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The Economics of File Sharing
Howzer writes "A great Salon article popped up today, and it appears Stan Liebowitz at the Cato Institute is having second thoughts about his paper that was published on May 15. It seems the facts simply don't support his earlier assertion (& the well-known position of all the major recording labels) that downloading hurts music sales. It's good to see this argued from another angle, especially by a guy like Liebowitz."
This pops up on slashdot right after i submitted this cnet story about sony and universal lowering the prices of there online digital music, as well as alowing downloading to mp3 players and burning on cd. Wich a least suggests these companies aren't as afraid of piracy as they where before.
". . .That's the beauty of the market. That's why it can't get too far afield. If they get every consumer mad at them, they'll be in big trouble."
Are you listening, RIAA? Either the mainstream is starting to realize just how full of it you really are, or this guy didn't get his payola check for the month.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Personally, I have purchased more music since buying a cd burner. My interest in music has increased as well. Now only if the iPod would drop in price.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Now that I've downloaded the entire soundtrack to Glitter, I won't buy the CD! Ha!
I would hope that authors and organizations have more respect for their reputations than to play this game.
I'm sick and tired of people arguing that this doesn't hurt sales. But while I believe it hurts sales, I don't believe it hurts them as much as the Record companies have been saying.
I haven't bought more than 2 or 3 CD's in the last 3 years. I have downloaded probably 1000 or more mp3 files in that same time period. But this does NOT mean that I would have bought those files had I not downloaded them. I may have bought 10 or 12, but not all of them.
So should they stop mass file sharing? Yeah probably. Will I be happy about it? Not one bit, but I'll accept it.
Also in other news I heard yesterday on the radio that a couple of the labels will be selling singles online for $.99 and albums for under 10 bucks. If that happens, I wouldn't mind forking over the cash every now and then when there's something actually worth buying.
Just my $.02
Yet, at the same time, they post record profits and album sales.
I'm sorry, but I don't buy into the idea that the majority of people use mp3's as a taster and then go and buy the product. It just doesn't, well, sit right with me.
But at the same time, they are boasting these profits. Sure, there are people who use mp3's as a sampler before purchasing the products but I seriously can't believe they are in the majority.
It's a case of what would appear to be the logical reason sounding ... well ... wrong. Am I the only one confused by it all?
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I can tape the song off the radio just like I can download it off the Internet, but I still want to buy, buy, buy.
Why does this not register with label execs, economists, etc.?
Can I bum a sig?
This is a serious challenge, folks. We need a new strategy.
At first, it seemed that filesharing really would destroy the RIAA. Then, just as it became clear that this was never going to happen, they started throwing fits sufficient to make me think it didn't need to - they were going to destroy themselves. Now, it looks like they may wise up.
So, we have to ask ourselves - since the RIAA has developed some means of distinguishing it's collective ass from the hole they've dug themselves into, what can we do to ensure their destruction? I think filesharing can still be an important part of that plan, but really, we need to look into alternative methods of eroding their strangehold on popular music discourse and promotion. Even if CD sales stay up, if we can really bring people into a genuinely alternative culture of music - free from the RIAA - that can accomplish the same goals. While we're at it, if we can continue to fool the major labels into thinking that Kazaa will somehow eradicate them from the face of the earth, that would be wonderful.
I think we need to start a letter writing campaign! Everyone, assume some l33t speak teenage hacker monicker, and inundate random e-mail addresses at the RIAA/major lables with threatening e-mails about how you've developed a new file sharing app that will somehow cause people to pirate more music. Sensical explanations are not required, or even desirable, but we need a lot of DIVERSITY in the messages so that the RIAA becomes convinved that there's a huge conspiracy out to get them. Brag about the number of your friends that you've convinced never to buy another CD.
If we work together, we can keep them frothing at the mouth until they've lost what little remains of their credibility, and deflect their attention from genuine threats to their hegemony.
A certain element of humor was intentional.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Interesting idea in there - that perhaps the music companies should have negotiated with Napster, found some way to change the "rules". The example he gives is that in order to download, you have to upload. Would this have worked? Obviously what you upload in a P2P system is partially dependent on people actually taking stuff FROM you. But could they have said "If you want to download, you need to have at least 1/5 of your d/l amount available for others." Might have kept the leeches away. Reminds me of the BBS days, and the U/D ratios many had.
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
DRM can't keep you from reading the material, as long as you pay the price. Some say, Well, how can you take a paragraph and copy it anymore? That's what we normally consider to be fair use. But the fact is, you can still do that. You might not be able to cut and paste but as long as you can read it, you can type it... It's just not as easy as it could be but it's not any harder than it was 30 years ago.
True, there is no way to plug the "analog hole." However, to revert back to it as the only mechanism for copying is to effectively undo 30 or more years of productivity enhancement through technology and features such as copy/paste. The point of technological advancement is to automate manual processes such as transcription.
Estimating the lack of productivity seems popularly acceptable for damages alleged by computer viruses. If we did a calculation for the lost productivity costs of DRM difficulties imposed on legitimate copying in business and academic work, it would likely be a large number, perhaps dwarfing the revenues protected by DRM. Therefore, Mr. Liebowitz's argument founders on a zero, or perhaps even negative, sum.
I'm just waiting for the usual /. story at the end of the year where the RIAA comes up with their mysterious numbers and bitch about piracy reducing sales, blah, blah, blah. But I wonder if the RIAA will actually bring 9-11 into the equation, factoring that most of the nation was too shaken up to worry about buying the latest CD's for the last few months of 2001. I'm curious because almost everyone has been using 9-11 as an excuse for everything lately (bad sales, security, etc) but I think most of the /. population understands that issue already, so I'll leave it at that.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Something I haven't seen anyone (in the press) really correlate directly:
Put those together, and I think you have a more powerful impetus for buying CDs than the "people are honest" and "sample before you buy" theories represent. It's much easier to buy the music than it is to figure out how to get good sound from your MP3 collection.
