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Helping Artists Online
Lost in the Napster and free music legal brawling is the original purpose of copyright. Congress originally enacted copyright protection not so that ideas and intellectual property could be owned forever and licensed by big companies. These laws were enacted so that authors and artists would have an incentive to produce new works and to encourage the free and rapid circulation of ideas and opinions.
Congress reasoned that if anybody could steal anybody's work at any time, authors would have no motive to keep writing books and other works. And since books and documents were cumbersome and expensive to produce, copyright laws were easy to police. They aren't easy to police anymore. The Net produces high qualities copies of almost any text, audio and video you'd like -- quickly and usually for free.
Today, the purpose of copyright laws seems to be earning even bigger profits for media conglomerates hiding behind the mantra of protecting artists. But 18th-century notions of copyright doesn't make sense in the year 2000. Nobody can argue that the sharing of music online necessarily deprives the music industry (or artists) of any incentive to create music. And the Net is the greatest medium yet for ensuring the rapid dissemination of ideas and opinions, a boon that should be protected, not shut down.
There is more music making more money in more forms -- generating $15 billion in profit in l999 -- than at any time in world history. In fact, culture in many forms, from music to movies to several varieties of publishing, is flourishing. It would be tragic to create a more restrictive environment around the Net before we even try and figure out how artists can get the protection and compensation they deserve. A study released last week by Jupiter, a Net commerce research firm, says that online music users are 45 per cent more likely than nonusers (http:www.nytimes.com, Thursday July 27, 2000) to have increased their total music purchases over the last six months. How, exactly, do artists benefit from reversing that trend?
The new purpose of copyright may be the reasonable protection of the rights of artists and other creative entities; namely to ensure that they be paid fairly for their work, although perhaps in new and different ways. (An equally important copyright trial concluded this week in Manhattan, where movie industry lawyers have filed suit challenging the online publication of DVD source code). Copyright laws also need to recognize that access to culture and music has become a tradition and right for tens of millions of people, mostly younger Americans who grew up using the Net, and who are now routinely branded "thieves" and "pirates" by corporate publicists and their close friends (corporations are the biggest contributors to political campaigns), congressional lawmakers. Music lovers also need some sort of fair-use protection, granted Americans offline but stripped by the DMCA (see below).
It's absurd to give giant conglomerates the right to speak for artists. Music companies are to artists what wolves are to sheep. If they could hire lobbyists, wolves would no doubt enact stringent legislation to to protect the rights of sheep to be controlled and devoured by them. That's more or less what the recording industry has sold to Congress.
In the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act, Congress made it a felony to write and sell software that circumvents copyright management schemes. In the judgment of Congress, regulating users would be nearly impossible, but regulating the code that users use would be a lot easier and more technically feasible. It simply isn't clear yet if they were right or not (if you're a college student losing or about to lose Napster, it might seem that they were.) The DMCA eliminates "fair use" provisions of law that would permit at least some sharing of music. Tracking software like that deployed by the recording industry against music fans in recent months makes no distinction between "fair" and reasonable use of content and theft.
The issue has been thrown out of whack, the law tilting sharply towards media conglomerates, in part because individual citizens and music fans have no lobbyists.
The question of artist's rights is complex and urgent. Many artists not under contract to large corporations can't get their work seen or published at all. Many artists who are under contract feel exploited by recording companies, who take a disproportionate share of profits, and who make enormous margins on conventional music sales. Millions of music lovers feel that they are overcharged and offered too few choices and controls about the music they want to hear.
The Net provides a marketplace of cultural exchange, benefiting new artists and to music lovers. It's not simply a matter of theft, but of creating an environment in which culture thrives. That needs to be legally and politically acknowledged. And many people in the music industry, though still a distinct minority, believe that the sharing of music online can generate enormous interest and revenue for artists, musicians -- and for record companies.
How can artists rights be protected on the Net? Maybe music-lovers could pay a flat fee to access music sites which share revenue with entertainment companies and artists. Perhaps artists can use the Net to begin selling their work directly to fans and the public. Maybe debit and other forms of transactional software can be used to charge small amounts of money for downloaded music, using some system that measures time or data. Maybe college students could pay a fraction of a cent for each song they downloaded on college sites, the overall volume generating a fair amount of revenue for artists and corporations.
How can artists be fairly compensated for the transmission of their work online? Until they can be, it's going to be difficult to get the free culture issue beyond the "you're-a-thief, no-I'm not" stage.
What we need to answer this question is an artist forum on the topic. How to answer freedom of information vs. copyrights is something the creators of art should help decide. A quote from Ani Difranco may help shed some light: "People used to make records As in a record of an event the event of people playing music in a room now everything is cross-marketing it's about sunglasses and shoes or guns and drugs you choose" --Song: Fuel. Album: Little Plastic Castles I personally feel that coorporate control of copyrights is generally hurtful to both consumers and artists. Yet many artists may feel differently, Nina Simone speaks very plainly of how she was hurt by the bootleg industry, which disseminated much of her music without her ever seeing a dime.(See her Autobiography: I Put a Spell on You). But the Grateful Dead openly encouraged bootlegging. This issue reaches far beyond music, it applies to all of the arts, and it is important that all artists speak out loudly and clearly regarding this issue. For myself, I am reluctant to post any of my own visual arts online, since I do not want them to be pirated, even for web page use. But then, if I knew that anyone using my images would either link back to my page or at least give me credit for the image, I would be less concerned, as long as no money was being made from my work, without being paid myself. Yet if someone took my images and made money off them, without ever telling me or paying me, I would be as furious as Nina Simone. Perhaps the answer lies in the difference of making money off someone else's work, without paying them, versus freely sharing someone else's work, giving the artist full credit in the process. I am against the first, and for the second, as an artist and as a consumer of art.
Recording and broadcast studios still use DAT a lot. It didn't "fail".
You're right, though. The music industry's whining and lobbying created a DAT tax which keeps the price of DAT machines too high for the average home user.
> The principle that the work you created belongs > to you and should be controlled by you is as
> timeless as it is global. For centuries, new
> inventions, from the printing press to the
> Internet, have threatened that principle. For
> centuries, advocates have resolutely defended
> it. The RIAA is just such an advocate today.
This is quite simply: PURE BULLSHIT.
You have quite a bit of gall ending an article in which you actually quote the intellectual property clause of the US Constitution, with such contradictory drivel.
The 'property' is merely a means to an end and is meant to enrich the population at large, not a few isolated interests.
Actually, one CD I ripped recently took maybe 2 hours. There was a bad scratch that I couldn't repair, and though you can hear the scratch in the mp3, it still hasn't skipped over that section of the song (you hear song and scratch intermingled).
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
doesn't matter if the destination of the rip is mp3 or cdrom, same thing really: you want the best possible quality rip. You must be ripping from good cds with a fairly good cdrom to be getting away with a 15 minute rip. I've had too many rips that needed help to trust anything faster than cdparanoia (dog slow, but it does a damn good job).
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
You know, I wonder if that's why we get so many Katz bashers? You recognize it, and are honest enough with yourself to say so out loud. I wonder if the others are getting off on the rush, but don't know why?
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
I wonder whether or not "business" is the correct term for these guys. the only other 500%+ margin "companies" I can come up with are mafia or drug lords.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The music racket has stuck it to artists and consumers alike for decades while reaping extortionary profits. They bought the law and the law won. Now they are whining about Napster and such. Is righteousness for sale? Sure seems that way.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Well, actually the framers were the Congress when the Copyright Act of 1790 was passed. But yes, later Congresses did start extending copyright in various ways, seemingly with little concern for the original intent.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Here here, except one thing. Labels actually pay for you to play their music in stores. This has been going on for years, you get deals on what you buy if you agree to a certain amount of "in-store" time for whatever artists the distrib is promoting that month. Otherwise, I agree whole heartedly.
"God is REAL
> I have a minidisk recorder, and it has the best of both worlds, plus it's more portable than either!
Not really - it just seems that way. Minidisk technology uses an inferior, lossy compression scheme to record data to the disk - DAT does not. For recording quality live digital audio DAT is clearly the best solution. Of course minidisk recorders are smaller which can be an advantage in some situations, but don't think that you are getting the same recording as you would with a DAT.
> Why would anyone go to a website and go through the trouble of registering and/or entering credit card information simply to buy a song for a $1 that they can download for free off Napster in a shorter time? Remember all it takes is 1 person to buy it for it to get on Napster
You use kick ass servers that are more reliable than Napster users flaky connections, and are guaranteed to have the song you want, rather than half a million copies of the same Britney track.
> Why would anyone use a client that charged money per download when a free alternative exists?
Because it's (potentially) 1000% more reliable than Napster / Gnutella / Scour?
> Every encryption scheme can be broken given time.
Which is why you don't bother encrypting.
Unfortunately Napster has now perpetuated the idea that music over the internet sounds like shit, and is missing the last three minutes.
> That means that all the distributed.net machines are going to have to work non-stop for a year to crack A SINGLE SONG. End of game.
...or, they can hack the code, and rip the unencrypted stream right out of the bleeding heart of the playback software.
1 Criminalize Napster
2 Guaranty that artists see no money per record company contracts
3 Guaranty corporate profits a-la monopoly regulation
4 Uninvent the Atomic bomb
Because until now, musicians have had no choice. The record labels had all channels of distribution completely locked up. Now, the technology is in place for both independent production and independent distribution of music. If this technology continues to mature, the record labels will die. If they can kill electronic distribution before it goes anywhere, they can continue to dictate their own terms because they will continue to control channels of distribution.
Do you think it might possibly be because the artits excptects to profit in some form from the services provided under thier contract with the label?
Like I said, they didn't have any choice. It boils down to this: we, the recording industry, control distribution and advertising; you either sign our contract, or you don't exist. Period. This is extortion.
Sure, the Recording industry makes lots of money off of its artits, but I doubt they make very much off of the struggling, poor artits they've signed. If the artist has no money, where does the labels cut come from?
If a musician doesn't bring home the bacon, they cease to exist as far as the record label is concerned. If you're not popular, they boot your butt out. They can't afford to keep "struggling, poor artists" on their roster.
The reason an artist signs a contract with such an evil entity is because that artist wishes to sucseed, and utlimitly make lots of money (because we are talking about america here).
Heh. Do you realize how much of the profits go to the musicians? Less than 1%. The record labels get over 50%. Everything else goes to middlemen.
Actually, only the record labels expect musicians to take a vow of poverty; that's why they shaft them with craftily written contracts.
Where musicians lose the most money is from restrictive contracts foisted on them by record labels.
Yes, they hire many lawyers to write contracts that screw the musicians. That's the way it works. The musicians lose all rights to their work, they lose all profits; and once they realize they've been screwed, the CEOs laugh in their faces.
The congress made these copyright laws to protect the monopoly of cooperations, not the rights of the artists.
Natureman
It amazes me that a system hasn't been put into place that solves a majority of the copyright, digital "stealing" problems that have cropped up in the last while. If I had more experience (and influence) in the area I would do the following:
Make all ideas, works of art, scientific papers, etc freely available over the 'Net. Perhaps a company run database, or even a government run idea warehouse.
Mark or somehow identify all content with digital signatures.
Implement a convenient, simple digital transaction system that allows micro, small or large payments.
Let the people decide who gets paid. Yes, this is not how things work right now and it would take some time before it really got into societies "unwritten rules". However there is precedent - people give to charities all the time, and we don't think twice about tipping at a restaurant. In fact to encourage people spending money on artists (and scientists) they could be given tax breaks (like charitable donations).
As for record companies - keep em, but change their role. They are very useful - as promoters. In this new system they would be hired as promoters. Artists could spend however much money they want promoting themselves (by hiring the record companies). People like to own things (go consumer society!) and will gladly pay money for tangibles (provided by the old record companies).
This system puts the consumer in charge of the artist, whose in charge of the record companies. This is how it should be.
Seems simple to me.
Complexity Happens
But DAT was and is inferior for consumers compared to CD's. It's got a shorter lifespan, is linear (you'd have to fastforward and rewind, rather than just hit skip, and forget about random playing), and is more subject to things like heat and humidity. Just for a very SLIGHT increase in quality. The tapes are more expensive to produce than CD's as well.
DAT belongs in the recording studio, where quality counts a lot more for mastering, but only a very small percentage of consumers would have actually wanted it... and those people are better served by vinyl than they ever would have been by DAT's.
Yes, the recording industry destroyed any potential for DAT's, but even if they hadn't stepped in, it would have been a doomed format since it would have had to compete against the much for "user-friendly" CD's.
Opinions are like assholes. Everyone's got one and they all stink.
Yep. And nobody seems to be able to live without their asshole either.
If people didn't have opinions to "frame their reality" for them, it's like they'd dissapear into some "void of unknowing" or something. Imagine all those people at the donut counter... petrified, rooted to the spot... unable to choose their "favourite" ... not knowing what to do ... ahhhg --- the horror of it!!!
I find that in Mr. Katz's article there are several points where it would be helpful to consider the concept of "fairness" in a broader perspective than simply in relation to the prices charged by recording companies, for example.
When I first heard the saying, "Information wants to be free," applied to the music copyright debate, I thought it was pointless. Music is entertainment, not information, one would at least first think. But, it came to me when thinking of the value of music as art that perhaps we should not be so quick to write off the consideration of music as information.
When we consider the natural right of free expression to be applied to the arts and humanities, frequently we come to the conclusion that having free expression is integral to a thriving artistic culture. But in guaranteeing free expression, for example, to musicians, is society being treated fairly by then having to pay simply to be exposed to the products of free expression?
I like to consider myself a big supporter of free speech/free expression/etc., but I also have a distaste for some of the "popular culture" (what I would call crap) that is being produced by the entertainment industry. However, as was seen in the previous crusades against explicit lyrics in music, for example in the ones led by Tipper Gore, the most that has been achieved by "concerned parents" organizations, for instance, has been the label of "explicit" lyrics now attached to many albums. The music industry continues to use the argument of free expression to allow it to produce sensational products, including rap by such "artists" as Eminem and Dr. Dre (just examples, since the "Up in Smoke" tour just rolled through my area).
But why, I should ask, should we as a society guarantee these musicians completely free expression? Are they truly artists?
The recent MP3 debate sheds some light on this question since copyrights, one can see, have had the effect at least in the music industry of turning music, the art, into music, the product. By demanding complete control of their works, "artists" like Lars Ulrich restrict the products of the free expression rights that society has vowed to protect. But in this control and subsequent requirement of payment, these "artists" limit the people that can be exposed to their works to only those socio-economic classes that can afford such exposure.
Thus, the lower socio-economic classes, who are very much a part of society, are not treated fairly by artists for whom those classes have guaranteed free expression rights. Also, those classes then cannot try to attempt any control of the content of those music products because of the right of free expression that has been granted to musicians.
The conclusion that I think arises from realizing that art is information (and therefore music as a form of art is information) is that if the current copyright system is to persist, then everyone must be guaranteed the ability to access the works of the artist in some way (hence, services like Napster, Gnutella, etc.) if the musicians are to be guaranteed the right to free expression.
Otherwise, if musicians like Lars Ulrich want to have "complete" control of their works, then they should have to answer to "concerned parents" organizations concerning the content of their music, being that their music is a product and not the art protected by free expression. That we restrict pornography from minors, for example, shows how things that are products can have their content controlled by organizations like those of "concerned parents."
I do not wish that musicians be controlled by parental organizations, but in the sense of fairness, I think that businesses should have to live up to standards of propriety. If music is to be a business, then let it be controlled. Art is not responsible for the downfall of society, but sensational popular culture products made sensational to make more money do not help artistic culture to survive and grow.
www.DigitalRenegades.org -- Good comments or editorials getting unfortunately buried? Submit them to get them published on the web for all to see.
What?
Finally, I have to take exception to your comment about distributions giving lip service to "giving back to the community." Recording artists enter into deals with record companies because they think that they will make money off of it. No one gets into writing free software for the purpose of making money off the deal - those who do deserve what they get (with the notable exception of services like SourceXchange). The way in which distrubtions usually give back to the community is in funding development in areas where Linux is lacking, and by encouraging employees to continue to devleop for the platform.
So, in short, don't look your gift-culture in the mouth. Beyond the utterly superficial, I don't see any similarity between record companies and Linux distros.
> Nobody can argue that the sharing of music
> online necessarily deprives the music industry
> (or artists) of any incentive to create music.
Isn't that exactly what they're arguing?
I create a song. People on the Net then take that song, not compensating me at all, and distribute and do whatever they want with it.
I have no incentive to release another song which I won't control.
Katz's proto-ideas about some sort of slush fund for artists doesn't take into account an artist's individuality: I don't want a predetermined fraction of all the profits, I want my profits from my songs.
When Katz realizes that the individual of the creators must be respected more than any rights of consumers, he'll start getting the picture.
Why? Because they create.
While Ayn Rand may be a bit over the top, the kind of things she warns against are exactly the kinds of things Katz is describing: appropriating one person's work for the good of the "community."
She called them looters. How's that for a better term than "thieves," eh?
But I didn't see anything from Katz suggesting that there was any collusion between record labels. But who is getting less than 10%? The super mega stars are getting more than that because they are established hitmakers who can get a contract anywhere. It would seem to me that the labels would be actively competing for upcoming talent that they can get for 10% or less so if/when they hit HUGE the labels get most of that money. Signing Metallica/Elton John/N'Sync would return less of a percentage to record companies b/c of labels offering sweeter deals to these bands to sign. Until there is any proof of anti-trust violations/collusion then I have to believe that the amount labels pay is market value.
But frankly I don't hear that many musicians complaining about their small cut, but it is a point of view I would be much more ready to embrace than that of people who think that they have a right to pirate music.
And not that I am saying that they don't deserve more
It took you that long to make the point: "music companies are attempting to protect their 'exorbitant' corporate profits and that's just wrong!"
Firstly, you calling it 'exorbidant' proves that you obviously don't understand the capitalistic society that has given you the ability to write books and articles for a living. They charge what they can get people to pay for music and accusing them of making 'too much' profit is one person's judgement call which is worthless. If everyone was as upset at high prices then they would organize a boycott of the RIAA just as they are for the shutdown of Napster. And don't tell me that they are using Napster as a form of boycott against buying music...you just said that half of Napster users are more likely to buy music didn't you?
Just write an article next time saying what you really mean: Music companies make too much money, and everyone should be able to pirate the music they want because music costs too much.
And I am still waiting for the free, web version of your new book...you know, the version I don't have to pay 15 dollars for b/c let's face it, that is just too much!
He didn't mention the work "geek" once. I think it's an imposter...
Many people, including Jon here, have used the argument that since CD sales have been on the rise over the last severl years, there is no evidence for damage done by mp3-swapping.
Note however, that there are a myriad of causes for this growth (including the overall growth in the economy), and simply looking at net sales will not disentangle the causes. The question is not whether CD sales have increased, but what is the net effect of mp3-swapping on this growth? The answer is not obvious, since broadband net access is still only enjoyed by a minority, and so the effect of mp3-swapping is still insignificant in comparison to total sales. However, as more and more home users get broadband access, we can expect this effect to become very significant.
My own opinion is that the current effect of mp3-swapping is small and negative, but we can expect it to grow to enormous proportions in ten years or less, as the recording industry continues to fight a losing war.
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
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I have just been wondering what happens when this convergence becomes total - when all large recording companies are co-owned with music hardware companies. What happens when a new digital media format is specifically designed by its manufacturers' consortium to force users to adhere to excessively restrictive use limitations?
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You shouldn't wonder. You only need to look at SCMS (Serial copy management system, as it appears on consumer minidisc/cd/dat machines), and SDMI to find out.
My advice would be that you get the necessary hardware to bypass SCMS (it's quite easy), and don't purchase SDMI "compliant" hardware. You'll be a lot happier.
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;) and you, and everyone else reading this...
Then, while the Recording Industry was attempting to sell special CD recorders that would only take $13.95 audio blanks, the Computer Industry was coming out with CDR drives that used 99 cent blanks.
Guess who won.
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I did.
It's worth noting that there are solutions to the same (SCMS, et al) problems with other media, also.
First off, there are audio-capable DAT drives, and perfectly audio-capable DAT cartriges, also, which are sold as data equipment. That's an option for DAT.
(I don't believe the data carts have the RIAA tax.)
Next, any "professional" model DAT or minidisc (or CD, if such a thing exists) recorder will at least be able to switch SCMS off.
Lastly, you can get SCMS filters for consumer equipment. Some boxes that are designed to do digital signal conversion, S/PDIF-to-Optical, for instance, will also incidentally have an SCMS on/off switch.
Unfortunately it's a little more expensive to bypass this, but it's well worth it, if only for the principals.
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;)
So a famous artist that distributes his work free via mp3s and trade that fame for money. Selling his/her work is completely unnecessary. Once they are famous they do personal appearances, sponsor products whatever they can think of, to simply trade that fame for Money, Sex or Power. I'm taking a step back here and wondering why the artist needs to be paid upfront. Good art will generate fame.
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Let me answer by quoting your last statement.
"Good art will generate fame."
It follows, then, that "art" which is not good -- or is only nominally "art," will not generate fame.
In simple terms, most "artists" suck. They want paid upfront so that you can't tell how bad it's going to be before you buy it.
At least -- that's one theory.
and this piece is especially amusing:
Maybe debit and other forms of transactional software can be used to charge small amounts of money for downloaded music, using some system that measures time or data.
Haha! The "small amount" is what makes me laughing. That is typical. Again he is declaring some kind of freedom at someone else's cost. Musicians pay the same rents, the same price for a car and the same price for a lunch. So why should they get "small amounts" of money? Jon Katz, you are again and again declaring music worthless.
And yes, it is pretty tough to deal with the major labels, but there have always been a lot of indie labels. And you know what? They charge more or less the same money for a CD! Because otherwise they loose money.
I have been talking to so many of them, since we are setting up an mod service for indie music. And you know what? 99% of them demand some kind of copy protection for their music on the net. Because they need to get money for the music. Why should they get paid worse than Jon Katz? May be musicians have to be protected from the major labels. But indie labels have to be protected from people like Jon Katz.
Tut, tut. Go back to Troll School and do the Subtlety module this time :-)
Well, like all monopolies, the music cartel is itself a limiter of opportunities. I don't see how much more moral business is when it uses its political power to stifle and kill upstarts (in a generic sense, refering to the insider deals and mutual back-scratching that goes on in business), or the way it buys off the government in order legistate their power (Sonny Bonehead copyright extension, much of DMCA, tariffs on recording media, etc).
Nobody can argue that the sharing of music online necessarily deprives the music industry (or artists) of any incentive to create music.
;-).
