Free music, the «pirates» of our youth
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NoonMarch 1, 2023 – 09:58
The story of the Frattasio brothers from Mixed by Erry told in Sidney Sibilia’s film
Of Peter Treccagnoli
It wasn’t just a question of money, of the little money one has in one’s pocket in adolescence and early youth. Music piracy in the seventies and eighties of the past century was also a cultural and political issue, however deviated and unrealistic. It was coupled with self-reduction at concerts. Music belongs to everyone, we shouted and thought, not just those who produce it and those who sell it, in spite of copyright and intellectual property. Stuff that if you tell your children, they will look at you as a Martian, worse, as a survivor of the submerged eras of Neanderthals. We were in the prehistory of the work of art in the era of technical reproducibility. Oh well, we didn’t even know who Walter Benjamin was, he just copied himself. And it was bought from outlawed and tolerated stalls. Everyone had to live. «Mixed by Erry» was the brand par excellence, the guaranteed brand. From Forcella, and where else? Now that illegal world is also a film, directed by Sydney Sibilia, which for many winks at a fake and dangerous folklore. But surely it is a testimony of near and distant times. Years that now seem like an archived geological era: the magnetic era of cassette tapes, tapes that escaped the tracks and had to be rolled up again with the Bic cap. Prehistory, because then came the CDs and burners to create your own playlists. And now there’s Spotify: 15.99 euros a month and you’ll be afraid. Music revolved around us and we wanted to pay it as little as possible. So for many the Frattasio brothers (who ended badly in May 1997) were Robin Hoods. But there is little to be romantic: it was thefts and Fimi (the Federation of the Italian Music Industry) also underlines it in a statement, which warns against attitudes of sympathy, from the usual and predictable wink that transforms the illegality in a legitimate art of getting by, because behind these phenomena dominated the Camorra which with that money invested in far more dangerous trafficking than seven notes.
«Mixed by Erry» could deceive us and acquit everyone. Who, in those years, didn’t take advantage of the availability of friends to have a vinyl cassette cloned, and later a professionally mastered CD? All pirates, no pirates. Of course, among friends, he didn’t trade in it, at least not all of them. But intellectual property was evaded. Really today, with all that the Net allows, that world can arouse a mischievous smile and little more. Piracy has long been almost exclusively digital. Servers all over Europe, Asia, the Middle East host sites that illegally distribute millions of audiovisual contents. A round, calculated by default, of at least 120 billion a year.
Everything is pieceable. Because it is reproducible. We can all transform ourselves into a virtual Antonio Scorcelletti, the incomparable copyist of «Totò, Eva and the forbidden brush», grappling with the Maja in her shirt, although, unlike what Steno’s character claimed, now copying is no longer difficult what to do. Indeed, it is very easy to forge. And we see it every day, on the street, especially in Naples. Piracy (of CDs, DVDs, video games, computer programs, smart cards, any electronic product, which can now be downloaded with a simple click, you just need to know where to look) is only a part of the industrious world of counterfeiting which ranges from handbags to t-shirts, from perfumes to watches, and elsewhere even to medicines and some food products. One wonders why brands tolerate counterfeiting. There is a partial answer: whoever buys apezzotto product could never afford the original and so whoever wears clothes with flashy brands does nothing but advertise the fashion industry for free. They are parallel worlds that converge in illusion. And everyone benefits from it. Piracy, no. Intellectual and artistic work, by its nature, is impalpable, currently reproducible with extreme and unpunished ease. And in a country like Italy, where intellectual work is considered a sort of hobby that doesn’t need payment, pirating is part of the nature of things. In the times of social media, then, when everything circulates without rules, when a “copy and paste” is enough to become master of the creativity of others, invoking the rules of copyright is like going looking for butterflies under Tito’s arch. Unfortunately.
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March 1, 2023 | 09:58
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