Is Anyone Else Confused?
Last week saw the latest copyright lawsuit filed. This one is a variation on the theme of “we’re putting songs in little devices that aren’t really radios and aren’t really record players (remember those?) so we’re not really quite sure who should do what but this side thinks its free and this side thinks its not.”
Intellectual property is a slippery concept, because it’s intellectual and doesn’t exist in a corporeal form. And that’s always been the case, nothing has changed there.
But wasn’t it a lot easier to think about this stuff when to get a song you had to buy a record? And radio, which has always been free, was just radio? Then we could say to ourselves “If I hold it in my hand, I have to pay. If it comes out of the air, I don’t have to pay.” That was simple.
Today is not simple, but as soon as we can get our minds around what’s what, it’ll go back to being simple, because nothing has really changed, nothing is really different, we’ve just all gotten confused by the new stuff - like my grandmother got confused by the telephone with the speakerphone feature. It’s not really hard, just new. We’ll get it.
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