That is bullshit. Regardless of how evil the big record companies are, the ability to copy music online is most certainly a disincentive to create music. Sure, you can tell the record companies to go screw themselves, and publish your work to a worldwide audience, but what good is if you can't make money because all the kiddies put your stuff on Napster (or Gnutella, or Freenet, etc)? Oh wow, you can play live shows. Great, you're either forever a local band, or you go on tour, and be forever exausted with the short musical career that implies.
I swear, if I gave enough damn, I'd transcribe everything Katz has ever published and put it on Napster, let's see how he likes it. Of course, no one would probably read it, and no one buys it anyways, so guess not much would change.
What we needs is something like SDMI or those ebook schemes, but really cheap and uncontrolled by the record/publishing companies. Where everyone from Eric Clapton to the average guitar geek can publish their music on the net and set the price to whatever they feel will maximize their profit (which of course be a small fraction of a penny for the average guitair geek
Why would anyone use a client that charged money per download when a free alternative exists?
You said it yourself.
Guess how many of today's artists would exist if there was no way to get a return of their investment of time and talent in their music?
People realize this and precisely for this reason people would be willing to pay for mp3s (assuming the price is right) to support their favorite artists. I know that I generally try not to pirate. I want to patronize artists and companies that provide me with something I enjoy or find useful. I would be more than happy to pay for my mp3s but currently there isn't a way to buy a single song like that so I end up pirating them off napster until I realize I've download a significant portion of an album to warrent going out and buything the CD.
Yes there would still be piracy, but take the case of computer software. It is easy to pirate software and many people do but you dont see Microsoft, Adobe, ID, etc going out of buisness or sueing the world. Enough people still pay for the product to keep them in business. Essentially the record industry is creating their own problem because they haven't given people like me a alternative method of napster-like transactions where I can pay.
The solution to this hypothetical problem is quite simple:
If you're an artist recording music, don't record on these formats and don't sign contracts with music companies that use them.
If you're a consumer of music, don't buy music on these formats.
If you think Company X is a predatory monopoly, preventing other companies and artists from getting into the business, call your state Attorney General or write your congressman. You can even sue, class-action or otherwise.
Note that note of these solutions involve distributing copyrighted music outside the bounds of fair use.
~TomW
Strange, the target="new" doesn't parse right...
Oh well, here's the link
Laissez-faire!
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There is no try at jedinite.com
Actually $1 per song is pretty expensive...
emusic.com charges this but... then it's like $8.99 or less for whole cd and they offer their unlimited service too.
i recently started using them for my conscience and with the availability of Napster in question. Usually I only downloaded stuff from napster by bands that I usually buy cds from or regulrly go to shows.
being a musician also i really want to supportthe artsts, not necesarily the record company bigwigs... I'm sure they deserve a cut for some of the things that they do but not nearly as much as they get.
Most disks I buy are 17-22 songs per disc. That's 17-20 bucks. Usually these cds can be had for the $12-$14 dollar area. I think a lower price for zero manufacturing costs and lower sound quality... maybe
The rant was informative, but it was stolen from someone else.
;^) and her music is...um...not my style. I've tried without much success to get more familiar with it, but only out of distilled greed -- ask anyone who knows me.
...
Interesting, I had not heard that. Do you (anyone?) know who the original non-famous author was? I'd be interested in a link, if anybody has one.
Indeed, I don't worship her -- Jim Ray worships gold!, everyone knows that
What first caught my attention about Courtney Love was not her rant or her music, it was her performance as Althea Flint in the movie about Larry Flint, which I saw by accident.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
...Once artists become well known, it may be that they can bypass the major media outlets and go to their audiences directly. If so, the marketplace will sort all of this out without the need for government involvement. That would be the more desireable path ...
Of course, Stephen King practically defines well-known, yet he is using Amazon (my personal boycott precludes any link to them until they get a clue about how to get themselves out of the red) and Mr. King probably isn't even AWARE of the fact that -- thanks to my customers in the Netherlands -- he's going to his audience directly. Unwittingly, he's allowing the marketplace to sort all of this out without the need for government involvement, which I agree is a far more desireable path.
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
Nobody using the e-gold system even has dollar-one. e-gold is GRAMS, not dollars, and if you want to get rid of e-gold and buy coins, you can go to a coin dealer, like the one at the top of our news section, (or me). I repeatedly offer 1/10th oz gold Eagles, silver dimes, etc. to those who rant about this (anonymously, or otherwise) for e-metal, to 0 effect. /.)
JMR
(Who wonders why he even responded, it's not like I *want* ignorant customers, even from
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
Easy. If the middleman is costing too much, cut the middleman out of the picture and take 100% of the compensation for your work yourself, instead of less than 10%. Think you're too small? Accounts are FREE.
She has already done the math, so I wish that Courtney Love would contact me. *sigh* We could help eachother a lot, IMO, and I liked her recent rant. Oh well.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
Correct me if i'm wrong but didn't a survey recently reveal that well over half of Napster users would gladly pay a monthly flat-rate fee for the service?
jh
"Education is the perpetual realisation of our ignorance"
Ok i know this method probably sounds like a pile of shit, as I thought it was when I first heard it! But it works!
;)
[1] Get yourself a soft, old toothbrush
[2] Take your scratched cd
[3] Get some toothpaste (i wouldn't use any freaky flavour - just stick to minty freshness)
[4] Using the toothbrush, rub toothpaste all over your cd
[5] Wash the cd (hey some people might not realise)
[6] Stick it in your CD player and forget those scratches!
Have fun
jh
"Education is the perpetual realisation of our ignorance"
Actually, it's been mentioned many times, and even in quotes from the RIAA that it's not illegal to share this stuff on a one to one basis for personal use. Now, granted, they were using this to argue something bigger and badder against ___fill in the blank____ but, it was mentioned non-the-less. This is confusing to me too... however, this proves that the copyright laws are confusing, lacking, and written for other instances besides what is going on.
Have you ever seen web sites that say "You can't download anything on here". Or, "You must delete these songs after 24 hours". These are loopholes that even the RIAA recognize. Downloading Metallica songs off of Napster is 100% legal, providing Metallica songs for others through Napster --- was maybe illegal, we're not sure yet. Being Napster, and providing these people to provide Metallica songs... well now we have one entity to sue. And they haven't won or lost yet either.
When a person starts to make MONEY off of copyrighted material.. that's when the hammer comes down. Napster's whole system is designed to profit from racketeering. It's no wonder they're in court.
MP3.com provided a means for people who owned their music to listen to it anywhere they had internet access. They got sued!
You keep on arguing until you're blue in the face, that my MP3 collection is illegal, and I'm making artists, that I'd never buy from anyway, starve to death.
Please keep in mind, that we're talking about a possible copyright infringment. Not theft. They are 2 completely different things. And not only that, but the law is being reviewed and rewritten now for copyrights. So you might as well wait see what the law actually SAYS before you start pointing fingers.
And while you're praising your holy self, the RIAA will be one step closer to their original goal: Charging us EACH time we hear a song. Even if we bought the CD. They'd cream their jeans the day they come up with a DIVX solution, where we get charged pennies each time we hear a song.
On a different note, I'd LOVE to put up digital copies of Katz' books on the internet for everyone to download. If we could set up a system so that within a few hours of release, we could provide the book.... I'd love to see what Katz would do. He'd probably 2-face it just like Napster did.
Rader
But there is large a postal committe in the government that "looks" over the actions of the Postal Services, etc, and they are indeed tax-funded, much like any government committee. There are also government facilities run by tax-payers money like printing presses, etc, and these services are used by the Postal Office, at "preferred-discount" rates.
Rader
However, this never kept me from getting the albums I really wanted. Some as low as $3.99. One of the niches that emusic.com had for me was that they carried genres I liked, but were hard to find elsewhere. Napster, newsgroups, and even the record store. If you enjoy Punk, Post-Punk, Gothic, Industrial, and other non-top-40 genres, this is a great place to go.
Cleopatra Records is one of the largest Indie Labels in the world, and their selection is well represented on eMusic.com. I remember looking through Goth mags about 7 years ago, and my only link to gothic music was buying a few Cleopatra Compilations, since I didn't know exactly what I liked at the time (and thanks to the Big-5, they could give a rat's ass in informing me what I'd like through radio or advertisement). Maybe if I lived in a bigger city, I would have had more similar-minded friends and been exposed to the subculture more.
I hope eMusic's new subscription rate works out well. I'm testing it out with a 3-month subscription at $14.99 a month. (They charge monthly, not one big lump). So far so good. Now a person can REALLY test out new bands.
Maybe this is a bad analogy... but I consider the selection from emusic to be inbetween Mp3.com and Napster. I think mp3.com was a good idea at one time (and I still wish them luck) but it's full of unsigned artists (and for good reason). I would check out their Top-20 list in the genres I liked, and I didn't even like their "#1" band. The first band that got me hooked to mp3.com was Trance Control. I liked them so much I bought their DAM Cd within 60 seconds. However, since that time, I've only found a few bands I considered even above average. (your mileage may vary) At least emusic has a large selection of signed artists (just maybe signed with smaller labels) with a higher ratio of quality bands.
If you've never heard of "They Might Be Giants", "Violent Femmes", "The Jesus Lizard", "NOFX", "Bad Religion" ... to name a few, then this post probably didn't mean much to you.
Rader
But I just wanted to puke when I read some response posts that were practically worshipping her (not you) for her "brilliance" and "courage". Bah! She's about as smart as her music is (heheh)
Rader
I think the wording is obsolete. I believe that if "Fair Use" was rewritten today, and the Big5 didn't lobby too much of their money on the right day, we'd have a similar reading saying that I can make CD copies for myself.
You still see those warnings at the beginning of video movies? Saying you can't sell copies of this movie, you can't show hundreds of people at a time this movie, and charge them, etc, etc. THAT is what the law should be about for music... You can't sell copies of this CD, you can't put on a concert with this CD and charge people (i don't know, maybe you have huge speakers)
Look at restaurants, clubs, etc. They pay big bucks to get a sticker in their window, allowing them to play music for their patron's delight. Jukebox at a bar??? I don't even want to know the paperwork that is involved in that.
You last analogy... Let's say I was the one who invented the paper umbrella that goes in drinks. (Remember Tom Cruise's Cocktail movie?) So I make millions of dollars because all the bars that serve girlie-mon drinks want to put a cool umbrella in them, and they have to buy by the box, and that means someone that was licensed to make them gets to sell it to them. That is how I make my millions.
I'm not going to get upset that a bunch of college frat guys don't like paying stupid money for a stupid umbrella, and so they make their own, wowing the sorority girls, and getting lucky with them. I also could care less that Delta Tau Delta makes umbrella really well, so they give them away to other fraternities on campus during Rush week or something.
Those numbers are so small. It's legitimate businesses buying huge amounts that count. If you're in a business making money, then you need to follow the rules. If you're a working stiff, and save money by building your own porch, or changing your own oil, or ripping mp3's, good for you. Menards won't go out of business, Jiffy Lube won't go out of business, and by god Eminem won't go out of business. (And if he does, it'll be because the Big5 fucked him) His album hit Napster atleast a month before it came out. And he still breaks a world record.
Rader
What does this mean? Basically, if the uptake of the net as a tool for artists takes off over the next couple of years, it will become next to impossible for the conglomerates to stop.
Unfortunately the RIAA is smokescreening the world with all the lawsuits. Not to actually stop piracy, digital distribution, and alternatives, but to bide some time so that they can come out with their own solution. The ONLY solution.
I don't know why they can't be happy with $15 billion a year, and more next year... but they want ALL of it. They don't want anyone else making money off of them. You could tell them that they could double their profits next year, but Bubba.com would also make a couple million. Sue!
Sorry to bring up analogies of stuff I know about: newspapers.... but the United States Post Office reminds me of the RIAA. Did you know that the only legal purpose of the Post Office is to make sure that every citizen has the right to communicate via letters to other citizens. It was very important in the late 1800's that everyone had the right to be heard, and communicate that the "Redcoats were coming"... etc.
But now it's big business, and they're in it for the money. They tried to screw newspapers that used Carriers to deliver, by disallowing a person's mail box to be used. It's against the law to use a mail box for ANYTHING besides holding offical postal mail. That is why you might see tiny mail boxes that say "Tribune" or something, and hangs below a real mail box.
UPS starts to make money, become popular. The Post Office has tried to take them out of business. They begin a parcel system, and now even spend your money (your money) on advertisements. Why do they need to compete against Fed Ex, UPS, etc? Back in the 1800's they did it because no one else could. Finally, we have a better, cheaper solution... why not let them take it over. Put them under FCC rules or something?
Now the Post Office tries to put supply companies out of business. They now undercut costs of envelopes, boxes, etc. And it's all from tax money and from raising your stamp rates.
I've been waiting for Portable MP3 players to take over the world. Last Christmas they could have, with SDMI appliances failing to make it in time. But it hasn't happened! We're in big trouble, because it won't be long before the big companies come up with their own distribution model, digital format, and FUD. A lot of people say... hey, artists could make their own fan sites. I bet the RIAA will do it for them. They'll come up with a million reasons to stick with them... and the artists will. Free web sites, whatever. And with a$$holes like Metallica sticking up for the cause before it's even panned out proves this point. I mean even a "spokewoman" of mp3's, only did it because she got a million something in MP3.com stock. And MP3.com has sold out to boot!
Whatever good points you and anyone can come up with that the internet can do for artists, the RIAA or big 5 will steal it and make it their own. They can do it 10 times better because they have 1000 times the money. Yes, they're very slow to change, but with all the lawsuits and scare tactics, it'll bide them just enough time to do just that.
Rader
Entertainment conglomerates have skillfully -- and at great cost -- distorted the purpose of copyright law and are jumbling two very different issues: the rights of artists, and the rights to exorbitant corporate profits. Most artists need more protection from media companies than from college kids downloading music online. How can the rights of artists be protected on the Net? Lost in the Napster and free music legal brawling is the original purpose of copyright. Congress originally enacted copyright protection not so that ideas and intellectual property could be owned forever and licensed by big companies. Today, the purpose of copyright laws seems to be earning even bigger profits for media conglomerates hiding behind the mantra of protecting artists. Nobody can argue that the sharing of music online necessarily deprives the music industry (or artists) of any incentive to create music. It's absurd to give giant conglomerates the right to speak for artists. Music companies are to artists what wolves are to sheep. The DMCA eliminates "fair use" provisions of law that would permit at least some sharing of music. The question of artist's rights is complex and urgent. The Net provides a marketplace of cultural exchange, benefiting new artists and to music lovers. How can artists rights be protected on the Net? Maybe music-lovers could pay a flat fee to access music sites which share revenue with entertainment companies and artists. Perhaps artists can use the Net to begin selling their work directly to fans and the public. How can artists be fairly compensated for the transmission of their work online?
Forgive me for not having lots of statistics to quote, but it was my strong impression that artists generated as much or more revenue from big-time media-blitz touring as they do from record sales.
The reason I mention that is that it seems to be commonly overlooked in the whole "We need to find a new way to enable artists to make money from their music" discussion. Picture a world in which nobody pays for recorded music but instead pays at the door to see the artist perform, because seeing the live act is more fun than listening to some old CD anyway.
There might be some side effects. Big concerts would be even bigger, and probably more expensive. Artists would have to find ways to bring more fans in to their tours, which might be at odds with their studio needs.
And of course this scheme is open to abuse by the big record companies too, as I understand they are currently abusing it. But it seems to make the intellectual property issues pretty much moot.
I dunno, maybe it's not the whole answer, but it could definitely be a useful tool in creating a new industry status quo.
-- Mojo Tooth : exploring our world as only an idiot can.
I look at Jon Katz articles posted here as trial runs for articles that are going to appear in less technical publications, like maybe Rolling Stone. By putting them here, he gets technical people to look at the article and help him clean up the technical flaws.
I don't know why I didn't think of it before, but to me it sounds like you're bang on, Phil. Slashdot is Katz' unpaid coterie of technical editors, all he has to do is ignore some verbal abuse every week and he gets his article looked at by a number of technical professionals.
Getting to the article itself, obtaining music is not a "right" of anyone. Just because people have been doing it for a while doesn't mean it's a right. Tradition, okay, but right? Somehow I think "getting music free" shouldn't be anywhere near "free speech", "due process", or "jury of peers".
Also, Katz' may want to point out that there already are sites which sell songs for a buck or so, with payments split between the label/artists and the sites. The business model is out there. It's not making money yet (in large part due to Napster & similar) but everybody should show these sites support.
e-Music is the one I use. 20 bucks for a month of no limit music leeching, plus I know that the artists are still getting something. Not all the labels/bands that I'd like, but a fair number. Do a search and find one that works for you.
Kwil
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
MODMAN NEW MUSIC ERA
now that's what i call copyright! =)
Absolutely. People are used to downloading for free, right-click and it's mine, etc. Everybody that says they'd pay for a song, well, they have 10 friends who are gonna ask to get a copy of it for nothing, so you have the same problem all over again.
Bands who have really good interactive sites will ride out the storm. Beastie Boys, Phish, Nine Inch Nails, they understand that you can give away preview videos and songs for free and the fans will continue to buy CDs and come to shows.
"I know all the sites that have my bootlegs and all my MP3s. Actually, I don't give a flying fuck." --- David Bowie
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
linux distributors indeed do offer value back to the community. But usually this isn't giving money to developers, but additional applications/tools/etc. that are GPLed, like the RedHat Package manager (used in more than just RH distros). they don't offer money, they actually offer value.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I've heard a number of people state that person to person sharing of copyrighted materials is legal as long as it's not done for profit--that you can make copies for family members, friends, etc. One of the arguments I've heard in favor of Napster is that it's person to person sharing so it's legal, and one of the arguments against is that you're sharing with people you don't know, so it's not legal.
My question is, is there a U.S. statute or judicial ruling stating that person to person sharing is legal? I've looked around a little, and all I can find is the section of the copyright law describing "fair use", which is pretty vague, but in my opinion, would be impossible to interpret as allowing this kind of person to person sharing. Could someone tell me a URL pointing to a statute or judicial ruling to the contrary?
Thanks.
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
I think it goes beyond a tad stale, I think it's another extremely redundant piece of crap.
All he has to do is call Napster "a website" and it could be the exact same piece of crap I've gotten from every local newscast every 5 minutes for the past 2 weeks.
Really, if a) you don't understand the issue or b) you have nothing new to say, just shut the fuck up.
We have enough non-news crap to wade through every day without more of this shit piling up.
Meet the New Media. Same as the Old Media.
My housemate is of the opinion that since an MP3 is 1/10th the size of its original aiff or wav or whatever, that IT IS 1/10th THE SOUND QUALITY. I disagree. I believe mp3 is to aiff (in audio) what jpg is to psd (in graphics), i.e., you cannot edit the waveform of an mp3, and that's why an aiff's file size is so much larger -- it is editable. My opponent believes that MP3's sound like crap, so he prefers to stay in the audio CD world by burning AIFFs to CDRs. What think ye?
---
Powerbook G4/1.5GHz 12", Toshiba Satellite 1135-S1554
Yes, of course there is a decrease in sound quality, but is it really 1/10 the sound quality? Obviously not. MP3s sound GREAT in my opinion, my housemate is a all-frequencies nazi. What is lost exactly???
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Powerbook G4/1.5GHz 12", Toshiba Satellite 1135-S1554
Ah, the whole "testing to see who's right / who's wrong" scenario won't work. I'm sure my opponent would not agree to having his integrity questioned like that. (Plus it would cause unnecessary housemate friction!). He has these super high-quality audio-geek studio speaker monitors, so I'm sure he can tell a good difference in your run-of-the-mill MP3s.
Nevertheless, your super-long post was informative and much appreciated, Sodium Attack! I now have a better understanding of the bitrate-to-ear factor. I'm sure both my opponent and I are both right in a way. (me: sounds great! him: loses sound quality, and rubs me the wrong way, no thanks!).
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Powerbook G4/1.5GHz 12", Toshiba Satellite 1135-S1554
**you are actually incorrect. That was a payment to the MODEL, not to the copyright holder of the picture. The model could have gotten a per-publication royalty, but generally they don't. In that sense, they would be the same as a studio musician, in that the musician gets paid a fixed amount to show up and play for a day on the recording, and that's it as far as the musician goes. A studio musician is not considered an "artist" so much as a worker.**
Okay.. Im interested now..please enlighten me. When I buy software, a record, a (whatever) its right there in plain print on the sleeve or box or somewhere what "fair use" of that is. However, a picture I find in a newsgroup has no such information on it. I snap a picture with my quickcam of my Pirhana swimming happily in his tank, and post it to rec.fish.with.big.teeth, and later find that same picture on some dudes webpage, do I have any legal recourse? Is a disclaimer of some sort required? That was the basis of my argument.. I understand that there *are* copyrighted images... there are also a heck of a lot that *arent* copyrighted in any verifiable way. Is a copyright implied and automatic? I see a lot of pages where someone has "Copyright, Dave Jones, 1963" on a picture, but I suspect that would be impossible to prove.
Am I correct? how does this work?
Thanks for your input!
maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Apples and oranges. Music is not an *idea*. I would agree if you heard someone hum something, and then made a song out of it. What you are talking about is not what I am talking about. Music is something that has been produced, it is a product.. and that comes at a cost. Millions of dollars worth of cost, in some instances. The end product, the song, is sold at a "fair market price" (IE: what the people will pay for it) in an attempt to recoup some of those losses. Its not right, moral, or just, to say "because I can copy this, and Im not physically removing it from the artist, its okay."
Which only proves that it is *okay* as long as someone elses ox is getting gored. I suspect that if you came up with something you could make good solid money on, and that was your livelihood, then you would feel differently when someone started taking your livelihood away and simply called you a "fucking whiner" for wanting some recompense for the hours and hours of work you put into developing it in the first place.
maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
***Please keep in mind, that we're talking about a possible copyright infringment. Not theft. They are 2 completely different things. And not only that, but the law is being reviewed and rewritten now for copyrights. So you might as well wait see what the law actually SAYS before you start pointing fingers.***
AFAIK, it is already illegal.. it is illegal by the DMCA to make a digital copy of something. Period. So somewhere along the line, someone did that, and broke the law. If you transmit or recieve that, without the artist specific consent, you are what, aiding and abetting? an accessory? something, anyway. Granted.. some artists freely release their work via the web. (Beastie Boys, etc) BUT: other artist do not. My giving a digital copy of a Metallica CD to someone is, tecnically, illegal. Or I misread the law. As it stands now tho, I dont think it is legal.
OTOH: I think it is ridiculous to say "You can copy a CD to tape to listen to in your car, but you cannot copy it to a CD to listen to in your car, or on your PC so you dont have to take the CD off the shelf.".. thats just silly.. I think personal use copyrights should exist. once I pay the personal use royalty on a song, if I make 0, 1, or a billion copies of a song, as long as I am not redistributing them, I should be fine. (I did have someone argue that if I got the CD stolen, any MP3's I had should be removed, and I would have to RE-BUY the CD to get new copies, as the copyright follows the item, not the purchase.)
