Jonathan Rowe wants to get rid of the suits in the creative industries.
"We’ve all heard the justifications for the emerging property police state – the copyright term extensions, the international jihad on infringers, the government mandating of anti-copying technology and the rest. It’s to protect the “creative process,”, the inspired artist laboring away in a basement or garage.
To listen to the whining from the film and recording industries, it is a wonder that a Charlie Chaplin ever bothered to pick up a camera, or Frank Sinatra to croon a song, seeing that the term of copyright was much shorter in their days than it is now...
Once in a while the truth slips out, which it did recently in GW Magazine, which is published by George Washington University in D.C. The magazine (Spring/Summer 2005) did a profile of Dan Glickman, the former Congressman and Agriculture Secretary and a G.W. alum, who has succeeded Jack Valenti as head of the Motion Picture Association of America. The piece quotes Glickman on the industry’s crackdown on copying. “The average movie today costs $103 million to make,” he says, “and six out of 10 of them don’t make that money back. Making movies has become incredibly expensive — and that’s why preventing piracy has become so crucial.”
It’s not about a creative process but rather a non-creative one, with bloated budgets and overpaid and often under-talented stars. The push in other words comes from the business side of the house – the side that often pulverizes the very talent the lobbyists in Washington are claiming to nurture."
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