Decision time

Lots of cool stuff coming out of SXSW, aparently. This relation of the public beating questioning of an MPAA representative is damn good, and this bit especially caught my eye:

And that's really the problem, isn't it? There are these industries of middlemen - RIAA, MPAA - that claim to "protect artists" but what they're really protecting is themselves. Artists (and I include myself in that word) need to rise up and tell these people to go get stuffed. We can decide when a mashup is perfectly fine with us. We can decide to embrace file traders to build awareness of our work. We don't need you anymore. You're just holding us back.

I think that anyone who is inside the Music/Movie industry cabaal's clutches probably got there as an accident of history, so I don't blame them entirely. I hope they do their damnedest to get out. For the rest of us doing creative work, there is no excuse for joining this monster anymore. In the internet, we have the tools at our disposal to distribute our art ourselves, ethically (and still make money!), and we owe it to our audience to do so. The industry's self-interested obsession with rights is not compatible with the vibrant, but necessarily somewhat derivative, social process of creation, and each increase of its power represents a subsequent impediment to our art. The creative world is at stake; it's time to recognize this and act.