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The Death Of Intellectual Property
sheath writes: "The National Post
has an article on the possible death of intellectual property as a result of trends on the net. They quote William Gibson as saying, 'This may be the end of a 90-year window when it was possible to make money off recorded music.' Interesting piece from a mainstream (in Canada, anyway) source."
Your profit is that you now have the thing you created. There is nothing to recoup.
Absolutely. Copyrights, for example, are intangible, but are considered property.
Copyrighted material, on the other hand, is not property, never has been, and never could be outside of an Orwellian world where up is down and black is white.
The Jefferson quote (boy, that's a good one) is an excellent refutation of your outrageous claim. If that's not enough, please check out some of my posts from Friday and Saturday, as they're pretty lengthy and I have no desire to retype them again and again and again.
Remember above all else, ideas aren't like property; an infinite number of people can have them at once. If I 'took' your opinion and also claimed that ideas were property, this doesn't keep you from holding the same opinion.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I think that such a democratic form of patronage will work better than the "pay-per-copy" model that dominates music, or the corporate sponsorship model that dominates web sites.
I'm calling this a "sponsorpool", for lack of a better name, and I'm going to be working on it over the summer. (I'm quitting my "day job" to work on some side projects for at least a few months.) For the prototype, I'm using PayPal to handle payments. (I'm faking the web interface with Curl.) If anyone's interested in more info, drop me a line and I'll update you when I've got something worth sharing.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
This would seem to be an issue of convenience. Newspapers can be read very selectively and non-sequentially, and can be unfolded to view a LARGE area (much larger than a typical monitor allows) at once. They can be rearranged. They can be highlighted, cut up, folded, and so forth. And you can take 'em with you and read 'em pretty much anywhere, at your leisure.
That's more convenient than the online version.
However, a bootleg movie burned to some digital medium can be more convenient than that in a theatre. You can view it wherever (once DVDs are burnable by the masses, oh my -- there are now notebook-sized portable DVD players), whenever, and however many times you wish. You may be able to pause, rewind, search frame-by-frame for pranks, and whatnot, and you don't have to rip yourself off for the popcorn. Try doing that in a movie theatre. And some folks have NICE home-theatre setups...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
If you can justify the $5 million per year Liberace was making or the multi-million dollar pile of cash Micheal Jackson has made I might change my mind.
Easy.
People voluntarily paid this money in exchange for something they thought was worth at least that much. Or, I take it, you know better uses for other people's money -- right?
Besides, what do you mean by "justify"? Do you mean that there is some accounting-ledger-in-the-sky thingy into which one can look to find out exactly what one deserves?
"Er... you deserve $113.45, a dented '79 Oldsmobile and a kick in the ass. Now git!"
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Sure, this kind of drivel is something that the freeloaders and their sympathisers spout constantly. However, while a limited amount of freeloading may not be that harmful, the consequences of removing copyright law altogether ( effectively encouraging freeloading ) is a different kettle of fish altogether.
Hey, seems that cluetrain has entered Canada. Is it going to move on to US too or it's having opposite direction?
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Kind of like property in general, huh?
No, not at all. Property is a bundle of rights guaranteed by a legal system. To "deserve" something implies that you have no rights to that something, but according to some value system you should have it anyway.
How is that different from "you deserve this because your name is on the deed".
I do not *deserve* it because my name is on the deed -- I *have* it because of this. I may deserve more or less: it has nothing to do with what a legal system agrees I own.
You are confusing legal rights and what some value system believes to be "just".
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Wagner was considered quite a cult superstar in his day, and some people traveled all over Europe to hear his stuff performed.
I think the rise of the celebrity to the masses can probably be mapped to coincide with the rise of the middle class... a large group of people with enough money and leasure time to obsess over their favorite performer.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I think new writing has stayed pretty much the same: which is to say, it has remained clear, simple, but generally uninspired.
Of course, 'inspired' news writing is not the point; after all, isn't news writing -- at least in the big news dailies -- targeted at, say, a 7th grade reading level?
I might agree with you if you say the *analysis* has slipped over the years -- but even that's hard to judge since 'analysis' is such a slippery word in the first place.
And, of course, it's entirely possible that 'bad analysis' may actually mean 'good analysis of a simple subject.'
Regardless, I think this whole issue comes down to the notion of trust. Newspapers and news magazines have an enormous amount of hubris when it comes to things like 'journalistic integrity' and 'trust'. "You can trust us, because, well, we've been around for 156 years. I mean, for chrissake, how long has *eNews* been around?'
The editors and news writers of print rags steadfastly maintain that they're doing it the way it has always been done -- and the way it should be done -- and that's why you can *trust* us. You can't say the same for MSNBC.com or CNN.com -- or can you?
Last night I watched 'Network.' An amazing film -- made even more amazing by the fact it's over 24 years old. (Substitute 'Microsoft' or 'Intel' for every time the Howard Beal character rages on about 'IBM' or 'Exxon', for example.)
It seemed that Network was touching on this same issue: the idea of trust eroded by the corporate machinations of ever-changing culture. What's the role of 'network' news in an era when Dan Rather has been, for the most part, made irrelevent? (Answer: there is no role for the network pawns except little drones designed to exact profit from you and me. For chrissake: why is it that 'Dan Rather' and 'Peter Jenkins' demand such respect? They're talking heads, that's all -- yet a significant portion of the American public (not to mention these guys themselves) consider these heads erudite authorities on everything from WWII vets to cultural trends. What, they sit on a chair and read the news with a deep, sombre voice and they're some sort of intellectual elite?)
I mean, I can remember watching Walter Cronkite sitting behind his anchorman's desk and report each night about Vietnam -- and I can remember the sense that, well, I could 'trust' Cronkite. "That's the way it is," he'd always say, and I believed him.
And I think that's the same angle that newspapers will continue to follow: you may have access to faster news, more up-to-the-minute news, but our news is news you can trust. You can set your clocks to it, goddammit, because we're a bunch of old white guys in suits and we're telling it the way it is. And, boy oh boy, you better believe the corporations are breathing down our necks -- but we've got integriry and we know journalism like no one else knows journalism -- so don't go telling *us* about conflicts of interest because, we're keeping the corporations in check so we can keep our ethics intact.
This, of course, is bullshit. It was bullshit in 'Network' ("I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it!") and it's bullshit today: there is no trust. There are no 'journalistic ethics'. There is only god, spin, and Microsoft. And not necessarily in that order. (And if it was up to Microsoft, they'd patent god and copyright the bible.)
All this talk about the death of intellectual property is such bullshit. Artists won't stop making art because the business model has shifted. If anything, this'll sift out some of the 'bad' art from the 'better' art. Record labels might be forced to jettison some dead weight. I don't have a problem with that because artists -- good artists, I mean -- are savvy. Art will triumph over business.
But here's what the death of 'intellectual property' really means: it means the death of the stranglehold of corporate America on ordinary Americans. It means what it has always meant: that the internet is the great equalizer and that if you're gonna compete with this equalizer, you gotta be smart -- not just daddy's little son/daughter who got the suit job because daddy had a fit of nepotism (or generosity) one day and decided to let you in on the secret of America: that corporations are god and that if you're one of the chosen -- one of the old, white, pin-stripe-wearing, wingtip "Hey mister, shine my shoes will ya? I gotta get to work!" wearing, going off to the Hamptons for the weekend, name-dropping, Lexus SUV driving, cell phone jabbering, illiterate, yes, but I really want to become literate, I just don't have the time talking -- fuckers who think life is a thing to be lived once you've made your third million and able to order whatever the fuck it is you want from the Williams Sonoma catalog even those 4000 dollar outdoor grill with built-in plumbing -- then you are one sorry heap of shit.
Forget about the quality of newswriting mister, because in the end, it's these guys that could care less. They just wanna leverage their minimal education, makes their money, and then takes their spoils. They wanna leave everybody else like smoking heaps in their wake.
Actually, that might not be a bad business model for writers. The simple fact is there is hardly any money to be made by novelists. Most authors do it more or less as a hobby and have a day job as well. An author typically only recieves pennies for each copy of a novel sold.
The weathly writers such as Stephen King and Tom Clancy (and to some extent, William Gibson) made the vast majority of their money through a different application of IP -- selling the movie rights to the novels. Having the novels free but retaining the movie rights would probably work just as well if not better than the current system
I bet some native Americans would have some interesting comments on the concept of "idea ownwership." Especially considering their unhappy experience with the foreign and tricky idea of "land owndership."
Hard to imagine how the natives got along without the idea of land-ownership for so long, but they did and wonderfully. Let's learn something and drop IP. Fuck A. Rand.
If he was alive now...
"Somebody get me out of this pine box!!!"
The facts expressed here belong to all, the opinions to me. The distinction between fact and opinion is yours to decide.
I recently went from $6.00/hour at Mcdonalds to $30,000/year as a programmer and it wasn't the massive increase in money I thought it would be. I'm not suddenly rich by my old standards either. Taxes rape the hell out of you when you go from minimum to a 'real' salary. :)
Of course, as a trainee in the computer field, I don't need to wear a stupid hat
Finkployd
My issue with this arguement lies in this sentance.
What's interesting about this trend is that the pirates are usually not profiteers. They believe that cultural and intellectual property belong to humanity and many go to great lengths just to provide people with free copies of things.
This says that the individual (or group) who ownes the property owes it to humanity to give it something back to the world. Why does that have to happen?
Say for example a person spends 10 years going through Universities and post grad programs to get his degree in Engineering. Say he has to get loans and crappy summer job after summer job to pay for this education. After 10 years of school our friend the student owes a whole whack of money not to mention the time he spent learning and the money he misses while not working. He gets out of his PhD program and ivents a new way to produce thinggimajiggs that saves the manufaturer time, money and materials. This is his intellectual property. It's my understanding that the people who believe that this property should belong to humanity and so our friend gets nothing for the years he spent developing.
This is very much a left wing view. Why does one man have to give up so much of his life and get very little, if anything in return?
I'm sure that he gets the 'gift of knowledge' in return for his time and effort learning the material...but shouldn't that be free too? And since there's still a cost of living, then that should be free for anyone who wants to learn? Suddenly you're being given money to pursue your own interests. Sounds like welfare to me!
I guess I take issue with the argument that any intellectual property should be free. It kinda seems like it would turn us into a society of left wing welfare bums. I believe that our society works because there is the ability to have the choice to free your ideas or keep them to yourself. I don't believe that someone making the choice for you is acceptable and that's what these pirates are arguing.
Like sex? Read and write about it! Indecent Blogging
The National Post, not William Gibson, is the mainstream source that was refered to. The post is a (go figure) national newspaper here in Canada.
This is your right, as your Idea is yours until you share it. However, you still make the error of arrogance in thinking that noone else but you alone has thought of it. Another thing that history has shown us is that ideas tend to come to multiple men, completely unrelated, at about the same time, and it is generally the first to either implement it, or share it with another to implement, that prospers from whatever reward may accompany it. It happens all the time, how many times have you heard say someone say, "I was thinking about doing that long before they did.", and more importantly, how are they doing now?
You may not make any money by sharing your idea, but you are guaranteed not to by keeping it to yourself.
Purity and reality often clash. Reality usually wins.
This is generally true, and I would be hard pressed to argue, but the reality in this situation is that if your Idea is of value, someone else will think of it, and eventually someone with the morals to share it, if it betters mankind.
-Tommy
"I got a half gallon of Jack, and 2 dozen Ant Traps. I'm about to get wild." -me
Yes, someone might have come up with it later but the fact of the matter is that this person thought of it first. Just like we reward people who reach objects or do things first we reward people for thinking of things faster.
And I think that's the fundamental flaw with all of this, I don't see why we should reward people to this extent for just being first. Granted we don't remember the second person to cross the Atlantic solo (at least I don't), but should the first person to do that have a copyright on it?
Now this person who might think of it second can take what the first person did and expand on it and get there own copyright/patent if what they expand on is orginal.
Ideally yes, but look at how the Church of Scientology get's disparaging remarks censored, by saying that the text of their religion is copyrighted and this person is infringing on that by commenting on it. It doesn't matter that they are making commentary that is probably covered under fair use, they can't afford to take this to court and thanks to the DMCA they have to prove themsselves innocent before they can bring it back online (in the case of a webpage).
And it's not like the thought is automatically patented as it comes out of the persons mind. They have to put it down and take it in and have it covered.
You don't get a patent but you do get a copyright as soon as you put it down. Copyright is awarded at conception (no pro-{life|choice} jokes please).
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
-- H. L. Mencken
The emphasis (perhaps subtly) changes from "here's an idea and worship me for it (offering appropriate sacrifices) because I have control of it" to "here's an idea and here's what I'm doing with it".
--
--
The Internet is the Suppository of All Knowledge. You get it in the end.
Justification: Liberace and Micheal Jackson both did something people wanted, therefore the people paid them money to do it.
This money didn't just magically appear out of thin air and drop into their laps. People gave it to them (through various methods). Just like you pay a plumber or a electrician to do work for you the same goes for entertainers. They are doing work for you so you pay them to do it. If you don't like them then you either don't pay them to begin with (references) or you don't pay them to do it again (poor work) or you even get your money back (really bad work).
And as for paying the RIAA to determine who gets big and who doesn't... That's just an excuse for weakness of will. They don't force you to buy anything you don't want to buy. If the only things that you want to buy are what you see advertisements, i mean video's, for on MTV, then of course you're going to be buying the lowest common denominator of muisc.
If I want to buy a CD by anyone incapable of starting their own label and having the resources to cut an album themselves, I have to get through a mass market label like geffen. These people don't just put out MTV tripe, they put out decent artists too, you just don't hear about them as much.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
-- H. L. Mencken
Is there anyone here who thinks this is actually a bad thing? Those of you here who harp about the "freedom" to use another's intellectual property without permission should remember that there is only one resource required to make IP, a resource that everyone has in some amount: time. Every person has the opportinity to create IP, no matter how much money they have to start with. I suspect IP has been a greater equalizer than all the all the rethoric about social justice in the last twenty years.
The lack of scarcity is not an excuse for you to steal. The laws on physical property are just is arbitrary, does that make it ok to shoplift? The lack of scarcity means you can create IP and not be dependant on any other person or entity, unless you choose to be so by utilizing their IP. This is not possible with physical property, which will always have a previous owner (unless you drege it out of the ocean or pluck it of space). You can literally make value out of nothing, and be paid for it! Why do you want to destroy this system?
Is it just my imagination (or my outlook changing) or has the quality of writing in the (even so called quality) newspapers been declining over the past 20 (or so) years?
I don't think the cult of the celebrity will ever die out. Instead, I think, it will be used as a source of wealth.
Consider a practical function of record execs. They filter out the lesser talent and promote the greater talent. You can debate all day what defines greater and lesser, but the fact remains that these people perform a function most of us have no time for.
If we assume that the money-making capability of recorded media declines to the point of non-profitability, then the obvious place to make money lies in personal appearances and live television and radio. Making the big time may not involve distributing music at all, but rather the amount of live media exposure.
