Who Owns Ideas is a great introductory documentary about the history of copyright and current controversies in copyright. I wished however, that it had gone more into depth about downloading music and movies. I was reading a blog post of someone who attended a techy conference and was very offended by a young panelist who stated that youth feel no guilt over illegally downloading music. (As a side comment to me, someone mentioned that it is at least better than adults who pay money for bootlegged DVDs in Chinatown but that’s really a whole different issue.) I think this documentary nails it on the head. Theft implies ownership; and who really owns ideas? Who owns culture? If it is truly “insane” as Graham Henderson, CRIA prez says, to take music and not pay for it, one wonders about the type of “sanity” that has allowed corporations to privatize things like rain water, living creatures and dna, life saving vaccines and medicines, so on and so forth. In the age of late capitalism, experiences, ideas and brands and of course, intellectual property as it is now called, are all fair game, just as things like non-state aboriginal lands were fair game in the age of colonialism.

In any case, illegally downloading music is not as neatly equivalent to shoplifting or crimes like car theft, as it is so often compared to. The act of say, downloading an entire album off a torrent, is very different from a fangirl making a “mixtape” mp3 soundtrack of different artists for a movie she loves (complete with a Photoshopped virtual CD cover/back) and then posting it onto an lj community of like minded fans (for examples of what I am referring to, look up lj communities for any recent popular film). The motivations, results and contexts are entirely different. Rhetoric about file sharing lumps this wide spectrum of behaviour into one crime, which is highly problematic.