But, my point is, if you buy a car illegaly, you bought it illegaly.. when someone has something that is worth money, or is traditionally paid for, and you get it for free against their wishes and against the law, you are stealing. By transmitting copies of Metallica songs, (frinstance) you are stealing from Metallica, who would normally charge a royalty fee for it. I dont see what is so hard to understand about that.
I will use the same analogy I used in another post.. if you invent something, and copyright it, and I start making them and give them away for free, thereby taking away *YOUR* source of income, I suspect you would consider it stealing, not merely a "copyright infringement".
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
*BUZZWORD CREATION IN PROGRESS**
.Jpg's and .gif's to be posted, because they are typically a one time payment to the model/artist, but its *totally* different to post a song that is a retail commodity. As I said in another post.. as soon as you put your books up in .pdf format, so I dont have to buy them, I will start to accept that you believe what you claim to believe.
Oh PLEASE.. what "free culture"? There is *NO* "free culture". Unless you are running around the back alleys of a city at midnight with a gun, nothing is "free". You pay for everything, one way or another.
Katz. Im really starting to get tired of your incessant whining that the 'net should be a communistic place. Its one thing for
People arent being "branded" theives.. people are BEING theives. Copyrights exist to protect the creator as much as to spur them on to create new works. Sorry, but its true. And what spurs musicians on to create? for some, the sheer love of making music, for others, the sheer love of folding green. Sorry dude, but I'm not going to spend 10 months writing and recording songs, just to have some jackass on the net tell me it should be "free" simply because it can be transmitted by PC. That is theft, plain and simple, and theres no real argument about it. The law states that if you make a digital copy of music, and distribute it, you are a criminal. Course, it also says if you drive over the state speed limit you are a criminal. The difference is that some crimes just arent prosecuted, and so far, this is one of them.
Doesnt make it any more right.
As far as making it "free".. well, we saw how well that worked with shareware. *sigh* I have actually sent money for programs I like... because I'm honest like that.. but in today's society, of coroporate raiding and clawing ones way to the top, I can certainly see where I would be a minority.
I think you just really *REALLY* need to admit that you want to be a communist when you grow up, and stop using "culture" as a brand to mark it with. Its not "culture" its "how much can I get away with".. which, IMHO, is less culture, and more counter-culture.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
So, what you are saying, is that if you invent something, and I see it and start copying it, you are losing nothing? That is the best analogy I can think of to this.. you are saying "its okay for me to copy something you made, as long as I dont make any money off of it.. and thereby deprive *you* of revenue, because you *DO* make money off of it"?
That is your point, is it not?
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Hey, great job - thanks for framing the issue in a balanced, even-handed way...
Of course, there are also more people in the world than at any time in world history...
Copyright laws also need to recognize that access to culture and music has become a tradition and right for tens of millions of people, mostly younger Americans who grew up using the Net, and who are now routinely branded "thieves" and "pirates" by corporate publicists...
If you don't like these terms, that's too bad. I don't think that "access to culture and music" is less of a euphemism. These people are taking the product of the labor of many people, without paying anything for it, while those people who produced it would like them to pay for it. And, that taking is currently against our laws. How is that not thievery?
Introducing greedy corporations into the argument is a complete red herring. No artist is compelled to sign on with a record company - but most choose to do so, because they believe that they can make more money (by exposing a great many more people to their music) than they can on their own. Of course the record company takes a large profit - that's their right, just as it's the right of the artist to try to sell music on their own, if they so choose. Those that choose not to sign with a record company are hurt even more by music copying, since they get more of the profit from a sale.
Many artists who are under contract feel exploited by recording companies, who take a disproportionate share of profits, and who make enormous margins on conventional music sales. Millions of music lovers feel that they are overcharged and offered too few choices and controls about the music they want to hear.
Why do *you* get to decide what is "disproportionate"? Why shouldn't record companies make a large profit from selling music for their artists? The artists asked them to. If music lovers are pissed off, why do they still buy CDs? Because record companies are useful to both artist and listener. Anyone who feels otherwise can do without them - as long as both the artist and the listener agree to the transaction.
And many people in the music industry, though still a distinct minority, believe that the sharing of music online can generate enormous interest and revenue for artists, musicians -- and for record companies.
Some people believe that, and some don't. Those that do are free to try to make money any way they want. Those that don't believe it should be allowed to make money too. Isn't it awfully convenient that people who steal music think that everyone would somehow make more money if they're allowed to download their music for free?
How can artists rights be protected on the Net? Maybe... Perhaps... Maybe... Maybe...
Well I'm glad you have this all figured out. Thanks.
(I am not associated in any way with the music industry.)
Two -- could you post the URL where all of your published works are available, in complete and unabridged form, online, for free download? (ASCII for easy online reading and PDF for printing, ideally, but I'll settle for plain ASCII) I'd like to read some of them at my leisure, and I assume you have an FTP site where I can get them. Thanks. (I tried the obvious 'jonkatz.com', but I got a lookup failure...)
Slashdot posters seem to automatically discount everything Jon Katz writes these days, so I wanted to post a link on his behalf:
The problem with music, by Steve Albini.
It's a famous article in which Albini basically outlines just how major recording companies fuck bands out of all their money. If you've read the recent Courtney Love speech on the same issues, this is where she got her ideas.
-jacob
Would ideas and opinions not circulate faster - or at least, no slower - if copyright was nonexistant?
Only if they are released. I think the idea was that if there wasn't a guarantee of some sort that you, the creator of the idea/opinion, could get a benifit from it, you'd have no reason to release it. Who whould want to do a lot of work and then have someone else get rich off of it. At least that's the idea. In practice, the recording industry has driven everything to Hell, with the artists that copyright is susposed to protect getting screwed.
--Ty
Who protects the artists' rights, Jon? They do. They are grownups who should know better. They protect themselves the same way every successful entertainer, actor and athelete does: With a good lawyer, agent and accountant.
Adulthood and maturity are derived (in part) from experience. Most of the artists being pulled in by the record companies have none. All they have is a naive vision of fame and fortune. They are ripe to be pulled in by the very people you say should protect them: the lawyers, agents and accountants who work the entertainment business. These people make money the same way the record companies do, by taking a cut from the artists. An agent stands to make more money playing the record company game than by not. The artists are still responsible for their own mistakes but to suggest that somehow the agents and lawyers of the business should or would protect the artists strikes me as naive.
Don't like and want to change the system? Try this.
Don't buy new CD's or tapes.
I buy directly from artist when I can or through independent distributers when possible
Don't listen to commercial radio stations or support advertisers (if at all possible) who advertise on commercial radio stations.
I don't. I listen to a listener supported station in my area. When you take away the playlists, todays versions of payolla, and give control of airplay to the DJ's it's amazing how the quality and variety of music goes up.
Don't buy concert tickets.
I haven't been to to an arena sized show in years. I tend to go festivals and gigs where the money flow is more directly to the performers.
Convince future artists not to sing contracts and contribute to the ongoing fodder. (Don't be surprised when you find out this takes time and committment).
It takes time and commitment on the artists part. What we as consumers can contribute is support. We can buy the albums and see the shows of artists we like who are trying to make a go of it bucking the system. The trick is to find these artists. If all we do is listen to commercial radio all we will here are big label artists. I would suggest finding listener supported station in your area and on the Net as well looking for downloadable samples. A big thing is to support alternative methods of distribution. Record labels are distibuters, their fear of the Net derives from its potential as an alternative. If an artist can promote and sell their music without a major label and all the costs associated with that many will. This is true of the artists who are working the scene I am familiar with.
Great idea...
...too bad it didn't work.
I tried to download the MP3's and listen to them, but every time I tried, it crashed my damn computer. Thankfully, it didn't do anything worse.
Embedded code in what should be a data file is a horrible, horrible, horrible idea. What's to stop someone from putting up an MP3 that's supposedly an eLicense file that when played corrupts your hard drive, or installs a back door into your system?
Someone's gotta come up with a better way to handle this.
So instead, they advocate something like you discussed above, where artists essentially hold their work for ransom until they feel they have been fairly compensated, then release it, and it immediately enters the public domain. While the scheme is not without its problems, it is the most seeminly workable alternative to our present system I have yet to come across.
I don't know about what we will do if there is ever no media to accept copies. However, as long as there is media availible, music will always be easy to copy. There is nothing to stop you from setting up a mic in front of each of your speakers and copying a song that way even if it has totally uncrackable encryption protecting it. There is really no way that anyone can ever stop you from doing this. Granted the quality of the sound will suffer somewhat, but if you get a good mic and are careful I'm sure it would be listenable for most people. People already do this when they smuggle camcorders into movie theatres to bootleg movies before their theatrical run is even over.
I am not going to make all the same points that he has but if you have a look at thethe.com you can see that at least one band is fighting the corporate monster. Matt Johnson is giving away his music now because he has been screwed by Vivendi / Seagrams / Universal / Interscope / nothing. The second track from the new album is available at the moment with a new track every week.
Since when is identifying something for what is unintelligent?
Now if they could just do something about sound quality.
t
Never thought the RIAA and Archer Daniels Midland business practices would map so nicely atop one another.
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
They should know better. I know more than a few people who have been screwed by Record Cos. All that the Cos are looking for is the Next Big Thing, they dont give a damn about the artist, until they are in court decrying the fact that no one can exploit artists but them. Why do you think that so many bands come and go so fast? After the hype surrounding the NBT artists first album (read one hit) dies off so does the intrest from the company. If a band signs a contract on the basis of a self funded album, the Co has it re-recorded with a more "consumer friendly" feel to it.
"we like your music, we want you on our label. sign here"
"COOL!"
"but... it isnt suitable for mass consumption so you will have to change it a bit."
"a bit?"
"well, completely. something suitable for TV movies and advertisments"
corporatism is the enemy of true creativity and freedom.
-- Hail Eris
Damn you! Im dumb as a rock now! Just because you want to be cool in the eyes of the other druggies and losers by bashing Mr. Katz doesnt make you cool, in fact it only exposes your lack of intelligence and professionalism.
Thank You
I don't know what CDs you buy, but I'd think that the average would be closer to 10 or 12 than 17 to 20 songs per CD. And the actual manufacturing costs for a CD is extremely low, anyway.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
There's a kernel of truth to their propaganda here. However, as they explicityly state, the actual manufacturing is only a small fraction of the costs they detail. And this manufacturing cost is the only cost which would be defrayed by selling music online vice via CD. Add in the additional costs of creating and maintaining the electronic distribution site and savings are quite minimal.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
It seems to me we have a system in place here similar to the old feudal system in Europe. You have a rich nobility (the RIAA members) who own the land (a stranglehold on music publishing). The peasants (musicians) do all the work, while the nobility takes all the money. Then, they have the gall to sit around and complain that we're ripping off the poor, pitiful peasants.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Hear hear. I get sick of people who think that ethical thought begins and ends with one well intentioned but reactionary document. Its also funny how the same people who babble on about the "new economy" and how "old ideas of copyright can't be applied" then appeal to 200 year old ideas as the true meaning.
I don't care what Thomas Jefferson said about IP. I really don't. He isn't here now, he had no idea where publishing, music recording or any of the oter technologies that make up our world would go, he has no relevant opinion on how modern producers of IP should be compensated for their work.
The bit about shakespeare is really interesting, I didn't know that. Looks like that "work for hire" evil we heard about recently is just a throwback from our briefly enlightened age. :)
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
One has to ponder how many moderator points the Goat poster has snarfed.. heh
Jeremy
If you think education is expensive, try ignornace
> > Every encryption scheme can be broken given time.
>
> Which is why you don't bother encrypting.
'Given time' is the essence of encryption. The office crypto textbook says you should plan crypto so that given a Moore's Law increase in processing power for the most powerful machine currently available, for the next 10 years (say) your crypto won't be crackable in less than a certain time. Say you've designed for a year's worth of distributed.net processing to be needed to crack the crypto. That means that all the distributed.net machines are going to have to work non-stop for a year to crack A SINGLE SONG. End of game.
A better approach which I'd love to see is to incorporate a variable-quality system of encryption. If you download the music, by default you get a 22k mono recording, and you have to pay to get the key for it to play it at full quality, or maybe have a limit that it'll play full-quality first time, but after that only at radio quality until you get the key. Link the key to the hard drive so folks can't swap keys, and you're away. To allow HD upgrades, maybe charge $5 to move all your keys to the new HD - the program would check that all the keys are linked to the same old HD and any keys which didn't match the majority would be ditched, so you can't just pass keys around and expect them to be fooled by paying the $5 HD upgrade fee. Get this kind of system going, and you're away - it'd work just like feature-limited shareware software.
I know it's not 100% foolproof as it stands, but it's better than unencrypted Napster (which doesn't give any return to the artists) or the RIAA.
Grab.
"The principle that the work you created belongs to you and should be controlled by you is as timeless as it is global... "
:-)
There's another side to your story: Many artists (including some big names like Shakespeare) see themselves as conduits, receivers and transmitters, of art, not "creators." I'm one of them. I think my poems, songs, and my book were "given" to me from the world around me. I therefore think there's a limit to how much I should control people's ability to share it with each other.
That said, I think you're right that we're better off if artists can make a living from their work. If I can make a living, I can spend more time "sending and receiving"
This has to be weighed by other considerations about what's good for society. For instance: I think the ability to explore culture can enrich people tremendously. I don't think financial limitations should restrict people's ability to explore music and expression. I think the importance of the concepts expressed in art are often of great value. Most social change of the 20th century had a musical movement associated to it. Our ability to participate in social change is connected to our ability to understand social change. Once something has become part of contemporary culture, people have a right to be exposed to it.
The internet has been changing a lot of things. It makes it easy for us to share music and other forms of expression without giving money to the artists, but it also puts us in a position to look out for the artists. We can participate in the creation of the next cultural distribution paradigm! There are obviously many of us who want artists to be able to make a living. Lets make sure they can make a living!
If a pickpocket meets the Buddha, all he will see is the Buddha's pockets.
(ps. I just realized I've been using bolds instead of breaks in my last few posts. I feel silly.)
If a pickpocket meets the Buddha, all he will see is the Buddha's pockets.
You know, I think you summed that all up fairly well :-)
I'm hoping to see a couple of centralized systems of finding and downloading music come into play, where it's easy to plug different payment schemes into them. Keep it open to experimentation, I say.
I like the idea of a cultural this-is-how-artists-are-making-money model based on trust and goodwill, rather than the notion that most people are too greedy or stupid to support artists they like. Some people are, but many have more integrity.
I think the structures we set up and support have quite an effect on new generations. Kids who grow up learning that art and music they like exists thanks to people who know well enough to support artists will be more inclined to SUPPORT ARTISTS!
If a Pickpocket meets the Buddha, all he will see is the Buddha's pockets.
If a pickpocket meets the Buddha, all he will see is the Buddha's pockets.
A buck a song seems like a lot. I figure the internet is going to nix 90% of what used to be the costs of publicising and distributing music, so if we're paying 10% of what we used to pay for a CD, the artists should be getting the same they used to get.
If a pickpocket meets the Buddha, all he will see is the Buddha's pockets.
Lets take publishing books as an example. It costs about a buck a book to produce books in volume. Books sell for about $15 in the stores. The artist is making about $1.50/book. Where does all the money go?
;-)
First off: 40% goes to the bookstores, and it's HARD for bookstores to make a living. That's why they're all going out of business.
Another 20% goes into distribution. Distribution is tough! Shipping, re-shipping, inventory, etc.
A bunch more money goes into publicity. It take a lot of work to get word of a book or album out to the world. Somebody's gotta write press releases, design posters and ads... it adds up.
The music industry and the publishing industry are different, but they have a lot in common (i'm a publisher). However, I can tell you this: Most of the costs of distributing and publicizing music ARE DISAPEARING! No stores = no more paying 40% for stores. Distribution can obviously be done for practically zero, so there goes another 20%, We can set up networks and collaborative filtering systems to take care of publicity (http://www.thevenue.org/ase.html)... suddenly we're at 10-20% of the costs we had before.
With a little audience/public enthusiasm, we can come up with a service oriented business model that will allow the businesses to be profitable even if they're only making 10-50 cents per album... I think
If a pickpocket meets the Buddha, all he will see is the Buddha's pockets.
That's a bit like the argument that the companies using child labour in third world contries are doing something good because they're employing people who would otherwise die... I think they're taking advantage of people. I also think it's up to us to decide if we want to support that. Artists sign with labels because they often don't have alternative means of getting their work out. We're now creating an alternative.
If a pickpocket meets the Buddha, all he will see is the Buddha's pockets.
Hmmm. I would like to point out that the costs of making, say, music videos, and getting them to millions of people are a fraction of what they were a few years ago. The one thing keeping small artists from going head to head with big companies is the ability to get people's attention.
That's why I'm into the idea of collaborative filtering (http://www.thevenue.org/ase.html) which works like this: You rate music on how much you like it (or have a built in system that assumes how much you like it based on how much you listen to it). A server compares users tastes, and finds people who *tend* to share your tastes. If a small, unknown band starts becoming popular with people who *tend* to like the same music as you, that band shows up in your music-I've-never-heard-of-but-will-probably-like box. Check out http://www.moviecritic.com as an example.
If a pickpocket meets the Buddha, all he will see is the Buddha's pockets.
As an artist, I think I'd be wanting to have my cake and eat it to if I wanted my art to become popular culture, AND expected to stay in complete control of it. Once it's part of the cultural makeover of a society, people in that society have a right to access it. (this is all personal opinion, I admit.)
Not only do I email my book to people for free if they're a little too poor to pay for it, I often GIVE it to people (the actual book, which cost me money to produce) when I think they would enjoy reading it. Fortunately, there are people who still buy my books.
If a pickpocket meets the Buddha, all he will see is the Buddha's pockets.
Remember that mp3s and related hardware are a very new technology. In a couple of years I'm sure we'll have portable mp3 players that can record hundreds of hours of music, all with a handy digital interface and "beaming" technology to share your music with friends. This is very, very new! If a pickpocket meets the Buddha, all he will see is the Buddha's pockets...
If a pickpocket meets the Buddha, all he will see is the Buddha's pockets.
I have a minidisk recorder, and it has the best of both worlds, plus it's more portable than either! I can also use it to do interviews and other high quality recordings (that's actually why I got it. The ability to take music around with me is just a bonus.) If a pickpocket meets the Buddha, all he will see is the Buddha's pockets.
If a pickpocket meets the Buddha, all he will see is the Buddha's pockets.
It's not just that. Copyright laws were origionally created to protect artists and the creators of original works. Over the years, organizations like those represented by the RIAA have put a lot of money towards paying lawyers to slowly move the laws towards favouring industry over artists. I'm not judging them, but I think society's losing out. I'm hoping we'll find ways to put the control of culture into the hands of it's creators and those who enjoy it. If a Pickpocket meets the Buddha, all he will see is the Buddha's pockets.
If a pickpocket meets the Buddha, all he will see is the Buddha's pockets.
Well, obviously it's good to start something new by looking at all the consequences of the old, and yeah, I think we should look at what is GOOD about the current industry as well as what is bad. For instance, having a group of companies that were making money meant they could back artists. I know a lot of artists who don't have the funds to self produce. If there hadn't been a business model behind the distribution of music... well, the blues, jazz, and 60s music movements might not have happened (along with the social change that accompanied them.) So how SHOULD things work? I, for one (of many), support the idea of a pay-what-you-can system: If we make it easy and affordable enough to give small donations to the artists we support... enough of us will support them to make it a plausible way to make a living. (Buskers make a living, right?.) (If you haven't, check out http://futureofmusic.com) So the question is: If you just listened to an album that you really liked, and you think the band is great, and you could give em a buck as easy as you could give a buck to a busker on the street... would you give them a buck? As an artist, I don't think I should have the kind of control over my work that the RIAA thinks they/I should have. If I don't want people to share my work with each other, I should keep it to myself. I certainly think copyright should entitle me to recognition. People shouldn't be able to alter my work, or pass it along without the contact information that goes with it. A lot of artists (myself included) don't see themselves as creators so much as conduits of art. My inspiration comes freely from the world around me, so I think it should go freely back to it. I have ideas of how I can make a living, but "control" isn't high on that list. I also think the system we support will have a powerful effect on our thinking. I'm suspicious that a culture system based on the concept that people are all theives and have no social conscience encourages people to feel justified going through life stealing and having no social conscience. "Why do I have to pay a dime everytime I want to listen to my favorite song, dad?" "Well, it's because all people are thieves at heart, and will always steal when they can, son." "Oh, so it's natural for me to want to steal, and so I should steal whenever I think I can get away with it..." I'm getting carried away... If a pickpocket meets the Buddha, all he will see is the Buddha's pockets.
If a pickpocket meets the Buddha, all he will see is the Buddha's pockets.
Begin JonKatz quotation:
The point that you get that Katz obviously missed is that Congress did nothing of the sort. Everything was originally provided for by the framers of the Constitution. They were simply the ones that created the legal vehicle, not the ones who decided that we should have copyright in the country.Oh, and somebody please moderate that post up.
--
--
We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
I challenge you to do a little research, yourself. I've already done some. We don't know how much it takes to develop a drug and bring it to market. The drug comapanies give figures like $200 to $400 million dollars, but that includes a lot of expenses for marketing and promotion. The drug companies have consistently refused to break the figures out. We do know that the bulk of basic research is financed by the government and, to a lesser extent, by universities. The New York Times a few weeks ago estimated that between 20% and 40% of the cost of developing a drug is taxpayer money, but the private companies get 100% of the profits.
And the drug companies have nothing to complain about - they've been consistently the most profitable companies relative to their investments of any industry in the world for the last half decade or so.
Record companies have to spend a lot of money to support artists (not to PAY artists neccessarily, but to transport them and promote them and pay their legal fees and all sorts of things)
That's nonsense. The record companies ADVANCE the money to the groups for these expenses, but the musicians are the ones who bear the ultimate cost.
When artists want to cry about piracy or copyright violations - they should cry to the police departments in every major city.
In NYC, for example - on almost every street corner in the Wall St. Area (esp. Fulton St) there's some guy with bootleg CDs on a card table.
These guys aren't downloading albums from Napster, and ripping them onto CDs! They're big-time bootleggers - this is where the artists are truly losing money.
Alot of times I've downloaded MP3's because I was curious about a band. If I liked the band I would go out and buy their cd (mostly for artwork, lyrics, etc).
So now all the major record labels just lost the BEST free advertising campaign they could ever get. And they can thank everyone's favourite loud-mouthed mullet - Jackass Lars.
[Connection closed by foreign host]
How can artists rights be protected on the Net?
