Video: Aram Sinnreich ’94 at iMinds conference in Belgium

Author and assistant professor at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information Aram Sinnreich ’94 spoke at the iMinds conference in Belgium about “creativity and copyright in the digital age.” Creative Media Days interviewed Sinnreich about his forthcoming book, The Piracy Crusade: How the Music Industry’s War on Sharing Destroys Markets and Erodes Civil Liberties.

Run time: 4:23. Watch on Vimeo…

From the video:

“Creative Media Days: ‘You’re working on your new book, your second book, The Piracy Crusade. What can we expect?’

“Aram Sinnreich: ‘Well, basically, it’s a three part argument. And the idea is to tear down all of the myths that have been keeping us from developing our culture and our society in the direction that they need to go in the digital age. So the first part of the book looks at the history of the music industry and it makes the argument that the music industry doesn’t exist because that’s the way it should be or because god handed it down on some tablets. The reason it exists the way it does it because individual people and companies at individual points in time made different decisions and those decisions interacted with each other and we ended up with this weird mess that we have now.’

“‘So the second part of the book takes the argument that Napster, the file sharing network, destroyed the music industry and it just rips that apart. What basically happened has nothing to do with Napster or file sharing or the Internet, really. A perfect bubble grew up during the 1980s and the 1990s, a perfect bubble meaning that the value of the industry just expanded way beyond what it probably should have been. And then during the 21st century, after the perfect bubble popped, we experienced a perfect storm where all kinds of different economic factors and technological factors, that again have nothing to do with piracy or peer-to-peer, undermined the value of the music industry and made those numbers really fall down.’”

Watch the segment and see Sinnreich’s slides…

Image: iMinds.

Friendly URL: wesconnect.wesleyan.edu/news-20121204-aram-sinnreich

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Related links

• Sinnreich ’94 blogs: Do global music sales predict value of dollar?
• ‘Not an Apple fanboy’ Sinnreich ’94 gives kudos for Reuters
• Aram Sinnreich ’94 recalls his ‘Decade of Dust’
• Book by Sinnreich ’94 studies high-tech music culture
• Sinnreich ’94: Technology stretches human social capacity
• Aram Sinnreich’s blog

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