I think you mistake my first-hand experience and readily available knowledge with preoccupation. I'm an editor and I work with rights-managed materials all the time (especially on historical documentaries) so I can ramble on about this stuff pretty much at the drop of a hat. I also prefer to give reasonably detailed responses when I can because I find it more helpful than being curt and/or ambiguous and, quite honestly, I think the Industry is fascinating especially with all the changes that have been taking place the last 10-15yrs. Many things have changed, but many net results remain the same.
Overall, I don't really care what you do or don't do as an individual, but the topic at I find very interesting.
Lethal
As a filmmaker myslef, I take the issue very seriously. Making money from my films is important. And the film industry doesn't have the same ticket sale/merchandise revenue stream to fall back on that the music industry does. Sure, those might be great for George Lucas, but for a film like The Hurt Locker, DVD sales are their bread and butter. And so I sympathize for people like Kathryn Bigelow when their bottom line is cut by people downloading illegaly. It's a shame that artists see their proceeds diminished.
But the record companies? The film studios? I can't respect their position because of the way they've chosen to deal with the situation. I can't respect people who do things like
this and
this and
this.
You can't find just a few people and make them pay for everyone else's crimes. That's pretty much what they're doing. You can't give one murderer 2000 life sentences and then just let all the other murderers go free. People have argued, "Yeah, but they can't find and arrest everyone." But guess what? That's not your problem. It's their problem. A cop can't pull over every car, but that's not my problem either. If he pulls me over, he can only give me a ticket for what
I did. He can't ticket me for every car on the road.
If technology is becoming a threat to their industry, and if they can't keep up and can't evolve with it, then they die out. This is a capitalistic society. People will still make music and the world will go on. The business structure of the record labels is terribly outdated as it is. It's been said that the old powerful railroad companies of the 19th century would still be around if they just realized that they weren't in the railroad business, they were in the transportation business. Instead of competing with cars, they should have been building cars. Well if the record industry wants to survive, they need to realize that they aren't in the record business. They're in the music business, and they need to evolve. Records (well, CDs) just aren't cutting it. One big first step was embracing iTunes (as well as it's competitors). That was good. Now it should be the music industry that is developing and financing things like Spotify, as alternatives. Today a lot of young people don't even see the point in illegal downloading because they just pay $5 or $10 a month and have nearly every song ever created on their iPhone, Android, iPad, PC, wherever. I know a lot of people who never use anything like iTunes or Winamp. Today things like Pandora, Spotify, Last.FM, and Turntable are wildly popular. People are streaming and seeing less of a need to own their own (and therefore illegaly download) music. It's really pretty amazing and it's a much better way of dealing with the problem.
And regarding event videography specifically, the record companies have sat on their asses and allowed this to go on for the past, what? 30 years? Now all of a sudden it's a concern for them? That's largely why I feel so bad for people like the guy in that article. What he was doing was illegal, but it was also widely known to be a standard industry practice. There had previously been sort of an unwritten rule that the two industries left well enough alone. Now the record companies finally and suddenly decide they want to enforce the law, and they do it by destroying the financial standing of a handful of individuals and businesses, instead of addressing the problem as a whole. They're victimizing a few people arbitrarily, to use them as a scare tactic for the rest of the industry. But again, a person should only have to pay for their own crime, not everyone's crime.
