Dissent.

An amusing lesson on copyright – brought to you by the characters of Disney – well actually:

Brothers Grimm (Snow White & the Seven Dwarves)

William Shakespeare (The Lion King aka Hamlet)

Antoine Galland (Aladdin)

Hans Christian Andersen (The Little Mermaid)

Charles Perrault (Sleeping Beauty & Cinderella)

Madame Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve (Beauty and the Beast)

Greek mythology (Hercules)

Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)

Felix Salten (Bambi)

Victor Hugo (The Hunchback of Notre Dame)

Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book)

Dodie Smith (101 Dalmations)

J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan)

Carlo Collodi (Pinocchio)

Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan)

and perhaps some actual Disney creations of their own original characters and plot lines.  You didn’t actually think the people of Walt Disney had all their own original ideas, right?

Whatever happened to the notion that any publicity, even bad, is actually good publicity?  Oscar Wilde once said, “There is only one thing worse than being talked about…and that is not being talked about.”

Ever since the internet became the largest media outlet, legislation has been flying around the Houses to try and regulate the use of material (music, movies, art, design, etc.) and how members of the internet share and/or distribute them.

Enter DMCA (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act).  This is a hefty piece of legislation that pretty much defines the ways that copyrighted materials can be used digitally…or how digital materials that are copyrighted can be used…or how digitally copyrighted materials can be used.  I use these “definitions” because the legislation is quite convoluted and makes some unique twists to include/exclude certain uses and terms of copyright.

So where does all this lead?  If you go to YouTube and search any well-known artist, you might click a video of their new single and get a message stating “This video has been removed due to copyright infringement.”  Funny, huh?  If I was a major recording artist, I’d love my videos to pop up on YouTube and for my fans to post them all over their blogs, MySpace pages, Facebook profiles…or anywhere else they’d like.  What’s this copyright infringement bologna?  It’s rather obvious to anyone with half a brain that if I post a copy of Lady Gaga’s Poker Face video, that I am not the performer and that I had nothing to do with the making of the video.  I most likely would have posted the video for mere entertainment, to share with the world, and, in turn, promote the artist that is Lady Gaga.  I’m sure she wouldn’t care…but her label might care.

Herein lies the issue.  I don’t think it is the artist, specifically, that doesn’t like people to use their music…its the label.  Capitalism reigns around the globe and money makes the world go ’round.  The corporations claim to try and “protect” the artist and their work, but that seems a little far-fetched to me.  Honestly, I can’t imagine why anyone would deny the publicity.  Again, any publicity is good publicity…right?

Remember kids…make sure you you don’t use any work by any artist…ever!  Don’t drive down the street with with your windows down and Backstreet Boys blaring…you’re illegally broadcasting and infringing on the copyright.  Don’t make a video of yourself dancing wildly to Rehab as performed by the cast of Fox’s Glee…hmmm.

Absurd.  Strange.  The law.