There are times when I have to eat my words. This may be one of those times. Today I said:
"deliberately not blacking out his avatar because: 1. It will achieve nothing, 2. It's harder to actually use twitter with people doing it."
Whilst the second is still true the impact of having 2 pages full of black avatars is hard to ignore and appear to have been proven wrong about the first, but have I? The blackout caught on faster than I thought it would and even jumped different groups of people I know in twitter, so in that sense it's been a great success.
However the goal of this campaign is to stop Section 92A of the Copyright Act from being passed into law and I just don't see that happening. I've seen lots of stupid laws passed but this one takes the cake for me because it has both the people it will hurt and the people it's designed to benefit against it.
The argument goes 'Copyright is good because artists need copyright to make money'. I'm not arguing that artists should make money, but when you have artists signing a petition against 92A (myself included) you've got to wonder what the heck is going on.
Another comment I made today rings true in this:
"Democracy: The loudest group of voices gets what they want. Sounds fine until you realise some groups can afford megaphones."
I could go on for pages about how the industry has been lobbying for this. To make criminals out of NZers without the burden of proof. It's a dream come true for them, but I won't because google can find these blogs for you and Brenda has quite a few emotive posts.
What I will say is that I have lost any illusions I had about democracy being fair and balanced. The odds are stacked firmly against the general public and in favour of the companies that have the money to push their message. I hope this blackout gets media attention and gets the law delayed, reviewed or just thrown out, however that was my hope when CFF launched and when the media originally picked up the stories.
All I've seen from that media coverage has been exposure of the issue, but also the Government denying the issues and the pro-92A lobby calling me and my fellow thought-capable workmates/friends liers for taking this out of context, promise it won't be abused and just generally spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
New Zealand - prove me wrong. Prove democracy can work. Else I'll be right, this effort will achieve nothing and this is a time I want to be wrong.
