From the Twitters
The European Copyright Directive has reared its unsightly head again and what I find notable about these regular Rights battles is that the one group of people who are ignored are those of us who actually pay for what we consume. It’s always so called ‘creators’ versus pirates and the rest of us are supposed to just lump it.
It’s definitely made me buy more stuff second hand and concentrate my purchasing on independent artists. Why should I support those who want to make it easy for the Government to clamp down on dissent by enabling a censorship system that won’t work to stop piracy.
Like the ‘Home Taping Is Killing Music’1 campaign the concentration on the debatable effects of piracy just diverts from the money grab by the big media companies and the business practices of Amazon and the like which is where artists money is actually going.
And we live in a backward looking era where there’s hundreds of years of proven high quality books, art, and media for new work to compete with and a vast over supply of artists. There’s a lot of good writers, musicians, etc. about but very few decent plumbers. Supply and demand.
P.S. And in a desperate attempt to save the word from its current decline to just a marketing phrase – this is what creative means.
‘In 1965 Seiichi Miyake spent his own money to invent tactile blocks (or Tenji blocks as they were originally known) to help a friend whose vision was becoming impaired.’
- It didn’t. ↩