Maybe music-lovers could pay a flat fee to access music sites which share revenue with entertainment companies and artists.
Perhaps artists can use the Net to begin selling their work directly to fans and the public.
Maybe debit and other forms of transactional software can be used to charge small amounts of money for downloaded music, using some system that measures time or data.
Maybe college students could pay a fraction of a cent for each song they downloaded on college sites, the overall volume generating a fair amount of revenue for artists and corporations.
Just some ideas....
-- In the future, everyone will code Perl for 15 minutes. --
How about this? Have the Music Industry do what it does best, packagaing and marketing music.
Imagine a site where you could choose music/songs and musicians, of your choice (that are with that particular label). Say up to 12 tracks/60minutes of music/CD, for a set price, say $8.00. After tracks are selected and arranged, the customer selects insert art that includes a customer selected title and "customized for (insert name)." Additional photos/bios of the musicians would be included with the insert. A listing of the music/musicians and track# on the back. CDs would be sent in a jewelcase, just like the ones purchased in the stores. Click 'done' and arrange to have CDs mailed.
The value added with the customization provided at the site for the customer would encourage purchase. Also customers would find an advantage in not having to purchase an entire for one good track, they could get just the one good track!
"Open code, in other words, can be a check on state power." -Lawrence Lessig
Maybe they're not in it for the love of it anymore, but they used to be. No band is going to make it if they decide that they are in it for the money alone. They have to have actual talent - and if you have talent, more than likely you're going to enjoy it. Any band that has the persiverance to get signed probably didn't start it for the money.
There are some exceptions to that (namely, groups like Backstreet Boys or New Kinds on the Block that were created specifically to make money), but most musicians I know do it for the love of music. If they make money off it, that's great. No one I know who plays anything objects to making money off their talent - but not making anything off it is OK too. They just like to do it.
Inconceivably, they expect to be compensated. If they don't, they're probably amiable amateurs. The starving artist stereotype belongs in the last century.
Before an artist is actually signed, they need to be discovered. To be discovered, they need to be playing somewhere, somehow. Usually, they won't be pulling big bucks at this stage. In fact, many successful musician's main job when they were signed wasn't music at all. They did it as something on the side.
The kind of equipment and talent it takes to compose, play and produce a high-quality album doens't come cheap. Sure, there are a lot of musicians who fit into your category of "just wanting to be appreciated", but they are probably not doing much cutting-edge composing, and they are not recording in $100/hour studios.
No, and they don't need to either. They aren't trying to release records. Besides, I know plenty of people who know enough to record a CD for about $2000 at a one-time cost, and at about $1 a CD after that. Most of the $2000 is something capable of burning audio CDs, the rest is equipment to record sound. I can record CDs of people on my computer, with decent quality. Most starting bands can as well. When a band gets bigger, they might consider trying to book studio time and playing for money, but not at the start.
Next time "Before They Were Rock-Stars" is on VH1, listen to what the musicians did before they "hit it big." Most of them had a day-job, and got gigs at local bars for some extra cash and for fun. Also listen to inteviews with major artists. Listen to how many still say that it's mostly about the music. If I recall, Lars was upset about Napster not only because it was stealling potential income, but also because he didn't have the choice to put music out that way. Any musician who is in it only for the money doesn't deserve any - they've sold out, and are no longer worth listening to. Yeah, musicians like to get paid for doing music. But that's not surprising. I like writing code - and I like getting compensated for it. Artists like creating their art, and they'd like to get compenstated for it as well. But even if I couldn't get hired, I'd still do some code in my spare time.
All the musicians I know personally are in it for fun. They may not be after the persuit of incredible excellence, for perfection, but they are after fun. Don't forget, most musicians aren't Metallica or Britney Speares. They're the ones playing in the garage band down the street, the people in the church choir, the people playing in the street. Yeah, they'd love some cash for doing it, and if their music's any good, they deserve it to some extent. But nothing's greater to a musician than being told that their music is wonderful and a moving experience.
Just because some people hit it big doesn't mean everyone will, or everyone should. Try going to the next highschool "battle of the bands" and asking the band members why they play. I'll bet the answers would be closer to "for the love of music" then "for huge cash advances." Of course, it could also be "to pick up chicks" :)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Yeah, it's in the appeal stages, and according to the site, it should enter an appelate court in "spring 2000." Lemme see, this article was posted Jul 30 2000 - that should be after spring, right? No news isn't always good news... And they already lost in the first court, and case law seems to be quite firm against them. The best bet would be to petition our various representatives to create newer, better copyright laws more in the favor of consumers.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
My problem isn't with the word, but the all-too-common multiple meanings and usages. If you think about it, you sorta sound like the Smurfs.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
Sorry man, have to do this. Forgive me. The phrase is "There AIN'T no such thing as a free lunch" (TANSTAFFL). Robert Heinlein wrote about it in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" about a penal colony on the moon becoming a soveriegn state. great book.
Actually, the term "intellectual property" is a relatively recent term. I'm not sure if this coinage was designed to do so, but the term by itself tends to create a false analogy between "intellectual property" and personal property, which the previous post reflects. Our "law of ideas", patent law, explicitly does NOT make an idea the property of "the person who though[sic] of it", but clearly offers a quid pro quo (that's "something for something" for those of you who forgot your Latin) - Make your idea public - give it to the world - and for 20 years the government won't let anyone make money with your idea without your permission, i.e., they'll grant you a patent.
A patent is property, an idea is not.
Is this true? I've never met a CD player that didn't like a CD-R, and I've got some OLD players. On the other hand, CD-RWs, obviously, are a different story. I've found that CD-RWs aren't playable in any of my CD players, but my DVD player recognizes it just fine (which, I guess, you would expect.)
CD-Rs burn a dye layer in the disc, and there are a few types of dyes that are used. I've found that the "greenish" dyes used in some CD-Rs, notably TDKs, works very poorly in first generation Macintosh CD drives in the PowerMac 7100s, about 15% of the disks I burned (a production run of 200 CD-Rs) wouldn't read, and another 10-20% had high error rates or other glitches. "Gold" dye CD-Rs worked fine in the same drives. These were all old, old drives, 1x or 2x readers, I think, certainly under 8x, and I've not seen this problem with any modern drives...
Other than that "gotcha", I've always found no performance difference between "burned" CD-Rs and "stamped" CDs.
CDs are sometimes 1 dollar per song (thats a little low..more like a dollar and a quarter), and more often they're about 5 dollars per DECENT song. I realize the physical object/package doesn't cost enough to directly account for the difference, but it is worth something to me. When I'm paying for the storage medium, when I'm eliminating much of their work in distribution and sales by downloading from a centralized location exactly what I want, without them having to predict (or attempt to influence...only attempt in my case, but my friends are all pretty malleable) what I want...dammit, what I'm buying had fucking well better be cheaper.
Without a resonable expectation of profits, artists will have little incentive to continue to produce works of art. While I admit that some artists will continue regardless of if they make money or not, some can not. Hunger etc. will force them into other occupations. A great example of how piracy is crippling an industry is the Hong Kong movie and music industry. Type in "VCD Hong Kong piracy" and you'll have many web sites, many by fans, complaining about how they are driving everyone from Hong Kong. The movie theatres are empty, while the VCD shops are packed. The number of movies scheduled has dropped from 200 to 75 this last year. Plus, Hong Kong's biggest artists are leaving it for Hollywood. I believe the same thing will happen to music and intellectual property rights must be enforced for it to stop!
Lars and many other artists see two corporations, the record industry and Napster. One pays them for their work, the other steals their work, and gets revenue by redistributing it.
This is the problem with Napster, it seeks to make profit by leeching off the recording industry. Non-central systems like Gnutella are far better in a moral sense than Napster.
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
Matt
co-founder.
www.fairtunes.com
The whole idea of Fairtunes is that you get to cut the middle man (the RIAA/the label) out and send money to your favorite artist direcly.
But of course will consumers be responsible enough to send money to artists whose music they've "downloaded"? This remains to be seen.
Matt
co-founder
Fairtunes
What....Just becasue he reguritated what C. Love said last week on Salon (linked to on Slashdot, and napster and just about everything else)
does that make him stale.
Nope that makes it DogVom.
Yes I can not spell...Wait....for a second there I almost cared.
Daaaaaaaaaaaaamn man I think you've got a weeeee bit too much free time on your hands... Seriously... Go outside or something...
Wow. You're right, we've all been a bunch of rubes! I shall now endeavor to never again offer Katz any constructive criticism for his work, and instead just mock him endlessly for my idle amusement.
The troll who keeps saying "Yay noise" might be on to something.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I've worked with a start-up artist, one that has done herself not-bad. She could have done better, had it not been for the exorbitant costs of the media companies.
Yes, I agree that the artists need more protection, especially from the media companies that will easily charge them sooooo much for distribution as to nearly make them bankrupt.
The artist I'm talking about recently released her new CD, and I can tell you, it took a lot of time, money, patience, negotiations to reach a deal with Sony Records. I'm told not to share the exact figure, but I can tell you that it costs a lot more than I initially assumed it would.
Knowing this, I'm confident that a lot of artists are discouraged and don't want to create an album. Even recording at a studio will cost you about a thousand dollars a day for a decent recording.
So herein comes the internet. Is it the best medium for startup artists or will they just be giving their proprietary music away? I'd have to say that for now, CDs are still a much better way for artists to get the money they desperately need. Believe me, they have to live very cheap lives to get anywhere, as ALL of the money has to go to advertising, recording, and CD making.
For Christmas I gave my sister, who studies opera, a minidisk recorder that she wanted. She uses it to record voice lessons. About a month ago I got a CD in the mail with a copy of a recital that she did and recorded on her minidisk recorder. I was very impressed when I considered the price I paid for that recorder.
Agreed, sort off. Right now you can "quickly" make perfect copies of imperfect copies ( copying an MP3) or imperfect copies of "perfect" material (CD -> MP3). Or perfect copies of perfect material (CD -> CDR)but not quickly or easily exchanged. Now when we can easily distribute perfect copies of CD's (CD->wav, I emphasize easily distribute). RIAA's worst nightmares *may* come true. This may be why they are attacking Napster now, because eventhough they aren't loosing much to MP3's now they may loose a lot in the future. What does not make sense is that they are trying to kill something they cannot kill (They may kill Napster but not online music trading). They should be trying to become key players in online music trading. In the end what irks me most is the attempt to stiffle inovation and freedom.
I always thought that there were studies that showed piracy due to tapes had no real impact on the revenue of record companies, and actually helped promote sales. If anything the record industry fears that their worst nightmare may finally come true, despite the evidence against it. The irony here being that the more they try to stiffle a new distribution format the more they encourage more threatening piracy. Now that I am boycotting RIAA anyone wanna swap burned copies of CDs... This may not sound to realistic for the majority of the population but in a college dorm environment, why not. I would if I was still in college. I don't see how portable MP3 players could scare anyone. or MP3 for that matter. Like you said it's too expensive to carry the CFlash memory that equals the 30+ CD's in my car. We are forgetting that the number of people using portable MP3 players or even MP3s is a small percentage of the total music purchasing population. We are also forgetting that MP3 does not equal CD quality. I find MP3's horribly inconvinient, I cant play them on my really nice stereo I can't easily carry all of them with me and the sound quality ranges from ok to bad.
You do have a right to try and make a profit by engaging in business, but succeeding and making money is not gauranteed.
I wasn't trying to imply that there is a "right to success", only a "right to opportunity". Katz seems to think that opportunity should be limited.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
In other words, Katz, you're a blowhard.
This case is not solely about people trying to stick it to the man (in the form of record companies? Please. There are more important battles to be fought.), nor is it about the future of an individual's ability to express an idea. Yes, large corporations act in their own best interests. No, those interests do not always line up with our best interests. Is this a bad thing? Yes. Is it the end of free speech and life as we know it? No.
Katz is a blowhard, but more than that, he is the worst sort of person to have espousing your cause. Through his ignorance of the real issues and his inability to do anything other than talk about talking about an issue, he manages to so diffuse any effort expended in discussing or dealing with important topics that anyone who wants to change things for the better has a harder time of it. By wasting our time with his drivel, he has made it that much easier for the powers that be to maintain their hold over our society.
Perhaps Katz is in their employ. We know he's a writer, and that he is (by trade) a cog in the media machines that try to tell us what to think and how to feel. Katz' job is that of manipulation, and we would do well to remember that when looking at his screeds.
Think for yourselves, ladies and gentlemen. Don't let pseudo-pundits like Katz dictate your worldview, or deceive you into thinking that talking about a problem is the same as doing something about it.
Fight the Power.
www.alarmist.org
A bit of Philosophy:
/.er, this article is poor considering its basically a rehash of what was out last week. Instead of stating the obvious, lets go for some fresh angels.
Self-interest=Pursuit of Money, Sex, Power or Reputation
Given that premise, I don't believe artist is thinking money when they do their work. If they are (like Metallica) they tend to be looked down upon by the general public. Hence the term "Selling Out".
I would argue that, if anything, they are thinking Fame (or Reputation). For any philosophy buffs, they will recognize this self-interest argument I'm using here. That argument states that any of the big four (Money, Sex, Power & Reputation) can be traded for the other. So a famous artist that distributes his work free via mp3s and trade that fame for money. Selling his/her work is completely unnecessary. Once they are famous they do personal appearances, sponsor products whatever they can think of, to simply trade that fame for Money, Sex or Power. I'm taking a step back here and wondering why the artist needs to be paid upfront. Good art will generate fame.
Another note: I have to agree that, even being a somewhat new
*You Said I Won't, I Said I Don't, But I Just Might*
How about paying artists in advance for the work they do. Instead of paying an artist, be it a musician, author, computer game developer, or whatnot, for the right to consume something they've already created, pay them to create something new for the benefit of yourself and the public; once created, others would be free to copy, use and make derivative works from the creation.
This could be accomplished in a number of ways. One way is to commission works from artists or developers. An individual or a coroporate body, such as a business or a fan club, would commission a work from an artist for a fixed sum of money. In return, the artist would supply one master copy of that item to the commissioner. The commissioner could keep the copy to itself, make and sell copies, or give them away, but anyone who happened to acquire a copy, either for free or for fee, would be free to use, copy, redistribute and make derivative works from it. The original artist might agree not to distribute further copies, or might be free to sell additional copies to others.
A second approach to this method would be to take something like the King approach. A new artist would create and release, for free, a work of art to the public in order to establish a reputation as an artist with something unique and desirable to offer. After this, the artist could announce a price and wait for that much money to be paid before creating a second work. The artist could accept input from those making payments. Third party brokers could play a role in this by collecting money and holding it in escrow until enough had been accumulated, and then transferring it to the artist (minus a service fee), ensuring that the artist wasn't cheating by pocketing the money and claiming that not enough was received. Once commissioned, the artist would be legally obliged to produce a product within a certain span of time, or else pay back all the money, with interest.
A third approach would be to develop fan clubs (either grassroots or sponsored by the artist or a third party fan club organization), where fans of a particular artist would join together to retain an artist. The artist would request a particular salary, and the fan club would charge dues equal to (salary + administrative costs) / members. If the artist demanded too high a salary or produced to little work of too low quality, fans would quit the club, driving up prices and either leaving a small core of very loyal fans willing to pay high prices for the artist's continued work, or else no one at all, forcing the artist to reduce salary demands, increase quality or quantity of output, or find another line of work. This structure would also give paying fans a much louder voice: dues-paying members could offer suggestions and expect that these suggestions will be given some weight.
There are others too, I'm sure. And none of them will be perfect or closed to all possible abuse. Ideas like these would need some refinement before they could be practically implemented, but commissioning or retaining artists is hardly a new or untested idea; the real challenge comes in getting the commissions or retainers payed collectively by fans instead of by a single wealthy patron. But even this isn't exactly a new problem; many projects have been carried out using the contributions of many anonymous individuals.
There's no such thing as Scotchtoberfest!
The present situation is one where the publishing industry is engaged in wholesale theft--first, theft of the works from their true authors; then theft of what should be in the public domain (and thus the property of all of us) from us as a society.
Er... most thieves don't financially remunerate their victims for what they have stolen. These folks do voluntarily enter into contracts, contrary to popular opinion. I don't mean to defend the current system in its entirety, but claims of theft are going a bit far.
The heart has reasons that reason does not understand. - Jacques Bènigne Bossuet
I agree with the contributor who noted that 18th century notions of copyright are more important now than ever. In particular we need to recover the notion, expressed by Adam Smith, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, that copyrights and patents are monopolies in derogation of the public right, and are to be tolerated only to the extent that they encourage the growth of what we now call the public domain.
Some of this history is discussed in the articles posted here.
Of course the constitution needs to evolve. The question is whether any particular development is consistent with its fundamental principles. Since I identify the public domain as the fundamental principle of copyright, I consider the acts of 1998 (DMCA, CTEA) to be largely inconsistent with copyright's deep values.
I prefer anarchy, but only under a strong & wise anarch
actually, the entire sony catalog (and thus the enitre cbs, columbia, epic, and and maverick) is available on MD---you just have to find it. besides MD has always been about recording your own mixes, not purchasing music. the lossy compression precludes that.
london is drowning and i live by river
the same thing is happening to minidisc, albeit a little bit slower. minidisc would be the killer app of mp3, but since sony controls it, it flounders in relative obscurity, while almost-but-not-quite players like the rio prosper. if there was a way to sock an MD in a drive and put mp3s on it faster than realtime, sony and the rest of the md manufacturers would make a killing in both md-data drives and portable players. even if you had to convert from mp3 to atrac3 (the MD native audio format), the added step would not be enough to deter most consumers (witness the memory stick walkman, which requires a conversion to atrac, and thus sdmi-compliance).
but a long time ago, sony agreed to the rest of the industry that it would keep the md-data and the md-audio specs from ever getting in bed with one another, and that sealed the deal right then and there. we could've been all been playing atrac files off MD drives in 1996, in full compliance with SDMI, but the industry stifled this step forward until it virtually killed the format.
this time around, the major mp3 players, except for aol-nullsoft, are not in the riaa--creative, samsung, diamond, napster. it's not when the riaa said to sony, "this is what we're doing, hold to policy." the riaa has to go through the courts first to deal with these "renegade" companies, and i think the courts will decide that the only thing the riaa is responsible for is the content, not the media.
recording industry association of america. they make recordings. why does the format matter? worry about making more recordings.
london is drowning and i live by river
I realized that something were fundamentally wrong with copyright laws when I realized that Disney owns the right to Winnie-the-Pooh. In my mind, Disney has no moral right whatsoever to make any profits from the ongoing abuse of the Winnie-the-Pooh character, in fact, what Disney is doing to the character, I find mostly highly immoral.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
All together now.....
HYPOCRITE, HYPOCRITE, HYPOCRITE!!!!!!!!
I feel better now.
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
I'm very tired of hearing how copyright law was enacted to protect artists and authors and to promote further creations by these people. That may have been the popular hype, but it wasn't true. Copyright was enacted to protect the investments of publishing companies (publishing was expensive in those days and it took a sizable investment to accomplish.) The artists were paid once, when the work was purchased, and/or a small percentage of each copy sold. When a MP3 is made available to the users of the internet, there is no publishing cost associated with it. Therefore, there is no sizable investment to protect and no reason for the work to be protected by laws meant to protect those investments. Take apart the word 'publish.' What does it mean? Simply, it means to make available to the public. (The word doesn't include any mention of recompense.) If you wish to maintain control of something, keep it to yourself, don't offer it out to the world.
Don't just complain - DO something about it!
The idea came suddenly.
Manufacture our own CDs, go into chain stores, and leave them in the appropriate bins. Down among the established pop hits and top 40 product, these CDs await those curious few who take them to the counter.
Then what? Witness the confused faces of cashiers and customers alike when the CD does not show up in the inventory. But they'll most likely make the sale, and the CD known only as THE DROPLIFT PROJECT will go home with yet another customer. Mission accomplished.
On the weekend of July 28th, 2000, all across the United States and Internationally, ordinary citizens walked into record stores with copies of THE DROPLIFT PROJECT hidden on their person. They proceeded to leave them, well filed, in the stacks, and walked out.
Why do this? Surely the artists know they won't get any MONEY from this puzzling act.
Ah, but perhaps you are starting to understand already.
The artists on THE DROPLIFT PROJECT make and find recordings of the stuff we all hear on radio, TV, in the news, on other CDs and tapes, and from everywhere around us. Then we cut it all up and rearrange it to make new art, social commentary, parody, and contemporary criticism.
It's nothing new. Artists have been making collages for the last hundred years. The world of Fine Art has long recognized the artist's right to use found objects in a new context to make a comment.
The world of music has been a little behind.
Record companies reject our works outright, wishing to avoid unpleasant harassment lawsuits. CD Plants, acting on an RIAA mandate to curb piracy, are skittish about pressing material that might contain recognizable samples. Even free music venues on the Internet refuse to allow sample-based works.
Is it illegal? Depends on who you ask. We know we are protected by the First Amendment and the Fair Use clause of the Copyright Act. Apparently the Music Industry does not follow such things.
The atmosphere of stark panic about the creative reuse of material has really got us in a bind. Our only recourse was to manufacture and distribute a disc on our own.
In this way we find ourselves in the awkward position of acting in a way that is seen by some as criminal.
So here it is! Listen to it! We're not doing this for our health. This is a deliberate attempt not only for our talents to be heard, but to encourage some discussion about artists' use of sound samples in their work. If you like the disc, spread the word! Write an article, play it on your radio show, make tapes and CDs for friends, and help us get it out there!
JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP JUMP IRRIGATE
Don't wait! There are allready a player that just use a burned cd with MP3 on it. It just reads off the mp3 from the cd then convert them... There's an article in the french journal "Le Monde" @ http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,2320,82820,00.html The player is called "mp 2000" and seems to be commercialized by a society called "Provideo", a screen for an Honk kong manufacturer. That's a killer, much better than any flash or hardrive solution.
"Of course I'm french, why d'you think I got this outttrrrageous accent?"
I won't speak for idlmx, but I do.
I loathe Katz's writing. (At least his /. writings. I find his writings on freedomforum.org to be much better, probably in part because he has an editor there, and in part because he's not trying to talk about technology to a bunch of people who know more about technology than he does.) But I love to hate Katz's writing. Every time I see a new Katz article, I'm drawn to it for the adrenaline rush I get out of being pissed off at his article.
