Earlier this semester, my friend Thessaly La Force and I made a nine-minute documentary about student activism in New York City. We began by hitting the pavement of Times Square and handing out flyers, warning consumers -- probably none of whom were native New Yorkers -- against buying CDs that we felt abused the status of copyright.
Internet users and music fans alike were interested to hear how big music corporations had used Digital Rights Management (DRM) as an excuse to encrypt invisible viruses into their CDs, lest they desire to download their legally purchased music onto their computer hard drives. But what alternatives exist to licensing and purchasing copyrighted content through big media?
The public domain provides many a network for legally obtaining alternatively licensed content: www.archive.org and www.ccmixter.org are both good places to start searching. Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org), pioneered by Lawrence Lessig, author of the tech-geek bible, Free Culture, provides an alternative space for young artists to license their work and for downloaders to enjoy this content without Sony DRM-justified viruses annihilating their hard drives.
As soon as Thessaly and I finished editing our film, we immediately CC-licensed our work, reserving some rights, but allowing viewers to download, re-edit and distribute our film without the threat of legal liability. Within less than a week, our film has received over 1,300 downloads. Of course, you do not have to be a striving musician/filmmaker, nor an Internet-obsessed tech-geek, to appreciate the importance of these issues.
As a final note in our documentary, Thessaly and I address questions of civil liberties, of youth activism and of how they exist in the virtual space of the Internet. Although the streets of Berkeley and Brooklyn in 2006 are no longer paved with the progressive cries of Bob Dylan-devotee protesters, a significant, politically subversive movement still brews in the space of cyber. The Internet is ripe for youth activism.
If you're still not convinced: I spent four hours listening to Kid Rock on repeat in a cafe last weekend. Kid Rock sucks. His music gives me a headache. Next time, I think I'll resist big record labels by downloading some CC-licensed music.
