Mark McKinnon is a veteran political consultant who has worked for President George Bush and Senator John McCain's candidacy for President. He is Co-Chairmen of Arts and Labs, a collaboration between technology companies and creative communities that have embraced today's rich Internet environment to deliver innovative and creative digital products to consumers. Visit www.artsandlabs.com
Mark McKinnon
What’s Right is Rights: Piracy is Theft
by Mark McKinnonWord is getting around that the RIAA seems to be stepping away from lawsuits as a key strategy against piracy. Lawsuits were never going to be the solution, as other major rights-holders, like those working together through Arts+Labs, will attest.
That’s not to say that we’ve all stopped believing in creators’ rights or that we no longer think piracy is a real problem. On the contrary: the creative economy depends on creative rights.
We all understand the demand for easy access to inexpensive content, and the people who produce that content – artists, movie makers, journalists, musicians, songwriters and more – are eager to deliver it. But, as it turns out, they want their rights to be respected.
Unfortunately, some consumers get confused about the difference between demand and entitlement. A recent TechDirt screed illustrates this entitlement mentality. Writing about Joel Tenenbaum, who was sued for pirating and distributing songs online (a jury found that he had willfully infringed copyrights and awarded a judgment far larger than had been asked), Mike Masnick wrote: (more…)
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The Scourge of Scandinavia: The Dread Pirate Bay
by Mark McKinnonIt wasn’t much of a surprise when the New York Times reported that one of the most highly anticipated movies of the year-X-Men Origins: Wolverine-had been leaked a month before the film’s release date and was available for download on illegal file-sharing sites. Stories like that are all too common, unfortunately, with the ease of illegal file trafficking over P2P sites like Pirate Bay. The Wolverine leak is particularly troubling because the leaked version was unfinished, missing several key scenes, music, and special effects. As the film’s star Hugh Jackman said, “It’s a serious crime and there’s no doubt it’s very disappointing. I was heartbroken by it. It’s like a Ferrari without a paint job.”
What was surprising however, is that this time, the leak was universally condemned by Wolverine’s online fan community, bloggers, movie buffs and comic book fans. Several movie blogs are refusing to run reviews of the raw footage (FoxNews.com’s Roger Friedman was fired for writing a review of the pirated copy), while others such as Dark Horizon have condemned the uploading of the pirated copy as an “act that cruelly robs thousands of people of not just months of hard effort, but their livelihood as well.” The New York Times was even spurred to ask whether Internet access is a fundamental human right, or a privilege, carrying with it a responsibility for good behavior. (more…)
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