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| Have you seen me? Missing since 1990. :-( |
Last fall I listened to Last Seen by NPR, which focused on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Heist. When I hear "podcast," I think Last Seen, and I was DETERMINED to make this fit into the assignment. All week it's been rattling around my brain - and I threw different ideas at the wall, and none of them stuck.
So today, during a long car ride, I put it together. I think. My topic is Art heists, the psychology of stealing, and a sub-focus on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Heist. This meant I spent A LOT of time exploring podcasts and videos that could work. Some were good, others were bad.
This week we also chatted about copyright law and fair use. The standard-bearer Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed was used as an example of fair use. I do find that I have a fairly strict moral code (in general) and I tend to play it safe when it comes to copyright.
With that said, I was SHOCKEDDDD by an article I stumbled upon on Freakonomics.com. Excerpted:
In economic terms, intellectual property is non-rival, whereas tangible property is rival. As a result, the “piracy” of intellectual property is simply not the same sort of zero-sum game that car theft — or theft of any tangible property — is. And that means that when Hollywood or the U.S. government says that music or movie downloaders are “pirates” or “thieves,” they are indulging in a bit of loose rhetoric. There are, in general, good moral reasons not to take what doesn’t belong to you. But as this video by filmmaker Nina Paley so beautifully illustrates, copying is not theft.
uhhh...what? Of course it's not tangible. But denying money from someone's pocket is thievery all the same. (And that's not to say that I didn't have Napster. And I remember those alarming days in the early 2000s when music companies were going after college students. That scared me straight.)
The video from Nina Paley is...alarming to this future librarian's eyes and ears. It seriously seems like propaganda. Surely I am missing, something, right?
On that alarmist note...I am OUT!

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