I'm a little too young to have been much affected by Michael Jackson's music. To my fourth grade ears, Weird Al's renditions of Fat and Eat It were immensely more entertaining than the source of their parody. Of course, for some reason I thought Madonna and Marilyn Monroe were the same person until I was twelve, so my childhood reflections upon popular culture are probably entirely lacking a relationship with reality. The main impact Michael Jackson had on me was a realization of the clusterfuck of American copyright law.
In 1985, Michael Jackson purchased for $48 million the rights to the ATV Music catalog, which included most of the Beatles songs written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. McCartney hoped to win the rights to the catalog himself with a little help from his friend (Yoko, oh the irony), but was outbid by the King of Pop. The incident did not exactly have a beneficial impact on the friendship of the pair. The story is legendary at this point and is often retold with one of two underlying messages: look what a dick Michael Jackson was, or look how out of touch Michael Jackson is with reality that he'll drop fifty million dollars on a lark to fuck over a friend as a joke.
The conclusion I drew was far simpler: how can Paul McCartney not own the rights to his own songs? How is it rational that Paul McCartney owes Michael Jackson money every time he sings "Hey Jude" or "I am the Walrus"? Well you see, someone else owned the rights, and then sold those rights to someone else, who bundled them into an attractive package and sold all those rights to all those songs as a lump legal entity. It's quite simple if you can think like a lawyer instead of a human being.
Stop for a second and think about theft. There are two components to stealing: you take something and the person you took it from no longer has it. When you take a picture of someone, it is not stealing. You made a copy of them, but they still exist, nothing (well except their soul if you're of certain stone aged religions) is missing that was there before. Copying does not meet the common sense definition of theft. I cannot have stolen something from you, if you still have it after the supposed theft.
Consider copying a song instead of photographing a person. You copy the song onto your computer from a friend's iPod. Your friend still has the song, but now you also have it. Nothing has been stolen. Ah, but you see, you just cost the record company the value of that song, so you stole from them. Does the record company still have a copy of the song? Well, yes. Then how was anything stolen from them? Well it's not really the song that was stolen per se, it was the money. What money? The money you would have paid them for the song. So if I had no intent to purchase the song, then I didn't actually steal anything? Or put in another way, if Schrödinger's cat is simultaneously alive and dead in that box, then he owes $1.9 million to the RIAA.
Enough dancing straw men, they enflame my allergies anyway. The root of the problem with copyright logic is that it only makes sense within a certain framework of legal assumptions that do not exist outside the minds of attorneys. Any file on your computer is just a big long list of zeroes and ones that when read in the right way become a picture of breasts, or a pop song, or a shopping list, or this article that you're reading right now, or a picture of bigger breasts. Saying that it is illegal to copy a song is the technical equivalent of outlawing a number.
In any case the lesson is, every time you download a Beatles song without paying for it, you're stealing money. From Michael Jackson's children. And won't someone think of the children?
In 1985, Michael Jackson purchased for $48 million the rights to the ATV Music catalog, which included most of the Beatles songs written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. McCartney hoped to win the rights to the catalog himself with a little help from his friend (Yoko, oh the irony), but was outbid by the King of Pop. The incident did not exactly have a beneficial impact on the friendship of the pair. The story is legendary at this point and is often retold with one of two underlying messages: look what a dick Michael Jackson was, or look how out of touch Michael Jackson is with reality that he'll drop fifty million dollars on a lark to fuck over a friend as a joke.
The conclusion I drew was far simpler: how can Paul McCartney not own the rights to his own songs? How is it rational that Paul McCartney owes Michael Jackson money every time he sings "Hey Jude" or "I am the Walrus"? Well you see, someone else owned the rights, and then sold those rights to someone else, who bundled them into an attractive package and sold all those rights to all those songs as a lump legal entity. It's quite simple if you can think like a lawyer instead of a human being.
Stop for a second and think about theft. There are two components to stealing: you take something and the person you took it from no longer has it. When you take a picture of someone, it is not stealing. You made a copy of them, but they still exist, nothing (well except their soul if you're of certain stone aged religions) is missing that was there before. Copying does not meet the common sense definition of theft. I cannot have stolen something from you, if you still have it after the supposed theft.
Consider copying a song instead of photographing a person. You copy the song onto your computer from a friend's iPod. Your friend still has the song, but now you also have it. Nothing has been stolen. Ah, but you see, you just cost the record company the value of that song, so you stole from them. Does the record company still have a copy of the song? Well, yes. Then how was anything stolen from them? Well it's not really the song that was stolen per se, it was the money. What money? The money you would have paid them for the song. So if I had no intent to purchase the song, then I didn't actually steal anything? Or put in another way, if Schrödinger's cat is simultaneously alive and dead in that box, then he owes $1.9 million to the RIAA.
Enough dancing straw men, they enflame my allergies anyway. The root of the problem with copyright logic is that it only makes sense within a certain framework of legal assumptions that do not exist outside the minds of attorneys. Any file on your computer is just a big long list of zeroes and ones that when read in the right way become a picture of breasts, or a pop song, or a shopping list, or this article that you're reading right now, or a picture of bigger breasts. Saying that it is illegal to copy a song is the technical equivalent of outlawing a number.
In any case the lesson is, every time you download a Beatles song without paying for it, you're stealing money. From Michael Jackson's children. And won't someone think of the children?
I wonder then if the MJ camp profited from the creation of Rock Band: Beatles? Was the intellectual property that was used in that game owned by Micheal?
perfectjargon: That's an interesting point you bring up. It looks like most of the songs used were owned by ATV (and thus yes, Michael Jackson's estate gets paid for that). However, Apple Corp (the sort of holding company owned by McCartney, Lennon, etc.) played a huge role in the development of the game because it features the likenesses of the Beatles at length, which is not something that got sold along with the licensing rights to the music. So in short, MJ made some cash on that game, but the primary third party was still the Beatles themselves.
That is one of the worst assessments of copyright I've ever heard. This is almost Rush Limbaugh stupid.
The very existence of real arguments on either side of the "copyright debate" - the rights of artists and consumers - is how the protection of those rights develop (push and pull effect), so that, at any given time, neither side supposedly gains too much power.
You didn't even acknowledge any particular point. I am more stupid for having read the above garbage. Don't bother addressing an issue you know nothing about, redneck.
Peter G: By all means, please explain the real arguments defending what seems to many to be a completely incoherent approach to copyrights. But don't resort to name calling, it's just tacky.
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We still miss MJ the King Of Pop. Rob
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