The Copyright Walls
I live in Athens, Greece. It’s not the center of the world, but thanks to the Internet, I can participate in a global culture. I read blogs from all over the world, I listen to podcasts, I watch videos on YouTube. I have my own blog, I write here, on Medium, I upload my videos on YouTube, my photos on Flickr.
My friends live all around the world —some of them are Greek but live abroad, some are friends I made while studying abroad, or traveling, some are colleagues I got to know while working at a global advertising agency, some of them I got to know through the Internet.
I follow their lives, their ideas, their achievements through their blogs, facebook, twitter, LinkedIn.
To me, this sounds like the ideal environment for the creative industry.
Well, contrary to what one would expect, the creative industry, instead of taking advantage of the connected world as a global market, prefers to build walls.
Hulu, amazon instant video, iTunes Store, netflix and the rest are required by the copyright holders to raise “geographic restrictions”.
I call these restrictions, The Copyright Walls. Artificially created barriers designed to prevent the free circulation of intelectual products, and require extra resources and investment to built —from a technical, legal and political aspect.
What used to be part of a distribution system -labels, studios, networks- has turned into border patrols and checkpoints.
When one of my friends tweets “Winter is comming”, I am not allowed to get it: even if I’m willing to pay for it, Game of Thrones is not available in my country. Some years ago, I had to watch Season 1 of Lost, while some of my twitter feed was discussing Season 3. House of Cards? Forget it. I could go on and on…
Connected people need a shared context ususally provided by culture —and yes, movies, tv series, music are part of modern culture. We need this context to communicate better, to better understand each other. The Copyright Walls are standing in our way.