Now, if the studios partnered with, say, Adaptec or Nero to create an application that could burn traditional CDs from uncompressed (or extremely high-quality MP3) sources bought and downloaded at burn-time from the labels, that provided a way for the average computer owner to burn mixed CDs that would play in her stereo, I think you'd see huge uptake. (You'd also see the death of the much-decried "album" with one decent tune and nine crap filler tracks, which is the pigfeed trough^W^Wbusiness model the RIAA member companies are fighting so hard to maintain...)
Need a UNIX/Linux/network guru in the Boulde
Noticed something he said in there:
"While it's true that there's always been a balance, we don't know if it's been a particularly good or even balance."
So how is an uneven balance a balance?
- In hell, treason is the work of angels.
This is one of those issues that defies easy analysis, simply because we're all so prone to assuming that the whole world does what we do. Are there people who use file sharing just to sample before they buy, thereby increasing sales? Yes. Are there people who only take from file sharing and never buy a CD, thereby lowering sales? Yes. What's the net effect of those two groups on overall sales? No one knows for sure, and we're all just guessing. I'm not even sure how you could get reliable data on the net effect, given that the people who download music would not answer a survey, or would blatantly lie.
I took note of Liebowitz's estimate that music downloads approximate five times the volume of CD's sold in the US. That's an impressive figure, and he correctly asks--if the volume is so huge, where's the dent in music sales?
My tentative hypothesis to explain the disparity is that relatively few people are downloading all that music. Most of my friends are not heavy computer users and either do not download music at all, or maybe look for the occasional song now and again. But the two people I know who download music regularly go ridiculously overboard with it--they've got stacks of burned CDs and huge hard drives full of downloaded music.
(Before you respond and say, "Hey, all of my friends download music and I do too," think--how many of your friends _aren't_ computer geeks?)
I'd be really interested to see what the distribution is of the frequency and volume of music downloading. I suspect that maybe a tenth or twentieth part of the users are downloading most of the music--they're the ones who are stealing more than they're buying, but it doesn't matter much because everyone else is still buying CD's.
hyacinthus.
I'm glad to see an academic who is confident enough to be able to say, "I may have been wrong; I don't know." These days such professors are becoming a scarcity.
He makes a very good point, too; you would expect CD sales to noticeably decline if people were using MP3s as a replacement for CDs. But they're not. The average computer illiterate still finds it difficult to turn an MP3 collection (which, more often than not, is a jumbled mess of files spanning a several directories) into CDs, because they just don't know how to sort them or how to keep track of them. So they keep the MP3s on their computer and buy the CDs for their Discman.
Many (including myself) have bought a CD because they found a few tracks online, but couldn't get good copies of all of them, and they wanted all the songs in the original order. Other people are still buying CDs, but they're buying the ones they can't find online. I know many people who buy into the whole ultra-pop-star fad, but don't buy those albums because they're so easily available online. Instead, they buy music they like that they couldn't find online--and in the end, it's those artists who need to be bought the most.
But the truth is that nobody can tell how much downloaded music is affecting record sales. It's hard to get the recording industry to ever release detailed statistics on what they sell, and when they do release information there are always doubts as to its validity. (They do have to make the shareholders happy, after all.)
Normally I'd rant and rave about how file-sharing is going to be the death (or the rebirth) of the music industry, but I think at this point people have started to realize that on their own. Now it's just a matter of buying popcorn, sitting back, and enjoying the show, because over the next decade or two we'll get to see some of the biggest and richest corporations in the world die a fiery death.
As a recording artist who has actually been suspect to a record deal in the retarded ass music industry. I can say that filesharing is nothing but a good thing.
Labels and publishing companies will continue to hide under the umbrella that file swapping is hurting the artist.
No.....what realy hurts the artist are slimy record execs who sign artists to crap deals and only give them a 10th of the profits. Which they then get the luxury of spliting amoung their bandmates and leaches like managers, business advisors, attorneys, and oh yeah and uncle sam. Not to mention they have to recoup every penny that were alotted for a recording budget before they see a dime.
So who really loses? The industry has been screwing the artist for years. The only ones who benefits are the fortunate few who sell millions of albums and those are far and few between.
Don't belive these cry baby record companies whose only real intent is protecting their old dusty business model.
I say out with the old and in with the new! Believe me they got it coming!
While I am glad to see the man change his mind - it's nice to see an economist using the scientific method - 'cause the facts don't fit his original hypothesis, it's a shame that he's still clinging to his belief that micropayments make sense.
Flat rate is the way to go - no matter what. People don't like to pay for what they use - causes way too much anxiety over what the next bill is going to be. Almost everyone has a budget, and budgets need fixed costs.
The idea behind micropayments is to hide away paying for things - to make it small, unobtrusive, and in the background. No one I know of likes to be nickled and dimed to death, and we sure don't like not knowing **at the time** what we are being charged for (i.e. happening in the background). Even AOL went to flat rates and it wasn't to simplify their bookkeeping.
Maybe he'll let go of micropayments in a few more months. The sooner that myth dies, the better
I view the DMCA as draconian. I'm really quite unhappy about it. But I'm not unhappy with digital rights management, narrowly defined to software that keeps you from making copies; that doesn't extend the length of copyright; and certainly doesn't get rid of fair use.
I wonder whether he understands DRM technology. If a DRM locks up a work, you certainly won't be able to go to a library and copy a page to cite in a paper, so goodbye fair use. (He seems to think the analog hole does away with DRM.) And whenever the copyright term is reached (if it ever is), the work will still be locked up--so the DRM effectively makes the copyright perpetual.
...and have been quite vocal about it here (and been modded down into hades ;), I don't think the problem is the sales getting hurt. More to the point it is people ignoring the laws surrounding the distribution of the product.
I have and will continue to feel that it isn't right to do this. That aside, it seems to me that the best way to step forward both for the industry and the consumer is for the record companies to provide this music for download at a reduced price. This could save people significant dollars. When considering the retail market, most of the cost is not in making the product, but in bringing the product to you.
Once the CDs no longer have to be made and trucks no longer need to run around the country in order to get music in our hands we will be able to see savings. No more inflated retail rents, electricity bills, payroll and health benefits to pay. Sounds good to me. This doesn't even start to cover the amount spent in advertising dollars.