Will this enhance an artist reputation or will we see more acts such as the Backstreet Boys and In-Sync? These are acts that can be created and destroyed by a whim and are backed by organized media efforts (actually the same one since the Backstreet Boys tried to sue their management and thereby bit the hand that fed them. Their creator then shifted his efforts to his "new" band In-Sync).
Personally, I think we'll see more of the latter type, since passable talent is easy to come by, easier to manage and cheaper to replace. Every couple of years a new group of 12-14 year olds "discovers" popular music. Even more quickly, they forget the bands in favor of the next new flavor of the year. Recorded music will become more of a cost of doing business in the industry of endless media sparkle.
Bottom line, there are too many lawyers trained in Intellectual Property law for IP to disappear. It would take the concerted will of government to overturn or ignore IP law, and the bottom line is there's just too much lobbyist money for that to ever happen.
Gibson is underestimating the degree to which MP3's have been allowed to prosper, so as to force the hands of the courts, the houses, the lobbyists, and the competitors. He should know just how devious corporate behavior can be; the back story to most of his multinational conglomerates would probably look like the TimeWarnerAOL agglomerations of today at this point in his timeline.
I'd say more, but I've got some work to take care of. More later, hopefully.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
He was referring to the 'National Post' newspaper.
Canada's other national newspaper.
According to the article, PBS and NPR do quite well with contributions from their viewers/listeners. Then why do they receive all that Federal funding? And why does PBS have to beg for my money on a regular basis? Contributions of this nature simply haven't proven themselves as a method for anyone to make money. Utopian views of society aren't going to accomplish much of anything. -Goliath
Musicians might have to go back to making money via performance, teaching, and patronage by the wealthy! Oh no! That system would never produce any good music, would it?
Did you not read the sentence to which you replied?
It is arrogant of you to assume that the thing you wrote is of any value that someone should reimburse you for it.
If it is, they will. Maybe not everyone, it is certain that some will not, even though they derive value from the work. However, there will be those that see that same value and compensate you as such, if the value is there.
If not, you may take it as a sign that you are doing the wrong things with your 'time and effort'.
-Tommy
"I got a half gallon of Jack, and 2 dozen Ant Traps. I'm about to get wild." -me
you cannot quote someone anymore, due to the lack of intellectual property, and the "ownership" of the written or spoken word, the quote symbol (") will no longer be allowed. Only loose references to someone who might have *used* that phrase or *borrowed" those diary entries from a famous historical figure can be used.
Besides, I just patented "the use of punctuation marks to indicate a direct quote"; feel free to use double quote marks (or any other punctuation mark), just be prepaired to pay a royalty to me...
Just think if the lending library did not yet exist; if the only way to read books was to go and buy them.
Now suppose that Benjamin Franklin was alive today and just now proposed the idea that large buildings be constructed with taxpayer dollars and more of those tax dollars be used to purchase books and magazines (copyrighted material) so that the public can come anytime and read these materials freely.
The print publishers would FLY INTO A RAGE and call Franklin every dirty name they could think of from "thief" to "crook" to, yes, even "pirate" who is "opposed to people profitting from their hard work" and "taking the food out of baby's mouths bacause writers won't be able to support their families anymore", and how all publications and writing will end because there's no money in it anymore.
Of course, today, Franklin would have proposed that libraries included software, video, and audio, and indeed, all copyrighted works. Today, many public libraries today do lend VHS and CDs. And it wasn't just for the purpose of education and betterment of the public. Most books were an entertainment medium in the 18th century as much as movies are today. So don't isolate Franklin's idea as having only altruistic motives.
Who would say that closing all libraries would be a GOOD idea? Very few I'll wager. Why should it be any different when it comes to CDs/movies/software than it is with books/mags?
And oh yes, despite the existance of libraries, (gasp!) people still make money and can even (choke!) earn a living as writers and publishers. Well imagine that. Free access to copyrighted books and magazines didn't kill the industry after all. In fact, it expanded it. Just like VHS rentals home video sales resulted in Hollywood making more money today from home video sales than it ever did or ever will from theatrical ticket sales (despite the Great VCR lawsuit against Sony's Betamax).
Ever rent a movie, video game, book, or magazine. Then you too are as much a pirate and thief as you label others to be. Libraries even install photocopy machines at taxpayer expense. What's all that about? I see no harm here.
Personally, I don't see this as ever really stifling IP. But if it does, the free-market has a natural counter for it. People will simply stop producing ideas. No one (read much less people) will enter a field where the prospects of earning a decent living are substantially lower than in other fields.
Eventually, the shortage of new ideas will add value to the ones that are there, and mechanisms will come in place to protect IP again. Even open source programmers need to eat. Intellectual Property is the basis for innovation, and whatever it takes, society will keep innovation coming. The market will demand it.
Of course I use Microsoft. Setting up a stable unix network is no challenge
Can someone define "Intellectual Property" for me? I've always been a bit shaky on the definition.
___
A requirement of creativity is that it contributes
to change. Creativity keeps the creator alive.
___
I'm an exhibit on the mounted animal nature trail.
This doesn't stop the per song model from also being effective. You try out songs through services like Napster, buy the songs you really like, and if you like all the songs on the CD, you buy that.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
One of the staples of Libertarian dogma is that the ownership of private property is a moral absolute. I was hoping to trip you up on it.
:-)
Trip me? I'll freely concede to you that ownership is a social construct, having nothing to do with morals. One could argue that ownership is biologically determined -- after all an awful lot of animals are territorial and territoriality can be viewed as proto-ownership -- but in any case, this has nothing to do with morality. I tend to moral relativism, anyway
You may have had in mind an observation that societies which restrict ownership tend to restrict other freedoms as well -- Soviet Union having been a prime example. That happens to be valid historical correlation, but again, it has nothing to do with morals.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
He doesn't. He either 1) Pays a fee. 2) Uses IP that his label owns. or 3) Settles the lawsuit afterwards.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
This also references computer software as well. It costs nearly nothing to copy a CD with software, and make a profit on it. Look at the copies made in Russia, where $2 can buy a CD with every OS that Microsoft makes.
Clearly our model of property is screwed.
Creating a new system that rewarded innovation is hard.
*very* few musicians ever reach the amount of income you're talking about.
Are you telling me that if I sell 20 Million albums, I shouldn't make any money from that?!
I'm sure the pile o' cash Jackson had was from advances; IIRC, his last couple albums pretty much tanked.
We could hold the same argument for actors: is Tom Cruise 'worth' US$20 Million a picture? His acting is OK, but if his movies bring in a lot of cash at the box office, based on his 'Star Power', then the money paid is 'worth' it, right?
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
AFAIK, stealing a riff or a few chords is unlikely to put you in court. BTW, IMO, there's a difference between performing another artists work and simply copying it. IMO, the former should be allowed if you don't claim it as your own work -- because re-interpreting is defensible as a creative act. So is plagiarising a riff. However, electronic copying certainly is not.
BTW, scatterbrain wrote a whole song consisting of plagiarised riffs. Frank Zappa also stole other people's riffs ( largely for satirical purposes )
In other words, if I write a song, and it is recorded, I no longer have control over the spread of said song, and my song must stand on it's own value.
It's a nit-pick, but I think that statement mischaracterizes Jefferson's words. Jefferson was saying that there is no natural property right inherent to the creation of work.
What the post omits is Jefferson's statement that there is an artificial property right created by men. Jefferson even seems resigned to the concept as an inheritence from British law. That he considers the right artificial does not automatically mean the right has no merit. Again, it's inclusion in the text of the Constitution implies the framers thought it was a good idea.
Where the original post is dead-on is in pointing out that this is the same debate we face today.
Now to pick on myself -- it was poor word choice for me to characterize the Bill of Rights as an affirmation rather than an enumeration. The Ninth Amendment actually refers to, "The enumeration of rights...." The whole text of the Ninth, however, makes it clear that the framers believed there were more natural rights than could possibly be enumerated.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
I wasn't serious, but you've probably right. The computers are a tool for expression and since freedom of speech is guaranteed... yadda yadda yadda.
The truth of the matter is that the vast majority of proffessional musicians make less then the poverty level. Some make it big, but most dont. I have met amazing musicians who work as carpenters, waiters, house painters etc. Even when signed, a musician has no garuntee of wealth. The label (like the house) always takes its cut off the top. "always get a cut of the gross, not the net. ."
You are confusing legal rights and what some value system believes to be "just"
:-)
Actually, that is exactly the point I was trying to make. One of the staples of Libertarian dogma is that the ownership of private property is a moral absolute. I was hoping to trip you up on it.
The guy who you're agreeing with didn't understand my post. People who think that property is a simple concept just haven't thought about it enough. I was pointing out that it's just as easy to be simple minded on the side opposed to IP protection as it is for someone who advocates IP protection.
And IDEA CAN NOT be copyrightable.An implementation of thet idea SHOULD be though!
Here is what Justice Holmes says in Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Co. (188 U.S. 239 (1903)) :
The copy is the personal reaction of an individual upon nature. Personality always contains something unique. It expresses its singularity even in handwriting, and a very modest grade of art has in it something irreducible, which is one man's alone. That something he may copyright unless there is a restriction in the words of the act.
He is talking about what makes an idea YOUR property. The particular expression that bears the stamp of your personality. That in itself is not an easy thing to distinguish from the subject matter or raw material from which your creative effort had to begin. On top of the subtleties of Holme's point, there were three dissenting justices in that case, who expressed concerns about the rationale for granting property rights in some intellectual artifact:
Judges Lurton, Day, and Severens, of the circuit court of appeals, concurred in affirming the judgment of the district court. Their views were thus expressed in an opinion delivered by Judge Lurton: 'What we hold is this: That if a chromo, lithograph, or other print, engraving, or picture has no other use than that of a mere advertisement, and no value aside from this function, it would not be promotive of the useful arts, within the meaning of the constitutional provision, to protect the 'author' in the exclusive use thereof, and the copyright statute should not be construed as including such a publication, if any other construction is admissible.
So you see, even if we consider court cases, we find the line between what is and isn't property gets very blurry. Especially in the case of IP, since the laws protecting creative works are meant to fulfill a public purpose, not a private one.
Mozart died broke.
Actually, no. Check out The Pauper Myth
A brief excerpt: Mozart was never poor. He and his wife moved in an expensive set in an expensive city. The loans that he asked from Puchberg in 1788 were so that he could maintain his standard of living, certainly not so that he could keep starvation at bay.
Well put. I also like your idea about prompting users for voluntary contributions. At least it would give people the chance to do something.
I truly wonder if, after having broken down the current reward structure for IP with our shiny toys, we can't come up with anything better than returning to a centuries old model. Did patronage give listeners more choices? I don't know.
Why does music have to come from somewhere or someone else? In the days before recorded music, families in England would gather and sing their own madrigals for entertainment. THAT is music. We unquestioningly accept the opinion of the experts on who is a "professional" musician. We live in a culture of "professionalism" where the ability to be uncreative is rewarded. I don't need music from a source like that. I don't have to have ANY canned, recorded, packaged, or otherwise mutilated art. I can sing a song just as well as the next guy. We've got to put the music back in people's lives that the music industry stole.
This whole argument over IP law and technological revolution really has me in stitches. Only 190 years ago, big business was hanging Scottish Luddite protestors whose complaint was that the advent of a new technology (the weaving loom) was making their traditional life style redundant. That sort of makes the internet and big bandwidth the 'loom' of our generation.
Isn't it great that this time we are putting the run on the big buisiness.
I think it's a question of changes in media 90 years ago. The technology for piracy has always existed (memory, recording on paper or performing live), but distribution has been a problem for the ancient hacker - geographic limits cuts down on the value of posting information for all to see... it just wasn't worth the time or effort or cost to redistribute materials compared to getting it from the official channel and paying copyright.
If, for example, everyone had to pay by the download (e.g. volume, adjusted for compression technique) you could make getting warez as big a hassle as buying legit. But you would also kill what I feel is the essence of the internet - once you're on, it's free... you can expose yourself to all the information you want.
Data East: "Leaders in Dot Matrix Technology" - Star Wars pinball
That depends on the person. Some people will just listen to music for the sake of pumping some form of rhythm into their brain. Others do so in order to learn from it.
You can't hope to really become a decent musician if you don't listen to anything other than yourself. It's pretty much accepted that most musically inclined people have been listening to almost *anything* since the day they were born.
Does music have any practical value aside from producing more musicians? Maybe not. It all depends on how deeply you want to look at it.
Raptor
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
There's a difference between what Beethoven did (took PUBLIC DOMAIN music) and what Puff Daddy does. Folk music, what Ode to Joy is based upon, is classified by ethnomusicologists through 6 methods. One of which is that the authorship is unknown. If the authorship is unknown there's no one to credit. In the case of Puff Daddy, he has to give credit to the people he "borrows" from.
So there I was. Naked. In a refrigerator. With a potroast on my knees. Smokin a cigar. That's when it got REALLY weird.
Hidden in this article is one of the most powerful memes I've seen yetwith regars to the free distribution of what some would call "intellectual property":
Those aren't "pirates" stealing copyrighted works, they are, in fact, LIBRARIANS, working in the world's biggest, massively-distributed, online library!
Holy Paradigm Shift Batman!
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
It doesn't matter what kind of semantic games you want to play. The fact is that "intellectual property" is defined in all developed nations and in most developing nations. Who cares if you want to quibble. The issue isn't can you make an argument that a non-lawyer couldn't refute. It's about whether people should be able to set the price on the result of their labor. Why should I have to pay McDonalds for a big mac? It's not like they created the cow. Or the grain that that cow ate. Or the wheat the went into the bun. Or the water that carried nutrients to the lettuce. The fact is that every thing man has ever created is merely a transformation of something that is already there. The only thing that distinguishes a piece of roadkill from a hamburger is the work that went into it.
Most of the overhead is from promotion (paying radio stations, commercials, banners, parades, stadiums, whatever), though there is a lot involved with the great number of bands that never work out, yet get lots of money dumped into them (promotion, studio time, equipment, etc).
I'm still working the music club angles... The last few times I've bought CDs, I've paid ~$3-4 each, plus a (ever growing) ship^H^H^H^Hhandling charge (usually ~$2.50/cd). $7/CD is a heck of a lot better than the stores, but you don't get instant gratification (waiting for the sales, then waiting for the delivery). It's worth it, though, if you actually want the discs. I think I've been on this 'buy unlimited CDs at 2/3 off' deal for a while now... before that is was 'buy one at 1/2 price, get three free'... not too bad. Availability isn't always the best, but hey, you get a break. Flea markets and garage sales are the best place, but there, the selection is usually pretty thin "Oooh, the complete works of Neil Diamond on CD... I have a microwave just waiting for these!"
Yeah, I'm cheap for commodity goods. I dont like being swindled.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Yeah, and governments will fall and we will all live in happy anarchy, yadda yadda the end
whoops, just slipped and hit my head on cement
Right, but if all you're concerned with is keeping the idea to yourself so nobody else can gain from it while you are alive, why would you care what happens to it after you die?
They're controlling what people want? How? Mind waves? Sure, they'd be thrilled if I would pony up money for the Backstreet Boys, N'Sync, or Brittany Spears... but I'm not. If you don't like the music being offered, don't buy it.
