When I was
a child, I was wondering why copying songs from disc to tape was not
allowed. On all disc labels or authentic tapes it was written with
small letters that this action was prohibited by law. However i
remember numerous copied tapes that everybody owned which were played
in public and people were also making many copies with a variety of
playlists.
The
first tape i bought from a neighborhood's music store was a copy from
a disc, of course. In music stores there were always disc and tape
players of good quality used to make copies with playlists on their
customers demand, although this was prohibited by music companies.
Reasonably,
many questions occurred in my mind such as “why should copying
discs be considered illegal although everybody does it, despite the
fact that it is prohibited?”. What was the actual cause of this
situation? Since anybody was able to buy numbers of “empty tapes”
and record any type of musical material, a “need” was occurring.
The need for at least one tape player-recorder. So, within a very
small time an enormous global-scale industry and market bloomed
regarding tape-recorders, sound amplifiers, “walkmans” and
anything related to music production. A world full of copied tapes
needs a vast number of tape-players, is listening to music much more
frequently, thus, is used to buying a lot more records. We would say
that, behind the cassette piracy there was an informal but obvious
support of the sound industry under a well-aimed speculative plan.
The same story takes place today with the dvds, the computer software
as well as anything turns out to be a commercial species implying
“intellectual property”. Half of the Greek population is
connected with “pirate windows” and listening to music downloaded
from “youtube”. Some values are constant. Why does this happen?
Michael Moore within a documentary regarding international-scale
companies has mentioned that some are so greedy that their greed
tends them even to sell him the rope which he plans to hang them
with!
The modern pocket-PCs
are the incredible descendants of the cassette and the sound
reproduction mechanisms. The processing power within the ability
framework of these media can overcome our imagination and even
enhance it with an ocean of information that we couldn't conceive
before, of a wonderful world we have just discovered while we weren't
aware of the fact that we weren't allowed to step on its grass! On
the other hand, the computer as well as the internet sometimes bring
us to solitude with a very, otherwise, communicative way: the
new symbols of our age: “YouTube”, “Facebook”, etc. Recording
has been renamed to “downloading” and cassette piracy to an
“electronic crime”. One can just press a “link” and suddenly
a caption appears on the position on the screen of your favorite
video clip: “This video is no longer available ........ because
of multiple notifications for copyright violations .........We
are sor.......”