I think the way to accomplish this is to vote with our dollars. Don't buy any more music. Write a letter here and there to the record companies stating that you would buy music if it weren't so expensive and that you will be looking forward to signing up for their download service.
Anyways...it's just a thought.
Or the stuff i kept and DIDNT pay for, i never would have in the first place.. so no-one actualy lost any revenue...
Just because they didn't lose any revenue doesn't make this not stealing.
I think this guy has a real blind spot when it comes to networking effects.
He's famous for "disputing" the network effect for computers and now he can't explain why file sharing isn't hurting sales.
Easy, it's a variation of the network effect. If there is more music, if people are hearing more artists and being exposed to music styles they've never heard before, naturally they'll spend more money on music. Some of that goes to hard drives, CD-R's, etc. but some (most?) goes to legal CD's and concert tickets.
I think this guy needs to read Asimov's The Foundation series and take some pshycology courses before he becomes completely irrelevant!
>you just won't have your free music anymore!
... audio tapes, MIDI, mp3s .. there will always be free music (and free movies, and free this and that.), dont kid yourself. You'll just need a little program (like the tape on audiocasettes, natch!) to copy your music. Anyhow, I think you implying 'wont have ALL your music free anymore!', where the point of the article is that a little free music never hurt nobody to any degree that it dissuaded them from running a company, turning a profit, etc, nor purchasing CDs for themselves.
... since it would be self-defeating for everybody to cheat out the industry, it wont happen. Furthur more, as more people join one side of the equation, the people on the other side tend to mobilize or compesate for the shift in numbers in some manner. For instance, as file sharing became more common, I contend that some people purchased more of their music than they would have before, fearing that if they didnt support music, there'd be nothing left to fileshare.
But, I've had it since birth
The joke is, if youre Darwinian, you'd recognize that all this technology COULDNT kill the music industry. Why? If we all stopped buying CDs, and EVERYONE copied, the record companies would crumble, musicians would stop publishing music, and there'd be nothing left to download. Social patterns always ensure there's a balance (like, if everyone littered, we couldnt move, if everyone was a conservative, we wouldnt have important liberal influence, if everyone was a liberal, we wouldnt have important conservative influence)
And if one insists that we do put the record companies out of business - really - so what? The whole cycle of small labels getting grassroots support (where people are much less likely to rip off local artists than megapopstars) starts again, and we're out a few hundred thousand guys in suits. boohoo. Music is 5% of the USA's GDP to be sure, but to think all that would come off the GDP instantly assumes that absolutely nobody comes in to take the place of the fallen dinosaurs, and that this collapse happens overnight. Highly unlikely.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I'm not sure what is more alarming, that it took this guy 6 months to crank out his piece for the Cato Institute or that someone at Salon actually imagined that anything coming out of there constitutes serious research.
This guy is not worth this attention. His essay on QWERTY hardly constitutes the rebuttal of path dependence he thinks it does. All it convinced me is that QWERTY isn't as inefficient as everyone claims. The logical gap between stating that and claiming that "lock-in" effects are trivial is enormous.
But he gets press for ideological reasons. Once you admit to certain kinds of inefficiencies you invite the kind of public debates the Cato Institute hates: the merits of price-caps, or quality controls, or "open access" requirements on things like source code or cable lines.
It all leads to a ridiculous faith in the efficiency of markets. Getting screwed by your local telephone company? It's not a monopoly! ANYONE could compete with them, so let 'em charge what they will.... i386 a standard? Microsoft?
I'm personally waiting for this crowd to produce a piece of "serious research" teling us all that Enron really was perfectly efficient after all.... What were we thinking?
DRM, as I see it, is merely the protection in the software, on a CD or whatever, that would allow micro-payments. It doesn't do this yet, but in principle it could. That's what I view as closer to ideal. They can let you do a lot and you pay a higher price, or let you do only a little in which case you'd be paying a lower price.
I read this with a sinking feeling in my stomach. What do you think he means by "higher" and "lower". In this case, I doubt that the price will be lower than the current cost of music. The record industry doesn't lower prices.
If DRM with micro-payments is succesfully introduced (read legislated) it wont mean that I pay less for music. The record companies will charge me for my copies. They'll charge me for each time I play it. And though initially I paid 99 cents for that song, after a year, I've payed $5 for that one song and I will keep paying for that song in perpetuity.
The record industry has a very bad record (no pun intended) at passing along savings to the consumer. The CD was supposed to make the whole process cheaper, lowering prices for the consumer. But that never happened. Instead, the prices went up (which they justified by saying that new technology costs money) and they stayed up.
So, if they can release music digitally in a way that prevents copying and tracks your use of that music, the price wont drop. It will increase, despite their cost savings on distribution.
sweat
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
or why do i keep seeing all those 'Benzes on dubs' on cribs. if the industry is hurting they sure are not showing it. my stealing is going towards the benefit of curbing the outrageous spending habbits of the recording industry.
this is fucking rediculous! in my mind, if a band is making an outrageous ammount of money like this, i will steal all of their music with no reget. its the sellout tax! as soon as you sell out its free game for me.
I want 2D games back.
C'mon. I know we like to trumpet this around as a pro-sharing platform and many of us (including me) have gone out to buy CD's only because we liked what we heard.
.05c/MB), I think we'd have people signing up. But it would have to include most/all of the labels. Nobody's paying $9 for Elektra, and then $9 for Colombia, and then $8 for .. you get the picture.
But for almost all of the songs I've downloaded I never had any intention of buying the CD. This is because the CD is $15 for one friggin song. And frankly if the song was $1 I still wouldn't pay for it. The songs I download (as opposed to buy) are songs that I wanted to hear once or twice for some reason and never listen to again. Or, somebody told me about a cool song on a CD they bought, so they mail me a copy.
I'd say about 90% of what I listen to/download in MP3 form is stuff that doesn't last on my machine for more than 24 hours. The other 10% generally becomes a CD purchase eventually. In fact, the main reason I haven't bought many CD's lately is as a quiet boycott of the industry.