Yes, the corporations are using advertising and such to push them but that doesn't mean that you have to buy the product. I've seen ads for tuna fish with cute talking fish and such. I haven't rushed out and bought it though (I hate tuna).
I've said it once and I'll say it again. No one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to buy something. You can even say that the saturation of the advertising is forcing people to buy it or want it but then you're just making a argument for a weak willed person who can't say no or make up their own minds just because it's thrust in their face on a regular basis.
To sum up: People do what they want for their own self interest. They buy music because they want to (for whatever reason).
And as a side thought why not try and make a go of a different mode of distrubition or just a new tack on the old model. Invest in some good recording equipment and a rack of CD burners and make the music you think people will like. Distribute it over the internet, go to concerts and sell it, talk to local record stores and get them to carry it, charge people a few cents a song to listen to it online or download it off your servers etc. If you have a good product then you will be rewarded for your efforts. Try and put into practice the alternate methods of distrubtion that you read about all the time. See if it really works. Be prepared for some of them to fail. You never know. One of them might work out unbelievably well and make you rich. You never know. In the end people will remember you for what you did not what you said.
I think this article was ghost-written by Jon Katz.
24-hour banking!?! I don't have time for that.
-- Steven Wright
Kind of like property in general, huh? It's all ledgers-in-the-sky until someone with a weapon says "that is yours, this is mine".
How is that different from
"you deserve this because your name is on the deed".
"you deserve this because your father had it before he died"
"you deserve this because the government says its yours"
If a rule system determines that he deserves a '79 Oldsmobile, then he deserves a '79 Oldsmobile within the context of that rule system.
>Too bad, because I really wanted to see Lars on
>an episode of VH1's Where Are They Now digging
>in dumpster looking for something to eat.
Patience, grasshopper. Metallica hasn't made a dime on musical merit in at least 5 years, maybe more - the only thing that keeps them going is the loyal fanbase they built back when they had musical integrity and something to say with their music... a fanbase that Metallica has no problem alienating, and is doing so with much zeal - not just with their legal MP3 tangles, but with the shoddy and formulaic pop-metal they insist on delivering lately.
2 more years, you'll see your dumpster-diving Lars.
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
What's your point? That culture leetches get fed by government as well as by guilt-ravaged CEO's? And what do student loans have to do with intellectual property? Having a well-educated labour force is a requirement for an economy to function at all. If we were all illiterate, there wouldn't even be a piece of the pie to fight over. We'd REALLY be living in the dark ages.
No one really needs manufactured culture anyways. The NSF, NEA and the like are irrelevant to modern culture. How many kids learned to play piano because the Canada Council sponsored Glenn Gould? None. If I really want music, I'll make it myself or with my friends. If the state wants to add to that for the sake of national pride, then let them do so. They are utterly dispensible.
You're right, they put approximately $20M into advertising; someone called the BWP an "ultimate experiment in mass marketing." Moreover, the $35,000 figure which everyone seems to know was obviously a part of this marketing campaign.
:)
Even though marketing types are constant subjects of laughs in software industry, don't underestimate them - some are VERY good at what they do - remember the BWP every time you say something like "marketing people are dumb."
... which, however, doesn't disqualify the statement "I hate marketing people"
I agree with william gibson about the window. When recorded music began, musicians were payed for the session, and recieved no royalties form the proceeds. This practiced in Nashville far longer then any other part of the music industry (once again the south lags behind the rest of america in labor laws, go figure) which is where the tradition of country musicians churning out the albums came from. When you get a one time check for your music, you gotta make more music to make money.
Don't worry, in time EVERYTHING will be made illegal as seems to be the trend, when that happens there will be a backlash and people just wont care anymore and the anarchy that is the internet will catch like wildfire in the real world and the common rule will be that you can do whatever you want as long as it doesnt physically injure another individual. At long last its finally here.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
>>Producing CDs costs them pennies yet the CD
>>prices have stayed at $14-18 for the past few
>>years.
>This is, simply put, a load of cr*p.
Well, it would take about $3-4K worth of consumer grade hardware & software (the most expensive part being the special printer to duplicate the artwork on the CD itself).
You'd buy the raw materials (blank CD-Rs, jewel cases, glossy paper for the liner notes, etc) in bulk.
Once everything was scanned in and set up properly, I'd be able to duplicate a copy, that the average joe couldn't easily tell from an original, every fifteen minutes at a cost of a $1 per.
Bump my equipment budget up to $10K and I could do about 20/hour still at a cost of $1 per.
And that's with CONSUMER equipment you can find advretised all over Computer Shopper, Macworld, or the like.
The record companies have CD fab machinery that cost millions, and can spit out thousands of CDs an hour. Plus, they buy the raw materials in much greater bulk than is possible for me.
I don't find it implausable AT ALL that the RIAA minions could produce CDs cheaper than myself by AT LEAST a factor of ten.
john
Imagine all the people...
Consider a practical function of record execs. They filter out the lesser talent and promote the greater talent.
Or one could say that they filter out the less marketable and promote the more marketable.
Don't you mean, record labels will not be able to make money in the same ways and the same quantities they do now? Artists frequently see more money from concerts than they do from sales of media.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, but ask yourself this question. Which one of these are you more proud to say:
1) Well, I work the register at McDonalds for a living.
2) Well, I program computers for a living.
Money isn't everything, but it would be nice to keep more after taxes.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Bad AC! Shame! Shame!
What a waste of bandwidth, resources, and oxygen.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Ha! You took the bait. I said (roughly): Hey, I can oversimplify things just like you are. I intended my comment to be a gross oversimplification so it's not surprising that you should call it BS. I would too.
But I would also call your statement that "I consider my property to be something that is mine" to be question-begging, circular, vacuous, and simple-minded. Think carefully about how we become owners of anything, and you will realize that the process is nowhere near as cut-and-dried as you make it out to be.
You can still hear good singers in your own community. I'm sure there are many who are good or great. Perhaps not as good as Andrea Bocelli (sorry, I don't know who that is) but very good nevertheless. And when you go out and find talent in your own community, you're not just doing something for yourself or for the corporate fart factories, you're doing something that will benefit everyone else in your community.
hehe I'm not whining. I do alright out of the music biz and I know a lot of people who do a lot better. But my point is that the sheer scale of the market skews the business. What I'm saying is that for a few years work someone can bank millions of dollars. I don't assert any moral grounds but it just doesn't sound right compared to people who work all their lives on the poverty line. When people don't feel valued then bad things happen. Super pop stardom, we can live without it. I think that this market should find it's true worth. It is skewed by the artifical value placed on it. Yeah $9.99 is good value to be entertained for a a few hours but... I mean can't anyone see my point. I'm not advocating Napster style trading. It's not right to rip people off but it needs to work both ways. You'll be telling me next that is great that superstars then bugger off to live overseas "for tax reasons" thus robbing the people again. Makes me mad.
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I agree with you. But I think a lot of slashdoters are a bit confused.
Copyright infringement is taking someone elses work in it's entirety or part and copying AGAINST the authors wishes. If the author doesn't mind you copying and you do then it's NOT copyright enfringement.
And IDEA CAN NOT be copyrightable.An implementation of thet idea SHOULD be though!
If I come up with some amazing idea or programing algorythm I want to have the right to copyright it. (By this I mean I want to be able to copyright my implementation of it.. not the idea itself). I want the choice of how my idea will be distributed. If anyone want's to write their own implementation they should be free to do so.. as long as they don't COPY mine.
Remeber your liberty ends where mine begins. Too many people seem to think that their rights out weigh anyone elses. Get over it.
-Sebastian
Books further knowledge - even if used for entertainment.
Music is almost purely relegated to entertainment.
Mainstream (In canada?) what do you mean by that?
Gibson is by no means a 'mainstream' celebrity in Canada.. at least, no more than he is in the rest of north america....
There's something about a newspaper which is much different from reading news online.
I read slashdot several times a day, and as a result, I read about, well, "news for nerds". But I also go to the coffee shop every day to read the Toronto Sun.
When reading news online, you get to choose exactly what topics you'll read about, so you generally miss out on all the stray news articles about, lets say, rave laws being passed in Toronto, for one example.
Newspapers won't be going out of style any time soon, because somebody needs to be doing the job of selecting articles for a specific region and audience.
And, even if that's been done online, I ain't bringing a laptop to the coffee shop to read my news =)
when the rain comes, they run and hide their heads. they might as well be dead.
Andrea Bocelli is an opera singer from South America (IIRC.) Very talented individual, in the same class as Pavarotti, et. al.
I agree, except on the software part. Books, magazines, music, movie etc help people learn (besides entertain), and apply the ideas they learn as they like, without charges. I think of most software as a tool. I don't expect to be able to borrow it out of the library and keep a copy forever, the same way I don't expect to borrow a bulldozer and keep it forever.
You could use similar logic to argue against letting people borrow books, magazines, etc, but I think there's a difference. Software, like MS Word doesn't help you learn. You don't really need MS Word. There's nothing you can do with MS Word that you can basically do without it. Books contain ideas that you can't expect to get on your own. I'm at a loss to explain it better. One way to look at is that books impart knowledge, and software and equipment are facilitators. With those books, you can obtain the knowledge to build the software and equipment you think you need.
Also, I think software in libraries is a good idea if the idea is for trial use, use the software until you return it. Pay for it afterwards. Open Source is nice, but there's a lot of other nice software we wouldn't have because it takes too much time and skill to produce for free.
Copy machines in libraries is a good point though, and has significance to the software industry. Even though you can copy an entire book in the library, people still buy books. Though, sometimes it is just as expensive to photocopy a book, not to mention it's time consuming.
Lasty, I should mention I'm a bit of a hypocrite because I use some pirated software. Almost all the software I use often (once a month or more), I buy, if it's not free that is. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, but, for instance, I don't want to pay $100+ bucks for MS Word, when I use it rarely to view and lightly edit a Word file someone sent me in an email. Also, I have no stolen software that I would buy to use if I wasn't able to steal it.
A song on your website ripped one of my woofers. I demand payment.
Wait...girls? Not allowed to read Slashdot? Why didn't anyone inform me of this?
And to think of all the "trivialites" I've posted!
I'm gonna go cry.
-k-
"While frightening to some, this new reality will not destroy all creation of wealth through inventiveness or artistry. People, including this techno-pirate who downloaded the film, will still go out to the theatre. People will still buy newspapers. They will still listen to commercial radio and television and still pay for CDs." People will not necessarily pay for CDs. People will go to the theatre for film, but for concerts-- some concerts are truly performances, whereas some concerts are impossible (industrial music is often better listened to studio-mixed than with some guy on a stage trying to do it in front of a crowd). Fewer and fewer people are buying newspapers, as news reported online is more up-to-the-minute and often more complex in its detail. These things will remain, of course but the difference is this: they will no longer be the source of major profits. Newspapers will have a harder time making the big buck. Artists and musicians will not be able to make their money in the same ways and the same quantities as they do now.
Do something about world hunger. Click here
try reading my post, nowhere to I advocate or even mention the "brave new world of free music".
.oO0Oo.
They'll be poor when we trade their recordings for free" scenario is not my scenario. Please don't attribute other points of view to me thanks.
What I said was that the market must change and it will change whether it likes it or not.
In fact we already know that it is, and I'm not just talking Napster et. al.
Music production has been revolutionised by home production. I'm there matey, I know. My friends and I get record deals every week and see the other people who are doing ok out of digital music.
A global market reduces choice and funnels money in to the hands of those who control media access. MTV etc.
Do you think Brittney would be doing well if she had to gig her way to the top without the help of Fox & Sky & Disney?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Things might eventually come down to fame and not fortune. The article mentioned a little about concerts and movie theatres still being things that people will pay for and I think that that will be a trend that people will start to take. Ponder for a second what would happen if the moment a movie comes out in the theatres it was available from an fserve on IRC or on GNUtella. If it was good enough quality to be worth skipping the theatres, then the theatres themselves would certainly have access to even better connections. This would mean that digitally distributed movies should move in at about the same time that piracy of movies becomes anything of a threat. That will mean that movies will not cost near as much to distribute (read: nothing) which could mean cheaper movie theatre prices and even better quality. But where will they make their money? Food, toys, knick nacks, all those things that you can't copy no matter how fast your connection is. Does anyone really believe that a tub of popcorn should cost $4.00? It could be justified though. Discount theatres that show movies after they have been out a while already make a good profit that way. It also might force theatres to stay one step ahead of the game by ramping up the sound quality to DVD-A (hehe anyone seen orgazmo?). It also might bring in 3d movies which would be incredible but probably pretty far off.
As for concerts, they must rake in an incredible amount of money. You get screwed every which way. I would suspect that just the promise of the money from conerts and the rush someone must get by playing in front of 25000 people would be enough for someone to make music without being able to actually sell it.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
One thing to remember when pondering these grandiose discussions on what the Internet will or will not do to permanently change the nature of life is that it is a relatively young innovation.
Throughout the history of science and technology (and most noticeable in the modern era), new technology rarely if ever produces Good Things right away. When plastic was introduced as an economic production material, for instance, there was an overabundance of absolute garbage mass-produced. Inane, purposeless objects that really didn't need to happen, and that nobody really used or wanted (cigarette holders in the shape of monkeys, letter-openers that look like mermaids, and thousands of other knick-knacks), but just exploded into existence because it was cheap and easy to make them. As time went on, and the novelty of the newest, freshest, cheapest technology died away, plastic was used to very good purpose for items that WERE needed (or at least had more purpose than lawn flamingoes).
The Internet is in the same stage of infancy - experiencing an explosive growth spurt as it becomes more and more accessible to the public. Is every person who has an Internet connection a web designer? Hardly. But does that mean they won't publish websites? Hardly. And that's not necessarily a bad thing - it's a necesary step in allowing the Internet to mature into what it should (and eventually will) be. Give it a couple more years, and I think that we'll start to see a lot of these issues like IP battles work themselves out as the Net becomes regulated, or at least more firmly grounded. Jon (the guy I'm responding to) has an excellent point - all this music piracy and intellectual property infringement will end up solving itself, as it brings about faster regulation of the Net.
But it's far too early to pass judgement about the Net's ability to destroy traditional values - it hasn't even finished growing up yet.
hehe thanks, hope you're not one of my friends.
.oO0Oo.
I do have a triangle and I can play it. Fortunately my repertoire of skill is expanded beyond that.
I know where to place apostrophes too
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The death of intellectual property? Please, don't make me laugh. I haven't read the article but I doubt it's saying anything worth the time it'd take me to read it.
The net is not going to really change anything fundamental long-term, it'll just change the arena that it's done in and the tools that'll be used. At the moment the net is just going through a transitional phase where people, companies and governments are still trying to determine what it is and what should be done about or with it. Sooner or later, and it'll probably be sooner, the way the net will integrate into people's lives will become apparent and it'll be business as usual.
All the current rampant law-breaking and theivery is serving to do is get the net regulated faster than it would have been anyway. And it's giving both corporations and governments a great excuse for flexing their muscles in the international, rather than national, arenas. Instead of being able to pass laws in their own jurisdictions, the net is giving countries like the US an opportunity to push it's laws, and hence itself, into other countries. Truly, a globalists dream - the American hegemony extending itself into every country in the world.
