Torblog

Or “Why are people still stuck with their heads up their ass in 2010?”

Here’s the deal; lately I’ve made a few videos depicting World of Warcraft gameplay with music to accompany it. In all the cases except when I use Japanese songs or anything weird that copyright holders in the west doesn’t know exist, these videos end up blocked in Germany when uploaded to YouTube. That is fine by me, as Germany is one big censorship when it comes to media content, so I don’t care if they can’t access it. However, yesterday when I uploaded a new video the audio got removed due to copyright claims, and here’s my beef with this:

Why oh why can’t copyright holders get it into their 1800’s centered brains that even if somebody listens to one of “their” songs for free it doesn’t mean one lost sale? Here’s what happens to me and other people I know when we’ve seen fan-made music videos and similar on YouTube: We like the video, we find the song and band interesting, we check it out and – and the following is true for me – we sometimes actually buy their album. And even if we don’t end up buying it, we spread word about the video, and get other people to listen to their songs by watching it. And more often than not, the cycle repeats itself and at many points along the viral highroad, people end up buying music by a band they hadn’t heard about before. As long as people mention what song and what band they use in their video and do not charge money for people to watch it, what is the problem?

We are now in the year 2010, yet some people still persist on earning money on other people’s hard work. And whatever happened to fair use? The members of the record industry are the people who create the kind of economic meltdowns we’ve been facing. They are middle-men, and the only purpose such people serve is leeching value from a society’s monetary system, and they will fall, because they are superflous and they always have been.