Thursday, May 7, 2009

The Battle Over Language

So, Fox is still in a kurfuffle over the money they might have lost with those Wolverine downloads. 


"Piracy is a serious issue for us. We now estimate that there are above 4 million downloads of that stolen 'Wolverine' movie that was up there," News Corp. COO Peter Chernin told Wall Street analysts on Wednesday.
Notice he says "stolen". This is inaccurate, as Fox still has the movie, it was not stolen from them. It was copied. Fox still has as much of the movie as it had before, all of it. Nothing is missing. Although Chernin makes a financial assessment, it is not at all like theft from a bank where actual physical goods ($) are taken from the bank and the bank no longer has those goods in its possession. 

This... is hegemony! What a great word. It is the battle over ideas, if you accept that intellectual property is exactly the same as physical property, then you are thinking what they want you to think.