Tag: free speech

Find a Real Cause

                   

Let’s compare.  Both of these videos are technically marketing pieces. I would know as I’ve made a few hundred marketing videos in my career.  But what is each video selling, and how is each doing its job?

The video on the left is produced by Kim Dotcom and is selling one message:  Free Kim Dotcom.  The video on the right is produced by The What Took You So Long Foundation, and it is selling one message:  TEDx is a force for positive change in the world. Dotcom’s video has nearly one million views; the TEDx video, just over one thousand.  The former is an example of what I consider the most destructive and cynical manifestations of the digital age, while the latter represents what I perceive as the best in next-gen, progressive spirit connected and empowered by technology.

Dotcom’s video is more than a little creepy. It uses the desaturated hues we associate with post-apocalyptic movies, a fake TV-noise plug-in to give Dotcom himself a subversive, underground appeal; repeated images of angry mobs hiding behind Guy Fawkes masks to enhance the theater of revolution; and a catchy, electronica tune with lyrics that speak of humanism in contrast to the almost threatening, dystopian montage.

Dotcom may have the gall to compare himself to Martin Luther King, but the video is actually more reminiscent of a terrorist training film than a promo for social change, and that’s why it’s effective.  It takes a cynical, pseudo-revolutionary video to appeal to a cynical psychology — one that actually believes that streaming stolen creative media via torrent sites is somehow striking a blow for freedom and justice in the world.

By contrast, everything we see in the TEDx video is exactly the opposite in sensibility and intent.  First, we see faces, a lot of faces of real people who left their desktops and traveled to Doha to participate in something and engage in physical interaction. Not that the TED enterprise is without its flaws, but this video itself taps into what I would describe as a progressive deconstruction of institutions — a global “think different” consciousness that very likely will bypass traditional means to solve real problems like hunger, disease, and poverty.

When Eiso Vaandager says toward the end of the video that he “envisions the UN coming to TEDx organizers to solve a problem they can’t,” this is the kind of audacious claim worthy of our attention; and it only underscores just how offensive it is to hear Kim Schmitz use the same media to compare himself to civil rights leaders and other legitimate heroes.

I suspect the jaundiced supporters of the Dotcom video imagine themselves somehow allied with the proactive folks in the TEDx video because, of course, people have a tendency to believe in associative relationships among things that sound similar (both are bucking systems, aren’t they?); but there really is no comparison.  Dotcom’s video targets Americans — people who already enjoy freedom, and it aims to convince them that his incarceration would be their prison, too. The TEDx video targets a global community, and it aims to convince people that energy, willingness, and intelligence can solve real issues.

Of course the word freedom is a slippery little bugger. It gets used by everyone from peace activists to corporate fat cats to terrorists; and Dotcom is merely following in a long tradition of vested interests abusing the concept to defend personal gain and deflect attention away from the harm he does. As an artist and an American, I cherish the First Amendment above all other laws; and it is destructive both to creative works and to the First Amendment when a guy like Schmitz presumes to hide his theft of the former behind the humanistic benevolence of the latter.

If what you envision is legit social change, there are plenty of progressive and tangible ways to take action — everything from just supporting a crowd-funding campaign for a cause to lending actual knowledge, assistance, or muscle to a project of interest. But streaming free entertainment in order to fill the pockets of a guy who has produced exactly nothing in the world counts for less than zero on the social change meter.

There is actual oppression in the world, real sorrow, real evil worth your attention and action. Right now, thousands of human beings worldwide are being trafficked as sex or labor slaves; too much of the technology we take for granted is being produced by hands in poor working conditions; climate change is real; terrorism is real; hunger is real; there’s a revolution in Syria you might have heard about; the Iranian government is playing a dangerous and complex game; we have thousands of homeless and suicidal veterans here in the U.S.; Russia just sentenced musicians to prison for performing a protest song; oh, and the world economy is still pretty shaky.  If you’re looking for heroes and villains, they’re out there; but if Dotcom and Hollywood fit those definitions for you respectively, you’re more than a little naive.

