watch this video explaining what I mean by that. Clay Shirky explains it far more eloquently than I can:
Blah blah blah, SOPA, blah, I know. Everyone's been saying so much about it. But SOPA is just the latest in a 20-year battle against creativity. The media companies of last century do not want individual people to create their own artwork, their own stories, or their own popular culture — something like this furry community we have is absolutely abhorrent to them.
If you are an independent artist or creator, you may think that you have some common ground with Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, and the other companies sponsoring SOPA: when people download your work without paying you for it, it makes it difficult to make a living. But you do not have common ground. Big media does not want you, the small artist, to make a living selling your work. They want to destroy you, because you are a competitor.
And now, we're all artists. We make up our own characters, and invent our own ways of entertaining ourselves instead of sitting on the couch and watching television. Our mere existence is seen as a threat by Warner Bros. and Universal.
Please, I beg of you, as a fellow person with eyeballs and ears and a respiratory system, take fifteen minutes to watch this video explaining what I mean by that. Clay Shirky explains it far more eloquently than I can:
What groups like the RIAA and MPAA want to do is become a guild that basically controls the release of any and all recorded content. Making it easier to bully independent artists with bogus claims is just a step in that direction. It irks them that talented artists slip through their greasy fingers all the time and take attention away from their mass-manufactured pop stars.
And for those who don't believe that's the agenda, I already know of some prototypical legislation proposed in the UK a few years ago (I was there when it happened). You basically had to have a musician's license to perform ANY live music. Standing on a corner with a guitar and a hat would cost you around 2000 GBP to pay a licensing fee. If the song you performed had any resemblance (one note to a bar) to a copyrighted work, it was considered a copyright infringement and dealt with accordingly.
The entire point was to spite the (then large) number of homeless street musicians performing politically-charged songs in places such as the London transport system for tips. It was a bid to quiet dissent by making sure that only those who could scrounge together a prohibitively expensive licensing fee could perform for a crowd of any size.
Of course, here in the US a government-sponsored musician's license would be unthinkable because of America's aversion to statism; they have to find a back door to set something like this up.
As long as they maintain the illusion of "free enterprise" they can get away with a lot more, so they work with a private entity that has almost as much (if not more) power than the government to control media, namely entities like the RIAA and MPAA, and the respective media companies they represent. So these "private" entities become a de facto state media agency.
Or, more accurately, comments like the one that I'm leaving right now are the reason the concept of the "Like" button was invented. So that people could express their complete, uncompromising, total approval and agreement without wasting a comment box.