I like mindless trance. I listen to Digitally Imported, and if I could get those songs on a CD, I'd be willing to pay $10. Sadly I don't know the artists or songs, nor do I think that any of it could be had for $10. So it's Internet radio for me. No commercials, well-mixed.
I dunno. I think the industry is stupid and paranoid and Hilary Rosen is a friggin idiot mouthpiece. On the other hand, the file-swapping community is defensive, hostile, self-righteous, and unwilling to obey the law. But then, CD's are monstrously overpriced and the quality stinks. In the end, people who want free copies of the music bad enough will get it and the industry can't stop them. Also in the end, the industry will find a way to protect their business model since it's easier to lobby politicians than try to ease their way into an ungodly lucrative market waiting to be tapped: a good on-line subscription service.
If the RIAA had all its labels agree to a subscription service where you paid a flat fee of, say, $9/mo to use the service, and then a bandwidth fee (something minimal - like
Release some songs on the site only. Release some on the CD only. Cross-market. If you buy this CD for $10 you get, as a side benefit, $5 worth of free downloads on the subscription service. A month of no subscription fees. There's an endless marketing potential here, to speak nothing of the possible advertising revenue.
right, the fact that it's not stealing is what makes it not stealing.
Oh.. did you mean to say just because the didn't lose any revenue doesn't make this not copyright infringement? that actually makes sense.
Sorry...I meant to put that in the post. Agreeable or not, it does make the music more accessible and cheaper for all.
My favorite specious argument is that the artists don't get money from their recordings. Too bad. Let me cry them a river while they are passed out on the Green Room floor with a needle in their arm. They should have signed a better contract with the record companies or been entrepreneurial enough to distribute the music themselves. However, P. Diddy seems to be up to his eardrums in Christal. Eminem still has enough cash on hand to bust off caps like its the 4th of July outside his recording studio.
All in all, these arguments supporting theft of music are smoke screens to justify boorish behavior by people that are irresponsible and do not want to respect other's property. File sharing has just brought these people out from under the rock they hid before P2P became king -- I exclude the 5 of you that use P2P networks to gain digital copies of your Frampton "Comes Alive!" LP which you bought in middle school.
Its very simple. If you didn't buy it and you were not given the right to use by the copyright holder, its not yours to use and enjoy on your hard drive. Grow up, get a job and purchase your music so I don't have to deal with poorly planned copy protection schemes that cause my Mac to choke on Celine Dion CDs my fiancee forces me to listen too. If you don't like the method of distribution, contact the business and explain yourself. A smart business that receives feedback from enough customers will modify its business plan to compensate for the demand. If they don't, start up a Geocities web page and bitch -- just don't STEAL!
Maybe Microsoft should just start appropriating GPL-ed code and justify it by saying that they wouldn't have purchased the code in the first place or the price of compliance with the GPL is just too high. That's about the same mentality. Property is to be respected and I surprised that someone from the Cato Institute saying otherwise. They aren't supposed to be communists with their whole property is theft concept.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I'm glad you said "mostly" Libertarian because the Cato Institute is the classic example of what I call pseudo-Libertarian.
True Libertarians are opposed to all threats to our liberty, whether they come from other people, from corporations, or from government. Pseudo-Libertarians are willing to accept any amount of threat to their liberties just so long as they don't come from government. In fact, they are willing to support threats to our liberty from corporations and from wealthy individuals if they can imagine that the government action which would protect us from a real threat to our liberties from business could somehow be construed as a government threat.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Here, effectively, is what Stan Liebowitz has just said.
And I'm done with listening to egomaniacs like Liebowitz. I'll stick to my Magic 8 Ball for my predictions on how DRM and P2P will turn out. It might not be more accurate than chumps like Liebowitz, but at least it doesn't collect a fat fee every time it spouts a random prediction.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I was just talking to a friend of mine who is the manage of a local big name record chain. He wants to get out NOW because his profit margins are so low these days. He blames it on p2p and says that record sales have gone down in the last few years (he has been managing franchises in different locations over the last 7 years or so). Granted, his location is smack dab in the middle of a big city university campus and his biggest customers are students (who have the time and resources to burn music, but $15+ is too much to buy music).
I told him, these companies need to adapt or die (taking a page from that article countering the deToqueville Institute FUD on OSS). I suggested either they need to offer a premium on the discs that you can't get through burning, lower the prices, or change their model to a kiosk stand where you pick and chose your music, and within a few minutes out comes a customized CD with nice linear notes, of what you want to hear, at a reasonable price.
His responses were, they have tried offering better premiums, that has not worked; the price margin for the retailers is about $1 per new CD so he can't budge lower; and the companies don't want to offer a la carte music. They tried cd singles before and could not make a good margin on that, they tried kiosks before and took them away. Really it comes down to promotion, and they want to promote a whole unit where they can release singles at a time. He couldn't really argue against me when I said that before record companies had a monopoly on distribution, now with broadband, that monopoly on promotion and distribution is being altered.
His choice on whether to adapt or die is he wants to get out of the music reatail biz and open other franchises.
I still think kiosks in a mall would be a viable solution. It eliminates the retailers biggest cost and that is CDs go stale. If you can't sell them, you have physical property that cost money but is worthless, wheras electronic bits that cost per burn never go stale and don't take up shelf space.
1. A lot of people who download music are not going to buy the CD anyway even if downloading is impossible. They simply don't have the habit of buying CDs.
2. A lot of swapped songs are old, while you don't see the recording companies re-releasing 4-year-old songs all the time.
3. Not all who download music have CD writers, and they need to play on their CD players too, so they buy the CD.
4. (Related to #3) Not all who download music have PC speakers that rival their stereos.
5. There are still people who buy CDs for the packaging, and for the tangibility.
6. Despite the existence of Spears, Dion and the like, There are still good music people feel guilty not to buy.
In support of the Pseudo-Libertarian label...
This article gets a positive spin on Slashdot simply because he believes that file sharing isn't really hurting CD sales.
