copyright & finances?

Marcus Westbury posted a comment on facebook today with a link to an audio interview of him by Peter Goer, evening presenter ABC radio Adelaide. one topic was copyright as it is also a topic on his ABC program Not Quite Art this week. there are two sides to every argument. Peter Goer was in favour of protecting the artists rights, and Marcus suggested he's on the side favouring remixing protected works. I can see both sides of the argument.

so whilst reading Reality Sandwich articles - about the 'global financial crisis' as it's become known over the past couple of weeks - I came across this paragraph which I thought was timely :

from http://www.realitysandwich.com/money_and_crisis_civilization
Money and the Crisis of Civilization
-- by Charles Eisenstein

"In ancient times entertainment was also a free, participatory function. Everyone played an instrument, sang, participated in drama. Even 75 years ago in America, every small town had its own marching band and baseball team. Now we pay for those services. The economy has grown. Hooray."

"The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item. Today we sell away the last vestiges of our divine bequeathment: our health, the biosphere and genome, even our own minds. This is the process that is culminating in our age. It is almost complete, especially in America and the "developed" world. In the developing world there still remain people who live substantially in gift cultures, where natural and social wealth is not yet the subject of property. Globalization is the process of stripping away these assets, to feed the money machine's insatiable, existential need to grow. Yet this stripmining of other lands is running up against its limits too, both because there is almost nothing left to take, and because of growing pockets of effective resistance. "

oh, and Marcus also wants people to Steal this film!

he's looking for work too, so if you have any work available get in contact with him