Piracy saves music

They say piracy kills music, kills movies and so forth, but that is totally false, merely yet another totally false statement from an oppressive society.

If anything piracy saves music and everything, from the powerful music, movie and publishing industry that has pretty much ruined music, ruined movies and publishing in general for as long as they have existed. All creative activity has been forced into narrow chunks of the cavern for so long, now, that people have forgotten what true, controversial art is like and can be.

The music, movies, books and all published by established publishing houses have been a disaster for decades. There were a brief period in the late sixties and early seventies where even they felt they had to release controversial and through-provoking stuff, but that period is long gone. I used to think the eighties were a disaster, but that’s nothing compared to the nineties and zeroes. This is what you stooges, you braindead supporters of the oppressive «anti-piracy» laws help sustain? You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Giving copyright rights to corporations are so wrong, on so many levels that I can hardly begin to address it properly. Personal copyrights should remain. People should have the rights to their own work, but corporations shouldn’t, also because it isn’t their work. Corporations shouldn’t have the rights to bacteria or genetic materials or similar either. It’s all the same insanity, the idea that life can be owned.

Individual copyright to art should remain. Everything else should go.

And even individuals shouldn’t have infinite rights to their own work. When they have, say earned about a million dollars on a record, all their rights in that regard, to that copyrighted property should cease. I don’t think such a demand is excessive at all. On the contrary. It should be implemented on a vast scale. How much is enough? I say.

All encouragement to greed should cease, right now.

Individual artists should always retain the intellectual property rights to their own art. It just shouldn’t include the endless money flow that some of them enjoy.

The massive downloading of various illegal materials has reduced the earnings of the established publishing and production companies, reduced the companies in stature and power. Their total dominance is at an end, and that is such a great thing. They still earn an insane amount of money unfortunately, but their influence is decreasing. Today an underbrush of alternative and individual and smaller creative units are rising all over the world. Anyone can publish and also in part and increasingly so distribute their own material. And that is what is truly bugging the tyrants, the moguls at the top. They’re about to lose control over the information flow, their established right to censor and steer people’s attention. The established publishers still have the existing enormous advertising machine at their disposal, but even that is changing. And desperate as they are, they use their established, but hopefully waning power to force ever more oppressive legislation on the world at large. The propaganda stunt «Piracy is killing music» is an integral part of that.

Reject it. Reject them, tell them to go fuck themselves and ignore their insane ranting, and enjoy the true art, the true fire of life coming from independent artists, people that haven’t sold out, haven’t sold their most precious inner fire and creative well to the corporative power of this ugly world.

True artistic freedom is no longer only a word.

Incorporate - The Dreamweaver at work

I incorporate my surroundings in my writing, my art. I see a tree, a street or a situation, and it’s burned into my memory. It stays there, live there, changes there or not, and it’s put on paper, like they would have said in the old days, before all writing all art changed, with the onset of the computer and portable laptop.

When I travel all new places stay with me. And even though I’m fairly good at describing places I’ve never been, too, you would probably know where I’ve been by reading what and how I’ve written about a given place or city. Up until recently I’ve usually written about real places. Now, with new books, like the Afterglow series and Alarums of Reality I’m creating cities and cityscapes in what I experience as a new thing for me. I’m building them, from scratch, taken a piece here, an image, a smell there, and changing them into something new and different. At least I am doing it more consciously than before.

I’m evolving yet again, and it feels good, so good. What any decent artist should worry about is growing stale, festering like a closed-off pond.

Lately I’ve spent a lot of time in what you might consider my hometown and area. I walk through and pass by places almost every day, and even if that’s not a situation I’m comfortable with, I’ve discovered it has its uses. One side of a building is one book, one story, the other a completely different scenario, miles, and even an entire universe away. I dream, like I always do, and I create upon it, into other dreams and nightmares and yearnings and failings and everything.

Even in the midst of desolation there are dreams and rebellion and liberation.