People who say "If you don't like Katz then don't read him" don't understand how good it can feel to be righteously angry.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
I would recommend, if you're running an electronic licensing system, a self-executing, self-playing file that isn't itself MP3, but contains an MP3 (and playback code). Run it; like it; pay up; it spits out the MP3 and deletes itself (or keeps the self-extracting archive separately, like the Register tools provided with some shareware.) This gives up the ability to charge for multiple distributions but substantially reduces the chance of abuse.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
"If they could hire lobbyists, wolves would no doubt enact stringent legislation to to protect the rights of sheep to be controlled and devoured by them." ... and to prevent pigs from owning brick homes. In all your huffing and puffing, Mr. Katz, your analogies have really gone to shit.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
An equally important copyright trial concluded this week in Manhattan, where movie industry lawyers have filed suit challenging the online publication of DVD source code
Hmmm dvd source code? No one published any dvd source code, however, if john is refering to decss, he should say "the decss source code", otherwise it's just confusing and silly.
So quick with fear you tiny fools!
First, the basis for current copyright laws came into existence because the printin g press made it possible to quickly, cheaply, and easily create almost limitless copies of current products being sold by a small group of people. The printing press forced literature to look at a new method of distribution and ownership.
Sound familiar? So, now that digital copying allows the quick, cheap, and easy replication of digital products, well...it's time for new laws, and a new way to look at music ownership and distribution. I think it's time we stopped looking at music as a product -- manufactured by musicians, packaged by record companies, and distributed by, well, distributors.
What if we started looking at music as a service, provided by musicians, subsidized by fans, and distributed to the masses freely? On a recent road trip, my fellow musicians and I were musing over the implications of digital distribution. Our model is this: Let the artist create. Let the listeners who care about the music and the artist support the project, contributing to those they enjoy and want to support. When x amount is reached, and the project can be funded, the artist releases the music to the masses. Never again will they have to charge, they can reach whomever they want unrestricted by the prices set by distributors, and they don't have to starve.
Much like many software distributions today, the listener could download the product for free, replicating for their own use, at their own expense. Or, the listener could still buy a packaged version of the product, complete with liner notes, cover art, and a physical media.
For a valid version of this model, check out Todd Rundgren's Patronet. His is a subscription service. You subscribe, you pay and he promises to deliver product exclusively to subscribers online. His most recent album was originally distributed online via this method. It's an interesting concept.
So, slashdotters, what do you think of Music as a Service? Think it's a valid model? Would you pay? Would you create under those terms? Now is the time to forge out the (workable) venue that you want.
"So we're not home and dry."
"Life. Don't talk to me about life."
Either you have an expansive grasp of the English language that can confused the hell out of anyone, or you used that "complaint generator" that recently hit The Register :-)
-ryry
-ryry
I believe it was from Steve Albini, and somewhere in this thread somebody else posted a link to it. Then again, I could be wrong, I don't really know ...
-ryry
-ryry
I don't think labels pay stores for in-store music time. I worked in a Sam Goody store for a couple months last year. No one ever paid us to play any certain music; we all just played whatever the hell we wanted (within reason, of course, no profanity over the loudspeakers, etc.) Maybe this does go on and I wasn't there to see it, though.
What labels do pay for, however, is the in-store placement of CDs (in relation to the cash register and the main aisles), cardboard cutouts of the artists, which artists we are supposed to recommend at the cash register, etc. Labels actually hire companies to come out to the store and make sure that the Limp Bizkit poster is hanging in the store window just beside the door, that the Britney Spears cardboard stand-up is sitting right in front of the counter, etc. The software industry works the same way.
-ryry
-ryry
Oops, spoke too quickly. :-) Slight amendment to my above post: companies gave us CDs to play over the in-store system; we never had to play them, but I do remember the rule that we couldn't bring in any outside CDs, that we had to use what was already there (i.e. company-provided discs; fortunately there was decent music in the pile). My bad.
-ryry
-ryry
very funny!
Time does not wait.
older CD players won't even play CDR's I have had real problems with the CDRs I have made. Certain types/colors work on certain players but not others. There is no universal standard that works on them all, but dark blue Verbatim seem the most compatible. I transfer out-of-print records to CD for a friend of mine.
MP3s suffer from the same problems as the other formats, however. It is not fast; reading and encoding the CD takes a while. Longer if you want error-checking. Second, the quality is pretty poor compared to CD...depending on the style of the music being encoded and the encoder. They are not "exact copies" at all!
Although tape pirating was a problem, I would argue that one of the reasons so few tapes were sold was the quality. Record companies sold (and often still sell) the worst quality tapes on the market (some companies, like American Gramaphone, were exceptions). And they were expensive! Often more money than the phonograph record, and you got a poor-quality tape with a lot of noise that would melt, stretch, wear out and break.
A solution? Buy the record and a top-quality blank. You tape it once, and the decent quality blank (which could be Cr02 or Metal if you had the right deck) would sound much, much better than a factory tape. Chances are it would last forever (a lot longer than the ones from the record companies), plus if it did wear out you just made a new one. Finally, the cost for a record and a blank was the same or just a bit more than the factory tapes.
When my phonograph died, I would buy factory tapes...but first-play I would copy them to a blank and keep the master in a safe place. Most of the factory tapes would degrade very quickly, and in the mid-80s ran $7-$14, which was quite a bit of money at the time.
True, it was easy to trade tapes. And unlike MP3s, the tapes lost quality with each transfer; not just the first one. But if the music industry wants to compete, they need to lower their prices (now way too high) or improve the quality. Give consumers a reason to buy the product, not just lawsuits.
I have little sympathy for companies who raise prices as sales increase...
Minidisc is cool in Europe and Japan. It "flounders in relative obscurity" here because so few US artists use it.
Classical albums: 6-8 songs/CD (longer songs)
Rock albums: 10-14 songs/CD
Rap/Hip Hop albums: 18-22 songs/CD (lots of short skits)
It seems more realistic to charge for the whole download of an album or charge by file size. Keep in mind that these things can always be exploited (a band puts a few seconds of blank space at the end of each song to get a few extra cents from each download). Also, think about hidden tracks. I don't want to pay for 15:00 of silence.
luckman
luckman
I don't involve myself with flames, much less know how to bait one.
You're right, of course, that recorded music is recent. Up until then, those composers worked for wealthy patrons. They didn't work for free.
Mind you, it might be nice for the rest of us if artists could somehow live like air ferns, at no cost to us, but denigrating them for their desire to feed themselves and maybe even raise families seems a bit much.
I wonder how often a musician has looked at a car mechanic and said that a really good mechanic would fix the transmission for love, not money, and that his work is weightless, not a thing that could be stolen.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Damn. I was all impressed until you tried to claim that after drug company A pays millions upon millions to develop a drug, drug company B should be able to take said drug and sell it much cheaper.
I've notice a lot of the people posting here complaining about "the evil corporations that charge us outrageous prices" don't seem to have even a rudimentary understanding of the economics that those companies operate under. It's always "they do this. they do that"
I challenge you to do a little research. Find out the average cost in money and time it takes to develop a drug and get it to market. Now tell me where that money comes from. I would take it from the sales of said drug, but apparently Hard_Code disagrees.
Record companies have to spend a lot of money to support artists (not to PAY artists neccessarily, but to transport them and promote them and pay their legal fees and all sorts of things) and to maintain an infrastructure that allows them to make music, put it where you can hear it, and sell it to you. I'm not saying they are great people who don't try to make a big profit, but very few people here seem to have a realistic understanding of the economics involved.
Whenever your theory starts to involve evil villains and conspiracies, it's time to step back a minute and rethink your theory. The (tobacco/drug/record) companies are greedy, yes. But they aren't evil, and they aren't conspiring against you. Get some perspective.
The New York Times a few weeks ago estimated that between 20% and 40% of the cost of developing a drug is taxpayer money, but the private companies get 100% of the profits.
If this is really the case and is a valid statistic, then it is the fault of those resposible for setting government budgets. You can't just give a company some money and expect them to suddenly change their goals from making money into helping humanity. If you gave these companies the choice between that 20-40% funding and the right to make a profit on their product, I bet they'd tell the government where to stick those tax dollars.
Maybe someone in the government thinks it's better for you to have Aspirin and Tylenol developed and as an option, no matter how much it costs you at the store, than it is to save your tax dollars. If they think that, it's their fault and you should place your judgments at their feet, not at the feet of the companies they donate to.
That's nonsense. The record companies ADVANCE the money to the groups for these expenses, but the musicians are the ones who bear the ultimate cost.
That's true of recording studio costs, (at least so I hear) but I haven't seen anything that supports the claim that record companies do not contribute anything financially to the artists (such as promotion (advertising), legal representation, transportation, and many other costs). If you think this is the case, I want to see your information source.
There are cases where other interests override those of profit though. Africa is a perfect example of this. They need the drugs because they are having a massive AIDS epidemic. There's no way they can afford to pay the price the drug companies want. They have little choice but to do whatever is necessary for survival, and I don't see that we have any right to stop them. This is something that I think we here in the US need to really examine as a country. There must be a way to continue drug research without having to charge prices that are prohibitive for many people, even though their lives depend on receiving the medicine. Maybe we do need a less capitalist health system in this country.
Like many people, you ignore the long term aspect. If you took cases where you think saving lives is more important than money, and forced companies to give away drugs to people who need them, companies would stop developing drugs that people need, and move towards developing only drugs that people want. This is already happening to some extent. No cure for AIDS yet, but Viagra and Rogaine are certainly prominent. Because if they came out with a cure for AIDS, and wanted to charge $1,000 per person for it, people like you would cry out that lives must be saved and demand the government force the company to cut their profits.
The problem (and many people will hate me for saying this) is that people (particularly Americans) attach too high a value to each human life. We all think that every single person is entitled to the absolute best cutting-edge medical measures to save their life. Well calculate how much money exists. The total funds of the world. Call this number W. Now calculate the cost of the most expensive cutting-edge medical treatment for one person, and multiply that number by the population of the world. Call that number C. I do not doubt that C is far greater than W. This means that if we put all the resources of humanity towards nothing but medical care, we would still fail at goal of immortality.
It's a simple fact of life. People die. You are mortal. So am I. So if 10,000 people's lives are at stake, don't insist that they be saved at any cost, when that cost might be bankrupting the corportation that would have developed a drug that would later have saved 100,000 people.
Well here's my take on the matter. As before, I fully expect to be called an inhuman bastard at any minute.
The USA, and drug companies therein, should not be responsible for the lives of anyone in Africa. (save possibly vacationing Americans)
If the African government decides to buy drugs to help their people, more power to them. If they decide not to because they can't afford it, I don't blame them. If they decide not to because they're greedy dictatorial types who would rather build mansions of gold, then let their people overthrow them. Maybe we'll help.
If, on the other hand, some company in Africa decides to steal a drug formula from an American company and market it ultra cheap in Africa, then I say the US shouldn't have to do anything about it. If the American company wants to do something about it, let them. Now as soon as somebody tries to buy that drug in Africa and ship it back to America, then it's American Customs' responsibility to stop them, because that medicine is a violation of American laws.
But I don't agree that "we'd be stupid not to do something to help." (assuming by "we" you mean the US government.) They're not our people, they're not our responsibility. If they're being oppressed by nature, tough shit. People die. If they're being oppressed by their government, they should overthrow their government. If they show that they intend to overthrow their government, but they can't quite do it, then maybe we'll help them overthrow their government. But I don't think that we're obligated to.
The difference is that now you can make perfect copies quickly and easily. Cassette tapes and VCR tapes degrade the quality each time. That's why this fight is different: the copies are just as good as the store bought stuff.
Quality troll. Keep 'em coming :)
This is a pretty tall order! Here's my attempt to raise awareness:
I can't tell you how many times I've seen this conflict portrayed as tech-friendly music lovers vs. Big Evil Record Companies. The Napster debate sure seems that way, since big names like the RIAA and Metallica are involved.
What bothers me about Napster isn't that big-name acts lose money, but that small time acts can lose money, which Katz briefly alludes to. For every Metallica, there's hundreds of musicians who eke out a living from gigs, CD sales (either from their website or their car's trunk) and maybe royalties. It's like micropayment without the tech. If their music is distributed for free, then they're not going to make money.
I'm reminded of a friend who told me he DLed various soundtracks from Napster. The soundtrack business is the kind of business where the musician makes his money from royalties. We're not talking Metallica, or Britney Spears, we're talking about nameless, faceless composers. When the composer's soundtrack is passed around for free, he doesn't make any royalties. You like his work, but he gets no reward for it. In fact, you're hurting him. It's like if you put in a 40 hour work week and didn't get paid.
That's why I don't like the Napster. If these lesser known musicians were common on Napster (admittedly, most of them aren't), you really would be taking money out of their pocket. Those of you who scorn Metallica and Britney Spears probably have lesser known favorite bands. Think about this: if your favorite, unknown band's music is distributed for free, they're not making any money, so they have to get the dreaded day job. They don't have as much time to spend on their music, they don't have the resources to tour and promote. You'll never see them live, and the quality of their work could suffer as they try to balance making music with crap like working a day job and commuting.
I'm a musician. Not one of those "I distribute my music for free" types - I make money from what I do. People pay to hear it, and I like that. But if my tunes are distributed for free, without my consent, that's a lot of money I'm not making. I don't like that. My intellectual property is my intellectual property. Not yours to give away.
I'd rather see the industry work from an MP3.com model than a Napster model. By all means, break down the tyranny of the record company, free the channels of distribution, put me on the Net so people can find me. But don't take the liberty of distributing my hard work for free.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
It is by spending ourselves that we become rich.
First, we kill all the lawyers.
Go to your local pub, club or street corner. Clap, cheer and throw some money into their guitar case. Why should the "recording industry" decide what everyone listens to?
The recording industry cannot dictate market conditions. Of course, they can pretend that they do. But people who buy music (yes, PAY for music) set the rules of the game. The napster/warez world may make headlines, but it won't budge the music industry one inch. The course of history is rarely influenced significantly by the activities of cheap bastards and thieves. If you want legal downloadable music, pay for it. convention coverage. satire. today: learn how to spot the naughty bits in your wife's romance novels. www.ridiculopathy.com
It may be that you don't convince someone to make more music by making them a millionare than by paying them a decent living to keep making music. But you almost certainly get more music from them paying them *something* than if they have to wait tables to feed themselves, and go into debt to make music.
This is a pretty well-understood problem in economics; music (and other copyrightable stuff) is becoming a public good. That means that it costs money to produce it, it benefits a lot of people, but it's not really possible to make any money producing it. Traditionally, public goods either get massively underproduced (relative to what people would be willing to pay for), or get financed by the government (good luck finding anything to listen to, with First Lady Tipper running the National Endowment for Wholesome Music), or get financed by charities of some kind (like the libraries and art museums financed by various rich people, dead and alive).
Either creators of music, art, writing, movies, etc., will find a way to get paid for it, or they'll end up creating less of it. (Though it may be that the current system of paying creators is bad enough, at least in some fields, that we won't notice the loss all that much.)
--John Kelsey, k e l s e y (at) p l n e t (dot) n e t PGP: 5D91 6F57 2646 83F9 6D7F 9C87 886D 88AF
>You are depriving someone of royalties when you
>download their music without paying the
>appropriate fees.. whether or not you choose to
>admit it
Actually, it's not clear this is true. If you planned to buy the music, but decided not to buy it once you found it for free on the net, then the artist, music label, etc., have lost money. If you wouldn't have bought it anyway, then they've not lost a dime. They've had someone play the music without paying them, but they haven't lost any *money*. They're surely not being harmed by someone they'll never meet listening to their music without permission. (On
the other hand, if downloading the music spurs you to buy a couple of their albums, then the downloading service makes them money.)
It's not at all clear to me that a musician has some kind of inherent moral right to demand payment from anyone who ever hears his music. Or for that matter, that a programmer or writer or painter or anyone else has such a right. (If I have a party, and play CDs that I own to entertain my guests, should the musicians who made that CD be allowed to send each of my guests a bill? Or to send me a bill for each person who listened to the music?)
--John Kelsey, k e l s e y (at) p l n e t (dot) n e t PGP: 5D91 6F57 2646 83F9 6D7F 9C87 886D 88AF
Eat the rich. The poor are tough and stringy.
Opinions are like assholes. Everyone's got one and they all stink.
Keep snagging those free tunes. After all, if everyone does it how can it be wrong?
Kong
--
Shoot, a fella' could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.
Where do I sign????
Hum, then I wonder why it is so many artist sign with such evil record labels. Do you think it might possibly be because the artits excptects to profit in some form from the services provided under thier contract with the label? Sure, the Recording industry makes lots of money off of its artits, but I doubt they make very much off of the struggling, poor artits they've signed. If the artist has no money, where does the labels cut come from? Think about it.
The reason an artist signs a contract with such an evil entity is because that artist wishes to sucseed, and utlimitly make lots of money (because we are talking about america here). The Record company is supposed to help them do that. Then it turns all bad. So back to the original comment, none of this would be an issue if the artists didn't have a desire to make lots of money.
Then I guess you've never heard of intellectual property? The idea IS property, and it belongs to the person who though of it.
I don't know what your area of interest is, but if your interested, Intellectual Property law is a very very profitable business to be in. And I don't think any of those lawyers would think that an idea as property is such an absurd concept.
Here's what DAT has that CD doesn't:
Hear something you like? Hit "Record".
That's it. Simple as tape. Erase/reuse all you want. No need to burn audio with a special program. No worries about buffer underruns. Hit "Record" when you hear what you like. Hit "Stop" when you're done. Record stuff in real time. Try that with CD. You'll be making $20 worth of drink coasters and rearview mirror decorations.
And the seek time for DAT screams. Forget the old days of waiting to rewind/fast-forward. DAT gets you to the track you want FAST.
DAT was ready to go when CD burners still cost $1000. It could have easily become a consumer standard, but the poor suffering recording industry was someone able to scrape together enough funds to persuade manufacturers to artificially inflate the price.
The real DunkPonch is user 215121. Everyone else is Bruce Perens.
I realize 'piracy' may be what is most convenient for the general public, but still the artists interest should be in mind. Napster may be copying physically, but in principle it is common thievery and deprives and hurts the artist you are desiring to hear. Yes, the record label's get the majority of the costs from album sales, but you must remember how much they do in the process of realease. They provide quality recording studios, producers, artwork, distribution, and marketing. All are very vital jobs that allow musicians to gain exposure and popularity from their music. Is it asking too much to compensate them for the privilege of listening to their hard work and craft?
Please, don't abuse the ars gratia artis argument and suggest that music should be free for everyone. After all, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms and the majority of the great classical composers recieved money from patrons and kings in exchange for their works. They were no doubt great artisans, but they also were known at times to churn out compositions in order to recieve the money to afford the cost of living. If Beethoven had not been paid, do you really think we would have his 9 symphonies to treasure today?
Emerson Willowick: Thinker, Writer, Human Being.
very good stuff there katzy :)
[mrzer0]
Release artworks under a GPL. Explicitly allow copying for anyone else, for free or for a fee. Then anyone can set up their own trading post website where other people can buy (or get for free) anything the site maintainer is willing to distribute.
How can any artist make money in this situation? How can any music fan find anything they like?
The artist can make money by auctioning off the initial copies of their work on a well-known website (say . . . a record company site) which performs the service of building hype for the artist. As copies flood the marketplace, reselling and free redistribution will bring the market price for a work down over time until at some point, anyone can get a copy of anything for free or nearly free if they're willing to wait long enough. Those who want to make money off of reselling, or who are rich enough and want first crack at a new artwork, will collect enough capital to bid on an early release of the work.
It's the initial sale that would make the artist (and the hype-building company -- which is a primary function of record companies today) the bulk of their money, but their music would filter out faster, consumers would have more choices, and instead of a few huge companies being the filters of wheat from the chaff, now everyone who wants to set up a website can become a specialized filter for different tastes. And eventually, all art would be available for nearly free, and probably nothing would ever go out of print.
Also, if the original sale points of artwork provide enough additional services to bring customers back, even though they could find cheaper copies of a work elsewhere, the creator of that work can still get some royalties long after the work is released.
Just an idea. I've written up a long-ass version of these ideas, and will happily email you a copy.
[Self-interest guides a man like] an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. -Adam Smith
I take any opportunity to ask artists: what would you think about releasing your works in a way that allowed copying, if there was a chance that that would get you more exposure? Maybe you're not a talentless hack -- maybe your work just hasn't filtered down to the right audience.
[Self-interest guides a man like] an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. -Adam Smith
Release artworks under a GPL. Explicitly allow copying for anyone else, for free or for a fee. Then anyone can set up their own trading post website where other people can buy (or get for free) anything the site maintainer is willing to distribute.
How can any artist make money in this situation? How can any music fan find anything they like?
The artist can make money by auctioning off the initial copies of their work on a well-known website (say . . . a record company site) which performs the service of building hype for the artist. As copies flood the marketplace, reselling and free redistribution will bring the market price for a work down over time until at some point, anyone can get a copy of anything for free or nearly free if they're willing to wait long enough. Those who want to make money off of reselling, or who are rich enough and want first crack at a new artwork, will collect enough capital to bid on an early release of the work.
It's the initial sale that would make the artist (and the hype-building company -- which is a primary function of record companies today) the bulk of their money, but their music would filter out faster, consumers would have more choices, and instead of a few huge companies being the filters of wheat from the chaff, now everyone who wants to set up a website can become a specialized filter for different tastes. And eventually, all art would be available for nearly free, and probably nothing would ever go out of print.
Also, if the original sale points of artwork provide enough additional services to bring customers back, even though they could find cheaper copies of a work elsewhere, the creator of that work can still get some royalties long after the work is released.
Just an idea. I've written up a long-ass version of these ideas, and will happily email you a copy.
[Self-interest guides a man like] an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. -Adam Smith
Burning a CD copy is still clumsy and slow ..
.. unfortunately my machine isn't fast enough to decode at 4x :)) Really, nothing could be simpler than pulling some select MP3s off of Napster and then burning a CD. Note that I'm not defending the practice of pirating copyrighted music. Most of the stuff that I download is live material that has been "blessed" by the artist. But I think you're exaggerating when you're talking about the process being "clumsy."
Actually, there's not much clumsy about it at all. With a lot of the newer burning software (I use Nero), all you have to do is drag and drop each MP3 that you want into the album structure, click on "Burn", and that's it. It decodes the MP3 on the fly and records it (I usually record at 2x
older CD players won't even play CDR's.
Is this true? I've never met a CD player that didn't like a CD-R, and I've got some OLD players. On the other hand, CD-RWs, obviously, are a different story. I've found that CD-RWs aren't playable in any of my CD players, but my DVD player recognizes it just fine (which, I guess, you would expect.)
Real simple answer: because if the artist doesn't get paid for making music, the artist can't afford/will refuse to make music.
This leaves out the simple economic realization that when you add value to your culture... just as you believe you do in your daily work... you deserve to receive compensation. That is at essence an ethical consideration, a concept which is probably too advanced for many who "want free music." You could be coerced to do what you do, and forced to live in your van down by the river. Slavery will always be an attractive concept to slaveowner types, who also love the idea of something for nothing, and the idea of an underclass.
