When I first read the part of the story about Stephanie Lenz and he baby dancing to the prince song taken as a threat to the multi-billion dollar company that is Universal I found it both hilarious, and horrific. These companies are so paranoid and over powering that they fear someone hacking a youtube video just to avoid paying prince for 29 seconds of his song! I found this absolutely ridiculous. But that’s what its come down to, we are so paranoid and protective of original material being stolen that we forget what it was really created for: the enjoyment of the fans.

From my perspective, I find these arguments and debates of extreme interest. Over the last few years I have become more and more interested in the dance/electronic music scene, until it has become virtually all I listen to. With the DJ/Producers in the electronic scene, none of this makes any sense! Producers pray for their music to be downloaded, even release high quality rips of the songs for free! I worked with a company’s whose sole goal was to find the underated music of talented people and promote the music for free to as many people as possible. I’ve run a website devoted to that purpose for over a year and a half. Tijs Verwest, also known by his super-ego DJ Tiesto is one of the largest, if not the largest DJ in the electronic scene at the moment. In multiple interviews he is quoted as saying that “illegal downloading is how dance music survived.” The tireless promotion of free ideas and music to others created and almost underground family within the music community. And as you can see today, these efforts over the last 10 years have turned into the largest and quickest expansion of music genera in history.

My point being, if we stifle the sharing of and artists ideas we stifle the method is which the artists got their inspiration in the first place. Art and media go hand in hand. With this recent media/technology boom we have seen an exponential increase in the amount of art that has been produces. We need to keep creation alive, not lock it in a cell.