No, intellectual property won't die thanks to the net. Unfortunately, I doubt the same could be said about freedom.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
I think we agree on 99.9% of this, too. The point about slavery in the Constitution is well-taken.
Thanks for printing the quote. It's always a relief when we look at history and find that our modern problems aren't so modern after all. I have little doubt that current and future generations will revise and improve IP law. If we want to continue to progress, we may have no choice.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
I am inclined to agree -- but people will not stop producing IP out of some kind of spite. It will not be John Galt stepping boldly off the stage. It will be the story of somebody named Bob who works at the convenient store and composes symphonies by night. The symphonies are played for Presidents and Kings, but nobody knows Bob is writing them, and he doesn't get paid. So naturally he writes fewer symphonies than he would if he could quit his convenient store job and buy a piano, like he could if he got a royalty check.
The reason why IP is a value is that it allows people to make their living (i.e., dedicate their lives) to the creation of some kind of IP or other. For example, a person can concentrate on how to make movies, and get paid for doing nothing but making better and better movies. Without receiving royalties, he will certainly still try to make movies, but it will be relegated to a hobby that pays little or nothing, and he will have to do something else during the day to make enough money to eat, no matter how skilled he may become. Remember, Mozart died broke.
If we are looking at the end of IP, then we are looking at the end of programming, composing, writing, as careers, and we are turning them into permanent hobbies.
Not only that, but it doesn't work, in a capitalist society, for you to do A but make your money doing B. Suppose Alice is a composer and a performer. Suppose Bob is a performer who can't compose worth [censored], but plays slightly better than Alice. Without some kind of intellectual property protection, Bob would make all the money he wants playing Alice's work, and Alice would die broke.
Be careful what you wish for. You may get it.
-- Sunlighter
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
Which brings an interesting idea indeed. If I'm at a gig and somone asks me for a light from my cigarette I've never known anyone even TRY to impose the restriction that I can't use that cigarette to then light another in turn. Perhaps if we make second-line relighting illegal and allow people (me!) to charge for First Generation lighting up we could build up a whole industry, protect it by laws, and this industry could then fund political sellouts to keep these laws for them! We'd make MILLIONS for the country.
It's genius I tell you, I'm off to meet with my local MP and bribe^h^h^h^h^h^h convince him to get such a law passed immediately. I'll be in control of ALL the cigarette lighting in this country before anyone even knows what's going on. Bahahahaha.
Don't forget, Pirate Lighting up is KILLING cigarretes, phone the Federation Against Cigarette Light Theft today!
I really meant that it seems wrong that someone earns millions of times more cash for putting in the same amount of effort of a toilet cleaner or something.
.oO0Oo.
Especially for singing and dancing a bit - not exactly hard work.
My point really is that the market is skewed and that the way money funnels seems not right. The global market reduces choice and those that win, win big. I think it's time for that to change.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The obscenity of how rich you can become twanging a guitar or tweaking a computer to make sound may well come to it's deserved end.
.oO0Oo.
I work in the music industry and the distribution of wealth within it is a constant source of irk.
If you can justify the $5 million per year Liberace was making or the multi-million dollar pile of cash Micheal Jackson has made I might change my mind.
The global market certainly makes it great to hit big and I don't doubt the hard work that goes into the music business but it is greatly overvalued due to the costs of reproduction and the size of the market.
They will die with a shout not a whimper but die they shall.
Hopefully the cult of celebrity will start to die with it but we've got a long way to go.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
But if you can't gain by withholding your idea under any circumstances, this does not preclude your ability to gain by disclosing it. Even if you can't control it after the first disclosure, you are still able to try to get paid by those you disclose it to first.
If people generally thought like you did we'd still be working on fire and the wheel. Fortunately most people love sharing their ideas, their works and their inventions.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Unlike you I can't sing as well as the next guy. Nor do I want to hear the next guy sing. I want to hear Andrea Bocelli sing. Sounds like a good reason to get music from somewhere else.
The important thing about being paid for your work, is that the person doing the work is the one getting paid. Unfortunately, the distribution mechanism has provided a landscape in which musicians PAY the record company for the "privelege", of having their work distributed. The intellectual property isn't controlled by the creators, its controlled by the huge corporations who manage the means of distribution. These corporations entire livelihood depends on their ability to extort money from people, while convincing them that they are being done a favor. I'm all for people being paid for their work, I'm simply against large corporations preying on other people's work, holding it up as their own. Only the most fabulously successful musicians make money off of their CD's, most only make a little, and then only for a short time. THESE are the people who need their rights protected .. and not from Napster, they need protection from Time-Warner (and Lars).
-- Rich
Free your mind and your Ass will follow -- George Clinton
As much as I disagree with how both the American and international IP systems are organized, I can understand how artists might like to maintain some control over their works. I mean, look at how great works of art and music have been used to peddle all sorts of junk on TV. Or how protest songs of the 60's are used to promote happiness-through-consumption now. I'd hate to create something only to have it used a few years later to sell breakfast cereal.
The real sales person is the sales person. Without her/him, the marketing materials would never get out the door, and nothing would be sold.
Next?
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
I disagree a little with your interpretation of Jefferson's words.
What he is really saying is that the protection of ideas is a recent social creation. Ideas are not "naturally" anyone's property. He is questioning the need for such an artificial protection, but stops short of actually condemning it.
Remember that the writers of the Constitution were very concerned with the idea of natural rights. Natural rights are inherently part of being a human being. They are not "granted" -- you get them just for being born. Jefferson is saying he believes what we know today as IP is not a natural right.
The Bill of Rights reflects this philosophy. It is an AFFIRMATION of rights, not an ENUMERATION of rights.
The Consitution DOES provide for IP protection in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 -- "To promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." Had Jefferson and the other Constitutional framers been opposed to these artificial restrictions, this clause would certainly not exist. This is NOT a contradiction, Jefferson is merely expressing his reservations in this letter.
Nevertheless, he clearly believes it to be an artificial right. The U.S. would do well to review its IP law in this light. Perhaps we are concentrating too much on "securing... exclusive rights" and not enough on promoting "the progress of science and useful arts."
The concept of IP protection may not be fundamentally broken. It may just need some tuning.
(Side note -- a Jefferson quote did not spark a Second Amendment debate on Slashdot? What are the odds?)
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
The Blair Witch Project is only an example of how a relatively cheap to create movie made lots of money because lots of money was put into its advertising. Based on the inundation of commercials for the BWP I am sure that much more than a mere $35,000 dollars were put into the advertising.
In the day of the Internet the adage still holds true:
It takes $$$$$$ to make $$$$$$$$$$!!
"A sample size of one is really just statistical masturbation."
For a recent, interesting handling of IP issues, see http://www.nap.edu/books/0309064996/html/ .
Look at music as an example.
Hypothetically speaking..
if music piracy (for free, not for-profit) bankrupts the music industry as it is now.. and artists can no longer make money off recording albums... then certainly, many artists will not make music anymore, and many new ones will choose different professions, as there will be no chance for them to make money. And then, society will be without the music it wants.. so what will happen?
Simply... *something* will work itself out so those who want (demand) can get what they want (supply) from those who can produce the goods. IN other words.....
is the music industry as it is doomed? Certainly.
Is it the end of music? Not on your life.
Why is that a bad thing? You mean music groups and recording companies will have to give up being super-mega-gizillionairs and have to get by on normal incomes? I don't think that's a bad thing. Riches have broken more bands than it has made. This would also put everone on even ground, and more people will have a chance to get into the mainstream music scene.. Places like mp3.com where there is already lots of non copyright music will become more popular. A lot of that music is pretty good. Of course, this is all hypothetical.... We all know there will always be millions of people who buys CDs and movies, this is just the kind of reaction people give to a 4% decrease in CD sales...
- - - - - - -
Oliver Sosinsky
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Oliver Sosinsky
OneBahamas.com
A scarry thought. I'm interested on your opinion about one of the other replies in this discussion, about libraries. Offering software in libraries, etc.
I'm really sick of this argument. Why is it that whenever someone mentions the abolition of copyrights, someone has to stand up and call them left wing or communist. Since when are government granted monoplies an aspect of a free market economy? And your scientist example is incorrect because it is not taken to it's logical conclusion. Welfare need not be the answer for our materialistic PhD. In fact capitalism would suggest that if we need such a complicated and easily abused system to maintain our current levels of technological innovation that we are currently spending to much on such endeavors. Under a real free market economy we would probably have fewer inventors and we would be spending the money on whatever it is that society actually wants. And we would probably be spending our money much more efficiently as well.
I think you're missing the point. Copyright would have prevented borrowing and derivation of music, at least some of the time. And it does so now. Puff Daddy is big enough that he can afford to sample (Beethoven would have been too, of course), but lots of people aren't.
a nd_music_sampling.paper http://www.eff.org/pub/Intellectual_property/ and http://www.negativland.com/intprop.html for further reading on sampling.
See http://www.eff.org/pub/Intellectual_property/art_
Part of the reason for the "Mozart died a pauper myth" is that for a very brief period around his death there arose a fashion for modest funerals (after an Austrian prince's burial I believe). As a result, people compared his modest funeral with the lavish affairs typical in previous and subsequent years and jumped to the conclusion that he had died poor.
Mark Austin
---- For Whigs admit no force but argument
A relevant (and funny) section from The Hitchiker's Guide:
"Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we?"[...]
"That's right," shouted Vroomfondel, "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"
I was actually disappointed by the article because it doesn't look forward. If IP law is stuck in the 1800s, how did people become billionaires in the twentieth century? And, based on this past history, who's to say that new forms of separating people from their money won't be found by the recording industry greedheads?
I wouldn't be surprised to see Napster and every other site offering entertainment content get so wrapped up in litigation that their great-grandchildren are indentured workers. I can see sites avoiding any possibility of being wrapped up in this controversy resulting in MP3 dying except for personal use on personally owned CDs.
Personally, I would like to see the levelling of the playing field that the article mentions - I think it would be a real change in society and one for the better, but I wouldn't count on it.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Supply and demand are the basic drivers of an economy -- "lottery", as you mention it, is a very poor purveyor of this system.
In the "lottery", all the suppliers line up with a small set of controllers who intermediate the demand for the suppliers. Then, the controllers pick suppliers to meet the demanders.
In a real economy, one which can drive riches and wealth well beyond what the "lottery" provides, demand and supply are tied together WITHOUT AN INTERMEDIARY. If 25,000,000 people like Backstreet Boys, then 25,000,000 people will still buy Backstreet Boys products and services. And moreover, without the intermediary, Backstreet Boys will make more money than they do today. However, those 25,000,000 people will have the ability to also like StarvingArtistA and StarvingArtistB, who would *never* be picked by the intermediary for whatever reason.
So, in answer to your question -- yes, we want very much to do away with this pathetic intermediary lottery system.
P.S. Music labels actually DO have a purpose -- they should be promoting and marketing for artists, and even potentially acting as venture capital sources for artists with no money, but they have no business as controlling intermediaries in the distribution chain.
Smokers
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First publishers did and do cry against libraries. Second most people in the 18th century couldn't read. So it's highly unlikely that books were at all an entertainment medium like movies are today. Maybe like live theatre but not movies.
Since someone else posted the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, I thought that some people might find the views of John Stuart Mill, the author of On Liberty, interesting. In the following quote, he is mostly concerned with patents, but considers copyright to be analogous in that it is a monopoly that is granted by the state.
From Principles of Political Economy, book V, chapter 10:
If you're in the US, that's not really true. $6- per hour is about 12K if you're full time, and the tax would be next to nothing ( less than 1K). The marginal tax rate at 12K is still low , and probably doesn't jump much by 30K. You should be taking home about double the money you earned at MacDs.
Amen to that, brother! I say the fewer money-grubbing courtiers we have suckling the tit of royal patronage the healthier our practical Sciences and Arts will be.
Good riddance to career culture leeches.
But a CD-R copy of a CD is virtually identical, and a MP3 copy of a CD is good enough for most people.
Some of it is a bit far-fetched, but the idea is certainly interesting. The most important part of the editorial is that it explains the reason copyright was put together in the first place. The major reason that copyrights were created is so that there would be more music for the people to enjoy. The fact that this allows artists and corporations to profit from it is only a side effect.
--
But both the CD-R and the .MP3 are a pain in the ass to get, one because the download time is huge unless you're on a T1, and the other because finding the files is tricky (all I ever find is dead links, and after an hour I give up. Obviously I'm doing something wrong, or I don't know the right places to go, but still...).
Anyway, I'd pay for the convenience of getting the real thing. But I wouldn't pay the unreasonable amounts companies are asking now ($3.99 for one song?).
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
-Tommy
"I got a half gallon of Jack, and 2 dozen Ant Traps. I'm about to get wild." -me
Basically, Bill's just saying that MP3 means people will buy music where the artist gets the cut, or will be used by the artist to arrange a touring schedule. I would love to be able to indicate to the bands I like to send me email about when they'll be in town. And I'll put them up at my place if they're in need of help there, even take them out for meals.
But it will cut into the margins of the superbands, which is why many of them are fighting back.
For movies - a lot of movies don't need the big screen, especially once we get HDTV big screens with decent audio. But movies like Goya in Bordeaux, The Matrix, ST:TUG (The Usurious Generation) will be in prime demand for big screen, good sound quality experiences.
Basically, what Bill is saying is the middleman will be cut out of his 90% of the take, and we'll go back to a more reasonable 50% artist/creator, 40% middleman, 10% other mix.
Bring it on!
Will in Seattle
Where do you come up with this bullshit?
Creative writing courses. Take one. It'll open up your eyes if you think novelists are generally rich. Almost every decent creative writing course at a university is taught by a professional writer -- sometimes quite famous ones. Do you think they would put up with that crap if they didn't have to pay their bills that way?
While the orginal post was extreme, it's not a far stretch to project a sharp decline in intellectual works if IP goes the way of the dodo.
Actors, writers, etc. are in the profession for two reasons: a) love of the art, b) the "opportunity" to make a great living at it.
As soon as you remove (B), you'll be in a situation where less people will have time to pursue (A) because they're too busy working at a desk job.
The explosion in intellectual works over the past century has been because of strong IP law. If we let it erode, we're sending (through the market) a very plain message: "we don't want books or movies enough to pay for them".
-Stu
I would hardly call it a 'window.'
It was not technologically possible before that 'window' to record music, therefore making money by it (I assume we all know that making money is a filthy practice that must be eradicated!!) couldn't have occured. There's no 'window' there. People starte making money with recorded music as soon as recorded music became tecnologically feasible. (it was feasible in the lab for a bit longer).
But this is a Gibson quote. It would be unfair to expect him to have a clue. He's just a science fiction writer, not an economist, and definitely not a political economist (few Americans are ever exposed to even the concept of Political Economy as a discipline).
There IS a pattern to this copyright-infringement behavior: usually it's younger kids who like something, but can't pay for it. So they make copies off their friends. Then they grow up and pay for the things they still like.
I did this with anime in HS, and now I'm upgrading my collection to commercial DVDs. If I hadn't been able to have my little bootleg VHS archive over the years, I may never have spent a dime on it at all.