But reading the article further, he merely looks at the numbers, with apparently no attempt to find out what's behind them. Aside from blaming the 5% drop on the recession, he doesn't really dig deeper, looking into the possiblity that maybe filesharing is acting as a try-before-buy, as is often advocated here.
The real corker though, is that this guy comes down squarely, firmly, and uncompromisingly on the side of DRM. Fair use on text? You can always retype a paragraph. Music or video? you can always get fair use by paying some money. Can't privately produce digital content? Blame some other supposedly non-DRM law, without realizing the obvious - that these laws are all part of a Web of Paranoia on the part of the entertainment media industries.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Then why would the founding fathers establish copyrights and patents from the onset of the founding of America? That would be not legislative fiat but constitutional establishment for the promotion of intellectual activity.
Music is tangible not virtual though it can be represeted in a virtual state. It can be written on paper and generally is before being changed into "patterns" as you describe it. With your mindset, the GPL-ed software is nothing more than patterns on a hard drive representing "pseudo property" that anyone can manipulate without regard for the content of the license. Thus making the license null and void.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
actually according to the *LAW* it's copyright infringement i believe and not theft. there is a distinction in the eyes of the law. the gnu folks talk about this and it makes sense to me.
-- john
Yeah SOMEONE needs to come along. He suggests "a credit-card type" company. Well gee, it's the year 2002 right about now. I wonder how long we're going to wait for this fucking genius solution to come tripping by. WTF?
Not to be pedantic, but here's section 8 of the US Constitution:
It seriously pisses me off when asshole motherfuckers like this dumb Liebowitch bitch go throwing these off-the-cuff solutions about some mega corporation is going to come and save all our asses with a fair and reasonable micro payment system when he knows he's full of shit and that the US Government is responsible for the currency of the nation. What a cock sucker.
Copying information is not and cannot be stealing. It can be illegal, it can be copyright violation, but it is simply not theft and doesn't necessary mean a loss to the "victim." This ridiculous assertion, that there is no essential difference between making an unauthorized copy of music that could be bought for $10,000 and stealing a $10,000 car, has been repeated here many times, and every time people waste effort pointing out how it's obviously wrong.
That is why you are being moderated down into oblivion. If you have no new arguments, what you're doing is the moral equivalent of stomping your feet and screaming at the people you disagree with.
The moderation category "troll" at least gives you the credit of intentionally being obnoxious and trying to start an argument, rather than being so stupid you can't recognize the obvious illogic of your position.
If you want to argue that copyright violation is wrong, go right ahead. However, don't expect any more respect for asserting that copyright violation is stealing than if you claimed it was vandalism, treason, murder, or rape.
Stealing is stealing and morally wrong. While there maybe degrees of harm, the act still grows from the same evil, taking from others what is not yours. You may require this sort of moral rationalization to make yourself feel better for your actions but you are still doing wrong. Its called respect for other human beings. What else can you rationalize?
The moderation category "troll" at least gives you the credit of intentionally being obnoxious and trying to start an argument, rather than being so stupid you can't recognize the obvious illogic of your position. If you want to argue that copyright violation is wrong, go right ahead. However, don't expect any more respect for asserting that copyright violation is stealing than if you claimed it was vandalism, treason, murder, or rape.
If saying "please don't steal" has become "intentionally being obnoxious" then our society has really started to crumble. The illogic of my position appears to be trying to tell a group of people that seem to feel they have the right to take from others what was not theirs is not a Good Thing. I never alluded to stealing other people's intellectual property to vandalism, treason, murder or rape. I am saying your appropriating someone else's property without just compensation is wrong and causes damage to consumers that engage in legal transactions with the property owners through higher prices and products that have copy protection schemes.
As for me being stupid for this position, the US Court system tends to agree with me, not you. If you think I am wrong, please challenge the music labels in court and we will see whose point prevails.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
it's going to be while -- maybe a decade -- before we get to reasonable pricing on downloaded music
Ouch...I'm going to be 40 yrs old when sanity returns....
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
...why this guy is so confused should read Paul Ormerod's book, Butterfly Economics. The book (subtitled "A New General Theory of Social and Economic Behavior") outlines the mathematics which University of Chicago economists broke through the barrier which had prevented others from mathematizing economics.
All they had to do was assume that all agents (that's you and me) in an economic system had an infinite ability to predict the future prices of goods (and they would all have to agree). Now, these economists didn't actually believe this was true, but they hoped further work with the math would allow them to make simpler, more believable assumptions.
And further work did just that. Sort of.
In 1968, it was proven that we could relax those assumptions so that different people could have different opinions about the future state of the world. The only assumption remaining which still flew in the face of common sense: All agents had to have access to an infinite amount of computing power. And it was proven that the math broke down if this requirement was relaxed.
One might expect that this would mean the theory would be thrown out. But one would be wrong. Because orthodox economic theory requires that markets "clear" in this way.
And from this orthodox economists have shown that the distribution of wealth and income which emerges from equilibrium markets cannot be altered without making someone else worse off. Which had implications for economic policy which greatly pleased those who were opposed to certain government tax policies and regulatory policies.
And those people were rich. They funded organizations like The Hoover Institution, The Cato Institute, and Wendy Gramm's Let Enron Rip Off California Institute.
It is taught because before it was disproved it acquired a strong political following, which included politically motivated private individuals who were willing to fund research which produced the results they wanted produced. So organizations like the Cato Institute have to continue to act as if a theory which rests on absurd assumptions is true, even though we know it is not. If they do not continue to so act, they will stop getting money from wealthy conservatives. That is why the absurd theory was never thrown out.
All of this would not make much difference except that an alternative set of theories have arisen, which take advantage of more recent developments in the mathematics of non-linear systems. They make no absurd assumptions, and (though incomplete) they do work. See Ormerod's book for more information.
They new theories do not skew either to conservative or liberal biases. (Ormerod is even more critical of European attempts to micromanage their economies than he is of laissez-faire Reaganism.) One of the results of including non-linear systems into the mix has been the discovery of what is known as the "network effect." Although most of us have experienced the network effect personally, Stan Liebowitz has developed a little mini-career opposing it.
