Grateful Dead lyricist lambasts DMCA

Phantasm66 · Feb 25, 2002

Whilst poking around on my usual net haunts, I found the article I have quoted below.

I wish at all of these evil record companies would just be happy with the amount of money that they make with their pop princesses and 5 wally boy group bands. They don't need to take away my right to watch "Star Trek: Enterprise" latest eps straight from their premier in the US months before they hit cable in the UK. Or my ability to download the latest Alanis Morissette song just to see if its worth buying.

When will people come to their sense and realise that peer to peer file sharing will not cost media companies revenue if they can just stop fighting. All that happens when you shutdown Napster is, much like a regenerating hydra, another head springs up elsewhere called grokster or kazaA.

Anywayz....

Grateful Dead lyricist lambasts DMCA
By John Lettice
Posted: 25/02/2002 at 11:46 GMT

Grateful Dead lyricist and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow has denounced the Digital Millenium Copyright Act as likely to turn the Internet into an information desert. Speaking at the RSA Security Conference 2002, in a session entitled "Copyright or Copy Wrong: Digital Millennium Copyright Act Examined," Barlow used the example of the Dead's approach to copyright to illustrate how the free flow of content did not necessarily choke off content availability.

Or indeed lead to anarchy, communism, the end of the world and very poor record companies (although he might agree that last one could be a good thing). One of the weird things about the Dead was that they positively encouraged fans to tape their concerts and share the tapes around, so in that sense they provided an early blueprint for some of the more radical ideas that are kicking around today. And in some other senses, if Barlow were not an EFF founder, aspects of the EFF would still be kind of 'based on an idea by...'

The Register however has no recollection of being positively encouraged to share tapes of Dead records around, and indeed remembers having to save up what at the time a king's ransom for the vinyl of Europe 72 live. Barlow's point that you can share without stifling its availability may or may not be supported by this, depnding on your point of view. You could argue that we're now in a different world, where the relatively clear-cut difference between live and studio (or packaged) material doesn't exist as it did in the Dead's time. Or you could argue that Linux distributors are actually doing something similar by building on something that's freely-available. If nothing else, the argument that you can still make money out of it will cheer them up.

Barlow argues that it's a matter of ethics, that Dead fans didn't sell the bootleg tapes the Dead encouraged because they were encouraged. But maybe it was because they were free, and therefore there wasn't a market price, or maybe it was just because they were hippy weirdos. In any event, there were the beginnings of a revolutionary idea in there, and it's one that becomes more revolutionary when it comes to new media. You can find out more about Barlow, his career and his thinking here. But if you want Dead lyrics jokes, as only two people noticed last time we did it, this time we're not going to even draw. Shucks... ®

source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/24186.html

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Grateful Dead lyricist lambasts DMCA

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