Short back and sides.
I took the boy for a haircut on Monday. We didn’t want him to lose an ear, so I traipsed across London to a special children’s hairdressers. It was pretty exciting – the boy got to sit in a pedal-car aeroplane and watch a bit of Cars on a small DVD player, in a room with a big, bright, friendly Disney mural – Lion King, Jungle Book, Winnie the Pooh. He left with a bit less hair, and both ears intact.
Being latterly obsessed with rights and culture, I’m certain that that lovely room was one big rights violation, from the use of trademarked characters to the showing of a film without licence.
I’m of course guessing here, but I’d bet that there was no legal permission sought. Should we really care about that? I can’t bring myself to.
When things become part of our culture, they should transcend the petty rights-squabbling of corporations and their lawyers.
In my moral calculus, the rights of kids to be surrounded by and participate in familiar, comforting culture trump the rights of corporations to squeeze money from ideas they bought from artists.
We should need pretty strong evidence that future culture creation is threatened to mess with that equation. I don’t think that evidence is anywhere like as strong as rights people contend.
In the digital world, it’s looking like enforcement and detection is going to be easier, even if the so-called crimes are the same.
Imagine a version of Adobe Photoshop that won’t let you draw a picture of Mickey Mouse. Somewhere a rights lawyer just exploded with that possibility. Will the next version of Garageband let you record cover songs?
And you can bet it’ll happen. My paranoia reckons within 5 years it’ll be seriously proposed by someone, if it hasn’t been already.
Why are we letting this wholesale denial of folk-culture happen? Remind me again.
I'm Ben Griffiths: