04/06/2002 Archived Entry: "Commodities"

I seem to have fallen into a different way of thinking. My view of consumer goods has been quantized.

I do not view goods in the same way that the manufacturer might wish. I want to buy what I want, when I want, in the quantity that I desire. I want to buy a book, read it, and then sell it. I want to buy a movie and watch it as many times as I want, without restrictions, and rip it off the DVD and watch it on my computer, if I so desire. After all, I bought it. I want to buy an album--no, even better, I want to buy three songs off an album--and listen to those songs on my PC, on my stereo, in my portable MP3 player, and in my car.

My view of consumer goods is becoming divorced from the medium in which those goods are designed to propagate. I am interested in the good itself, not the packaging or the context. I don't care about your licenses or your end-user restrictions or your void-where-prohibited-by-law prohibitions against usage. I buy it, and it's mine. I won't change it, I won't edit it, and I won't try to claim it as my own, but I didn't buy the license to use something--I bought the something, part, parcel, and package.

I am told by the distributor, with their lawyers and their guns and their endless amounts of money, that I own nothing; that all my movies and music are still belong to them, though they might consent, for a pittiance, to let me watch them or listen to them for a short amount of time. I am told that I am limiting commerce and destroying free speech by trying to loose myself from their restrictions. I am a Communist unless I play by their rules. I am told I have fair use rights, even though those rights are shut away behind a door whose unlocking is a felony. If I do not abide by thier model of distribution, artists will not create, and society itself will stagnate.

Artists do not create for money. Money is a wonderful dividend of creating, but artists do not create their art simply to get paid. If that were the case, then there would be no artists; whores, perhaps, but no artists. Artists create art--paintings, songs, sculpture, and all the other infinite kinds of art--because they love to create art. If there were a massive, Mad Max-style nuclear war tomorrow, and the United States of America, a Subsidiary of Hollywood, Inc., ceased to be, after the survivors crawled out from under the wreckage and figured out how to get food and water you would still have people who would sing, or paint, or sculpt.

It's not done for commercialism.

It's done because that is what humans do.

So fuck your license agreements.

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