I know this is a sign of my age and, perhaps, my previous life, but I really feel very awkward using copyright material in such a way as to possibly be illegal. I have spoken to teenagers about this and they appear to have no great concept of copyright – if it can be used then use it – seems to be their mantra. It would be very easy to see this as a modern fault but I doubt when I was a teenager I wouldn’t have really bothered about such matters. Of course when I was a teenager copyright infringement usually meant making a copy onto a casette from an LP – not that easy and the quality was always dubious. Nowadays that is not the case and it so so easy to rip millions of tracks and never pay a penny for the privilege. It doesn’t make it right and it is something I just won’t do.
The reason for this examination of the ethics of modern life is that I have made another very simple video of my drawings and paintings I made using the Brushes app on my iPad. I was going to publish this to Facebook with very restricted viewing which I thought would be ok as it was just to my close friends. Everything was going ok until the get of jail warning dialog box appeared. By this I mean, get out of jail for Facebook rather than me. Did the material comply with the copyright law? Well I suppose it was at the very margins of legality and so I chickened out and decided not to publish. I suspect most people would have not given this a second thought and just published anyway but I just couldn’t.
So because of my conscience I have deprived my close friends the pleasure(?) of seeing this video. I’m sure that Rick Davies and Roger Hodson would be pleased but as I write this other people would not be so caring. Ironically the name of the song I was going to use was called Give a little bit – which is what I would to do to use the track.
Simon Marchini
Web: http://WWW.simonmarchini.co.uk
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