Moving at the Speed of Creativity

Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

The positive side of piracy?

Anyone familiar with the RIAA or the school curriculum on intellectual property they have promoted in schools in recent years might think the title of this blog post is a bit ridiculous. I found the following perspective from China on piracy quite interesting, however, and rather thought provoking:

All those Hollywood movies and all those CDs flooding the streets of Chinese cities have provided unprecedented exposure for young Chinese to the cultural output of the West. Pirate discs have penetrated deep into the interior, opening a window into the Western world otherwise inaccessible to the insular Chinese hinterland. The great boom in the Chinese film industry, the explosion of rock music talent coming out of Beijing and other Chinese cities, even much of mainland China’s Internet revolution–all this has in large part been made possible by the piracy phenomenon. Piracy has provided an inexhaustible source of inspiration for musicians and filmmakers, raising the bar significantly for them, and created larger and more discerning audiences. (The benefits of piracy by Kaiser Kuo)

The question of what value the export of “Western culture” expressed via TV, movies, and other entertainment channels is certainly an interesting one. In the context of the Middle East, it appears that those “exports” are what conservative religious leaders object to the most. I hadn’t thought of those “exports” as being positives when it came to piracy, however.

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