Is copyright a threat to free speech?

This is a piece I wrote as a guest post for The Copyright Alliance. It got the folks over at TechDirt into a lather, but I suspect that’s because it wasn’t read or read very carefully by most of them.  

Not only have Copyright and Free Speech coexisted peacefully for the entire history of the Republic, but I would go so far as to suggest that Copyright is both literally and figuratively the money where our proverbial mouth is when it comes to the power of the First Amendment.  Think about it:  we are not only free to criticize our government, but if we’re really good at it (like Lewis Black), we’re entitled to make a pile of cash doing it.  How cool does that make America?  I say pretty cool, but there are those who seem to think the enterprise piece of the equation somehow diminishes the freedom part.  Au contraire.

If the U.S. is founded on one idea above all others, it’s that there is a link between free enterprise and freedom itself. Yes, this ideology has its flaws, and we’re still living through the economic woes of certain kinds of enterprise run amok; but let’s not throw out the baby with the bankers just yet. I believe it is no accident that we grant special rights of enterprise to those who exercise free speech in the form of books, music, and the performing and visual arts. After all, the First Amendment guarantees the right of anyone on U.S. soil to speak, but it in no way guarantees that everyone has something to say.

I know this may be hard to believe in the age of Tweetdecks, blogs, and threads; but all speakers are not created equal. Those who speak well enough to do it for a living have benefitted society in precisely the way intended by Article I Section VIII of the Constitution; and while you may quarrel with a particular form of expression, you can’t quarrel with the trillions of dollars in economic activity derived collectively from all works. Still, the mental contortionists of the copyleft claim that copyright, in the magic wonderland we call The Digital Age, now threatens Free Speech. And their position reminds me of another First Amendment stumper:  that same-sex marriage threatens the Freedom of Religion.

As alluded to in one of my recent posts the Kantian principle that your rights end where they infringe on the rights of another is logically implicit, if not explicit, in the broad, human rights established in our laws.  In a nutshell, society functions because most of us agree that your pursuit of happiness does not extend to a right to, say, drive an ATV across my yard and tear up the garden. Strangely, though, we often encounter folks trying to argue this principle in reverse — i.e. that my right to restrict trespassing infringes on your right to drive an ATV wherever you please.  Yeah, this sounds dumb because it is; but the logical construct is applied by religious zealots regarding same-sex marriage and by copy zealots (they actually have a religion now) regarding copyright.

The craftiest of gay-marriage opponents will argue that legalizing these unions infringes on their rights to be Christian in America, which is tantamount to undermining religious freedom.  Yes, anyone with two working brain cells can recognize that this isn’t sound reasoning so much as thinly veiled bigotry. Same-sex marriage can only be a threat to religious freedom if we agree that the zealot’s belief that homosexuality is a sin should implicitly influence our legal definition of marriage. There is no way to cut through this logical Gordian Knot without concluding that all marriage would have to be religious (and ultimately Christian) in order to be legal in the U.S.  And that would violate the definition I believe most of us apply to religious freedom.

Similarly, the copyright-threatens-speech proposal uses the illusion of reverse discrimination to suggest that when the producer exercises his copyright, this somehow infringes on the consumer’s desire to reuse or “share” the work as he sees fit, which amounts to a “chilling effect” on speech. Like the same-sex marriage thing, this argument glosses over personal bias to foster a logical leap to a shaky conclusion.  Copyright only threatens speech if we agree that the consumer’s right to reuse is more important than the producer’s right to treat his work as property. But we haven’t agreed to this for the same reason we don’t agree that you may drive an ATV over my lawn in the pursuit of happiness.  Freedoms have boundaries defined by the harm done to others; and free speech has managed to survive just fine despite the fact that it does not grant permission for plagiarism, perjury, libel, vandalism, disturbing the peace, hate crimes, or, indeed, theft of intellectual property.