The right to compensation for your labor... so fundamentally a part of any social structure... is something that most people will recognize... and they will try to see to it that the thieves... those who prefer to steal rather than labor... will be terminated with extreme prejudice.
We're simply talking about the difference between a cooperative society and a world full of brigands. Your stated question leads us back into the middle ages. If a short, nasty, brutish life is what you're eager for, you're decidedly in the minority.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Wait a minute! Is this what you're going to say to musicians who are getting ripped off by either music industry freeloaders or online freeloaders? I thought *you guys* were the computer/networking experts.
Rhetorical question alert ... oh I dunno, they wanted to see people being compensated ... Katz would have a mechanism to offer his work. ... credit cards? How establishment is that? What a freaking hoot.
If programmers and networkers had gotten off their dead ass and provided a viable online exchange medium, because
Hasn't it been the people who created cyberspace who've sat in their ivory towers, perfectly content to collect their wages, who've scarcely lifted a finger to make online commerce tractable???
I mean
This all goes back to Nelson's Xanadu... Nelson saw clearly what was needed to avoid this mess...
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
I keep seeing this interesting perspective of what most musicians expect expressed on this site. Trouble is, it ain't so.... at least, for musicians of the caliber that most Napster users are hungry for... or of the caliber you'd pay $16 a CD for.
Expectations for professional musicians have changed a lot since Grandpa sat around the cracker barrel pickin his banjo. Inconceivably, they expect to be compensated. If they don't, they're probably amiable amateurs. The starving artist stereotype belongs in the last century.
The kind of equipment and talent it takes to compose, play and produce a high-quality album doens't come cheap. Sure, there are a lot of musicians who fit into your category of "just wanting to be appreciated", but they are probably not doing much cutting-edge composing, and they are not recording in $100/hour studios.
When I hear the "most musicians feel the same way" mantra repeated, I'm always suspicious of how many musicians the person knows, and how dedicated those musicians are to the pursuit of excellence. I'd guess that this comfortable misconception is motivated by a lack of desire to see people get what they've got coming.... the same kind of bourgeois attitude toward musicians that plagued Beethoven and Mozart two centuries ago.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Some point to mp3.com or riffage.com or any of the rest of these online proto-record companies... offering to take 50 percent just to provide a server and a domain name... and say that's a solution, but in the long run it isn't, because it just leads back to the same dependence on a big brother. Sure, some people are happy for the exposure... but that isn't going to cut it in the major leagues.
Music has been like baseball used to be, rich owners, poor players.... and a lot of people complained when baseball players started making good money.
Today's musician, like any other modern entrepeneur, wants to control his work, and hire the help she needs. We're way past the "record companies are bad" thing, which was all decided 25 years ago in the punk era... it's just self-evident. Want to see a model for the new age of self-distribution, fan-base building, making the music you want, and making a living? look at Fugazi.
It's good to see the discussion of this topic finally getting down to what it's about. The music comes from the artists, and the artists need a working solution to escape the majors. If you want to see the dinosaurs get extinct, and get the music you want at the price you want, put on your thinking caps and invent a secure means of distribution that gets dollars to the artists, which they control. If you're just inventing a new kind of record company, then step down, 'cause they won't get fooled again.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
To all artists, "copyright" is more than a term of intellectual property law that prohibits the unauthorized duplication, performance or distribution of a creative work. To them, "copyright" means the chance to hone their craft, experiment, create, and thrive. It is a vital right, and over the centuries artists have fought to preserve that right, artists such as John Milton, William Hogarth, Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens. Twain traveled to England to protect his rights, and Dickens came to America to do the same.
Copyright law all started with the "The Statute of Anne," the world's first copyright law passed by the British Parliament in 1709. Yet the principle of protecting the rights of artists predates this. It may sound like dry history at first blush, but since there was precedent to establish and rights to protect, much time, effort, and money has been spent in legal battles over the centuries.
In the United States, the principle took hold during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 when James Madison suggested that the Constitution include language "to secure to literary authors their copyrights for a limited time." The provision passed unanimously. It is found in Article I, Section 8, U.S. Constitution. It states...
Before free speech, before freedom of assembly, before freedom of religion, there was copyright protection in our Constitution. The founding fathers knew copyright protection could improve society by preserving the economic incentive for people to come up with brilliant ideas and inventions. They also realized the fundamental fairness of granting control of the creative work to the author.
President George Washington signed the first copyright law on May 31, 1790. Nine days later, author John Barry registered his work, The Philadelphia Spelling Book, in the U.S. District Court of Pennsylvania, making it the first "writing" protected by copyright. Since then, the copyright laws have been revised numerous times. The revisions have been aimed at balancing the author's right to reap the benefits of his or her work, and society's ability to benefit from that same work.
Today, in the recording industry, singers Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Sheryl Crow, Don Henley, Bonnie Raitt, and many others, are fighting for their rights. In the music business, stars are made not born, and it takes plenty of hard work to make it. Poe cut her debut album, "Hello," in 1995. She knows the value of a copyright, "Copyright protects the creative process....It's rough out there....There is nothing more inspiring to creativity than independence and that requires protection. If you're an artist that can do something nobody else can, you need to know that your work will not be diluted or mass produced." It's as simple as that.
The principle that the work you created belongs to you and should be controlled by you is as timeless as it is global. For centuries, new inventions, from the printing press to the Internet, have threatened that principle. For centuries, advocates have resolutely defended it. The RIAA is just such an advocate today.
M$: "We're #2!"
I'm talking utopia here. If we ever manage to sort things out, *nobody* will have to do any work he doesn't want to. I agree that may seem far out, but I am a hopeless optimist, sorry.
As for intellectual property:
IMHO real developement (i.e. things that are useful and good) doesn't occur because there is money to gain, but because humans are curious (think children). It may slow down progress a bit, but I think that the loss of quantity will be MORE than made up by the increase of quality.
...when there is no poverty anymore (technically this is already possible, it only has to 'happen'), the only motivation to create art will be the love for it (or boredom).
Real artists don't do it for the money, the do it because they have no choice. Because they just can't stop. Because they're addicted.
Amen.
Good point, and I can't say I disagree in it's entirety. I was/am a Napster user, and I have downloaded some MP3s I did not have legal right to. However, the argument that "the artists need to get paid" is almost as stupid as the "net culture" argument. Artist's do not own the rights to their own songs, the labels do, and it's becoming rarer that artists are paid royalties on Album sales. Besides most of the money an artist is going to make is on the concert track, and I don't think anyone will ever be able to replace the thrill of seeing an artist in concert.
-- this
-netmouse
What is cited here is a statistic, not a trend. By definition, this piece of information is static. The fact that "45% of on-line music users have been more likely to increase their total purchase of music in the last six months" may have more to do with the kind of people who are enjoying music on-line at this stage in the game, than it does have to do with the Internet's ability to promote music sales.
Does this "trend" maintain itself when getting music off the Internet is as common (read here: done by the most technically illiterate) as using email has become?
Obviously, that's a gamble that the music industry is not willing to take. And frankly, it's a statistic they deny. I agree with the basic premise that corporate profits and artists' interests are not one and the same (and, indeed, may be mutually exclusive), but it should be no surprise to any of us that the corporate world would not fight this movement to the bitter end. Unfortunately, the bitter end is more likely to come to a movement toward improved artists' rights, than to the preeminence of corporate power. Our society must undergo a fundamental change in the way we think of copyright and capitalism before true relief will come to this issue.
When did we leave the world where artist did their work because they enjoyed it regardless of what rewards they were going to recieve. People have always written books, but until the 20th century it was not a true for profit venture for most authors. Likewise, it was not until the 20th century when recorded music came about, yet until that time there were still musicians and composers who created great works. I guess what I'm getting at is that if we don't pay artists the way we do we are not going to end up with no artists but a smaller more passionate pool of artists; the kind of people who care about there work above all else. Their passion is what creates great works of art, not the media conglamorets(sp).
Just get to the part where we eat record company execs! ;)
Help educate musicians to NOT SIGN WITH THE MUSIC INDUSTRY! As you say 'don't play the game their way!'. Talking about 'major labels' is deceptive as the same four companies own 95% of the _minor_ labels and 'indie' labels too. Have the musicians read the contracts- you can quickly identify which organisations are part of the music industry and which are not. The music industry contracts are the most brutally, obscenely unbalanced legal documents you'll ever see- genuine alternative resources (like mp3.com, at least so far) have contracts that are actually _fair_. It's _not_ hard to see the difference. Compare mp3.com's contract with farmclub.com's, for example.
I look at Jon Katz articles posted here as trial runs for articles that are going to appear in less technical publications, like maybe Rolling Stone. By putting them here, he gets technical people to look at the article and help him clean up the technical flaws. So, when you say
I personally believe he's doing that, you're just seeing it first.Of course, you always have the option of ignoring Jon Katz articles, since you're a logged-in user. Do you deliberately read the articles so that you can be offended and rant?
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
The (tobacco/drug/record) companies are greedy, yes. But they aren't evil, and they aren't conspiring against you. Get some perspective.
Do have any idea how difficult it is to prove anything about corporations as large as the tobacco/drug/record corps are? People who try to point it out when these corps do something very bad often have their lives ruined in the process. They are sometimes smeared in the media, sued and accused of anything the corp can dig up on them, even threatened with everything, up to, and including bodily harm, harm to family, and death. Corporations ARE NOT ABOVE THESE KINDS OF TACTICS. Don't believe for a second that they will hesitate to lie, cheat, steal, or even worse to protect their profits and reputation, regardless of how bad their actions were. This is why we have whistleblower laws, because we've seen what can happen when you piss off a corporation. But even those don't always help. I'm not saying that every corporation does these kinds of things, but I am saying that you would be incredibly naive to simply assume that they don't, perhaps thinking that it would somehow leak out and become public knowledge. That attitude just makes it easier for them to get away with such things when they do choose to do them.
That said, I think I agree with a lot of what you said. Obviously drug companies need a way to recoup their expenses and turn a profit. There are cases where other interests override those of profit though. Africa is a perfect example of this. They need the drugs because they are having a massive AIDS epidemic. There's no way they can afford to pay the price the drug companies want. They have little choice but to do whatever is necessary for survival, and I don't see that we have any right to stop them. This is something that I think we here in the US need to really examine as a country. There must be a way to continue drug research without having to charge prices that are prohibitive for many people, even though their lives depend on receiving the medicine. Maybe we do need a less capitalist health system in this country. Maybe the government should buy certain critical drugs outright from their creators and pay them a lump sum for the cost of development, plus a profit percentage or something like that. This could lead to many drugs becoming available for little more than the cost of production. In other words, dirt cheap. This would probably also lead to a fair amount of regulation on the industry, but that may be necessary in order to provide the best healthcare possible for people in this country.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
And enforceing a copyright on it to try and retain some of that money is not the same as depriveing humanity from a life saveing drug.
My, aren't we putting an innocent face on this? Retain some of that money? Try making $15 billion in profit last year. Gimme a break. What Jefferson said is important. Even England had managed to fight off the publishers who wanted perpetual control over copyrights. Just because you write and perform a song, you have no natural right to prevent anyone else from performing that same song. Then if you record the song, you still have no natural right to prevent anyone from making a copy of it. That's why we have copyright now. It's an artificial means to allow artists and creators to profit from their work so that they keep doing it. Unfortunately, we went from a reasonable length of time (14 years + 14 more on renewal) to the outrageously long term of life + 70 years, or 95 years for a work for hire (i.e. work created while under contract).
Since the public has been screwed out of its end of the deal (the works becoming public domain after a reasonable period of time for the creator to profit), it's no wonder people don't have much respect for copyright. It just feels inherently unnatural. Something created solely for the profit of big publishers. Which is exactly what it's become. The media industry has done this to itself by trying to screw the public more and more over the years. They got too greedy, now it's payback time. I'd like nothing better than to laugh at their folly and watch them sink into bankruptcy. Not sure if that's how it'll play out, but it's a nice thought. :)
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
and forced companies to give away drugs to people who need them
I'm not saying that drug companies should be forced to give away drugs. I'm saying that we should not use sanctions against African countries for violating patents when the produce the drugs themselves. They can't pay for them anyway, so drug companies aren't losing sales. The drugs are just helping people that would otherwise die because they can't afford to buy these drugs from American corporations. They seem to have worked out a deal of sorts now. The drug companies are now being paid, although at a much reduced rate, for the drugs that are being produced in Africa. This way they still make some money, and the drugs get used where they are needed the most.
The problem (and many people will hate me for saying this) is that people (particularly Americans) attach too high a value to each human life.
I understand what you're saying here. It's like when Spock died. The good of the many over the good of the one. But it's not always that simple or black and white.
Now calculate the cost of the most expensive cutting-edge medical treatment for one person, and multiply that number by the population of the world. Call that number C. I do not doubt that C is far greater than W.
I see what you're trying to do, but you left out so many factors that it's not even worthwhile to break out a calculator. I'm not saying that we should spare no expense to save everyone in the world. Many of these countries bring a lot of their woes on themselves, with Ethiopia and Eritria(sp?) being prime examples. But with the massive epidemic of AIDS taking place in Africa, we'd be stupid not to do something to help. These countries, and the citizens themselves especially, are extremely poor. They can't possibly afford to buy the drugs from the drug corporations, so there is little to no harm done to the corporations by allowing them to produce the drugs themselves by not forcing them to license patents (which the corporations won't license in the first place usually because they are too valuable when that company is the sole producer of a drug).
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
But I don't agree that "we'd be stupid not to do something to help." (assuming by "we" you mean the US government.) They're not our people, they're not our responsibility.
I'm not saying we're responsible for taking care of their people. I'm saying it's not a good idea to ignore an epidemic of that size because sooner or later it will affect us too. Maybe not directly, but one way or another. If we stand by and let it happen without taking any action, we could very well regret that decision terribly later.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I run a small record label/studio. We have our own distribution channels, and we are involved iwth NARM (National Association for Recording Merchandisers), however we have no ties to the RIAA. The RIAA represents what used to be known as the big 7 (although some mergers have changed that), and represents the distribution channels more than the actual labels themselves (for all intents and purposes, WEA, aka Warner/Electra/Atlantic is not Warner Music). It's actually the distributer that rapes the artist the most, claiming they've invested the most into the process. Most of the money a label puts up for an album is recovered from the artists profits before the artist gts a dime. Almost every piece of equipment I own, from my 24 and 32 track 2" reel to reel units to my 32 track digital recordes, to my DATs, or even the SOFTWARE and hardware I use for mastering have some form of tariff on them. Almost a third of what I pay for a new reel is a tariff that gets paid to the RIAA. The RIAA is not the Recording Association of America, they are a puppet for what might as well be the evil empire of music. THey offer no help or protection to indies, and have always tried to leave the impression that they do. They will alway try to turn things into exorbanant amounts of money. I wouldn't be suprised, if much the same tactic are used for internet music. I doubt the RIAA wil accept anything less than what they feel is the equivalant value of a song on the street. And they'll viscously fight anyone who attempts to circumvent any copy protection they put in place.
"God is REAL
This couldn't be more wrong. If there were no copyright, then there would only be two types of source code:
First, there would be public domain code. All open source projects would fall into this category. This code would be open, available, and owned nobody and controlled by noone. Anyone could use this code for any purpose.
Second, there would be code that nobody ever sees. Individuals and organizations who wanted to produce closed-source software would have to shield, obscure, and otherwise protect their code with contracts, usage licenses, and security.
The big difference would be that the public domain code would have no protection whatsoever from being absorbed by closed-source projects. There would be no protection for programmers who wished to enforce their choice of open source development on others.
In a world without copyright (and therefore no GPL) there would be nothing to prevent Microsoft from using any and all of the Linux kernel code in their own closed-source products. Without copyright protection, if your code was open, it would have to be public domain.
It is copyright law, and nothing else, that gives the GPL its teeth. Don't believe for a minute that the lack of copyright protection will somehow eliminate all closed-source software. The truth is, without the protection of copyright, there's no middle ground and we'd see less, not more open-source code.
Anyone who was around and using software in the late seventies and early eighties knows exactly what the software world would look like without copyright. Back when nobody knew what "software" meant, it was very unclear exactly how much protection copyright offered for software. Copyright law took several years to mature and adapt to the computer revolution and during that period the growing pains were sharp and harsh.
Would we really want to return to the days of dongles, hardware copy protection, usage contracts, and burdensome licenses? Without copyright, that's what software houses would have to fall back upon to protect their intellectual property. It wasn't until copyright established itself in the software world that we were finally able to move past those cumbersome and ineffecient methods.
If this concept bothers you, ask yourself why? The foundation of the GPL is that programmers should have the right to dictate how their code is used. If you accept the GPL, you accept that a programmer has an inherent right of control over their code that they can then be able to say "this code should never be used in a closed-source program".
How is it that programmers should have this right and musicians should not? Why should software have protections that music should not? Shouldn't a musician have the same degree of control and be able to say "this song shouldn't be made freely available"?
You say that the benefit typically doesn't go to the artist/creator. In the publishing industries whether music or book, the reason those benefits flow to a third party, is because they were sold to that party by the creator.
It's a fairly well established rule, that when rights to anything are given, unless specifically not allowed, those rights can be transferred to a third party just like any other property can be transferred to a third party. When you own something, you have every right to sell it, and copyright law gives ownership of the works to the creators, who then sell some or all of the ownership rights to publishers in order to get the work the widest distribution.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
2 thoughts -
- Anyone who suggests overhauling or abolishing copyright law should remember that it's the legal foundation for the GPL.
- The world will not come crashing to a halt if it becomes impossible to charge people for an incremental copy of your work, which costs nothing or next to nothing to produce. You and the rest of the world will adjust to this new reality.
One problem is that audio media is no longer seperable from non-audio media.
Yes. The Computer Industry was much, much smarter than the Recording Industry, which got caught with it's ass in the air and a big "sucker" sign firmly stapled to both cheeks. (PNG, anyone?)
First off, the Computer Industry got themselves completely written out of the law. This law was an RIAA law, and the Computer Industry wanted no part of it. Thus, the media royalty payments are only required on CDR media that is marketed and intended for use as audio media. Hey, no problem. The computer industry sells CDR drives that are intended for storing computer data, that just so happen to also handle audio data perfectly well, thank you.
Then, while the Recording Industry was attempting to sell special CD recorders that would only take $13.95 audio blanks, the Computer Industry was coming out with CDR drives that used 99 cent blanks.
Guess who won.
If you want to read the original document, see this page at the RIAA web site.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
You would have a stronger argument if the recording industry was a free market. The major labels control distribution and promotion. It's their way or the highway.
The situation reminds me of professional baseball in the "good old days". If you wanted to be a professional baseball player, you signed your soul over to one of a limited number of teams, who were owned and controlled by an old boys club. Players were "owned" by the teams. If you didn't like the contract and you were not a major star, too bad. Players were treated like property, to be bought and sold at the convenience of the owners.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The original copyright laws, such as the Statute of Anne in England, were more about protecting publishers and the state than they were about protecting authors. If a publisher had purchased a manuscript, and had it set in type and printed, he didn't want the market for the book to be damaged by another publisher reprinting the book. A publisher had the exclusive right to publish a given title, even Greek and Roman classics that would be in the public domain under current law. The crown wanted control over the publishing industry, to prevent the publication of subversive or heretical literature. The publishers wanted to suppress competition and make money. Rhetoric about the "rights of the author" was used to justify a system that enriched publishers much more than authors. When an author sold a manuscript, the "rights of the author" were transferred to the publisher.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Uh, this is severely flawed logic (otherwise known as a copout excuse) on your part! Sure, the artist may no longer "own" the song, but the artist did own it before. The fact is is that the artist chose to sell it of his own free will, whether directly or indirectly. By denying the purchaser the right to profit from the song as they see fit, you are reducing the value of any future songs that the artist may choose to make.
The fact of the matter here is that most of these artists enter into these contracts entirely voluntarily. It is not as if ANYONE is putting a gun to their head. What you see is the result of the choices of a rational human being (artist) who is looking out for his own well being. The choice boils down to: a) Sign the contract and get "screwed" by only recieving a fraction of the profits, but still get rich. b) Try to be greedy, go/stay Indy or whatever, and never sell enough records to turn a profit. Despite Napster, mp3.com, and your other theories, the people right there on the front lines, the artists, still choose A overwhelmingly.
There may be some truth to the fact that there is something of a lock on the industry. On the other hand, I know, as in so many other areas on slashdot, the users fail to see the bigger economic picture. The fact that the labels take risks too totally escapes them.
Don't just look at the profits on the individual CDs, look at their profits on the aggregate! How many albums are winners? How many are loosers? Promotional costs? Distribution? These aren't niggardly concerns, they matter to the artist too.
Uh, no. I'm sorry, but I happen to be in a related industry, medical devices. What you say is largly myth and misinterpretation.
A) It is not as if these universities are robbed of their work. They mostly SELL it. The marketplace IS competetive, but that inititial research is just 1/10th the battle and is only worth so much.
B) While the NYT may have quoted 20%, or even 40%, these numbers are easily distorted. If they aggregated the dollar figure of drug research and applied it against the whole industry, they'd get a scewed number. These programs are generally poorly run, they don't know their head from their ass. I know much of the money tends to go to professional academics who make their life burning through research money, not to the drug companies (though they do get some). Likewise, the universities are RESEARCH oriented and are totally inept when it comes to taking real risk and developing a viable product. Much of their "product" is frankly crap. They don't have what it takes to develop them, even though many of them are extremely wealthy. They bleed money because of this. Of both government and university research (which is payed through government dollars frequently) the drug, biotech, and medical device companies will cherry pick what little viable research is of some use. To then say government and universities spent 5b this year developing drugs, drug co's spent 25b, therefore government and universities are responsibile for 20% of research....well that'd simply be ridiculous. I can tell you from experience almost every dollar that counts comes from industry, not academia or government agencies.
B) Bringing a drug to market is extremely expensive, marketing aside. Believe it. Between FDA requirements. Proving effectiveness. Animal testing. etc...it all adds up very rapidly. Not to mention the various liability costs. The costs of paying human subjects. Lab facilities.
C) You neglect to mention that they're also in an extremely risky and volatile market. Those profit margins are necessary to obtain investment and to acquire debt, they're not nearly so high when compared to companies such as Intel, who have somewhat similar economics.
D) It's not a zero sum game. They generate viable products where others tend to fail. These in turn generate taxable revenue. Share holder wealth, which is again taxed. Employee wealth...etc. In short, I'd rather see MORE dollars going to these companies than less.
Perhaps the artists need protecting from $$$ flashing in their eyes. Before an artist becomes famous, perhaps they do it because they love their art. And would carry on making art regardless. But relatively rich bands may find it hard (read: impossible) to forefit their income. The more money they get, the more they want.