Before the internet was the way to trade things, we used to copy games (in the C64 days) and music (album to tape, then tape to tape, then CD to tape, then CD to CD...). Dire Straits, 10000 Maniacs, the first Beastie Boys, all dubbed onto tape (the first two by my father!), then once I had a job and money I replaced them with commercial copies of each. Same with the games.
I'm not defending people copying things that aren't theirs, but I'm telling you these napster kids are going to grow up to be collectors. The habit of being able to have an archive of anything you like is addictive, and if I was a record company exec I'd look at it as a great "first one's free, kid" heroin-dealer trick.
Without those first few pirated albums/games of my own, would I have bought 500+ CDs, 50+ PC Games, 50+ PS Games, and 50+ DVDs since I graduated from college?
-jpowers
-jpowers
Here's an interesting quote from an article in today's Philadelphia Inquirer that fits somewhere in this debate:
/. readers as well.
Consider some numbers collected by Philadelphia Federal Reserve economist Len Nakamura for an upcoming article in the Fed's Business Review. In the United States last year, there were 7.6 million people working as what Nakamura calls creative professionals - engineers, architects, scientists, designers, entertainers and so on.
That's more than six times the number of people working in such jobs in 1950. And as a proportion of the total workforce, the number of creative professionals has about tripled.
Aside from the higher wages they command and the greater amount of training they require, people in these jobs share another trait, Nakamura says: They are able to earn a living largely because of property rights - patents, licenses, trademarks and the like - which give them (or their employers) at least temporary monopolies over the product of their work.
I'd guess this applies, directly or indirectly, to most
The fundamental nature of the ordinary man is to go on out and do the best you can. -- John Prine
No. Re-read what Jefferson said:
This means society may give you the right to sell your song, and have people to buy your song (and thus have you profit from it) as an encouragement to you to write more songs. Of course people do not have to buy your song--but society may give you the exclusive right to profit: that is, society may give you the right to force other people not to sell your song, or otherwise distribute that song in a manner which prevents you from profiting from it. That is, Jefferson is describing the state of affairs that we currently "enjoy" today.
However, it would be arrogant of me to assume that anything is owed me.
No. What Jefferson is saying is that "rights" are things that arise out of a social compact: that your "inherent" right to possessions such as owning land or owning your clothes, or your right to profit exclusively from ideas you create (such as writings, music, inventions, etc) doesn't exist. "Rights" as such arise because we as a society agree to give eachother certain rights, such as the right to property (through enforcement of laws preventing theft) or rights to "intellectual property" (through enforcement of laws that prevent IP piracy). Other rights arise similarly: your right to life, for example, is only as good as our society's acknowledgement of laws against murder.
Just because these rights are man-made and not God-given or inherent to nature doesn't mean you're arrogant in thinking that you should enjoy them--any more than you should feel arrogant in thinking that you have the right not to have some mad-man come over to your place with a baseball bat and turn your skull into red-colored tapioca pudding.
How can I charge a price for something that no longer costs me anything? And how do I determine a price to charge another man for something that holds no value to him until it is given to him, especially when it may be of no value?
A thing has no value if it costs nothing, either in time, space, or material goods to reproduce. Unfortunately, even ideas take some time, and if they are recorded, take space and material goods to reproduce. Further, any idea of merit probably took a master artist a non-trivial amount of time to create. Perhaps some artists feel the reward of creation is it's own payment--but most people live in the real world, and the time it took them to create their idea was time they don't have to spend to make money to put food on their table or a roof over their head.
I'm always fascinated when people quote our Founding Fathers in order to justify things like erasing IP laws. Not only for the obvious reason that these people lived in a different time with different values--in a world where slavery was acceptable to many, where women were considered not to have an immortal soul and thus were no more spiritually valuable than a small dog, and in a world where only the landed arristocracy were given the vote.
But also because our Founding Fathers had completely different ideas about what should--and should not--be included with our Federal Government. And it wasn't until around the early 1800's when the actual shape and form of our Federal Government was really established--it took almost a couple of generations for people to "get it right", so to speak. (I'm refering to a number of Supreme Court decisions which were used to "fine tune" the accepted interpretation of the Constitution.)
While it is instructive to quote Jefferson, we're talking about a generation of people who were still trying to figure out if the Federal Government should be exclusively responsible for issuing currency, for heaven's sake! If they were still debating the idea of a central currency system (which wasn't even brought into being in it's current form until the early part of this century), then what makes you think their ideas about intellectual property rights would be any better formulated?
The last century is actually an anomaly - I don't remember any other point in human history where people expected to trade intellectual property for durable goods with the possible exception of religion.
The purpose of economics is to figure out how to take infinite need and map it to finite resources. Given that intellectual property isn't a finite resource (I produce DOS, and I can give it away an infinite number of times and still have it to give away!) mapping the barter of an infinite resource to a finite resource is ludicrous.
Software should be about the SERVICE it provides, not a commodity in itself, which is why the open-source model is so revolutionary in terms of putting the money where the actual finite quantity exists (implementor time).
As for art, it used to be that artists were subsidised by wealthy patrons for prestige. The idea of selling art in its own right was unheard of until recently.
Somebody recently pointed out that music used to be paying someone for their time in playing a show, not for a copy of that person's "image".
The real goal of the next coming period in our history will be to figure out how to properly reward people who produce IP without either getting into the commodification of things like knowledge (Einstein patenting relativity and charging a licence fee for E=MC2?) or the wholescale ripping off of artists who work hard doing what they do.
Hopefully nanotech will make all of this moot; by churning out everything anyone would ever want, we'd no longer be worried about anything but our own intellectual and artistic pursuits.
Ah, but then space would become a commodity. Damn.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Whatever happened, mini-spamming commentary everytime someone mentions IP is bad.
The point that I believe Jefferson is trying to make is that the value of Intelectual Property cannot be quantified in the same way as Physical Property is.
If I give my house to another person, I can no longer occupy that house, therefore it is within my rights to demand a payment, of the house's value to me.
When I write a song, and give it to another person, I stand to lose absolutely nothing. The song is still with me, except that now that person has the song also. Therefore it is only fair that I demand payment, of the song's value to them, and unfortunately, only they are able to say what that value is. More unfortunately, they themselves cannot determine the value of that song to themselves, without recieving it first.
That may sound a bit unfair, but consider the what road the alternative leads to.
The reason that the Major Labels (in the case of music) have been able to profit for so long despite these facts, is because of the lack of technology, that did not allow copies to be inexpensively made, of decent quality. But with new technologies emerging constantly, one can assume that one day, you will be able to record everything that one hears, as perfectly as it was heard the first time. What then?
Do you really want to allow Government (I'm sure that not only would they desire the job, but several individuals would scream for it to be done) to screen everything that you hear, to determine whether or not you have the right to hear it, or should be billed for it? And if you refuse to pay, will they be allowed to erase it? And do you really trust anyone other than yourself to determine what you can legitimately remember and what you can't?
I for one don't.
-Tommy
"I got a half gallon of Jack, and 2 dozen Ant Traps. I'm about to get wild." -me
That's why us tech-support people will always have work. No matter how smart you make computers, we'll always have stupid people using them. (or put another, more familliar way, no matter how idiot-proof you design it, some one else will design a better idiot).
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Remember how insane the movie companies went when VHS rental places became popular in the early '80s? "How will we sell tapes if people can just rent them?" Morons.
-jpowers
-jpowers
nitpickin'...just this part....
Of course people do not have to buy your song--but society may give you the exclusive right to profit: that is, society may give you the right to force other people not to sell your song,
up to here, I'm all for your statement, but this part...
or otherwise distribute that song in a manner which prevents you from profiting from it.
..is where I think you are off. (if I am interpreting your tone correctly) I don't think sharing or trading prevents the ability to profit. If you are granted exclusive permission to profit from something, how does a larger exposure and use of that something prevent your ability to profit from it? Especially if that something is a thing of beauty made to be appreciated.
--
+&x
Natives in america had abundant resources. Due to this, there was less conflict and inter community interaction - and, hence, less scientific and technical innovation. Communal systems only work under said and other conditions.
But yes, Ayn Rand can lick my cock and balls (for reasons unrelated to this conversation).
In a letter to Isaac McPherson, on August 13th, 1813, Thomas Jefferson writes:
...
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until wecopied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
...
In other words, if I write a song, and it is recorded, I no longer have control over the spread of said song, and my song must stand on it's own value. If people like my song, and they like it a lot, then those people have the choice to make payment to me, not necessarily for the song itself, but as an encouragement to produce more songs.
However, it would be arrogant of me to assume that anything is owed me. How can I charge a price for something that no longer costs me anything? And how do I determine a price to charge another man for something that holds no value to him until it is given to him, especially when it may be of no value?
This stands as well in the concept of Patents on Ideas vs. Inventions (The implementation of Ideas), which was the original subject of this letter.
That we are revisiting problems that existed 200 years ago, is proof that the man who holds no value in history is doomed to repeat it.
-Tommy
"I got a half gallon of Jack, and 2 dozen Ant Traps. I'm about to get wild." -me
Hmmm. So movies and music will be free in the future, countering recent history. Great.
But why just music? Doesn't the net simplify the distribution of all (artistic) media?
I've been holding out paying twenty-odd dollars for Gibson's latest novel, "All Tomorrow's Parties." (I'm a poor grad student, you see.) Perhaps I'll see if ol' Bill's latest and greatest is available out there gratis. Perhaps that'll wipe the smirk off his face.
With all this debate on whether weakening of IP is a Good Thing(TM), whether recordable music becoming free is a Good Thing(TM), whether musicans should perform their works for a living is a Good Thing(TM), I wonder why there isn't more discussion of what this means to software development. After all, most of us on slashdot work with software on one level or another
IMHO, the end of recordable music is as an extreme future as the end of commerical, mass-marketed software. I just don't see piracy killing off CDs; just as I don't see piracy killing off commerical software. But it seems that a good number of people (include Mr. Gibson) thinks that recordable music is becoming non-profitable. What keeps software from going that route? The software industry accounts for lost sales from piracy in prices it sets, and (more importantly), it actively goes after large piracy rings whenever possible. Seems okay to me; seems okay to a lot of people on slashdot; why isn't it okay for the music industry to do the same?
That point aside, what would happen if it became no longer profitable to sell commerical software? It seems to me few people (outside of the FSF) would argue that *all* software companies should start giving away software for free and start building custom software on a customer by customer basis. (I don't know what the FSF's stance on custom software systems are. I assume they're more concerned with mass-marketed software.) However, it seems a good number of people would like to see musicans stop selling mass-marketed recordings and stick to live preformances to eek out a living. I don't think neither the computer software industry nor the music industry would last long under these conditions; the cost vs. profit ratio is too high for custom products to support these mammount industries.
As a programmer, would I care if I worked on a commerical product or a custom one? No. As a musican, would I care if I made money through selling recordings of my music or playing live? No. (I would die of shock that someone would pay me to play for them and not to stop playing.) As someone would wants a career in computer programming, would I care that the number of jobs in the industry shrank because commerical software become unprofitable to make? Absolutely. And I bet musicans feel the same way about their industry. There's only so much code one can write and so many people able to pay for whole systems, and there's only so music one can play and venues that will pay to hear them.
George Lee
Myself and people I know are actually discovering different music and media online instead of what the mainstream spoonfeeds us. And we're willing to get our free sample and then go out and order the CD or movie. Their concerns seem to be primarily is that they can't figure out how to put us back in their marketing scheme.
What we are seeing right now could just be a global tape trading community. Surely there is a way to treat it as such without treading on too many legal toes. Either that or we're all just going to hell with everyone who has ever videotaped B5.:)
Your average indy label or low-moderate profile major label deal will net you something around $1-1.50 per CD. If you're so lucky as to have worldwide distribution, you will get about half that (.75 per) for overseas sales.
CD sales are not real music. Live music is real music. World tours and mega-bands live in the fantasy-land of mass-produced, mass-marketed, canned meat. Music is for people, not corporations. If a musician has to make a living playing bars in his hometown then so be it.
It is really sad watching all of this legal hair-splitting on Slashdot about stuff like the number of years before copyright needs to expire etc. This is what you need to know:
The major record and motion picture companies are in the business of hyping bland mass-market tripe. Life is short, it is in your interest to avoid and/or denigrate the mediocrity and crass garbage these swindlers try to pass off as art. Anyone who would stop making music or films if they were not making lots of money doing so should be encouraged to stop immediately by whatever means necessary. It is in the interests of your children that they be prevented from added more toxic crap to the human cultural system.
Educate yourself about independent film and music. Ignore or better yet actively work towards an end to Big Media. Respect yourself, dumb is not cool or funny. Your best weapon against exploitation is to mine and enhance your own intelligence.
Disconnect Big Media and reconnect with humanity.
Night
This article is just another example of the rest of the world only just now beginning to catch up. The internet and IP law have been clashing since the old BBS days (does anyone here remember BBSs?). Copyrighted material would be posted and proper credit given (which is the the core of IP)...however, no royalties or whatnot would be given. In other words..this is old news. Mp3s have been around for awhile and CD sales continue to rise. Movie piracy is a bit newer but watching a movie on your monitor and seeing one in the theatre are not comparable events. And as far as publication of copyrighted texts...that's older than I am. The point is, nothing is going to change due to piracy. And if anything did change it would be for the better. Muscicians are lazy and greedy these days, their performances sound like their albums. If pirates force them to learn how to give good concerts than I support the pirates all the way.
Creative writing courses. Take one. It'll open up your eyes if you think novelists are generally rich. Almost every decent creative writing course at a university is taught by a professional writer -- sometimes quite famous ones. Do you think they would put up with that crap if they didn't have to pay their bills that way? ;) ;)
<P><B>I</B> thought it was because famous/sucessful writers wanted to read hundreds of pages of sophomoric sprew.
<P>(I took a course with Joe Haldeman of "The Forever War" fame. Obviously, the course didn't take with me.)
George Lee
The law has a hell of a lot to do with semantics. You'd do well not to ignore them.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The article's title is misleading, what the author is really trying to discuss is the 'death' of the music and movie industries.
From what I read, they are saying that since many pirated CD's and movies are now available on the internet that this ease of transference will drop all moral barriers to the collection of 'stolen' property. This is the same argument that the movie industry made when the VCR came out.
I personally don't feel this is true, pirated software has *always* been readily available to well-informed computer users, but somehow, software manufacturers still manage to make healthy profits. This new medium will change the way 'recordable media' is distributed, paid for, and the end profiter. But it will not eliminate 'intellectual property' rights. Pirates have always existed in the music industry since tape decks came out, and the music industry is still there.
Why? Because if you can't make money at it, few people will do it.
As I said in a reply to another respondent to my comment -- of course it was outrageous. I MEANT it to be so. My point is that people, especially in wealthy nations like the G7(8?) are lulled into a stupor by the stability of their own commerce system. The process by which we accumulate stuff which we can buy and sell as property is very complex. What is the history behind the land that your house stands on (if you have one)? It wasn't ordained by God that that particular 50 feet of frontage in Orange County had your name on it. Every inch of property in North America was paid for by blood at some point in its history. Once the blood has been spilled, however, ownership disputes can be exceedingly polite and civilized. A few hundred years of civility and politeness makes you forget where your "property" originated. It was originally given to humankind by fate or God or the cosmos or whatever you want to call whatever put this here. For unknown reasons we decided that shedding blood was necessary in order to possess land. Not everyone shares our ideas about property or is willing to die to defend it.
