If you have read Part 1,
downloaded and watched the movie – we are ready to explore part 2 if not – then
you won’t understand half of the following;
 
We now know about the economic hitmen which are basically
the first line of defense – who go in to corrupt foreign government leaders.
The second line of defense are the Jackals and of course, as
per the namesake, Jackals either overthrow Governments (via funding
insurrection) or they assassinate them.
And if all else fails, – the military then goes in.
 
After the coup – in go the lawyers to organise the “Free
Trade Agreements” which of course always results in the country becoming a
signatory to TRIPS..

 
In a document I recently read, a US
attorneys brief
on Copyright:
 
Works published in almost all foreign countries are entitled to
full U.S. copyright protection. However, there are a handful of
countries with which the United States has no copyright relations.
These are:
 
Afghanistan Nepal
Bhutan        Oman
Ethiopia      San Marino
Iran            Tonga
Iraq            Yemen
 
A work first published in any of these countries by a citizen
or resident of any of these countries is not entitled to U.S. copyright protection. Nor
does it qualify for copyright restoration. In other words, it is in the public
domain.
 
Translation: The residents of these countries
continue to enjoy the same rights they have had for thousands of years without
paying through the nose for their own culture.
 
We understand the situation in Afghanistan,
Iran and Iraq.
But how will the US
justify an action in peaceful fun loving Tonga,
or Oman, one of
the wealthiest countries in the world. Or for that fact Nepal,
where the legislature has just passed legislation recognizing the [Tukrhu]
former reincarnation of a soul.
 
Possibly the USA will use this to insist on extending the
copyright term yet again to 50 years after the life of the author or any future
reincarnations the author might happen to have.
(Don’t panic, according to Nepalese Buddhist beliefs, it is
extremely rare to be reincarnated more than 3 times and far more usual to be
re-incarnated only once).

Quoting Smiers J. from his 2000 paper on

“THE ABOLITION OF
COPYRIGHT Better for Artists, Third World
Countries and the Public Domain”;
 
The Advantage for Third World
Countries is Doubtful
In many non-Western countries there are myriad
demonstrations of very lively cultural practices – partly thanks to the absence
of copyrights and cultural industries. A good example – which stands for most
traditional and popular music cultures such as calypso, samba, rap and so on –
is Algerian raï music.
…
For Third World
countries the commercialization of their intellectual and creative commons is a
cynical nightmare.
 
He continues  ‘that
American companies stand to gain $61 billion a year from the Third
World if U.S.
protectionist demands are met . . . at a cost to the South that will dwarf the
current huge flow of debt service from South to North’.
A substantial part from what the South pays the North for
using intellectual property rights concerns rights to cultural ‘products’.
Transnational cultural industries try to find as many outlets as possible, also
in non-Western countries, for the cultural ‘products’ to which they hold the
rights. Among the most important products are music, films and television
sitcoms. In order to reach their goals they will push away works of art which
are of local origin. Krister Malm and Roger Wallis experienced this on Trinidad.
‘The view generally expressed by musicians and others in our 1987–8 interviews
was that the share of local music in the media was as low as 15–20 per cent
except during the carnival season’ (Malm and Wallis, 1992: 78). Probably the
percentage of 15–20 percent local music will now, 10 years after the research
by Krister Malm and Roger Wallis, be even lower. It is clear that much more
research should be done in order to get a firm grip on the takeover of cultural
life in the non-Western countries by the big transnational cultural industries.
(Smiers, J).
 
It has. Nine years after the above was written, who can say
that foreign cultures are not being ridden roughshod over – all in the quest
for the almighty (but technically worthless) US Dollar.
 
In India,
millions of cinema attendances used to occur to soak up the cultural meme of
the people, expressed through song and traditional dance.  Now, the westernization of the Indian film
Industry, now called “Bollywood” is clear evidence of western influences
subverting, supplanting and destroying an entire culture.
 
Why?
 
So a very few can obtain financial benefits.
 
