Media & Society-Week Five: Freedom of Speech

TOPIC 1

There were a number of things I learned watching “RiP! A Remix Manifesto”. The first was that the U.S. government had made other countries agree to follow American copyright laws in order to sell goods to the U.S. I had never heard that and was shocked (although, I will admit, not surprised) that this country had used its economic clout to push our laws onto other nations. I also had heard of the copyright lawsuit brought against The Verve for their song “Bittersweet Symphony” but was unaware of the long history behind the songs in question.

Another topic I had glancing familiarity with but that the movie illuminated much more fully for me was the slowing of scientific and medical progress due to broad copyrights and patents on concepts and research.

As a long time fan of Radiohead, I remember paying what I wanted for their album “In Rainbows” and having even more admiration for them for ‘breaking out’ of the music industry standards. I hadn’t heard about the Warner-Chappell lawsuit but was pleased to hear that one of my favorite bands not only stood by their principles, but released even more of their work to be remixed.

As someone who considers myself an artist and has many artist friends, I completely understand the idea of intellectual property and I do still think it’s an important concept. I’ve had online friends who have created work and shared it online, had it ripped off by someone who sold likenesses or reproductions of the original work (a doodle of an original character is put onto a T-shirt or coin purse, for example), and had somebody else profiting off of their work while the original artist is struggling to pay their bills and keep food in the fridge. Often times, a polite request to stop profiting off of their work is ignored and the threat of lawsuit (or actual lawsuit) is their only recourse.

HOWEVER, a great deal of these artists also do ‘fanart’, or artistic depictions of characters or elements of some work of art that they are fans of, and this work also gets taken and monetized by another party. On the one hand, I can understand my friends’ dismay-they did draw/paint/etc. that art. It is, in a way, theirs but it also, in a sense, is also the intellectual property of the original creator of the art that inspired them. So who is the most wronged or in the wrong in this situation? The original creator (or, realistically, corporate owner of the copyright) of The Avengers, or my friend who did little doodles of those characters, or the unknown third party that took those doodles, reproduced them, and are now selling them online on a coin purse? This is where the problem with the concept of intellectual property gets really difficult, since, as the documentary points out, all culture builds on what’s come before. There’s many proud writers of online ‘fanfiction,’ an oft-maligned literary genre, that argue that some of our ‘classic’ literature is itself fanfiction of either the Bible or the old classics of Greece and Rome. As a great lover of Shakespeare, it’s impossible to look into the Bard’s history and not see that some of his greatest plays are reworkings, adaptations, or ‘remixes’ of other plays, books, and other media of his day. Yet, (I’m pretty sure) Shakespeare is considered one of the greatest artists of all time (also, recent historical research has found evidence that some of the many words and phrases we credit him with ‘inventing’ were part of street vernacular in London that he put into his plays).

So, the concept of intellectual property is a difficult one for me-on the one hand, I’ve cheered when a formal cease and desist notice has stopped people from profiting off of my friends hard work. On the other, I’ve also been dismayed when other creative friends, who make fanvids and other forms of fanart (and receive no financial gain from it) receive their own cease and desist notices from large media conglomerates (long ago, there was a YouTube user who made Myst fanvideos for fun-they were cute, and for someone who was still a Myst fan in the early 2000s, a nice reminder that there were other nerds who loved that fictional universe as much as I did. Because I was the only one who regularly commented on and liked the videos, I even got one dedicated to me! That made my week. Then one sad day, the account was just gone, deleted due to a complaint filed by Time Warner/EMI).  

The issue of hate speech and the first amendment is another thorny one. There have been many instances where I’ve felt that an artist has crossed the line by voicing an opinion, but for me what is inexcusable is when celebrities and other famous people spread misinformation as truth. For instance, Jenny McCarthy’s crusade against vaccines based on conjecture and untruth, which has contributed to the anti-vaccine movement in this country, which in turn has contributed to the return of previously eradicated and very dangerous diseases. Measles, which was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, has, according to the CDC, come roaring back with 117 cases reported so far this year. This isn’t, of course, purely Ms. McCarthy’s fault, the anti-vaccine movement has many prominent voices in across the country.

Whether or not any kind of government intervention should be taken in cases like this, I’m not sure. From one perspective, the first amendment guarantees you the right to say whatever you want (correct or not), on the other, if someone is using their public platform to spread misinformation that is a public health hazard, it seems like there should be some form of check in place to punish that.

TOPIC 2

Overall, I feel like WikiLeaks’ actions are useful. Transparency is important, and citizens need to be informed of important information. My issue with WikiLeaks is that the information they release doesn’t seem to be entirely unbiased. To get political, they published emails they’d hacked from John Podesta about the DNC in regards to the 2016 presidential election, which was a huge embarrassment for the Democrats and very well could have influenced the election, but now we are learning that Donald Trump, Jr. had his own embarrassing emails involving a meeting with Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer (who we’re now learning has had ties to the Russian Federal Security Service). However, these emails were never released or even hinted at by WikiLeaks. Dirt is dirt, but if an organization favors making some individual’s or organization’s dirt public and not others, this can become dangerous.

However, the work they’ve done worldwide exposing corruption and injustice is important, and the information they made public during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as their releases on the facility in Guantanamo Bay, is essential for the American people to have access to.

I am very worried about the current state of free speech. I feel that large corporate interests are gaining a stronger and stronger voice in our national forum and the voices of the people are given less protection. The consolidation of massive media conglomerates has been detrimental to our free speech as a whole. The continued attacks on net neutrality are just one more aspect of this. I feel like we as Americans have to either hold our elected officials responsible-or elect new ones-for maintaining and creating laws that protect the interests of individuals from those of corporations. As I’ve learned in this class, we once had many great laws that held these large organized interests in check, but they been steadily chipped away and new laws of their kind haven’t been made for the new Internet era.