So even physical, tangible property has oddities lurking in the shadows. But to extend this already stretched metaphor of ownership to encompass imagination and speech is not at all a simple matter. My point was that we ought to be cautious when we are considering adding to the already top-heavy notion of property. Making flatulent generalizations like "Property is what is mine" as the original poster did does not help the cause of discovering the Good Life.
It does - how did you know that? :)
Aim for the center of mass. Keep shooting until all movement ceases.
As someone who has fired more than just a few rounds through an AK, I prefer aiming a little lower - somewhere around the knees. Then you can rely on the recoil to take the next few rounds up and into the body.
Sheesh, in Africa we have these discussions all the time :)
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Sometimes this can work. If you are curious about a profession that demonstrates exactly what happens when technology passes you up, look at the history of typesetting. Try here for some detail on this.
I don't think this is a concern for most artists. After all, they sell singles on CD...
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I'm assuming the 90 years Gibson is referring to is the time between the beginning widespread use of the phonograph and the current day. (There were things like player pianos and music boxes for at many years before the phonograph, but they were expensive and/or limited.) So, really his 90 year window begins with the start of recorded music, and he's only saying that it's not going to be possible to make money off music soon.
.MP3 out on the web (_I_ can't seem to find anything!), people will just use the easy way and pay the cost (1$ a song sounds good). After all, the distribution costs will still be very small compared to shipping out CDs that in many cases will never sell.
I still find this dubious. It's quite easy to duplicate a book these days, but hardly anyone does it. It's easier to buy the book, because you get a nicer copy of the book than a photocopy provides you, and it's not prohibitively expensive.
What I'm hoping will happen is that the various companies will realise that if they provide a legal outlet that's cheap and easier to use than finding the
Of course, I still want the files in an open format I can keep and use on multiple devies, instead of some nasty limited proprietary format.
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
From Videodrome, I believe...
--
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
And yet...music companies CD sales are increasing.
I think what will be transitory is the idea that hackers and the net can overcome hardware restrictions enough to make a dent in corporate profits. The Asian companies that used to have a stake in pushing technologies such as VCRs through legal hurdles including appeals all the way to the US Supreme Court are now partially content providers.
They've stonewalled cheap DVD blanks, recorders for HDTV, etc. It's only begun.
So if I'm wealthy enough to not worry about the income or inherited wealth from IP because I'm wealthy from inherited wealth from ANY OTHER SOURCE then I should not expect any renumeration from said IP because it's really all for the common good and everyone would benefit from that IP anyhow.
Which however altruistic and abstract is somehow a strangely agrarian point of view eg. IP does not really exist and the only economic good that has any real value is REAL property like land, ships, slaves, factories, etc... Is not TJ's objection really more a matter of how you ascribe an agreed upon valuation to IP and avoid lawsuits, confusion, cheating, snake oil, scams, etc... Within the context of 1813 is this not really a fear of being paid simply to make promises??? A fear of the commercialization of science?
In this century though you don't have to make some physical good to produce something of value to someone else. In fact what is different now is that specifically your IP can produce value to someone else even where they themselves do not produce a physical good and only generate more IP.
The article talks a lot about actors, musicians, cultural icons becoming rich as a 20th century phenomenon, and it is completely right. This century, there has been this great boom of expectations to become rich by being an icon. Never before in history have people associated fast cars or the easy life with such people. In fact, I think we're foolish to make these people rich. Look at the salaries of movie stars, baseball players, rock musicians. They are all very high. You pay $11 to go see a mvie (at least where I live) which will gross in the hundreds of millions, but only cost in the tens of millions to make... if you think about it, they could spread the weath, and reduce the cost of your ticket.
Now what's been the point of that little rant? Not much, other than to say that most industries are lagging behind the times, especially cultural ones. In these times of the net, we expect things to be very cheap, if not free. These cultural icons have got to figure out how to get on the 'net to stay alive. Now, they might take a bit of a pay hit, but if that bothers them, well they can relax with the thought that I'm a starving student, while they make millions.
Now if industries don't figure out how to get online, they're going to go the way of the dodo. Darwinism is still applicable to modern society, just on a smaller time span. If you don't evolve, you're extinct.
Another problem we have in our society is the laws. Governements just can't seem to keep up with the 'net either. This is a problem because now we need to do a rewrite of entire sections of our lawbooks. Why? It's the same problem that we've had for years with software piracy: the laws aren't equipped to deal with the 'net.
Take the Sherman Act for example. It was barely able to deal with M$, and that's not even over yet. At least they had a tangible product. Can it deal with the next monopoly that's totally online? Can our other laws deal well with net problems such as hacking, fraud, etc? No. They can't. And this is going to be a serious problem in the next ten years as more and more of our world becomes hi-tech, and the rest doesn't.
This is the one and only train leaving for the high-tech world. You had better get on.
"Free beer tends to lead to free speech"
You are right. It is what the LAW says it is. No more no less. We need to look at what are we trying to gain with these laws. I say we need to stop looking at it as property. We should IMHO look at this subject as a right to make money from your work. It does not help us as a society to let people use your work at your lose and there gain. It is an unfair competitive practice. The ones doing all the work will go out of business and the others will lose their ability to use others work. So soon no more stuff made no more stuff to buy. This is what we are looking at protecting not some artificial concept of property. Look at it as a profit rights for fair competitive practices. People who want to twist the concept of Intellectual property would love to be able to control what you do with there interpretation of these LAWS even if what you do does not compete with them as a business. Mean while the original intent of such LAWS are being undermined by companies who use them to lock out competitors and hurt customers. Think of it as a right to profit from your work not property.
That's true, just like some like to learn to hurt themselves. J/K, you have a good point.
Sorry, I was not trying to belittle the time and effort that many creative musicians put into making there music, I was just trying to keep the discussion simple. However, my views are still the same.
As a studio musician, I know something of the costs it takes to produce an album, with or without any kind of backing. Cost of renting studio time (which for an album runs anywhere from $1000 to over a $1 million for a decent studio and enough time to record and work), instruments (which are damn pricey), audio equipment (musicians have their favorite mics, cables, adapters, effects pedals) and not to mention the media such as ADAT which is used at the studio to capture the music.
Do I have an explicit right to make money off of my investment and effort? No.
Do I have a right to prevent others from stealing my creation and profiting off of my investment and effort? Yes.
Yes, you do, unfortunately the simple fact is that the only reliable method that you have to do this, is to not release it at all. It may not seem right, it may not even be right (altough I think that further down the line, we as a society will see that the free sharing of information is best for society as a whole), but it is a fact.
The government has nothing to do with this issue - bringing it up is nothing but a red herring.
A little extreme? Maybe, but not quite a red herring. I was just trying to point out that government involvement on a VERY detailed level, is the only way to enforce your copyrights. And it is the level of this involvement that is detrimental to us all.
IP copyright issues are disturbingly similar to patents - if anyone can simply use and enjoy my work without any form of mandatory reinbursement that I can set, then my incentive for creating work is destroyed.
There was a time, long ago, when there were no copyright laws. Strangely though, we have some incredibly beutiful music, and famous musicians from those time periods. Bards like Shakespere, Classical Composers like Beethoven, Mozart, Rachmoninav, and because they were good they were hired by the rich to perfom and occasionally commisioned to compose new music for a living. Strangely enough, I do not believe that their motives were of a monetarial nature, and although their works were used and even "stolen" by other performers, they were not driven to living on the streets, because they were able to demand a higher price for their performances, being the original artists.
Musicians are caught between a rock and greed with internet distribution - on mp3.com, for instance, how many thousands of bands exist that haven't made more than $5 for every band that makes a decent living?
How many of them are good is more the question. How many of the bands on mp3.com deserve $5? And who decides whether they do or not?
The alternative to that is to become popular (which in 99% of cases takes a recording label's marketing power) and then watch as millions of people simply make a "loaned" copy from a friend and "forget" to pay for the music. And if you're popular without a nice, fat contract for recording and touring, then God help you, because until you do there really isn't any other source of income when free copies of your material is all over Napster and Gnutella except for local gigs (which pay for meals, and that's about it).
This is the part that you will probably disagree with, regardless of what I say, but I hope you will at least consider my words, harsh as they may be. Although it may not agree with you, popular music is popular for a reason. Yes, the Major Labels do play a part in that popularity, but for the most part, their popularity is based on the fact that they are good. Take the Major Labels out of the picture, and you will lose what Bias is left.
The voluntary "pay for download and support" system is completely bunk. Two reasons:
Think about how many times a day you listen to music and think, "Wow, this really touched me, I think I'll go look up the artist and give them financial support!" Heh. Just thinking about basic human nature makes me laugh at that thought.
The other reason? Why pay for something when you can get it for free? Let's take the example of mIRC, a program that's used by millions and has the same voluntary pay-for-support deal. For all the people that have downloaded it, the number of people that have actually paid is a tiny percentage. It's not like mIRC isn't a useful program - it's just basic human nature again. And unlike programmers, who could use mIRC to land a nice cushy corporate job, musicians are pretty much SOL in the "other jobs" department. They write and play music, and, well, uh, they write and play music. And do a lot of waiting tables on the side.
As far as people paying for the music because they like the artist, maybe the problem is more that there is no decent accepted method to pay those artist. $20 is too much, and of that very little is getting to the artist. If the cost is reasonable, people will pay it. Let's take WinAMP as an example (I realize it's not music, but that there are no good musical examples is part of the point I am making). WinAMP was distibuted as Freeware origianlly. Eventually, they began distributing it as Shareware, but fully functional. People had absolutely nothing to gain frm registering WinAMP. Nothing. I know this because I registered my copy, back when it was around version 2.04, and I got nothing for doing so, nor did I expect too, I just didn't want to see development of a product I liked cease to exist. A lot of other people did the same. Did the gang from Nullsoft go out of business or get driven to the streets? No. They're still pushing out software, and still distributing it freely, and still getting paid. BTW, if Mirc is doing so bad, why are there new releases of that still coming out as well?
Online distribution is not the end of the music industry as we know it - it is the end of the music profession as we know it. We're going to end up with 10-20 superpopular, hypermarketed acts that really have nothing to do with creative talent, and then there's going to be a sharp dropoff to the thousands of garage bands with the talent who don't have the capital to produce a great album, don't ever make the scene, and don't make a dime. The price of commercialization.
The price of commercialization is what we're paying now, and the 10-20 superpop bands you describe are the ones in heavy rotation on your radio now. With the dawn of free music, what you're more likely going to see, is an increase in the quality of music, and bands or individuals that rival the quality of classical music long gone, with modern sounds. No doubt bands like this exist now, and have conflicting morals with the likes of the Major Labels, and as such the Labels have no use for them. Instead, with the Labels out of the way, music will be come more spread by use of the internet, more popular by word of mouth, and musicians well paid for performances by the origianl artist, and commisioned to write music for what ever purposes. It will return to the way it was, but better.
But that's just my opinion.
-Tommy
"I got a half gallon of Jack, and 2 dozen Ant Traps. I'm about to get wild." -me
I would, in fact, have to pay the sheet music publisher. And I am happy to pay for artistic effort. What sticks in everyone's craw is paying for the PR, the marketing, the coke up the A&R girl's nose, the law suits, etc etc. My point was that if we were paying .$ instead of $$$ then there would be a lot less incentive to pirate. It is not a conceptual argument anymore - it is happening, just as the printing press made the circulation of writing much cheaper and broader.
Put the blame on meme
If we ignore IP laws, claiming that "information wants to be free", then why isn't it okay for people to use GPL'ed software in commercial applications? After all, it doesn't harm the original author if someone else makes a profit off of their work.
If people really believe that intellectual property isn't property at all, then it doesn't make sense to have any license for software -- whether it be GPL, BSD, Artistic, or EULA. The only thing that would make any sense would be releasing all software into the public domain. The best you could do is ask that people respect your wishes, even though they have no legal requirement to do so.
Corporate authors get 95 years. Individual authors don't get a set term (such as 120 years). Rather, their work is protected for the term of their life, plus 70 years. So in theory, the term could be over 120 years (if I write a book when I'm 25, and live to be 85, my book is protected for 130 years).
This amount of time is completely rediculous, and is only so large because of the large corporations which have a vested interest in keeping rights vested in their intellectual property. The most common theory for intellectual property rights is an incentive-based one. Whether a work will be protected for 70 years, or my life plus 70 years, really isn't going to change my decision to create or not.
Gotta love big business.
Most bands only get 25 - 35 per CD that is sold.
As often as this subject gets discussed under the mp3 banner, I can't believe people are still uninformed. Your average indy label or low-moderate profile major label deal will net you something around $1-1.50 per CD. If you're so lucky as to have worldwide distribution, you will get about half that (.75 per) for overseas sales. This is still a pathetic figure, but it fortunately does not get as ridiculously low as you claim.
With the exception of the handful of mega-bands like U2 & Pearl Jam, most bands make the bulk of their money from playing live
No, no, no. You obviously have no idea what you're talking about, so why are you talking? Here is the brief lowdown:
Small band that's popular enough to tour - The guarantee's, if any, are pitiful. The only way to come out ahead is if 1) You have friends in a lot of the stops you're touring at to sleep at 2) You're willing to live in a van packed with gear and 2-4 other sweaty humans who have infrequent access to shower facilities. Throw in any sort of duration or something a lot of areas have called "Winter", and #2 isn't an option in the first place. Throw in all incidentals (gas, food, laundry, whatever) and things are iffy. And of course unless you're willing to stop your lease and move (if you can) every time you attempt a tour, all rent+bills at the homestead are still coming in.
Bigger bands - The bigger the venue, the greater the cost. Lets consider
1) Tour bus + driver
2) Lighting + lighting crew
3) Zillion watt PA + sound crew
4) Misc roadies to carry stuff
5) Ticketmaster
6) Paying the venue
It gets better of course, as any large music venue will ask for 10-40% of the profits from any merchandise you sell there. The other gotcha with a grandiose tour such as this is that, unlike the bus days, you can't play (close to) every night. Setup/show/tear down is an all day event, and there's nowhere to play in Smallville, Colorado when going from Phoenix to Denver. Unfortunately your entire crew still expects to be paid regardless of the frequency your shows.
Touring is NOT a money making venture. Small bands come out ahead by merchadising along the way, and that (for any band I've been in or known) primarily CD sales.
Large bands do not expect to make money off performing live. This is while you'll VERY often find sizable tours coming out under the sponsorship of local radio or tv stations, or in the really big cases, under a megacorp like Pepsi or Sony. Big bands like this tour in hopes they'll expand their audience and sell more merchandise (and of course, hopefully they enjoy touring).
Summed up: Live performances do not net bands lots of money. There are rare exceptions (Say, the Grateful Dead), but by far and away the primary source of income for a band is CD sales, distantly followed by other merchadising.
