I really wanted to give something personal for the holidays this year.  I don’t knit and my last best drawing involved portraying a space battle between the Millenium Falcon and the USS Enterprise, so I settled on creating videos of the kids.  I had a backlog of photos and moving pictures (“talkies?”) that needed forcible eviction from various digital devices, so the project was motivating on multiple levels.

In the process, my videography jones got kicked into high gear. Pinnacle 7 got dusted off (quirky, but workable in Vista), the camcorder got a workout, and the clutter of tedious videos got transformed into something moving and timeless, set to a couple songs I like.  Nice.

Delivery became a dilemma.  Gifting a link seemed a bit too virtual, so I planned to put them onto SanDisk MP3 players (the Fuze plays video) and send them out to my parents.  The retrospective montages were guaranteed tear-jerkers, plus everyone got a great little music player for the gym.  The wins were racking up.

This is supposed to be the era of user-generated content (formerly known as “crap you waste your time on”), so I felt compelled to share my creation with others.  My Facebook page had fallen into disrepair over the holidays, so I uploaded my shiny new vid … uh, wait … “violation” … “privacy” … what?

Facebook froze the upload and threatened to remove all my content should I try again.  My mash-up creation had morphed into copyright infringement, and threatened to transmogrify into social media banishment.

So, this is the world we live in.  The RIAA has convinced a lot of people that music is a finite resource that cannot be borrowed or bartered without harm.  In our system, my creative application of music can only be perceived as a threat to the artist’s well-being.

And yet the reality is nearly the opposite.  With few exceptions, music is a sprawling, fungible commodity that has multitudes of substitutes.  Yes, there is (was) only one Michael Jackson singing Billie Jean.  But hearing a “free” version of Billie Jean hardly ever replaces a “paid” version, rather it is more likely to replace a “free” version of something else.  And that replacement is likely to promote future purchase of Michael Jackson’s music, movies, shirts, breakfast cereals, and commemorative plates.

Creative uses of copyrighted media put the source material into circulation in ways that it would not have otherwise, helps it break through the sensory fugue.  If anything, the artists should thank me, and present me with royalties for future sales that would not have come without my help.

Here are my videos.  Anwen / Madoc