With the whole "Markiplier making his own DVD copies of Iron Lung to sell" thing, it's been fascinating and slightly concerning how many people seem to genuinely believe that if a physical release isn't coming from a giant corporation, it must automatically be a bootleg.
Look me directly in the eyes while I say this.
You can just make things.
You can simply create something and put it into the world.
People have been doing it for centuries.
They sell blank VHS tapes. They sell blank DVDs. Blank CDs. You can buy flash drives by the bucketful if you really want to. If you create a movie, an album, a game, a documentary, or a four-hour video essay about the mating habits of fictional space goblins, you are entirely permitted to put that thing on physical media and sell it.
Piracy is taking something that belongs to someone else and reproducing or distributing it without permission.
If I buy a DVD of a movie, I own that copy of the movie. I do not own the movie itself. I didn't acquire the rights to duplicate it, press a thousand copies, and start selling them out of my garage like I've become the regional distributor for Warner Bros.
The copyright, distribution rights, and intellectual property still belong to whoever created it or whoever legally acquired those rights.
If I start burning copies of Iron Lung and selling them myself without Markiplier's permission, that's piracy.
If Markiplier, who made and owns the rights to Iron Lung, burns copies and sells them himself, that's just distribution.
He's distributing his own work.
If you made it, if it came from your own mind, your own work, your own time, your own resources, then congratulations. You own the thing. You don't need a corporation to bless it with legitimacy.
The corporation is not what makes it real.
The fact that it exists is what makes it real.
I think we've accidentally spent so many years living inside a world dominated by mass-produced media that some people have developed the strange assumption that all media emerges from a factory somewhere. As if films naturally occur in shrink-wrapped plastic cases and descend from the heavens aboard a pallet truck.
But independent artists have been burning discs, dubbing tapes, printing books, pressing records, and mailing things directly to people for longer than many of us have been alive.
The original, free-range, locally sourced leg.
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