Meh. The Irrelevance of Copyright in the Public Mind

Abstract

¶1For many who went to high school in the mid-eighties, a music collection was a pastiche of copyright infringement.A mixtape was a tangible sign of affection, something to be given to those you cared most deeply about.There was also the teenage economy in which one person would purchase a particular tape and then dub copies for their friends.Perhaps these youth were ignorant concerning copyright law, perhaps they simply did not care.Yet this ambivalence toward copyright was not simply a product of that generation.D'Entremont states that "the habit of music-sharing among peers is culturally embedded, and predates the technology that now facilitates its expansion.In the 1950s, American teenagers with reel-to-reel tape recorders distributed home-made tapes of singles and albums among their friends." 2 This article suggests that the problems of enforcing copyright law are not only legal issues, but also rhetorical issues.When considering copyright law from a rhetorical standpoint, the question becomes how to make people believe in the law, because laws are only effective when they have public support.Copyright law is, to some extent, unenforceable in its current state because copyright is not really a concern in the public mind.This is so despite the media coverage of lawsuits by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and others against copyright infringers, and, more specifically, file sharers.3 ¶2The purpose of this article is to consider some rhetorical issues that may be preventing the public from supporting current copyright law and to suggest some possible solutions that would help copyright holders to gain public support for the enforcement of copyright law.Although rhetoric has many possible definitions, for the purposes of this article rhetoric can be thought of as the way people make sense of the world symbolically.In this case, the rhetorical considerations encompass the narratives that 4 1 "Meh" is an expression of extreme indifference.

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