The author concept stands as a gate through which one
must pass in order to acquire intellectual
property rights. At the moment, this is a gate that tends
disproportionately to favour the developed countries’ contributions to world
science and culture. Curare, batik, myths, and the dance ‘lambada’ flow out of
developing countries, unprotected by intellectual property rights, while
Prozac, Levis, Grisham, and the movie Lambada! flow in – protected by a suite of
intellectual property laws, which in turn are backed by the threat of trade
sanctions. (Boyle, 1996: 124–8)
 
What if, the independents have it right. What if,
centralized distribution is not the most effective way of growing an
entertainers brand.
 
Better Remuneration for More Artists
It may seem contradictory to claim that it is to the
advantage of the average artist in Western and non-Western countries to abolish
the copyright system.
However, we must allow ourselves to become aware of the
consequences of such a new, and for many people probably unexpected, situation.
What we will see, then, is that the concentration of attention by cultural
industries on only a handful of artists disappears. This means that a more
normal situation reappears, namely that all artists have a chance to find a
public, in their own local environment or even globally. A diversity of tastes
could flourish, and numerous artists could make a reasonable living. The
abolition of the system of authors’ rights works positively for them!
The Internet provides the average artist with a global
distribution channel which makes it possible to reach local audiences, but also
publics or buyers worldwide. The advantage of the use of the new media is that
artists may create their own networks of interested publics for their work.
They are no longer dependent upon agents, record companies and other
intermediaries that monopolistically control global market access for many
artists. Artists can sell their work themselves by using the Internet. They can
also decide to use the Internet for promotion purposes only, and in this way
create a market for their paintings, designs, films or for their live
performances.
 
 
Rhetoric is cheap. But what about Radiohead?
What about the Grateful Dead?
 
The Grateful Dead only recorded one top-10 song during its
30-year history, but, through clever marketing, the band made more money in
1991 than any other rock group with earnings of 
thirty-five million dollars.
 
How?
 
Firstly the band built trust between themselves and the
audience by acknowledging audience participation in their concerts by providing
an area just for members of the audience that wanted to record the concerts on
tape recorders.
 
Many of these recordings are shared here http://www.archive.org/details/GratefulDead

 
So they were suckers….. (music industry executive
reaction…..)
 
Not quite.
 
They registered a number of trademarks and started
merchandising various products through the Grateful Dead Merchandising Company,
(GDM), formed in 1980.
 
Baseball caps, T-shirts, golf accessories, handbags and oh
yeah, tapes and CD’s.
 
How did that work out for them?
 


 
Wow!.
 
Sharing your music seems to have paid of handsomely for the
Grateful Dead.
 
So for the authors, the payoff was in the concerts, the
merchandising of the brand with some small change coming from CD Sales.
 
The copyright system makes it nearly impossible for artists
to create for and within the digital domain while using lots of sources. This
frustrates the development of a completely new artisticfield and pushes artists into illegality.
 
Viz Youtube and the commercialization of the YouTube meme
into a movie.
 
From the NZ Freedom Foundation  website: “Brett
Gaylor has made an admiring portrait of his favourite recording artist Girl
Talk (Greg Gillis), but also raises some fascinating questions about sampling
culture and copyright laws. Audio bricoleur Gillis is a fearless musical
magpie, with a whizz-bang knack for snatching the best snippets of the daggiest
songs (think Gloria Estefan, Journey and Whitesnake) and recontextualising them
into sparkling new tracks to create a bastard pop known as mashup. While these
spunky sound collages are thrillingly inventive, copyright laws determine that
tracks made from pilfered works (Gillis crams uncleared samples from 21 songs
into a three-minute track) are utterly illegal. As the NY Times Magazine
stated, Gillis is ‘a lawsuit waiting to happen’. Joyously celebrating remix
culture, Gaylor and Gillis articulately argue that the line between inspiration
and infringement for a media-literate generation is being increasingly blurred,
and that reshaping existing creative works for ‘fair use’ should be free from
copyright restriction.” — KD.
 
Want to watch it in Australia
? http://www.ripremix.com/getdownloads/
 (Don’t bother….)
 
Rip It Downloads
Sorry! Downloads and DVDs from this web site are only
allowed from within the US.
You can watch the film right now, though, by visiting the global Rip site: www.nfb.ca/rip.
You can also watch and remix the film at opensourcecinema.org