A recent survey of American college students disclosed that two-thirds of them think it’s perfectly okay to download copyrighted music. Now I’ll grant that swiping songs doesn’t rank up there with such major crimes as bank robbing, extortion and Will Ferrell’s movies. However, it does suggest that our school systems are churning out hordes of youngsters who could find gainful employment if only old Fagin were still in business.
These youngsters, like their parents in the 60s and 70s, clearly subscribe to the belief that if it feels good, there’s no compelling reason not to do it.
Even some of you adults – mainly liberals, I’m guessing – probably agree that a person would be foolish to spend ten or twelve bucks on a CD when modern technology makes it feasible to burn your own CD for a pittance. The fact that you deny the company any financial incentive to manufacture new product and deprive the composers, lyricists, singers and musicians, of their royalties, is clearly none of your concern. You people don’t write the songs the young girls sing, you just swipe them.
Not being in the music business myself, I don’t have a direct stake in this modern form of pirating. But as someone who began writing for TV over thirty years ago, I can assure you that a good number of the men and women who have written your favorite shows would have starved except for their residuals.
Some folks – especially those who have to pay them out – regard residuals as unearned money. After all, we were already paid to write the stuff. Why should we expect to be paid additionally for re-runs? Well, one obvious reason is that the studios and the networks are collecting additional ad revenue for the work, so why shouldn’t the writers, actors and directors, share in the windfall? A second, less apparent, reason is that by not demanding more money up front, we enable the producers to bring in the shows at a lower cost, and we are therefore gambling that the shows will be successful enough to generate backend dividends.
In the case of the Fox network, when it was first created, the various Hollywood guilds allowed it to pay the talent at a lower rate both up front and in re-runs in order to help create an additional market for their members. Naturally, once Fox was successfully launched, they repaid the kindness by fighting tooth and nail to retain those favorable terms.
The young college-based thieves naturally defend their actions. They point out that the recording companies and their artists are wealthy, whereas they themselves are not. It wouldn’t do any good to argue that every musician isn’t JLo or Elton John, and every composer isn’t Andrew Lloyd Weber, because that would suggest that poor people are in fact entitled to steal from the rich. It also plays into the lie that America’s college students are poor. Just check out how much dough they blow on beer, movies, and those jeans with the built-in rips. What they are, by and large, are lazy, self-indulgent, amoral ingrates.
It’s true I’m guilty of generalizing. But according to the survey, I’m generalizing about two-thirds of them.
Isn’t it odd that if a 17-year-old announces to his or her parents that he or she is going to become a lawyer or a doctor, their parents will be popping their buttons with pride, even though the lawyer might spend the next forty years doing his best to spring rapists and child molesters, and the doctor might spend an equal number of years performing abortions on 14-year-old girls that the kids’ parents don’t even know about? However, if their 17-year-old tells these same parents that he or she intends to join the army, navy or marines, and dedicate those same years to serving their country, a majority of these moms and dads would be shocked, angry, embarrassed, even severely depressed. Instead of popping their buttons, they’d be rending their garments and moaning, “Where did we go wrong?”
Judging by the moral pygmies populating our colleges, I’d say the quagmire that liberals are constantly referring to far better describes the Groves of Academe than the battlefields of Iraq.
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©2005Burt Prelutsky