The incredible ammounts of media hype surrounding the recent net boom and music piracy has been covered largely by a clique of elite mainstream reporters who never even MEET their sysadmin! I'm a musician/graphic artist, new to computers(read=20_years). Music is my life really so I've struggled to make whatever $ possible at it. Since that often means NO budget,DIY problem solving is the rule not the exception! I think we need more imagination than ever to forge new ways for artists to thrive and prosper. The 'ivory tower'business model doesnt seem to have much traction in the muddy climate of MP3 et al. The sysadmins who keep the inter/extra-networks running get paid handsomely for dealing with piles of STUFF-they provide a service for a designated fee. Better services and function are worth paying for still!
I think this is the article you asked my opinion on? If not, here is my opinion anyhow. Take it with a grain of salt, and let me apologize for the length of this post in advance.
I agree, except on the software part. Books, magazines, music, movie etc help people learn (besides entertain), and apply the ideas they learn as they like, without charges. I think of most software as a tool. I don't expect to be able to borrow it out of the library and keep a copy forever, the same way I don't expect to borrow a bulldozer and keep it forever.
The perception of Software as a tool is one that the Software Industry has been pushing for a very long time now. The truth is Knowledge in general is a tool. Software is just a different method of recording a set of instructions. The computer interpretting those instructions is the tool.
An odd example: If I wrote a flowchart to show the way that _I_ made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (I did this once as a kid!), and attempted to sue all the kids in the world who told their parents they wanted theirs made the same way(with potato chips in them!), everyone would agree that I was nuts. What if I had actually thought of this first (I admit I pirated the idea from the little girl next to me), and had actually patented it? You'd still think I was nuts, and anyone who wanted to put potato chips on their PB&J would continue to do so anyway.
Ok, fine, I lost that lawsuit. I'm gonna go sue the Producers of the movie that popularized my idea without giving me my royalties, and the authors of the 1000 or so cookbooks, that rudely took my flowchart and made recipes out of it.
Still think it's absurd? Yeah, because it is.
Even if I legitimately thought of the idea first.
Even if I was legitimately the first to do it.
Even if I had spent 100 hours of my own time, and bought 500 loaves of bread and 50 jars of PB&J, most people would think I was nuts to demand payment of them, just because they built their sandwiches the same way.
You could use similar logic to argue against letting people borrow books, magazines, etc, but I think there's a difference. Software, like MS Word doesn't help you learn. You don't really need MS Word. There's nothing you can do with MS Word that you can basically do without it.
But there is still a way to profit off of it, without directly selling it. If you (as a company) spend time to develop a product, then nobody is going to know that product better than you, and generally they are going to come to you for training and support for that product. Additionally, when that product doesn't do exactly what they want, but damn close, they're going to pay you money to figure out how to make that product do what they want. They may even pay you money to teach them how to make that product do what they want. Example: OpenNMS.
Another possibility is that you develop software that absolutely kick ass, everybody loves it, and you give it away for free, under a fully functional, but request (not demand) payment, "If you want to see it get better, send me money so I can keep making it". See WinAMP.
Or best of all, do it because it's what you love to do, and because you believe it should be done, and because you want to contribute to the world you live in. Package it with cool and unique but cheap stuff (Stickers), sell T-Shirts, and give recognition to the individuals or companies that support your efforts. I bought a copy of OpenBSD just to have a CD with a Pufferfish on it.
Books contain ideas that you can't expect to get on your own. I'm at a loss to explain it better. One way to look at is that books impart knowledge, and software and equipment are facilitators.
As I said computers are the tool, software just the instructions to make them work. If anybody should be funding software development, it's the computer manufacturers who are selling you a tool, and making you buy the manual from someone else.
It did actually used to be this way, I might add, before M$. Apple computers came with Apple's OSs on them(and still do). Mainframes with Unix. IBMs with IBM-DOS. However, once people started buying M$ to replace the installed OSs, the computer manufacturers eventually began selling computers without OSs. Do you think they removed the cost associated with the development of the software?
With those books, you can obtain the knowledge to build the software and equipment you think you need.
We as a society should be supporting the growth of that society, not reinventing the wheel, if it has already been done, the knowledge that you need to do it again should be freely available, I think that software falls into the category of this Knowledge. Building equipment, a physical undertaking is different.
Also, I think software in libraries is a good idea if the idea is for trial use, use the software until you return it. Pay for it afterwards.
Why pay for it afterwards? You haven't cost anybody any money by not paying for it. Instead, pay a company to better it, something they may not be able to do without the necessary funding.
Open Source is nice, but there's a lot of other nice software we wouldn't have because it takes too much time and skill to produce for free.
Free is relative. If computer manufacturers or corporations were paying to have it developed to begin with (for the purposes of their own profits), then it would already be paid for.
Copy machines in libraries is a good point though, and has significance to the software industry. Even though you can copy an entire book in the library, people still buy books. Though, sometimes it is just as expensive to photocopy a book, not to mention it's time consuming.
Indeed, I would buy a copy of an Operating System from the company that created it, if that cost was fair, and they were only profitting minorly from the cost of distribution.
Lasty, I should mention I'm a bit of a hypocrite because I use some pirated software. Almost all the software I use often (once a month or more), I buy, if it's not free that is. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, but, for instance, I don't want to pay $100+ bucks for MS Word, when I use it rarely to view and lightly edit a Word file someone sent me in an email. Also, I have no stolen software that I would buy to use if I wasn't able to steal it.
Excactly the point of this whole diatribe. Software is not priced fairly. Value is a relative thing, and one thing may have many different values to many different people. Perhaps if the software industry were to open it's eyes and see this, and build a more morally correct business model, then we wouldn't have the problems that we face now.
-Tommy
"I got a half gallon of Jack, and 2 dozen Ant Traps. I'm about to get wild." -me
First, let me say that I beleive IP laws are a good idea, but I do think that they have gotten out of hand in recent times. That being said, what about the songwriter? I don't think that the purpose of government is to guarantee that certain professions have value. If songwriters cannot make money without government protections, perhaps their vocation should die. Not all government entitlements are good.
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
I hate to contradict you, but I believe that newspaper sales are higher than ever... A supposed 'paradox' which is oft quoted in the press.
Libraries don't carry the national enquirer (hopefully).
Absolutely right, but whether it's a whole tape or per-song, it's the habit of having an archive that hooks them. Then later, ownership of the actual product becomes a badge of success, as well as (for me) a way to support the bands you like (most of mine aren't major label).
-jpowers
-jpowers
Since I really don't feel like a hour-and-a-half search of the campus library, I'll just make some unsubstanciated claims against the 18th century illiteracy.
a) since the acceptance of the guttenberg press making cheap bibles, the church has made a concerted effort to make sure the general populace could read at least the bible. Hence Sunday school.
b) literacy has always been underestimated in the past and even today, since almost all sampling is done of males, not females. Most knowledge storage and retrieval is through female social structures, and many cultures have previously seen "reed'n 'n rite'n" as actually a negative male social trait, leading them to say they can't do it, when they can.
c)and to quickly refute that books were not entertainment, please research copyright battles between the US and Britian between 1776-1875. Most books mentioned there are of entertainment value only.
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
The TRUE hero is the consumer, for without, stock wouldn't turn over, and no-one would be making any money.
Given that, if we got the economics fairy to wave a magic wand and make intellectual property and the associated income go *poof*, we'd find ourselves crippled economically.
Do we really want to go back to the old assumption that you have to own a factory to have any money?
And, before anyone starts complaining that "those rock stars don't need all that money," (or film stars, or Bill Gates, etc.), write down your salary on a piece of paper. Now imagine someone working at McDonald's finding out that you make that much (and some of you do!). I'm willing to bet that they think that you don't need all that money.
Don't get comfortable thinking that you have the right to decide who gets to make money, because the same thing can happen to you.
Ha. The economist provides the most reasoned, considered, researched and varied news I've ever read. I also like their dry sense of humour :)
Nobody has said it yet, but this article comes close.
The Music industry has made billions because we have allowed them to. We were willing to pay $15 for a CD, not even knowing if we liked the music therein, because there was no other option.
The RIAA can't put this cat back in the bag. More and more people know that there is an alternative. I suggest that even if they could control the all of the potential current and future electronic pirating technologies (which they won't), an educated populace who *knows* that there's another way will no longer pay $15 for that CD.
The music is ours, and the Music Industry control has been at our approval all along, in the absense of any other acceptable media.
'Course, it might take a few years.
:-)
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
A bit of a personal rant here...
I personally don't feel this is true, pirated software has *always* been readily available to well-informed computer users, but somehow, software manufacturers still manage to make healthy profits.
And yet Looking Glass Studios went out of business... I blame this entirely on two things. One, piracy; and two, those bastardly publishers who steal all your profits away!
*ahem*
Thank you.
"Free beer tends to lead to free speech"
For an example of this, look at the site that certain members of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Association are putting together, the Storytellers' Bowl. The idea is that pre-completed works will be published serially, each new installment coming out free for all to read, download, copy, pass around on Gnutella, etc. as soon as would-be readers have kicked in enough money. They'll be using the PayPal person-to-person payment system for contributions. It's being discussed now on an SFFnet newsgroup.
I personally think this is a keen idea, and I'm all afire to support it, especially since it's likely to result in more stuff from the Deed of Paksenarrion universe by Elizabeth Moon.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Whatever the law says it is, that's what. Concepts of intellectual property, based in patent and copyright law have been applied to music (and film) since it became recordable. Because of recordable music, a musician could be heard by millions, not thousands, and hence make more money, even though each listener may be paying less. This seems all good... People pay less for music, and musicians make more. HOWEVER, what happened was that each musician had to get his recorded music to the listeners; record companies were established to fill the void, and exerted control over the distribution channel. The "way" to make money for a musician now is to convince a record company to distribute you... This record company, incendentally, has an agenda which may not include you, no matter how good you are. The entire system, however, rests on the concept that it takes large capital to distribute the music; the internet removes the capital expenditure from music distribution AND... The Record Company is irrelevant. Unfortunately, they may be irrelevant, but they're still funded. And they have help. Musicians who are successful in the current system, (That's You Lars), have interest in maintaining it, don't think that they represent musicians at large. Most musicians are just trying to pay the bills, knowing they have almost no chance of being picked up by a big label. BTW, they do it anyway.
-- Rich
Free your mind and your Ass will follow -- George Clinton
There's one theme in the pro-industry spin that bears some thoughtful consideration -- do we really want to lose the 'lottery' system of creative expression. While it may seem that the recording industry rewards mediocrity like the Backdoor Boyz, isn't there an argument that a thousand other truly talented artists are motivated to express themselves in the hopes of a multimillion dollar "carat" on a stick? I know some people feel that art and commerce are best kept apart. Are we "nuking" the 'jackpot' music industry? Is this really a good thing?
Everything trust and good will? I wish. No, actually the whole purpose of property-law and contract-law is to _guarantee_ certain rights of property transfer -- namely the right to be remunerated for your services if such a contract is agreed to by both parties.
A strongly upheld set of property & contract laws combined with a stable financial system and currency are the foundations of any modern economy.
The US Consitution supports IP rights so long as it is the will of the public. I maintain that it still is the will of the public to keep IP around because intellectual works are governed by scarce skill and talent -- something regulated best through a free market. As long as you're going to do that, you need to guarantee that money is in the equation somewhere.
-Stu
Thanks for the reply, it gave me a lot to think about. One thing I am still not convinced about is all-free software. Perhaps most software could be free, but I think if we only had word processors to choose from that were made by a company as an internal solution and then released free, we might have only very specialized software or software that is hard for 'Mom & Pop' to use, or even people slightly more skilled. Which could boil down to computers not being as widely used as they are now, and the internet not growing as fast as it has. Maybe that's a good thing, but that's another debate, and I'm definately not the best person to argue any side of it. I lot of the work I do is eventually used by non-tech people (online finantial reports and online commerce), so you might expect I think it's a good thing that you don't have to be that smart to use a computer.
You would have a good point if making music, or any other creatively inspired work, were as easy as you make it sound. To quote:
When I write a song, and give it to another person, I stand to lose absolutely nothing. The song is still with me, except that now that person has the song also.
As a studio musician, I know something of the costs it takes to produce an album, with or without any kind of backing. Cost of renting studio time (which for an album runs anywhere from $1000 to over a $1 million for a decent studio and enough time to record and work), instruments (which are damn pricey), audio equipment (musicians have their favorite mics, cables, adapters, effects pedals) and not to mention the media such as ADAT which is used at the studio to capture the music.
Do I have an explicit right to make money off of my investment and effort? No.
Do I have a right to prevent others from stealing my creation and profiting off of my investment and effort? Yes.
The government has nothing to do with this issue - bringing it up is nothing but a red herring. IP copyright issues are disturbingly similar to patents - if anyone can simply use and enjoy my work without any form of mandatory reinbursement that I can set, then my incentive for creating work is destroyed. Musicians are caught between a rock and greed with internet distribution - on mp3.com, for instance, how many thousands of bands exist that haven't made more than $5 for every band that makes a decent living? The alternative to that is to become popular (which in 99% of cases takes a recording label's marketing power) and then watch as millions of people simply make a "loaned" copy from a friend and "forget" to pay for the music. And if you're popular without a nice, fat contract for recording and touring, then God help you, because until you do there really isn't any other source of income when free copies of your material is all over Napster and Gnutella except for local gigs (which pay for meals, and that's about it).
The voluntary "pay for download and support" system is completely bunk. Two reasons:
Think about how many times a day you listen to music and think, "Wow, this really touched me, I think I'll go look up the artist and give them financial support!" Heh. Just thinking about basic human nature makes me laugh at that thought.
The other reason? Why pay for something when you can get it for free? Let's take the example of mIRC, a program that's used by millions and has the same voluntary pay-for-support deal. For all the people that have downloaded it, the number of people that have actually paid is a tiny percentage. It's not like mIRC isn't a useful program - it's just basic human nature again. And unlike programmers, who could use mIRC to land a nice cushy corporate job, musicians are pretty much SOL in the "other jobs" department. They write and play music, and, well, uh, they write and play music. And do a lot of waiting tables on the side.
And then there's the "added functionality" variation, where you download the radio hits for free and the rest of the album for a price. Nice concept, if certain things like Napster didn't exist, where people can simply get a perfect copy of the rest of the album for free as well. And if someone suggests that Napster and other "freeware" programs like it will disappear once online distribution begins, well, don't make me laugh.
Online distribution is not the end of the music industry as we know it - it is the end of the music profession as we know it. We're going to end up with 10-20 superpopular, hypermarketed acts that really have nothing to do with creative talent, and then there's going to be a sharp dropoff to the thousands of garage bands with the talent who don't have the capital to produce a great album, don't ever make the scene, and don't make a dime. The price of commercialization.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Oops, I'm usually not this bad.. usually. Actually, I didn't think it was that clearly worded, most of the time I'm struggling not to digress and to organize my thoughts. Thanks though, and thanks for the constructive criticism.