... just an opinion.
These laws were enacted so that authors and artists would have an incentive to produce new works and to encourage the free and rapid circulation of ideas and opinions.
Would ideas and opinions not circulate faster - or at least, no slower - if copyright was nonexistant?
"It is a principle of American law that an author of a work may reap the fruits of his or her intellectual creativity for a limited period of time.", quoted from http://www.loc.gov/copyright/docs/cir c1a.html seems to be a more accurate description of what a copyrights purpose is. (Not that earning major bucks isn't an incentive to produce new works...)
Adam
That's an interesting example you brought up. I tried their thing a while back. It didn't work. Then I found the whole show, and donated my bandwidth and server space to sharing it because I thought it was a great show.
If you like, I think it's over here.
A buck a song seems fair, until a virus or a hard disk crash costs you $2,000 in very expensive one and zeros. Well then you just download them again, you say. Well then why can't I download them after I buy a cd? Charging people money directly for downloads will not work, IMHO. The only way to give the product any real value is to support it with massive IP police.
Keep selling cds, playing live shows, make some cool shirts, and do jag commercials. And be creative with revenue streams, there are lots of ways to capitalize on mass attention. And subscriptions of one type or another will probably be real popular (i.e. the "band list" $5/mo. access to secure server, first dibs on tickets, etc)
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+&x
Unless you can correct these perceptions, I can't see any way they are threatening
the potential of the net for unsigned artists.
This is one aspect of the Napster argument that many RIAA apologists totally miss out on. Yes, the majority of their traffic is major issues from major studios (87% if you belive Napster's CEO, who gets server report logs), however, the service is extremely useful for listening to bands that you would never hear in another forum. I've done this for a number of bands that I've heard people mention.
Now you say "oh, but look at how many N'Sync and Britney spears download there are.", but this is a side effect of thier rabid promotion, coupled with the general lack of variety on the teeny-bopper scene. Where do kids hear about new songs and artists? The MTV and radio. You know how much it costs to create a video and get decent airplay? Well, let's put it this way, the only way you'd have enough money is if you sign away your life's work to a major record company.
So along comes a promotional vehicle that is completely out of control of the major studios, allows access to a huge variety of music on demand. All you need to know is the name of a band. This is where their actions are hurting small-time musicians. By destroying a promotional vehicle. How hard is it for a local or whatever musician to say "The band's name is X, song is X, you can check it out on Napster (or equiv.)" This gives anyone the chance to hear it without the artist having a cost, and achieving a benefit..another listener exposed to their music.
Multiply this exponentially, which happens fairly often in this medium, and hopefully this is an example on how destoying distrubution systems hurts those that could use such institutions to garner the attention needed for radio airplay, or a decent recording contract. By leveraging the power of the network, an individual can bootstrap themselves into the mainstream consciousness. This hasn't happened yet in music, but it will given the chance. Until upwards of 30% of consumers have broadband though, it is very unlikely.
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+&x
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
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There is no try at jedinite.com
First of all, Courney Love gave a very intelligent speech about music, MP3s, and how the recording industry is the real pirate. Reading it made me think Katz isn't too far off the mark in this case (wow! a first! :-)
The solution? A site where you can buy plain old MP3s (no copy protection or wierd proprietary format crap) at whatever bitrate you want for a reasonable cost ($.20 - $1.00 a track). Throw in a few sample tracks... Artists always get half the take. Simple as that.
Sure, there will still be piracy, but most people really don't want to screw over artists, and would really prefer to get MP3s they know are well encoded. The convenience+conscience factor will win out if the price is reasonable.
Why haven't I gone out and started musicvana.net (instead of whining a la Katz)? It would take a lot of capital to pull it off, and I don't have the connections. If you do, or know someone who does, please contact me. I have a bunch more ideas for such a venture.
True. Also, the product that is released by the various Linux distributors often can *legally* be downloaded for free (bandwith can be expensive) and the different parts of the distro they're releasing were already free (beer and speach) before they repackaged them. Two things that don't apply to music distributors.
Thimo
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Avoid the Gates of Hell. Use Linux!
Source, please.
Since KaiShin's posted e-mail address ends in .ca, I presume he's referring to the Canadian blank media tax (they call it a levy, but that's just standard political language).
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
DAT isn't dead at all. It flourishes not only in the professional arena, but is well-represented in the artist-recording community and the "Tapers" community.
If you've been to a Phish, Dave Matthews Band, Eddie from Ohio, Agents of Good Roots, or Medeski Martin Wood show, etc then you may have seen a group of folks with mic's flying in the air, recording the show for posterity, onto DAT. While DAT is by no means a suitable medium for long-term archival, it's great for actual recording. No flips or swaps of media for about 2-3 hours, depending on tape length. Thanks to manufacturers like Sony and Maxell and Fuji, as well as vendors like Terrapin Tapes and Tape House and others, we have a stable and ready supply of blank DAT media.
Additionally, for artists, who don't have the budget to plunk down for a large block of expensive studio time, or the funds to drop on an ADAT unit, recording to DAT can be at cost-effective way to self-produce albums. Big Head Todd & the Monsters' Midnight Radio was recorded in such a manner, relatively inexpensively. Everything's original self-produced album Sol*id was also recorded using some material collected from their engineer's live DAT recordings of their early shows.
The RIAA's draconian "Audio" dat tax, as well as requirement that "non-professional" decks have SCMS, effectively killed it for the consumer market. Professional decks can be had for less than 500 bucks these days though, putting it near the range of high-end consumers, as well as close to MiniDisc prices, with NO compression, no flips every 74 minutes, and a larger taping community with lower media cost per unit.
The point is that DAT as a technology isn't dead (in fact new decks have been created in the last couple of years, and soundcard makers are building S/PDIF and AES/EBU i/o into their cards for transfer from DAT for Prosumers), it's merely become a "niche" technology, used by artists and tapers. Until portable harddrives which are capable of loss-less, skip-less recording with decent battery life and multiple sampling rates are built and reasonably priced, I'm sticking with DAT for my taping needs.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."-Tennyson
advantage in the formulation of the early legislative documents: the
reasons and motivations were presented with reasonable clarity, and
were thought to be things that you should establish by argument.
Today bills pass as a result of complex political horse-trading, and
is usually hard to unambiguously identify the idea that lies behind a
law, let alone be confident that it has been subjected to much
criticism.
This isn't an attempt to whitewash the flaws of the constitution:
to pick a controversial example, the second amendment is a horribly
ambiguous and flawed document. But I don't think that the retroactive
provision of the CTEA was subject to proper criticism, and, if I think
it's hopeless, I like the idea of being able to challenge laws for
being unconstitutional becuase it gives a chance to test the ideas
that lie behind them.
OK, I admit it. I've taken some cheap shots at Katz before. I think some of his articles recently have been over the top, basically on the level of FUD.
That said, I think that since folks like me are quick to point out his mistakes, that we owe him some credit. I think his last two articles on RIAA/Napster and related issues have been excellent. No "geekgeekgeek" and no post-Columbine.
Way to go JK.
Can your IM do this?
So what would be a decent price point for you?
.shn or an actual CD.
The thing is that there are handling/service fees for each transaction, so even if a band was doing distribution on their own without a record company this way, at say 75 cents per song they'd still lose most of it to fees, hosting, etc.
Personally, I'd have trouble purchasing an mp3 file, as I hate the sound quality. If I was paying the $$, I'd rather get an
Thomas Jefferson wrote this at a time when the US cheerfully stole technology.
Once I was a weaver in New England, heir to a labor tradition stretching back to the time when English settlers noticed lots of waterfalls, built lots of dams with water wheels, attached belts to the wheels, and looms to the belts, and found useful employment for surplus country kids. It's skilled labor, no real need for literacy, but skilled.
Oh, and the technology was, in modern terms, pirated. Totally dependant on a millwright who learned his trade well, and illegally emigrated to New England (there were laws againg millwrights emigrating, a somewhat more drastic EULA) where he built looms and spinning jennies and most parts for them, which were then copied by all and sundry.
You've heard of Yankee ingenuity. We stole it.
Now, pretty quickly the mills expanded (and the local country folks split westward to where farming had a bit less to do with dragging rocks out of fields to make picturesque stone fences) and new help, anyone available, was hired. Despite efforts by mill owners to encourage diversity (and discourage organization) about halfway into the first generation enough people got English down well enough to have bitch sessions, shortly followed by attempts to organise unions and/or strikes. (I recommend going to the Bread and Roses Festival in Lowell, Massachusetts presuming it's still held. You can get the details there from a surprising variety of sources.)
Eventually, the TVA made electricity cheap enough to move the mills south where unions had a much harder time organising. It turned out not to be impossible to organise unions in southern mills, though. There's no longer a domestic textile industry.
But Jefferson was watching the adoption of pirated technology, and the results seemed, to him, good.
It's only in recent memory that the US has bothered with foreign copyrights. The first paperback edition (Ace) of The Lord of the Rings in the US paid no royalties to J.R.R. Tolkein. A point noted prominantly by the author on the cover of the second (Ballentine) edition. Although I've read a few complaints prior to that about British authors being published without recompense in the US, those same authors toured the US to much acclaim, got a boost to their income, and generally had all-expnses paid vacations. Corporate control of authors' book tours seems to have made that perk a chore.
And of course, Jefferson would have howled to see 'piracy' applied to "intellectual property". Jefferson knew (and the United States licensed) pirates.
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
Basically, every post I've read simply boils down to exchanging a world where most artists are ripped off by record labels and some become rich to a world where artists are ripped off by fans and all of them stay broke. As long as Napster or something similar (i.e. free and easy to use) exists no online music distribution system will work.
REASONS:
PS: The problem is that Napster has now perpetuated the idea that music over the Internet should be free. Of course once home/car/personal MP3 players become cheap enough and popular enough this suddenly will mean that people will assume that all music should be free. Guess how many of today's artists would exist if there was no way to get a return of their investment of time and talent in their music?
What percentage of the artists at mp3.com do you think use only paid-in-full uncracked software?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Unfortunately for us, the RIAA/MPAA have realised this huge potential at a time when it is still vulnerable to pre-emptive legislation. They want to chain and guide this potential whilst they still can and their resources are up to the challenge.
I'm sorry, but I'm missing a part of your logic here. What website, list or server that works purely to distribute the works of consenting artists has been attacked by the RIAA/MPAA? Where has an attempt to promote unsigned artists with the permission of all artists involved been threatened or shut down by one of these groups? What part of any of their arguments against napster could be used to shut down such a service?
Yeah, so the big evil initials have been known to take advantage of artists they represent if they can, and don't try to make life easy for outsiders. But their actions towards Napster have so far been totally legitimate and in the interests of their artists, and largely orthogonal to the interests of unsigned artists. No precedent is being set which threatens the voluntary use of online distribution by an artist. The only attacks have been against third parties which distribute works they have no rights to, with small collateral damage to unsigned artists who use those channels. Unless you can correct these perceptions, I can't see any way they are threatening the potential of the net for unsigned artists.
-Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
I don't get your argument. Current copyright laws are something different than the founders intended? So what? Civil rights laws are different also. Should we re-establish slavery because the founders were slave owners?
The present copyright situation does suck. As if it was any better in the past. Shakespeare didn't even own the rights to his plays. His theater company did. (That's why he became a shareholder in the theater.)
And even the theater couldn't control their property. Some time, when you're not worshipping the Constitution, read some of the 'foul' Hamlet manuscripts. They were created by unscrupulous publishers who wanted to sell the play, but they didn't have access to the script. So they got someone to go to the play, try to memorize it, then they would publish it illegally and keep the money. Shakespeare didn't make a dime off these books. [But we got great garbled speeches like, "The question is to be or not to be/Aye, there's the rub..."]
I have just been wondering what happens when this convergence becomes total - when all large recording companies are co-owned with music hardware companies. What happens when a new digital media format is specifically designed by its manufacturers' consortium to force users to adhere to excessively restrictive use limitations? As much as people might like to tout Open-Source software and standards and Free (speech) software, I'm guessing few of you have the resources to manufacture an alternate physical media type which could be used instead of CD's/audio-DVD/whatever if the need arose.
I would hate to live in a world where transnational corporations controlled not only information but the means for distributing it in such a fashion. Of course, one might say "Well, we'll just have to distribute digital copies on the internet through system foo-ster etc." but what if a) music becomes almost impossible to copy in the first place (heavy encryption), and b) there's no media which will accept the copies anyway?
Freedom: "I won't!"
Well i did deliberately cite those three because they were all supported in different ways.
:)
:)
I have internet explorer 5 running on Solaris and IE 4.5 running on MacOS 8 without any windows in sight
What I feel is that bands should tour more often. I'm perfectly happy to shell out the price of an album to see them live for an hour or two, and isn't that really what music is all about.
MP3s can certainly help promote bands. I was at a Matchbox20 concert a month or two ago and heard people talking about the fact that they heard rob thomas singing on the santana song smooth, downloaded some more of his music then came along to the gig - doesn't sound unlikely either.
I'm quite sure I recall (being told) that when record players came out, artists were afraid it would be the end of live performances.
If Mp3 trading means an end to bands like oasis who do 3 concerts a year and feed their drug habits through album sales then you'll find me downloading. Equally if it gives bands more of a financial incentive to tour, you'll again find me downloading
Is this true? I've never met a CD player that didn't like a CD-R, and I've got some OLD players. On the other hand, CD-RWs, obviously, are a different story. I've found that CD-RWs aren't playable in any of my CD players, but my DVD player recognizes it just fine (which, I guess, you would expect.)
The reason behind this is that CDRWs reflect less light and thus require slightly different methods of using the laser light to read the disc. Standard CD players are not able to do this; therefore, they are not able to read CDRWs.
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I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Here here!
Jon Katz may not be your favorite writer. Fine. He's not mine, either, but he's not a bad writer, and he sure as hell is taking your side in most of these big issues and arguments. If he's going to work to write all these articles, exposing the masses to issues that are all so apparent to you and I, I think the least you could do would be to have a little respect for the effort. Plus, he doesn't feel the need to hack the English language up with stupid adolescent misspellings for normal words like "elite," nor does he use the word "fucking" in every other sentence.
Get a clue and get some class. Represent your species with some dignity.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
I think the recent offering by Stephen King of his serialized novel at $1 per chapter will be a good laboratory for the future of distribution of intellectual works. Once artists become well known, it may be that they can bypass the major media outlets and go to their audiences directly. If so, the marketplace will sort all of this out without the need for government involvement. That would be the more desireable path than future abortions like the DMCA.
"corporatism is the enemy of true creativity and freedom. "
Not applicable. Private businesses are in the business of making money. Signing, naive, impatient young people with a modicum of talent to produce maybe one successful single on an overpriced CD has proven to be a successful enterprise for companies like Time Warner, Seagrams, Sony and so forth.
Don't count on some recording executive waking up one day and changing things.
Don't hope the government will step in with some amazing new set of rules; they are making good money off the current methodology in the form of tax revenues.
Artists have to stop providing the fodder and content for the machine. Thats it. Quit feeding the beast and the beast will die.
Check that link and try again.
"You would have a stronger argument if the recording industry was a free market. The major labels control distribution and promotion. It's their way or the highway."
Thanks for bolstering my already strong argument.
Most artists *want* that world created and maintained by the big recording industry. That world includes the distibution, promotion, videos, parties and BS. That is why they sign. But once they do, they can no longer complain about the Terms of Service.
Independent, free thinking artists say, "No Thanks". They give up access to the distribution and promotion channels *built and owned* by the recording industry and find their own way. They say no thanks to the glitz, glammor and fake lifestyle and live like normal people on their own terms.
It is not slavery. Slaves are captured, sold and forced to work. Artists who sign contracts do so by choice. They want that glitzy life they see on VH1 and Entertainment Tonight and have to deal with the consequences of their actions. It is no different than the "signing your soul to the devil".
Don't play the game their way!
Because, Mr. Katz has fallen into an all to common attitude prevalent today. There is some imaginary line which allows for a company to be successful (profitable) but not too profitable and therefore, greedy.
This mindset prescribes that profits are fine for corporations as long as profits are "shared" with employees to some degree, are "donated" back to an imaginary place called "community" in some form, and are not made at the expense of offending any person, animal, plant or culture.
Any profits that are paid out to stockholders (greedy speculators and profiteers) or in the form of salaries or bonuses to top performers and leaders are not acceptable. Nor should employee compensation be tied to profitability - pay and bonues should be based upon tenure and title of employees rather than effort and financial condition of the corporation.
Taxes must be paid on all profits by the corporation, shareholders and employees in order to compensate the state for providing an environment in which those profits were derived.
According to proponents of this vaguely defined world, private business would thrive under this ideal condition and all would fairly benefit.
Entertainment conglomerates have skillfully -- and at great cost -- distorted the purpose of copyright law and are jumbling two very different issues: the rights of artists, and the rights to exorbitant corporate profits.
Jon, perhaps you could define for us exactly how much people (yes, people -- people own corporations, they are not alive) have a right to profit.
You seem to imply that corporation do not have a right to "exorbitant" profits, and that is just an incredibly foolish attitude. When government jack-boots its way into private business, and starts dictating profits -- in other words, legislating prices -- you are on the road to economic ruin.
I hope I am just misinterpreting what you are saying. If not, please review the history of the Soviet Union for lessons in what happens when government removes the right to profit.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
As a musician and a writer I believe very strongly in the Copyright system. All of my work is Copyrighted. On the other hand, I have been unable to get my music published, and very little of my writing has been published. I like to think that it's because I'm a talentless hack, but who knows.
I believe that the music industry needs to see the internet for what it is, a marketing tool. The internet is just like radio or television. Yes, people make tapes of videos, and of songs off the radio, and download MP3s off the internet, but without exposure to the music, there is no way to get them excited about it enough to buy the music.
And, yes, the industry takes advantage of the artist. Unless the artist is very business savvy, the industry gets the lion share of the profits. But, the industry does provide a service. It provides the dream. A hundred years ago, just as many people played music (percentage wise, obviously there were less people then), maybe more, but few performed publicly, fewer still performed for a living, and fewer still composed, and were well known. The life of a performer was not seen as a very desirable one, as performers made very little money and received very little fame. The recording industry changed all that. Mega stars are created through hype and marketing, not talent. It's the golden apple that has created untold thousands of garage bands seeking stardom. There has to be a balance, where the artists are treated fair without compromising the dream. Maybe we need a new Copyright law that dictates the terms of artist contracts, what the artist gets, and what the publisher gets.
The music industry still remembers tapes, that's what. I'd say that more piracy occured because of standard audio tapes than anything else. Artists had a horrible time selling tapes, and the industry was hurt terribly because of it.
Burning a CD copy is still clumsy and slow; older CD players won't even play CDR's. But MP3's offer the solution akin to tapes - fast, cheap, and portable. Now, I still prefer my CD player - it would cost me too much to carry around CFlash cards equivalent to what I can carry around in a CD wallet. But many people are happy with their Rio's, and it scares the industry.
For the first time since audio tapes the technology is there to make a fast copy of an album and share it with your friends.
This isn't about digital rights. This is about an industry scarred by horrible memories of tapes - of consumers who would trade albums instead of buying one.
Being Some Reflections Inspired by Mr Katz, Demagogue of This Parish
With Learned Comment And Precepts For The Wise
Grocery conglomerates have skillfully -- and at great cost -- distorted the purpose of contract law and are jumbling two very different issues: the rights of farmers, and the rights to exorbitant corporate profits. They aren't the same thing. Most farmers need more protection from grocery companies than from college kids harvesting fields under cover of darkness. How can the rights of farmers be protected out in the fields?
Lost in the legal brawling is the original purpose of contract law. The Common Law originally developed a theory of contracts not so that the means of production and distribution could be owned forever and licensed by big companies. These laws were enacted so that farmers and other producers would have an incentive to produce new goods and to encourage the free and rapid circulation of wealth.
Those judges in olden times reasoned that if anybody could steal anybody's produce at any time, farmers and manufacturers would have no motive to keep growing crops and making things. And since farms were small and local communities vigilant, those laws were easy to police. They aren't easy to police anymore. Big farms and rural isolation mean that anyone with a torch and a sickle can fill up his car with produce at harvest time, and modern home freezer technology means it can be kept in cold store for months.
Today, the purpose of contract laws seems to be earning even bigger profits for grocery conglomerates hiding behind the mantra of protecting farmers. But 18th-century notions of contract doesn't (sic) make sense in the year 2000. Nobody can argue that the sharing of food by "unofficial harvesting" necessarily deprives the food industry (or farmers) of any incentive to grow food. And the modern economy is the greatest medium yet for ensuring the rapid dissemination of goods and services, a boon that should be protected, not shut down.
There is more food making more money in more forms -- generating $15 billion in profit in l999 -- than at any time in world history. In fact, comestibles in many forms, from turnips to alfalfa sprouts to pork bellies, is (sic again) flourishing. It would be tragic to create a more restrictive environment around the modern economy before we even try and figure out how farmers can get the protection and compensation they deserve. A study released last week by Jupiter, a grocery commerce research firm, says that "unoffical harvesters" are 45 per cent more likely than non-harvesters to have increased their total grocert purchases over the last six months. How, exactly, do farmers benefit from reversing that trend?
The new purpose of contract may be the reasonable protection of the rights of farmers and other productive entities; namely to ensure that they be paid fairly for their work, although perhaps in new and different ways. (An equally important contract trial concluded this week in Manhattan, where grocery industry lawyers have filed suit challenging the right to own and drive a car at night, and to own a torch at all).
Contract laws also need to recognize that access to free food has become a tradition and right for tens of millions of people, mostly younger Americans who grew up filching produce from fields at night, and who are now routinely branded "thieves" and "pirates" by corporate publicists and their close friends (corporations are the biggest contributors to political campaigns), congressional lawmakers. Gourmets also need some sort of fair-use protection. It's absurd to give giant conglomerates and commodities brokers the right to speak for farmers. Commodities brokerages are to farmers what wolves are to sheep.
Et cetera. Further instalments must await the replenishment of my sarcasm reservoir.
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
As the RIAA clamps down on the sharing of music in all forms, taxes on blank audio cassettes and cds, using its legal power to shut down napster, trying to force music stores to pay royalties for the music it plays in its own stores, one must wonder where all this is going. It seems as though the RIAA wants the right to feed us the music it wants us to hear, and only the music its wants us to hear. Everyone else is talentless anyway right? Let the RIAA decide what is good for you!
An article in the paper today talked about how people at live concerts were taking advantage of the equipment provided for the hearing impaired to produce high quality bootlegs of concerts. The equpiment, which is required to be available by US law, pipes a direct feed from the soundboard to a receiver and headphone set, which is then recorded by the bootlegger. Elimination of crowd noise and distortion make the bootlegged copy of far higher quality than normally associated with bootlegs.