It turns out there is money in this opposition. Microsoft is willing to pay good money for this obvious nonsense. And it fits right in with Cato's nervousness about a competing theory which does not rest on the absurd assumptions theirs requires.
Which explains why Liebowitz has no clue as to why CD sales were up while Napster was booming and are down since it was shuttered. The Napster community was a classic network with people sharing their favorite music with others. Sure some used it to avoid purchasing CDs. But far more were able to hear music they might never have found otherwise. Liebowitz cannot afford to see this since it would cut off a lucrative source of income for him to admit the network effect has such power. But the rest of us are under no such limitation.
When radio came along, record companies said the new technology was so different it would destroy the copyright economy they thrived on; 30 years later they were bribing DJs to play their records. Cassette tapes were similarly attacked. VCRs were supposed to be the end of the movie business; today they are an important part of their bottom line.
Someday we'll probably see congressional investigations of record companies paying on-line music-sharing services to promote their products. And Stan Liebowitz will still be confused about why his absurd assumptions still don't predict real-world results.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
File sharing and Internet radio may start to look like an attractive promotional channel to the music industry, as Clear Channel slowly tightens the screws.
In this presentation, I will show how my new compression method's artifacts are more subtle than the ones made by the excellent Sorenson codec. [Type type type] This ASCII-art representation of a scene from The Matrix is the source that I have started with. Notice how the curly-brace I typed on the right side of the image, is very well-defined and clear.
Now I will show how it looks when encoded/decoded with Sorensen. [type type type] In the ASCII-art representation on the left, look at the loss of detail. The original curly brace is replaced with a square bracket...
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I believe the reason that we haven't seen a decrease in sales of audio CDs is because of convenience. I have many audio CDs purchased from retailers, many MP3 files downloaded from the internet, and a CD burner. I have copied only a small subset of my MP3 files onto CDs. Why is this?
CD creation is a time consuming process that requires me to purchase consumables (blank CDs). Then I have to keep track of where my CDs are and what is on them. Also, a CD holds a relatively small amount of data(700MB). In short, I couldn't be bothered.
I believe that you will see significant degradation in CD sales when hardware manufacturers standardize on a portable and inexpensive data storage media. This would allow consumers the ability to carry a "data storage widget" (compact flash perhaps..). It would store thousands of songs and plug into home audio systems or car stereos. It could store entire collections on something the size of a matchbook.
The only thing supporting CD sales is the "network effect" of the CD format. Once we achieve an "inflection point" of the presence of standardized portable memory modules and devices that use them, I believe the bottom will fall out of the CD sales market. I also believe that the record companies have foreseen this.
The CD market today survives on the "high viscosity" of data transfer from the internet to audio playback devices. New devices and technologies will lower that viscosity and change the media market forever.
People are scratching their heads trying to figure out why downloading doesn't hurt CD sales so much. I can't speak for most people, because I may be very different in this way, but I can speak for myself. The recording industry says that if I download, say, 10 CDs worth of music that they have lost 10 CDs worth of income (and these are the conservative ones). Now wait a minute... who said I would have ever bought those 10 CDs in the first place? I know myself, and before P2P, I just didn't listen to this much different music. Every couple of weeks, I would walk out, find a CD I liked, buy it and listen to it (along with my existing collection) for the next couple of weeks. I do the same thing now... every couple of weeks, I walk out, find a CD I like, buy it, and add it to my collection. So I downloaded 10 OTHER CDs during those two weeks. Well, I would never have bought those CDs anyway! I just happen to have a richer experience now, but my buying habits haven't changed at all. Again, I am only speaking for myself. I do know, however, that my 18 year old sister is the exact same way. She still buys CDs like crazy, and also downloads way more music than she ever would have bought.
My suspicions were pretty surface, thanks for the detail.
My college exposure to economics left me deeply unimpressed. They make major unwarrented assumptions about human behaviour. My professor waved away my objections by appealing to the law of large numbers.
The theories might be worth something if humans were linear elements, but we are not. Economics seems to be useless for predictions, so it's not really science, but they appropriate the language of science to gain credibility.
-which take advantage of more recent developments in the mathematics of non-linear systems.
Given that economics seems to have a shallow grasp of linear system dynamics, how much of this new book's useage of non-linear systems is really tough scientific thinking, and how much is appropriation of new buzz to get attention?
Although I agree with your points ( being a person who buys things based off of samples, mp3 or radio ) I must point out one thing
"File sharing doesn't hurt record labels any more than radio play"
with Radio you have to WAIT for that song to come on and hope it doesn't have a DJ interrupt for some lame joke or small tidbit of info. File sharing is immediate upon request.
Not that File sharing doesn't have it's problems either e.g. incomplete/misnamed songs etc but it's still easier to get the music via File sharing and thus (IF it hurt record labels ) would have the capacity to be more damaging than Radio.
Seriously.
How is listening to a radio station all day, waiting for that "new hit single" to be played (so that you can record it) anything like going on gnutella and downloading that same song in two minutes?
Instant access to everything you specifically want does not equal instant access to a random assortment of songs broadcast over the airwaves.
OK, our friend Leibowitits presents a reasonably convincing argument about file sharing.... file sharing is huge, and we don't see any appreciable change in sales, so something else must be going on. I buy that.
I have to question his credibility just a little bit. No network effect? The term "path dependence" is fairly well distributed through the economic literature, and I can't recall the name, but I once tried to work through a paper on it from someone at the Santa Fe Institute... not exactly a bunch of intellectual lightweights (at the very least as credible as anyone from the Cato Institute). The paper supported the network effect.
The Salon article almost presents Leibowitz as having debunked the concept rather than challenged it. Lots of handwaving if you ask me.
But then again, that's been my experience with econ in general. : )
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
I'm assuming that DRM wont really work in this context without some seriously heavy-handed legislation. If any publisher pushes a DRM solution onto the public while still competing with MP3's then the situation is very different.
It doesn't seem likely that any DRM will beat out MP3 in a fair fight. MP3 is open(-ish) and free for use. It's also well established with many different platforms supporting it. Any DRM solution, especially one with fees, will come with rules, hassles and problems.
