UncleSunny
Well-Known Member
So I got to thinking. You may or may not know that a while back Dr. Bill Cosby used his great fortune to purchase the rights to The Little Rascals, in order to eliminate the Buckwheat character from the America's cultural memory. Dr. Cosby thinks that Buckwheat personifies the black stereotypes that African Americans have fought to overcome for centuries.
It is a brilliant blow to the perceived slight against blacks everywhere. However, the issue of buying the rights to a piece of culture in order to suppress it strikes me as totally Un-American. Sure, Black people got a bad rap back in the day, but is suppressing information a good idea? Change the proper nouns a bit, and you'd have a bigger problem.
Lets say that I didn't like the way Tupac portrayed whites, and I had enough money to buy all the rights to his music. Then I could make it a felony offense for anyone to sell his music. Wham, that angry Black man has been summarily silenced, and our grandchildren won't know his side of this struggle.
The issue is complicated. I mean, no one would argue silencing racist propaganda, but what if I wanted to buy the rights to more liberal minded publications, and used the law to effectively force the sale of someone's intellectual material so that I could stop people from reading/hearing it?
Doesn't that just strike you as wrong? I mean, if I write a great story and pass the rights on to my kids, and they, trying to make some money innocently surrender the rights to someone else, that story can be taken away from the rest of the world. Furthermore, the reality of creative material is that it is more and more the sole property of large corporations like publishers and movie studios, who have ultimately even less interest in passing on the ideas of people and more interest in the bottom line.
I mean, Michael Jackson owns the rights to most of the Beatles songs. If he wanted to, future generations might never legally hear the Beatles' music. Is that o'tay with you?
It is a brilliant blow to the perceived slight against blacks everywhere. However, the issue of buying the rights to a piece of culture in order to suppress it strikes me as totally Un-American. Sure, Black people got a bad rap back in the day, but is suppressing information a good idea? Change the proper nouns a bit, and you'd have a bigger problem.
Lets say that I didn't like the way Tupac portrayed whites, and I had enough money to buy all the rights to his music. Then I could make it a felony offense for anyone to sell his music. Wham, that angry Black man has been summarily silenced, and our grandchildren won't know his side of this struggle.
The issue is complicated. I mean, no one would argue silencing racist propaganda, but what if I wanted to buy the rights to more liberal minded publications, and used the law to effectively force the sale of someone's intellectual material so that I could stop people from reading/hearing it?
Doesn't that just strike you as wrong? I mean, if I write a great story and pass the rights on to my kids, and they, trying to make some money innocently surrender the rights to someone else, that story can be taken away from the rest of the world. Furthermore, the reality of creative material is that it is more and more the sole property of large corporations like publishers and movie studios, who have ultimately even less interest in passing on the ideas of people and more interest in the bottom line.
I mean, Michael Jackson owns the rights to most of the Beatles songs. If he wanted to, future generations might never legally hear the Beatles' music. Is that o'tay with you?