Hearing impaired people have expressed fears that this service will stop being made available because of this bootlegging. Should they be fearful? Should such a great service be discontinued because of some perceived threat to the music industry from these bootlegs? Should fast and efficient file sharing be stopped because of a perceived threat to the music industry? Comne on RIAA, you're only pissing off more people.
"I live in a world of make-believe, with faeries and leprechauns and tiny little frogs with funny hats."
While none of this seems untterly clueless, it also doesn't seem very new. Katz's article would be a good peice to introduce someone to the issue, but for those who have been following it[i.e. /. readers] the article is a tad... stale.
-={(Astynax)}=-
-={(Astynax)}=-
"Darkness beyond Twilight"
http://www.smh.com.au/breaking/0007/31/A40420-2000 Jul31.shtml http://www.smh.com.au/breaking/0007/31/A40420-2000 Jul31.shtml
reject
can you say RIAA challenges federal disabilities act??????
Most artists need more protection from media companies than from college kids downloading music online. How can the rights of artists be protected on the Net?
Artists need saving from the representatives that they have contractually agreed to work with? No one held a gun to any musicians head, and forced them to sign with a particular label. Money was given to the artist, and if they felt so strongly that they wanted to retain complete control they should have never given that control away.
And since books and documents were cumbersome and expensive to produce, copyright laws were easy to police. They aren't easy to police anymore.
Apparently, since it's not easy to police anymore, then all enforcement should be totally discarded? Just because something isn't easy, doesn't mean that it's inherently wrong.
The question of artist's rights is complex and urgent. Many artists not under contract to large corporations can't get their work seen or published at all.
Which is exactly why many artists chose to work with labels. Only a large corporation can devote the marketing dollars necessary to make a musician as successful as many manage to get.
Many artists who are under contract feel exploited by recording companies, who take a disproportionate share of profits, and who make enormous margins on conventional music sales.
And those artists are more than welcome to not work with a recording company. The net allows them to spread their music far and wide, under whatever terms they desire.
Millions of music lovers feel that they are overcharged...
If you feel overcharged, vote with your feet, and don't buy music from the companies that are overcharging you. Music is not necessary for life, and if you don't buy popular culture, you'll still survive quite nicely.
and offered too few choices and controls about the music they want to hear.
The record companies aren't preventing artists from creating music. They are merely distributing those artists that they feel have the most potential. The other artists are still out there, and can be found. Getting rid of labels won't make the marginal artists more successful, since they aren't being handled by the majors anyhow.
The Net provides a marketplace of cultural exchange, benefiting new artists and to music lovers. It's not simply a matter of theft, but of creating an environment in which culture thrives. That needs to be legally and politically acknowledged.
This is more of Jon's normal rhetoric about how the rights of the consumer are absolute. And the rights of the artsits/owners should be trampled as necessary for the consumers sake.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
What 18th-century copyright law seems to have disregarded - and I can't know how intrusive of an influence this was back then - was that art and science is not only about commerce and making big bucks -- it's also about fame.
Now sure, n'Synch n' Spears n' Hansen are bloody rich, but they're also famous -- and let's not forget, one reason why they ARE so rich is because they have been formulated to LOOK FAMOUS wherever they go (i.e., it all started when the record companies "planted" groupies to yell and scream and cry when the stars get off their lear jet ... but I digress); and whether they deny it or not, the aspect of FAME is one of the rewards these "artists" were seeking.
You've heard the old saying, "there's no such thing as bad publicity," right? Metalica's big problem is their image -- if all they were inteserested in was their purses (which seems to have been the case), they should've just said so. But now, they're still fanous, alright -- famous for being out-of-synch with the technology, and therefore, looking like idiots.
It's interesting to me that the above-mentioned artists aren't complaining very loudly about Napster, et. al. ... it's MY guess that they aren't because their fame is not being being jeopardized. Sure, maybe their album sales have been dented (and even this I doubt, since most young fans NEED as many photos of their artists as possible, and there are photos included with the CD's)... and of course, they're getting more exposure than ever, thanks to Napster. And it would seem that since they're getting SO MUCH MORE exposure, they have MORE pressure than ever to produce more work (notice, I didn't call it "music" or "art" -- but "work") ... isn't THAT the intention of Copyright Law?
Those who don't study history are destined to re-implement it.
"He who questions training trains himself at asking questions." - The Sphinx, Mystery Men (1999)
Our gov't. tends to believe that without money, there's no reason to do anything. But as a musician it's obvious that having an audience is just as big a draw. Music isn't about money, unless you're the recording industry. Musicians obviously don't care about money as much as they do music: they've been making music for very little money(with the help of the industry)for a while now.
I don't know...it's a decent piece, but JonKatz's rants only get you so far. Let's keep music free; let's make more good, free music. Ultimately, the industry and its lawsuits are secondary to just making music and art...so screw it. Let's just rock out.
Hey, that's a pretty coll way to make a bootleg.
I'd really love to see the RIAA get a PR smack down for attacking the federal disabilities act, but I think they oftin tollerate bootlegs with small distribution, so I would not expect to see them try to stop this bootleging.
Also, I would not expect Slashdot to post this story unless the RIAA did something. It's not really Slashdt's job to keep up with the latest ways of making concert bootlegs.
The thing I don't understand is why Slashdot ran that story about Mojo, but did not run a story about Fairtunes. Fairtunes and it's cousins have much more potential for really creating the tipping based system of music distribution we all want, but Slashdot posts a story about a system which probable pays off the RIAA.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
**Depriving someone of the use of something they own. Copying an mp3 doesn't deprive anyone of the use of it, therefore it isn't theft**
Thou art mistaken, M'lord.. if you go to a consignment store, and take something out of the store that they dont own, but are merely holding, you are stealing from that store. You are depriving someone of royalties when you download their music without paying the appropriate fees.. whether or not you choose to admit it. Music costs money.. everywhere you hear it. One of Katz' first pieces was about "free music" that you hear.. he wasnt totally right.. if you hear music in an elevator, a hotel lobby, a grocery store, etc, more than likely that place has *PAID* for the right to use/broadcast this music over their loudspeakers. (legally, they are supposed to). So music isnt free.. someone is *giving* that music to you in that case. But if you just rip it off the net, it is theft, plain and simple. If you dont like it, get the laws changed.. but as of now, its theft.
Maeryk,
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
You expect others to figure out how to make money off of their art online, but you can't figure out how to make money off of your writing, except by selling dead trees, even though your book would be completely amenable to distribution online.
Instead of sitting in your pearly white ivory tower on slashdot, and instead of preaching to the world about how things should be, why don't you actually act on it and show the world it can be done?
It's awfully easy to sit up in your little nest, and tell other people what they should and should not be doing, but it's a lot harder to actually take action on your words, and change the world. If you expect anybody who has graduated junior high to even consider what you write about the "new media", "free culture", "corporatism", blah, blah, blah, then you need to get off your high horse and actually demonstrate that it can be done.
You are in a perfect position to do this. I dare you to. Of course, it's a moot point now, because you have already garned several million dollars at obscenely high margins, so it wouldn't hurt too much to stop that income. The only solution is to write a new book, and publish it online. You believe it would work. Why don't you do it?
You raise some key points about the requirements for backing. However, there is no nead for the backing to be from a record company as such. The old act of patronage is not illegal, and I would suspect that we shall see many such arrangements arriving over the next few years.
Take the large mega-star as an example, there are a number of musical superstars who have more money than they can ever need, who could easily afford the "risk" of not resigning with a record company and buying a server-farm. Then they can build a studio and tender for merchandisers (what lengerie manufacturer would not want to sell Madonna basques from her site). When they release their music (and especially videos) they "could" slow down the net enough to be noticed and get some free publicity there. The net will spread the word if the artist is sufficient. On the back of their resources they can help out other acts. Some would be gready, some would look for musical integretty and some would be straight rebelious about it, but they would use their wealth and resources to carry the little guys to their markets.
Add in the potential for radio stations (WKRN the people who bring you RadioHead), computer companies, famous business men and sportsmen to help and the potential for no record companies is easy to see. All it takes is some communal effort from the people who can make it happen. Once any weight develops on the pile, the era of musical depravity (the 90s was the decade of the remix for fscks sake) will end as we all start to listen to the music we want to, and we will all help pay for the music we all listen to.
I say buy-cot, the less use the label is to an artist the sooner they will bolt to the brave new world.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I've already mentioned this a couple of times in previous discussions, but it seems it hasn't been seen by many people so at the risk of repeating myself too often I'm going to post it again.
Try emusic.com they have flat rate plans ranging from $9.99/month to $19.99/month (depending on length of contract) for unlimited legal mp3 downloads. They don't have much in the way of top 40 stuff but that's fine for me.
This is a nice system because I get my music cheaply and the artists/labels get some money for their work. If this could continue on a larger scale with emusic continuing to sign new labels/artists this could be an important piece of the future of internet distribution of music.
No I don't work for them, I'm just a happy customer who downloaded about 10 gigs of legal mp3's over the weekend and only paid $9.99.
Does anybody here see the similarity between Linux distributors and recording companies?
The recording companies at least pretend to be interested in paying the artists, even though many of them manipulate contracts so that it doesn't happen, and many artists don't see a dime. Linux Distributors may talk about "giving back to the community" but few programmers see much of anything.
Yet the recording labels are monsters while the Linux distros are perceived as "getting it" and being "cool", "hip" or whatever teenagers say these days.
This is not a troll. Can anybody explain the difference? In some alternative universe, is there a website where musicians extoll the virtues of General Public Music while blasting software distributors for not paying programmers or allowing them to copy software?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'd estimate now that what the artists make from CD sales is starting to pale in comparison to other licensing arrangements.
:) he was the only band i saw.
Certainly in the case of Moby he's made far more money licensing his latest album for films & tv commercials than from album sales. I believe he's licensed every track on the album and many times over.
Added to this he must make money from touring - I paid 80 ukpounds for a music festival and on account of the rain (and my wastedness
Certainly artists could do without the RIAA - sure they would need a means for promoting themselves but I see no reason why it should be as costly to them as signing with a record label.
Consider the software world. Some of the worlds most used software is given away free: Internet Explorer, Napster & Linux to cite just a few. The companies behind those products do seem to make money.
Creators of music however should be given some choice as to what distribution model they want to choose - perhaps they'll follow the now common model of giving some stuff free and others not.
I dont see why artists should have to tolerate their stuff being distributed for free but i'm sure we could do without the RIAA and them imposing american laws on the rest of the world.
Do music artists have some sort of orginization that allows them (the artists *NOT* the music barons) to lobby, work, etc. in their benefit? Maybe musicians should team up to begin a digital distribution method like Napster, make sure *THEY* get paid, not the corporations.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
You are more than the sum of what you consume.
Desire is not an occupation.
- Present copyright term is not a "limited" term -- at least not in terms meaningful to a human being.
- Present copyright benefit does not go to "authors and inventors" as the founders would have understood those terms, but to some rather-removed third party.
The present situation is one where the publishing industry is engaged in wholesale theft--first, theft of the works from their true authors; then theft of what should be in the public domain (and thus the property of all of us) from us as a society. It is a vast leap from the originally-passed copyright term of 14 years to today's life plus 70 years!There is in fact a currently-active suit denouncing the latest copyright act as unconstitutional -- see URL http://eldred.ne.mediaone.net/complain t.html
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
It would be tragic to create a more restrictive environment around the Net before we even try and figure out how artists can get the protection and compensation they deserve.
Unfortunately, all we get from Katz is a list of "maybes" with little analysis. It's always easier to say "X is bad" but it's considerably harder to offer legitimate realisic viable solutions.
Instead of constantly slamming the music industry, can we get a full analysis of how things should work taking in to consideration all parties involved?
Being with you, it's just one epiphany after another
When Phish was playing their NYE show in Big Cypress, they were relasing a couple of tracks from the show every couple of hours as mp3s.
They used eLicense. Yes, it can be gotten around, but not by everyone.
Essentially, you downloaded an mp3 and could listen to it 3 times before purchasing. After the third listen it was $1 to purchase it.
A buck a song seems fair to me. Get some decent traffic through your websites posting mp3s and it could be a decent revenue stream.
13 Aug. 1813Writings 13:333--34
<rant> Think about that, and ask yourself if the public is being served when drug companies 1) pay off smaller companies so they won't produce that drug which will do the exact same thing as the major company's drug, but is much cheaper, and 2) whenever a patent is about to expire, they subtley and trivially change the chemical so that it is technically a different drug, but still has no benefit over the original, so that they can extend their patent-granted control. Should indigenous people's genes, or purely the concept of "one-click shopping" be able to be patented? </rant>
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
But 18th-century notions of copyright doesn't make sense in the year 2000...
I would argue the opposite. The 18th-century notion of copyright DOES make sense today: 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.
Get it? In my opinion, the 18th-century notion has two key words here: "promote" and "limited". Copyrights used to be 14 years, renewable for another 14 years.
It's the corrupted 20th-century notion that is fscked. The Sonny Bono "Screw The Public" Act had two clauses: (1) The Mickey Mouse clause, preventing anything Disney has even done from entering the public domain (95 years for works-for-hire), and (2) The Gershwin Heirs clause, keeping the Gershwins rich (life+70 years for works of individuals).
How does this promote useful arts? It doesn't. It promotes individual gains. Disney has borrowed greatly from the Public Domain and returned nothing. Bach's heirs didn't expect to be rich from their father's work; they wrote their own. The Congress has been bought and paid for. Art and science used to belong to the people (after 28 years). Now it belongs only to the richest campaign donor.
We have a moral obligation to fight the current copyright system. We must take back the public domain. A society with no public domain art is bankrupt.
--
My word processor was written by Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. Who wrote yours?
"The Net provides a marketplace of cultural exchange, benefiting new artists and to music lovers. It's not simply a matter of theft, but of creating an environment in which culture thrives."
Jon, here's something for you to chew on, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
That aside, this is a matter of theft Jon. Yes, Napster is a great promotional tool. Yes, Napster has helped a lot of artists get recognized. And that's all fine and dandy. But your candy-coating everything with "It's net culture!" doesn't work. The musicians need to get paid like the rest of us, and while some people buy the music they get off Napster, others don't. But let me guess, they're only participating in this "culture" thing you rant on, right?
"Maybe music-lovers could pay a flat fee to access music sites which share revenue with entertainment companies and artists. Perhaps artists can use the Net to begin selling their work directly to fans and the public. Maybe debit and other forms of transactional software can be used to charge small amounts of money for downloaded music, using some system that measures time or data. Maybe college students could pay a fraction of a cent for each song they downloaded on college sites, the overall volume generating a fair amount of revenue for artists and corporations."
And maybe I could stand on my roof and shout nonsense. You know, with the methods you advocate above (excluding one), it's still in a zero-sum situation. Sure, we're selling CDs in MP3 format online, and that's fine and dandy. It's just too bad that the same amount of money will still be going to the record companies. And that's a Bad Thing(tm), correct Jon?
We all know that record companies are getting a really big piece of the pie, but there's nothing that we, the music fans, can do about it. Sure, we can all take up the Jon Katz rallying cry of "Culture! Free music! Culture!" But that's just plain bullshit. What good is downloading music off Napster going to do? It's not going to make the industry think "Hey, we're screwing these musicians in the ass," it's going to make them say, "See, nothing but pirates out there!" If anything is going to happen, it's going to happen due to action from the musicians themselves. They're the ones who are directly affected by the industry's ways. They're the ones getting pennies on the dollar. If more artists could speak out and say "Look what they're doing to us," I think it would work better than just having a bunch of Katz groupies downloading music off Napster, because at least it's genuine first-hand experience. Just downloading music under the shield of "Culture!" is going to do more harm than good IMHO.
--
--
The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
Hey! How can artists protect themselves? By reading the bloody contracts presented to them by the recording industry.
Real simple. You sign, they own you. You want to be on MTV, hang out with Britainy Spears, open up for the Who, and snort cocaine in the back of a limo with a leggy supermodel? Sign the contract.
You want to maintain your independence and creative control and not have to sing songs penned for you by some numbnuts you never met? Don't sign. It is that simple.
Who protects the artists' rights, Jon? They do. They are grownups who should know better. They protect themselves the same way every successful entertainer, actor and athelete does: With a good lawyer, agent and accountant.
Don't like and want to change the system? Try this.
Don't buy new CD's or tapes.
Don't listen to commercial radio stations or support advertisers (if at all possible) who advertise on commercial radio stations.
Don't buy concert tickets.
Convince future artists not to sing contracts and contribute to the ongoing fodder.
(Don't be surprised when you find out this takes time and committment).
You can dream all you want about some imaginary utopia, you can imagine some warm, squishy world where artists and listeners/viewers/appreciators live together in peaceful, non-economic controlled state, but here is reality: the recording industry is a business which does this for the money. Deny the money enough and things change.
The fact that I have to remind you of this (yep you! The guy who gets a paycheck from a publicly traded, capitalistic, corporation) befuddles me to no end.
(Talking)
/.'ers love jonnykatz /. and just let loose
/. see
.................
May I have your attention please, may I have your attention please, will the real jonkatz please stand up,
I repeat will the real jonkatz please stand up.....we're gonna have a problem here.........
(Verse 1)
Ya'll act like you never seen a editor troll before
jaws all on the floor
like sengan just burst in the door
and started whoopin your ass worse than before
they first were divorced
locking out all posters (aaaaaah)
It's the return of the...
"awww..wait, no wait, you're kidding,
he didn't just say what I think he did,
did he?"
and CmdrTaco said...
nothing you idiots, Cmdr Taco's dead
he's locked in the Geek House
long time
chicka chicka chicka jonkatz,
"I'm sick of him, lookit him
walkin around, trollin for who knows what
talking about not really much"
"yeah, but he's such a good writer though"
yeah, I probably got a more than a few screws up in my head loose
but no worse than what's goin on in your parents bedroom (eheheheh)
sometimes, I wanna get on
and can, but it's not cool for people to talk shit about my posts
My bum is on your lips, My bum is on your lips
and if I'm lucky, you might just give it a little kiss
and that's the message that I deliver to little trolls
and expect them not to know what a dictionary is
of course they're gonna know what thesaurus is
by the time they hit 9th grade
they got the "Hellmouth", dont they?
we ain't nothing but morons
well, some of us panderes
have troll-armies who cut posts open like cantelopes
but if we can rework dead points and hype a lot
then there's no reason that I can't keep spewing the same rot
but if you feel like I feel, I got the antedote
geeks wave your cash around, sing the chorus and it goes..............
(Chorus)
I'm jonkatz, yes, I'm the real katzy
all you other jonkatzs are just imitating
so wont the real jonkatz please stand up, please stand up, please stand up
cause I'm jonkatz, yes, I'm the real katzy
all you other jonkatzs are just imitating
so wont the real jonkatz please stand up, please stand up, please stand up
(Verse 2)
Real writers are generally lucid and understand english
well I'm not, so fuck Webster and fuck you too
you think I give a damn about a webby
half of you critics can't even stomach me, let alone stand me
"but jon, what if you win, wouldn't it be weird"
why? so you guys can just lie to get me here
so you can sit me here next to timothy
shit, michaeal better switch me chairs
so I can sit next to CmdrTaco and Hemos
and hear em argue over who he gave head to first
little bitch, put me on blast on
"yeah, he's cute, but I think he violated my rights, whee hee"
I should download the audio on MP3
and show the world how you invaded MY privacy (aaaaaah)
I'm sick of you little girl and boy posts
all you do is annoy me
so I have been sent here to destroy you
and there's a million of us just like me
who post like me, who just don't make much sense like me
who troll like me, walk, talk and blather like me
and just might be the next best thing, but not quite me.................
(Chorus)
I'm jonkatz, yes, I'm the real katzy
all you other jonkatzs are just imitating
so wont the real jonkatz please stand up, please stand up, please stand up
cause I'm jonkatz, yes, I'm the real katzy
all you other jonkatzs are just imitating
so wont the real jonkatz please stand up, please stand up, please stand up
(Verse 3)
I'm like a head trip to try to understand
cause my rants attract nerd-boy wannabe fans
you preach about to your friends inside you AD&D club
the only difference is I got the balls to bullshit it
in front of ya'll and I aint gotta be correct or accurateat all
I just get on the board and spit it
and whether you like to admit it (riiip)
I just bullshit it better than 90% you wannabes out can
then you wonder how can
trolls eat up these albums like valiums
it's funny,cause at the rate I'm going when I'm ninety
I'll be the only person left at slashdot flirting
pinchin Signal 11's ass when I'm jackin off with jergen's
and I'm jerkin' but this whole bag of viagra isn't working
in every single person there's a jonkatz lurkin
I am workin at burger king, drooling on your onion rings
or wandering around senseless in the parking lot, screamin I dont give a fuck
with his windows up and his system down
so will the real katzy please stand up
and put 1 of those fingers on each hand up
and be proud to be outta your mind and outta control
and 1 more time, loud as you can, how does it go?
(Chorus)
I'm jonkatz, yes, I'm the real katzy
all you other jonkatzs are just imitating
so wont the real jonkatz please stand up, please stand up, please stand up
cause I'm jonkatz, yes, I'm the real katzy
all you other jonkatzs are just imitating
so wont the real jonkatz please stand up, please stand up, please stand up
cause I'm jonkatz, yes, I'm the real katzy
all you other jonkatzs are just imitating
so wont the real jonkatz please stand up, please stand up, please stand up
cause I'm jonkatz, yes, I'm the real katzy
all you other jonkatzs are just imitating
so wont the real jonkatz please stand up, please stand up, please stand up
(Talking)
haha guess it's a jonkatz in all of us........ fuck it let's all stand up
---- Some people do Haiku. I do pop.
Well, unfortunately the current model on which the music industry is run means that an artist requires the backing of a major label to reach an audience of more than a couple of thousand. Thanks to the way in which they've sown up the market from recording to distribution, an artist who is outside of their hegemony is going to find it extremely hard to gain popularity or even just exposure.
Whilst the net is changing this, allowing artists to reach a potentially far larger audience without the "backing" of a major label, at the moment the key word is potential. Nobody denies that the net has potential, especially not the RIAA/MPAA, but people are still trying to work out workable models that benefit both artists and consumers. A lot of people are happy with MP3.com's business model, but I'm sure there will be a lot more progress in the next few years.
Unfortunately for us, the RIAA/MPAA have realised this huge potential at a time when it is still vulnerable to pre-emptive legislation. They want to chain and guide this potential whilst they still can and their resources are up to the challenge.
What does this mean? Basically, if the uptake of the net as a tool for artists takes off over the next couple of years, it will become next to impossible for the conglomerates to stop. We just need to get through these challenges.