And it still wont solve the problem of Red-book CDs which people can still burn and rip to their hearts content. So even if every publisher that ever produces a digital version of the song uses a DRM, their songs will still be just as available as ever thanks to the prevalence of regular CD-Rom players.
Sweat
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
...actually played a role in the initial funding of the Santa Fe Institute.
In the early '80s, Cato and Hoover and the University of Chicago told the Reagan administration (where they were very welcome) that foreign aid was unnecessary because all the poor countries of the Third World had to do was adopt market economics and their economies would automagically right themselves and be tremendously productive. They even convinced the big banks to loan money based on this prediction. After all, they'd have plenty of money to pay back the banks.
Ten years later the money was gone, Bangla Desh was just as poor with a market economy as they had been without, and the banking system was threatened by the defaults these Cato prognostications had said couldn't happen. The banks went back to the Cato economists to ask what happened. All they got were shrugs and excuses (not unlike this article).
About this time the Santa Fe Institute was trying to raise funds for their new idea for an interdisciplinary institute. Many of their people were refugees from Economics programs at schools controlled by the same people who made the bad predictions. They had objected to the bad assumptions behind the predictions and found their careers stymied. Opted for the interdisciplinary approach at Santa Fe, where the ideologues in their own disciplines had less sway.
They walked in the door at Chase Manhattan just about the time Cato was telling them they had to just eat those billions in losses. Chase asked them if they had any research which could help. They said they weren't sure about help, but their economists had predicted the failure in Bangla Desh (where one had been a Peace Corps volunteer).
Walked out with a $100 million check.
Read Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos for a more accurate explanation of the events (condensed for this post).
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
I used to buy 10-20 cd's a year. At the height of Napster, I was buying more like 30-40 because I could discover so much more great music that I liked, and was apolitical with regard to music purchases.
Since Napster was shut down, I've come to see what a bunch of greedy f**kheads the RIAA are, and how, collaborating with the monolithic radio industry, they don't want me to hear and discover diverse music. They just want me to shut up and shell out for whomever they've decided is the next star.
Now, instead of feeling excited about all the great music out there, I just feel disgusted, ripped off and insulted when I see the price tag on a CD.
As a result, I've only purchased 2 CDs in the last year, both from independent labels-- a 90% drop from my normal buying habits over the last decade.
In fact, the past 100 years of theoretical, experimental, and applied economics shows that there are many situations in which regulation is necessary in order to preserve market efficiency.
Being ignorant of a subject does not entitle you to go spouting off pseudo-libertarian aphorisms. Please go to your nearest university library and look up "market failures."
That is all.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
If revenues fall to the point where it's ecomically infeasible for a particular record company to keep scouting for new artists, or it's too risky to sign them, then it will be much harder for artists to get discovered and eventually the supply will decrease.
There's another alternative here. What if, instead of the monolithic recording industry that we had a much leaner, more efficient recording industry? If they can't continue to do things the way they do today (which is very much to the detriment of both artists and consumers by most accounts), then maybe they will just have to adapt and do things differently. If they don't do it, then someone else most likely will.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Besides, legislators may require that DRM opens the work at the expiry of copyright.
They already have. In the United States, the DMCA's circumvention ban (17 USC 1201) applies only to "a work protected under this title". A work that has fallen out of copyright is no longer "a work protected under this title". Therefore, now that Mickey Mouse is public domain due to faulty copyright notice, and some 1900s and 1910s silent films (PD due to copyright term expiration) have hit DVD, DeCSS software is now legal when marketed to be used only with such titles.
Will I retire or break 10K?
...over me. Because I choose not to buy his products, I have a competitive advantage over those who do.
But that doesn't tell the whole story. There are many threats that individuals (especially wealthy individuals) and corporations (especially powerful corporations) pose which do threaten my freedoms. Perhaps it is easier for government with its coercive powers, but it is quite common with corporations as well. Those who ignore this by insisting that all threats to liberty come from government do no service to liberty.
If the threat to my liberty is my daughter's asthma, it doesn't matter to me whether she dies because some factory nearby is pumping toxins into the air or because the government forced me to accept socialized medicine which was inferior.
If the threat to my liberty is my inability to market my next-big-thing computer program, it doesn't matter whether it is because the government taxes new businesses too highly or because investors think the idea is so good MS will steal it from me.
If the threat to my liberty is an economic collapse caused by insufficient resources, it doesn't matter to me whether those resources are lacking because of a command economy like Communism or because some corporation has figured out a way to overcharge all the rest for a second-rate product. It doesn't matter whether it's because the government taxed us too much or because the government borrowed too much. If the money is removed from the economy, it doesn't matter if it goes to the Microsoft tax, to the income tax or to buy Treasury bonds. (Actually it does matter somewhat, since these are coming from different parts of the economy. But any of them can harm the economy by starving it of resources.)
Yes, the corporations and the wealthy do exert power through the government as well, but that is not the primary way they threaten my liberty.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
The CD was supposed to make the whole process cheaper, lowering prices for the consumer. But that never happened. Instead, the prices went up (which they justified by saying that new technology costs money) and they stayed up.
It costs money to produce and promote music, and the dollar cost of "people time" has gone up, not down, in the last two decades. This is called "inflation".
On the other hand, the price of a CD has remained constant in the face of inflation. if you measure costs not in dollars but in multiples of the Consumer Price Index, in (say) 1983 U.S. dollars, you find that the price of a CD has fallen from $17 in 1983 to $9 in 2002. If a CD costs the same number of dollars as before, but CD buyers earn more dollars per week than before, then each CD represents a smaller portion of the average weekly paycheck.
Will I retire or break 10K?
A 5% drop in music sales.... Hmm, well, we've had a recession at the end of a huge economic boom, large companies that used to employ a ton of people go bankrupt and get caught comitting fraud, (Enron, Global Crossing) terrorist attacks on US soil, CD prices have increased, (little economic tip, when you increase prices, sales will decrease) mass consolidation in the radio market and a general homogenization of music, leading to less consumer choice, and, yes, people are pirating music on file-sharing services.
