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A Personal Experience with Copynorms
Posted by Steven Wu on Thursday, November 06 @ 02:34:52 EST Copyright
This is a somewhat more personal post than usually appears here on Lawmeme, but I thought it was amusing enough to note. Today I saw The Matrix: Revolutions (which is not so great). Prior to the movie, before any trailers were played, there appeared a short advertisement about a stuntman, who emphasized how much work he put into his stunts, and how much danger he faced every day--only to be ripped off by movie pirates. The moral of this little advertisement: piracy hurts ordinary people too, so stop doing it.

The one problem: the audience hated it. There were boos, there were hisses, there were even a few shouted comments directed at the screen.

Now maybe the audible reactions were a self-selecting sample: those audience members who strongly opposed piracy might have been the ones who tended to be silent. But, in a room filled with people around my age, I couldn't help feeling that I was hearing and seeing my generation's copynorms given voice.

 
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Re: A Personal Experience with Copynorms (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Thursday, November 06 @ 08:53:20 EST
Yes, I think the various trade associations haven't really fathomed how seriously out of sync law is from popular culture. I think it gets much stronger with younger generations. My brother is a highschool teacher, and tells me that his students universally believe (or behave as though they believe):
  • copyrights == patents == trademarks == legal instruments evil companies acquire to oppress you
  • it is completely moral and right -- completely, not even a hint of "doing something wrong" -- to infringe copyrights, since they are evil tools of oppression
In other words, the perception is not just the "I didn't know it was protected" / "I didn't know anyone derived income from that" sort of ignorance the RIAA/MPAA seeks to educate people out of, but a deeper sense that "protecting copyright is being a shill". They literally see no relevant distinction, other than quality and convenience, between a ripped copy of music/software/video and a storebought copy. If this is truly the future generations' atitude, legal reform seems inevitable. I'm not sure I would think any differently, had I grown up with the internet in my livingroom. He also claims his students' research skills pretty much begin and end with google; again, hard to criticize if it's been present during formative years.


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Comparison with real property norms (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Thursday, November 06 @ 18:53:58 EST
I have a blog article about property norms and land reform in Peru [flatline.org.uk], a situation which is surprisingly similar to the copynorm problem.


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Shoot! (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Thursday, November 06 @ 22:43:52 EST
Steven,

Darn. I started reading this and thought it was going to be a personal review of the Matrix.

My guess is that you saw this movie in New Haven, and your audience of fellow early New Havenite Matrix III viewers probably had that elusive thing that we sometimes call, in the popular parlance of the moment---- a clue.


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  • Re: Shoot! by Anonymous on Thursday, November 13 @ 11:51:51 EST

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