Very clever, extremely humorous, and free to watch (donations happily accepted). Click play on the screen below, and/or read on for a textual nutshell.

Beware of People

Society has become cultural industries’ biggest competitor. Copyright law – and especially all its subsidiaries (many of them lobbied into life because of the Internet), is working extremely hard to prevent this competitor from moving around in a free market.

People now have cheap access to the tools that used to be reserved for heavy-on-equipment, professional creators. This allows almost anyone to be a producer of culture instead of a mere couch potato.

But the kind of creativity this spawns is dangerous for the well being of the established industry model. So its moguls call out to their exterminating agent: copyright law.

By suing the fans, the industry hoped to make set an example to all the downloaders and remixers out there. But, for one, bald chickens make for bad plucking: they don’t make any money from what they’re doing; they don’t have the money to pay the required fees for what they’re doing; and if they did, it would take someone like GirlTalk – musical cut, edit, mix and mash up genius, about 50 years to clear all the rights for what he’s doing (click here for my personal selection of the late greats of 2008, including a GirlTalk track).

but more importantly, it doesn’t work. If anything, it’s destroying what little credibility big creative industry companies still have in fostering cultural development. So where’s the fun in that? What’s it helping anyone?

The only one making a ‘better’ living through all of this is the lawyer who gets to spend his expensive hours suing twelve-year old girls.

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Reality and Love the Remix

If you know where you’re music’s being played the most, you’ll better be able to decide where you should be on the stage. If you sell a live registration of your concert, to the audience, immediately after your performance, your studio work is but a marketing gimmick for the real thing – the real experience connected to a specific place and time.

So instead of going after downloaders and the remixers, to try and punish them so to set an example for the rest of us (or: to fence in what’s turning into common cultural practice), entertainment moguls should really be looking at them as a source of business model inspiration – or even as partners.

Emerging cultural forms of production are the R&D-labs of cultural industries. Not only do they provide insight into what’s driving potential consumers, they’re brimming with enthusiasts promoting someone’s work for free. Such developments are an opportunity, and seeing this allows companies to rethink what makes their business. Yet few are able to let step out of the comfort zone, to nurture this new practice, and make it work for instead of against them.

‘You can’t be taller than me and shorter than me at the same time. You go ahead and take the high-end of the market; let us play elsewhere. We’ll happily occupy that space.’ This film is remixed poetry – in images, music, and words.

Thanks to Rolf @ Loupe for letting me know.

(photo IMG_0729 by mecredis)