And there's *only* been a 5% drop in sales? Sounds like RIAA's doing pretty well to me. There's quite a few businesses that would be jumping for joy if they only suffered a 5% sales drop.
There are only so many hit singles at any given time in any given genre. 20 minutes might be a bit of an exaggeration, but not a very big one. Literally, the big new hits get played about once an hour. As for any song you might want to hear, then no, you wouldn't want to try to record it off the radio.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
In New Zealand, it's only theft if you "permanently and intentionally deprived" someone of something. I argue that it is NOT stealing, as they were deprived of nothing.
What about their right for you not to infringe their copyright?
...the foolishness of pseudo-Libertarianism.
You quoted me:
Replying:
Your stated assumption is not the only one your argument depends upon. You are also assuming the company didn't hide the toxic releases. You are assuming there are other places where there are no such health risks. And there probably were people who were there before the factory existed.
But even these assumptions (ridiculous though they are in the real world) do not change the fact that my liberties are being restricted. I do not have the right to live where I please. Property rights are an important value for all true Libertarians. Pseudo-Libertarians construct absurd arguments to justify their taking if the taker is not a government.
When you start talking about "personal property laws" and the Constitution, you only demonstrate your ignorance. The laws which allow for communities to restrict the location of factories are hardly guaranteed by the Constitution. The first such laws were passed in the 1930s. They are governmental restrictions on our liberties which are opposed by most pseudo-Libertarians and many Libertarians. On top of that, they do nothing if the plant is upwind.
Then you go on to say:
Yes, sloth of the masses results in many injustices against them. This, of course, does not absolve governments and businesses from their responsibility for their immoral acts, except in the biased eyes of pseudo-Libertarians. I do not "do nothing" to protect my property. It is the pseudo-Libertarians who urge the masses to sloth, particularly when regulation is the obvious path to protection.
Obvious paths not being your forte, you offered:
I made no reference to Enron (or "eron" for that matter). I was refering the taxes charged by Microsoft, including the upgrade tax and the tax they force on manufacturers who are forced to pay for lousy operating systems on every machine they sell, even if they want to put a better OS on a particular machine.
Of course, your analysis of the Enron debacle is as flawed as the rest of your reasoning. Gray Davis had little to do with deregulation. And deregulation had little to do with the California energy crisis (except that it was the panacea advocated by the pseudo-Libertarians at Enron who took advantage of it to infringe the liberties of Californians). To suggest that the results of the Enron affair prove the success of the free market is further evidence of your ability to look at things with an unbiased view.
As far as your claim that consumerism and free markets are "self-correcting," I am glad you included the word "often." Yes, they often are. Usually when they are regulated. Some of that regulation can be private (as in the rules of the NYSE) and some of it usually comes from government (usually over the objections of pseudo-Libertarians). In 1982 Joseph Stiglitz used the assumptions of the free-market theorists to prove that markets are NOT self-correcting without regulation. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics last year for this research. You might want to check it out.
Then you told us:
Unless, of course, some megacorp decided they were a threat and checked them by incorporating their ideas into their OS. Or stealing their code.
I never said free markets weren't useful. But to assume they preclude all need for government regulation has been proven wrong again and again. In fact, we have considerable evidence well-regulated markets are best solution. But pseudo-Libertarians (like communists) have ideological needs which require them to ignore the evidence.
Then you treat us to the following gem:
Nice that you share this little hint about your schizophrenia with us, but I suggest it might be more important that you tell your therapist.
Then you return to your strange constitutional theories:
Our Constitution was written by a strange alliance between conservatives who believed in the importance of government and liberals who feared government. They did such a good job they enabled us to become a nation of liberals who believe in government and conservatives who fear governmental power. And pseudo-Libertarians whose grip on reality has become so weak they believe their fantasies are what the Constitution says.
Then you close with some good, old-fashioned stereotyping:
First, the stereotypes: "college town" and "coffee house" and "socialist rants." I do not live in a college town. I don't much like coffee, and seldom visit coffee houses. I am not a socialist, as would have been apparent to anyone who saw that I used "socialized medicine" (perhaps unfairly) as one of the threats to my daughter's health.
Secondly, the substantive points: regulation need not be government; education is all that's needed; and the assumption that a government can be created which will only do what I agree with.
Yes, regulation is possible outside of government. Of course, this involves risks to our liberties much like those posed by governments, often with less chance of respresentation. In fact, the stronger the regulation, the more the regulator becomes like a government. (Indeed, the distinction may become meaningless.)
Yes, education is good. But it cannot do everything we need to protect our liberties.
I don't assume that governments will only regulate that which I think is "kewl." But that doesn't stop me from trying to get it to stop regulating that which is not "kewl" or from trying to get it to regulate that which I think needs to be regulated. As it will always be a compromise with others, I expect it will always be less than what I want it to be (or more).
But I know that those who assume they have a blanket answer all questions of regulation will be wrong about half the time, whether they are socialists or pseudo-Libertarians. The socialists will assume that all threats to our liberties come from individuals and corporations. The pseudo-Libertarians will assume that all threats come from government. Each will find the real threats to THEIR liberties comes from the direction they are ignoring.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Yes, there are many who use the term this way. But I think a review the historical record would show that it originally included all threats to liberty. I have certainly heard older Libertarians complain that the movement has moved away from the original meaning, which included big business as well as big government as threats to liberty.
So, I leave it to others to decide which is the perversion of the meaning. I certainly do not dispute the dictionary.com definition because maximizing individual rights has to include fighting all threats to individual liberties.
There may be Libertarians who believe that individual rights can only be violated through the use of force, but they are clearly wrong. Corporations and other people do impact others in ways that infringe on their liberties (especially property rights, which are dear to all true Libertarians).
When you conclude with "If they were a threat in the sense that I just mentioned, a libertarian would view it as proper for the government to stop them," you make precisely the distinction I made between true Libertarians and pseudo-Libertarians. True Libertarians would view it as proper for the government to stop them; pseudo-Libertarians assume that threats to personal liberty can only come from governments (or that they can only be violated through the use of force).
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.