Yes, most people are easily shepherded into paying for things they don't want anyway. So, it wouldn't be difficult, all it would take for the artists to get paid would be to appeal to the peoples stupid side: I.E. posting "Would you like to visit my sponsors?" underneath your ads generally generates more hits than simply posting the ads. Having the phrase "Secure Site" blink on a website, during an experiment convinced people that a site was 'secure' and they sent personal information. So, with a little knowledge of the psyche, and a little time, Napster, and the Artists could stand to make a large amount of money.
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I also, have appreciated your thoughts on this matter. It has given me much to think about as well. However, I am growing a bit fatigued with this subject, as it often feels like a lost cause, and as such this will be my final post on the matter under this aticle. Rest assured I will read any responses.
I will finish with this though. I am not saying it is wrong to profit from software, just that it needs to be done in a different way than Software Mon^H^H^HCorporations are doing today.
Since M$ is the worst case of this, and has been our example this far, let me ask you a question. Is a word processing package really worth more to you than the Operating System itself? M$ seems to think so. In many stores, It costs more to buy M$ Office 2000 (~$527.36) than it does to buy M$ Windows 2000 (~$276.97).
This is not reasonable, and is IMHO the actual reason that M$ products are so widely pirated, not the other way around as they claim(M$ says that their prices are driven high to recoup the cost of piracy, they charge the good guys for the actions of the bad).
Now assume they charged a reasonable price for MS Word. I think $20 is reasonable, others may not, but given the choice between buying a copy of software from the source, for a reasonable price, or getting a free copy, which I have no gaurantee will be virus free, fully functional, etc., I'll fork over the $20, but M$ better be ready to hold themselves responsible for any viruses, missing features that are advertised to be in the product, etc.
I realize, of course, that this may not be a reasonable business model, but I can't help but wonder if they wouldn't sell 30 times more copies (the amount necessary to come in around the same profit range) at a reasonable price than they do now, especially with the Market Share that they posess.
My closing point is this, there is _NO_ way to fully prevent piracy. If I can hear it on my computer, I can record it and play it back. If I can make it run even once on my computer, I can make it run a second time. If I can get it in a digital format, I can duplicate it. Why waste so much money chasing a ghost? Not to mention the cost to taxpayers to pursue these cases. It doesn't matter where one stands on IP, trying to enforce it is a waste of time and money, as well as a bane on progress, so find a different way to profit from the same Ideas. Maybe you won't profit as much, but does M$ really deserve that much money? Is a word processor more important to you than food? I haven't seen any billionaire farmers in the news lately, and even the laziest farmers work as hard and as long hours as most programmers proclaim to, just to be able to feed and house their families.
-Tommy
"I got a half gallon of Jack, and 2 dozen Ant Traps. I'm about to get wild." -me
Thanks, it's nice to hear that then :). I definitely will pay more attention to my spelling.
I really wish that the music industry would realize this and remember that every so often, it is time for a change in how to deal with the environment. What Blair Witch Project really told us is how to use the "power of the internet" to their easily publicized advantage for a tremendous profit... this can also be done with music! It's the idea of the compilation CDs that the underground major labels have been doing forever (such as Projekt or WaxTrax) .. I would say it's time to have compilation promo mp3 sites where bands can promo their upcoming CD. People will love to be the first on the block to get it when it comes out, that's the nature of vanity.
And that is the nature of the internet.
Gwendolyn R. Schmidt
Yep, I would pay $20 for MS Office. Commercial/Open Source would work well, if for instance Microsoft took a specialized, underfeatured Open Source word processor, and then added all it's bells and whistles to make it easier to use and more general for non-tech end users. That would lessen the work for a company like M$, and make that $20 a little more valuable.
I'm sure M$ would get blasted for taking an Open Source project and releasing their own closed source one. Then again, maybe not, IBM's Websphere is popular and I haven't seen them get criticized about it.
Lastly, it's nice to see people acknowledge how hard farmers work. I have some distant relatives who are farmers, and have visited them a few times when I was younger. I thought the tractors were cool and stuff, but even then I knew it was something I wouldn't or couldn't do. A lot of developers say they work long hours and try to impress you with tales of no food or sleep, but in my experience, most programmers fool around quite a bit I do too,to some degree, but I don't tout about how long or hard I've worked. In most enviornments, you can take long breaks, programmer friends of mine play foosball for an hour a day or more. Many many of them take days to get back to me on simple requests with no sense of urgency, like when I go to a client site, and they haven't setup a computer for me to work on, so they end up getting billed while I wait around for them to get to it. This will all change when the economy isn't as on fire as it is now, and companies will have to weed out these people.
copyright infringement is wrong. While you might want freedom to do what you want, so do the people who put copyrights on things. They want the freedom to do what they want with their ideas, and not have every john doe screwing around with it. There's more than one kind of liberty.... freedom to do what you want with other peoples things, and freedom to do what you want with your own. People generally forget about the second one on /.
Morality doesn't matter?.
The point of the is radical. The point is that morality doesn't matter. The article is not about whether it's right or wrong to copy information. The article states that it is possible so it will happen. There's nothing that can be done about it. Period.
until vinyl shops start handing out precious 12"s singles for free, i will not be convinced that there is no money to be made on recorded music...i think most would agree that mp3s will not be taking over the turntablist culture anytime soon!!
The outrageous claim I was referring to was that of the person who's post I was directly responding to, not your post.
I disagree with you however (your statement is very broad) as there _can_ be types of intangible property.
Copyrights (the rights - not the copyrighted material) is property; it can be used by the owner, it's use by others can be restricted (although there are many things it can't effect one way or the other, e.g. fair use), and it can be disposed of.
A story, on the other hand, doesn't qualify.
But yeah - property ultimately comes down to 'might makes right' and is not really a god-given right in the way that the unbridled freedom of speech includes the ability to copy and redistribute information freely.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Dyolf Knip
Dyolf Knip
I believe that the real issue here is not copyright, which is a fair and just concept, but the distribution of copyrighted material. At the moment, we pay far more for the distribution and packaging aspect of music, literature etc than we do for the actual content. Most artists get only a small percentage of the final selling price, and somehow we keep paying for books and music that are long out of copyright. Mozart, anyone? It's the publishers that make the money, not the artists.
So when the ability to charge for distribution goes away - what remains? An obvious way for copyrighted material to be distributed is over the web, where popular artists can sell adverts to make up for lost revenue. If the selling price is low enough, ie the current 10% that the artist gets instead of the $$ that we pay, then far less pirating will happen. And if the content is available globally instead of in controlled areas (DVD, anyone?) then there is also less incentive to pirate.
TV and radio have been making money from selling adverts for content for years, and it has so far been the way of the web. A little leakage from copying is probably inevitable, but if it serves to increase the popularity and recognition of the artist concerned, then that can only be an advantage. Remember the good ol' Grateful Dead - so much for home taping killing music.
IP is more about plagiarism than copying. If the artist retains copyright then ripping off tunes or copying words will still be actionable, but the distribution issue should just go away.
Put the blame on meme
pNot much depth to this article. What about the argument that its a cat and mouse game?
1->New technology for distributing IP property invented
2->new system to thwart IP theft invented
3->Goto 1
Problem is, people really like to see sky. You could have a multi-tiered living environment: ground zero would cost $1000/mo for a 2 bedroom floor 679 would cost $300,000,000/mo for a 2 bedroom.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Mozart died broke.
I truly wonder if, after having broken down the current reward structure for IP with our shiny toys, we can't come up with anything better than returning to a centuries old model. Did patronage give listeners more choices? I don't know.
And about the whole "Let them play live!" thing, that throwback to ancient times really doesn't work for modern day artists that use the studio as their instrument. The more raves you have to play to make ends meet, the fewer time you have to make new creations. And lord help people whose main talent is not performing in any way, but composing, mixing, or producing. "William Orbit will now play 'Strange Cargo IV' for you. Please turn off all mobile phones." Right.
We've got to do better than making art disposable and hope some rich guy picks up the trash. I am thinking that a connection between PayPal and Napster ("You have listened to this mp3 10 times. Click here to voluntarily pay 50 cents to the artist. Click here to add the original song to your custom mix CD for $1,-. Cancel and keep listening") might go a long way to making us honest again and keeping music afloat.
The artist would make more per disc (4.50 vs 1.00), if they would just realize the record companies have been screwing them for years. They should sign deals with Internet labels, and squeeze the greedy traditional labels out of the loop.
And since they'll control the file formats and have everything wrapped up in patents and copyrights, anyone outside the industry trying to encode their own content will be pretty much out of luck. So don't think you could even take refuge in garage bands and other Amateur content. You'll listen to what the industry tells you you'll listen to, and you'll like it! You won't have any other choice.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Expecting remuneration is not being "in it for the money".
Rich artists can be good artists. (The Beatles. Pink Floyd. Picasso. Andy Warhol.)
-Stu
See, I can be as obtuse and simple-minded about property as you.
I hope sooner or later artists like Metalicca and Dr. Dre will figure out that they can't prevent piracy. I searched Napster for "Dr. Dre" and got as many results as a few months ago. Those bans REALLY worked. Selling a custom mix on a CD-R is where the money is at these days. Then again the article states:
"People, including this techno-pirate who downloaded the film, will still go out to the theatre. People will still buy newspapers. They will still listen to commercial radio and television and still pay for CDs. "
Too bad, because I really wanted to see Lars on an episode of VH1's Where Are They Now digging in dumpster looking for something to eat.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.
How do we [Software Engineers] fight change like that? Do we have the ACM hire a bunch of lawyers to form the Software Engineer Association of America [SEAA] and sue the pants off of the creaters of this machine? Do we hire lobbyists to push laws that restrict it's use so the SEAA can go "cease and desist" crazy? You can, but not me. It would be like you're on the Titanic and throwing rocks at the iceberg because you're mad that it ruined your ship. No thanks, I'll be busy finding something that will keep me afloat until a new ship comes along, thank you very much.
While it's cool to see our subjects in a national daily, and Diane Francis is a well-known commentator, the newspaper is ... not quite real.
In fact, it's a personal project of Conrad Black, and its circulation is unimpressive. It's what we used to call "a rich man's folly", like a medieval watchtower on an unfortified manorhouse.
It will be in business for about another year, assuming that he can sell his other papers to keep himself solvent... in the meantime, it's a libertarian/reform newspaper without advertisements... or advertisers.
davecb@spamcop.net
let's take a historical perspective, they said the same thing about radio, cassette recorders, mini disc recorders, photo copiers, cd burners, vcrs and the internet in general. Guess what, people still publish books, people still by cds, people still go to the movies. Given that mp3s have lower sound quality that a cassette tape, I just can't see the begining of the end. If mp3s did not exist, the people who download them would not be running out and buyings cds, the would be recording the songs off the radio. Don't let the greed and paranoia of the publishing industry, (and that includes the software industry)destroy the freedom of information provided by the internet, IP is still, and will continue to be protected by Copyright. Though the publishing gravy train that was created by the cd revolution ($11.00 wholesale for a $.75 cd as opposed to a $4.00 wholesale for a $2.00 lp) may be finally reaching its end, the artist, (though some appear to be completely ignorant of this) will continue to profit from their work. In fact, the internet expands the viablity of self publishing, funneling a lot more of the profits to the artist, and a lot less to the money changers.
Copyright is dead. Get used to it.
According to http://www.heise.de/newsticke r/data/ame-12.06.00-000/ (in German), the EU Commission apparently decided not to fully implement the Berne Convention. In order to protect private and educational fair use, copying for oneself will be legal and circumvention won't be forbidden, either.
So DeCSS will be legal in Europa and everyone can download it from there. The (US) DMCA doesn't forbid the possession or use of "infringing devices", only their sale or publication.
Next time, look at the senate you elect 8-).
Computers. You can't live with them, you can't live without them.
If I was a moderator I'd have upped you.
I think the true sickness of the whole IP system today shows up best with the protection of works by authors long dead. Here is an example printed on the web at the bottom of some poems by Elizabeth Bishop, who passed away 21 years ago:
CAUTION: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws
and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer
the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
I love the all caps "caution", like the things going to combust or something.
...................
...................
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The idea behind IP protection is so a single author holds the rights to his music, storys, etc.
:)
Say I write a story. That is mine under copyright. If I give it away thats my right. If I publish it on Usenet that is my right. If I sell it to BlahBlah books that is my right. Having sold it BlahBlah books now owns my rights they arn't mine anymore. But I have the money in trade for that deal. Plus money from sales. A good deal.
Say I sell my music to BlahBlah records. Same issue. same story..
But.. fans of my writing do not turn to BlahBlah or usenet or where-ever.. they turn to ME...
Fans of my music turn to ME...
But thats becouse as part of the agreement my name is on the music/story/etc so my fans know where to go if I am good. (They also know who to avoid if I stink)
While book publishers won't "own" a writer the music industry wants to do just that.
"The artist formerly known as Prince"... The Prince name was not owned by the artist but by his recording company. By contract if he leaves them he leaves the name behind. I never liked "Prince" but what he did when he felt he needed to leave that recording studio was pritty cool in my opinion.
Steven King can pick and chouse his publishers. He can stay with one that treats him well or he can move on to someone who treats him better.. or move to one that treats him like a bitch but pays really really big bucks...
Totally his choice...
But the power of the IP is eroding.
Can the avrage Jo do a realistic prior art search? No...
But a larg company can BS it's way through one...
Thats why Amazon has one click patents and Jo shmo dosn't own the Tri-metric reverse phase encryption he dreammed up one night and why we have nither one click or Tri-metric encryption.
IP has it's uses... but for the most part it's being abused...
But IP law has a future....
I like the current application of IP law by commic strip websites...
Want to copy my strip? Shure... include my URL... want to use my carricters? Shure include my URL... Want to sell a book? Ok we talk contract and such...
Want to print t-shirts? Mugs? etc? Get my permition... Want to give away my work? Shure include my url...
Napster? Shure... include my URL....
Blast a strip all over the moon? Hack yeah.. include my URL....
See a theam here?
You like my music? Go buy my CD.. you don't want to buy my CD? Well then I guess you'll have to settle for whats on Napster... you'll miss out on 90% of my stuff and you'll miss out on the cool stuff... My comments to my fans... the lerics.. the fold out poster in the box...
Oh yeah and for those people who Napster my music.... INCLUDE MY URL....
Thank you
I don't actually exist.
Slashdot is not responsible for world idiocy. Oh no, ANOTHER story about linux! If you can't figure out anything new to say, you might take a moment to reflect why you continue talking. If you must respond to criticism anonymously, you might consider what's wrong with your ego.
If I remember correctly, the Copyright on works published today will expire 96 years after publication, for corporate works and works published under a pseudonym. It's 120 years for works published by an individual.
Of course, I wouldn't rely on copyrights expiring so soon -- copyright terms have been consistently retroactively extended several times over the past 30 years, and there's no sign of the trend stopping.
The net effect of this has been that no copyrighted works have passed into the public domain since World War I (unless the copyright holder allowed the work into the public domain themselves). Compare this with the original copyright term of ... uh, what was it ... 14 years?
When the institution of Copyright was created, you could reasonably expect contemporary writing and art to pass into the public domain within your lifetime. This allowed artists to draw on more or less contemporary work unhindered (all art is necessarily derivative). No longer.
One could argue that this is one reason for the current stagnation of the arts...
DNA just wants to be free...