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| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | ||
What Janet did isn’t illegal. But it was wrong. Wrong for her, wrong for MTV, wrong for CBS, wrong for the NFL, and wrong for the viewers.
The history of the last 10+ years of music has been built around a continual argument that, “Hey, what we’re doing is wrong—idolizing murderers, drug dealers, gang-bangers, cop-killers, and whatever else we can come up with—but it’s not illegal, so you can’t stop us, and if you try we’ll yell it’s a violation of freedom of speech.”
And that got the music industry a free pass to get free publicity by doing all the worst things they could think of.
This example at the Superbowl exposes the weakness of the “violation of free speech” argument.
All kinds of legal actions are wrong. Freedom means freedom. Good behavior cannot be achieved by legislation.
But this Superbowl moment shows how much harm can be done to oneself and to others by legal means.
The whole music industry is in the tank now. Its sales have been dropping precipitously for years to the extent that many in it wonder if it can continue.
It’s not because of downloading. It’s because the music is as bad as they can get it to be. And people are sick of listening to it.
We have to all stop buying into the music industry’s scam that if we point out how badly they’re behaving, we’re violating their freedom of expression. Something doesn’t have to be illegal to be wrong. They have the legal right to behave badly. But we have to tell them to stop doing it anyway, because it’s bad for them and bad for us.
Revised 2-4-04.
#1
How was seeing a breast harmful? Have you never seen one before, do you expect other people haven't? The outrage this has caused is ridiculous, it was only a breast!