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Tim O'Reilly Says Piracy is Progressive Taxation
Idmat writes "In Tim's latest opus, he reflects on the lessons of his experience as a publisher: (1) Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy, (2) Piracy is progressive taxation; (3) Customers want to do the right thing, if they can; (4)Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy; (5) File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers; (6)"Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service; and finally, courtesy of Larry Wall, (7)There's more than one way to do it. "
But I agree with your comment.
Here's a quote from David Bowie
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Someone who actually understands that other causes, like shoplifting, cost the MPAA/RIAA more money than pirating.
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
Maybe the ideas he develop aren't earthshaking in themselves (rather more like trying to burst through an opened door ^_-), but at least it's nice to see those arguments in an ordered & clearly presented way !
As many here i sometimes grab stuff from the net, but when i really enjoy i usually buy...
Tsuyoikoto ha taisetsu da ne, dakedo namida mo hitsuyousa (Strength is an important thing, but tears too are necessary)
screw those music companies if they are going to rip someone off for another cd with only one good song on it. simularly another cd with just a different cover or maybe a 'bonus' song on it. how many $15 disks did i buy that i didnt want once i listened to the damn thing? are there tracks i never finished? sure. nothing i can do about it either
... a nice box or animation on tv isnt enough to make me happy if the game is lame or behind by five years. especially in this world where nobody takes back returned games.
same thing with games as well
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
Have you ever seen someone making xerox copies of a newspaper and reselling them?
Answer to this question and you'll find why piracy does exist and how to fight it.
Every time a product price is overcharged because its producer wants to get the highest possible profit from it, someone, somewhere, will start to think on ways to copy that product or to sell fakes.
Things sold at fair prices will never get pirated, period.
Oh, how I hate that fucking line.
Let me elaborate on that. How exactly is being a musician any different from being a firefighter or a teacher? Well, lets take the entertainment factor out of it and put them side to side.
There is a very bad precedent set, which says you will make bajilions of dollars if you become a famous musician. Musicians and actors are 2 of the most overrated bullshit professions in America. I don't buy this argument about how Britney Spears has to pay bills which total 20 million dollars a year, or how Dr Dre has to have 5 mansions in Bahamas (and they still bitch about piracy). That's a simple case of overvaluation.
I "pirate" lots of music. In fact, I have over 600 Gigs of high quality music ripped and encoded to VBR via LAME encoder. I also own some 300 CDs. Do I still pay for music? The answer is Yes. From small independent labels. I don't feel like supporting Sony exec's crack habit or contributing more money to already fat purse of some of these musicians. I'll be damned if Sony, Universal or BMG ever see another dime from me.
Buy your music from Projekt, Kranky, Saddle Creek, or Polyvinyl Records to name a few EXCELLENT labels.
Fuck the mainstream bullshit.
You're listening RIAA? I AM STEALING YOUR MUSIC, AND THERE ISN'T ANYTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT.
Does your friend tip when he goes to a restaurant?
If there were a reasonable channel of distribution social pressure would guarantee that artists get paid. We're in the worst of all possible worlds right now because the content companies have a stranglehold on legal distribution and want to do everything they can to make sure the artists don't get any of the middleman's cut.
Your friend is being rude, no doubt. But who can blame him? It's tough to be conscientious when the record companies are screwing everybody in sight.
Support (O)penmusic- check out openmusicregistry.org. Share these files, provide another substantial, non-infringing use for the gnutella network.
For now, I'll support local and independent musicians, and those artists who do business with record companies will just have to suffer since I refuse to overpay the middle man.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
I also haven't bought a single CD in a very long time (like on the order of 5 years now!) in lieu of downloading it for free. I will continue to do so becuase I, like many people, have come to realize that it is simply wrong to ask that you be paid over and over again (ad nauseum) for the same 1 hour of work. The system is broke. I go to concerts, where artists get paid for the work they do on the spot. CD are and have always been a form of advertising to get people to their concerts (whehther they want to admit it or not!). Musicians can make a good living as long as they are willing to perform their works. That is /why/ we call music a performance art.
I see absolutely no reason why I should pay anyone for work that they have already done and for which they will be amply rewarded by driving ticket sales. It's overkill. Noone goes back to a dishwasher years later to give him royalties for a job well done, nor to a doctor (to whom you'd arguably own a greater long term, ongoing debt of gratitude for his services). Why do artists get this special (and relatively new, let's not forget how new this idea of Intellectual property is in terms of the history of the world) treatment? If that means polished studio CD's go the way of the DoDo, so be it. Hell, more live music isn't such a bad thing, is it?
-Tom
-Tom
The Grateful Dead let fans copy and swap recordings as much as they like. In terms of both popularity and money, they were quite successful. Being heard is the essence of music performace and builds your fan base. The larger the better/profitable.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Robin Hood wasn't real; it's a legend.
Right, the legend of a character we view as being "heroic". What's your point?
Morals are not "set by the population".
Then, how are they set? Why do different nations, states, cities and communities have differing morals? Sounds to me that while it isn't necessarily spoken, the morality is set by the community (or, the population).
Taxes have nothing to do with theft.
They're taking my money without my consent. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right.
I was having a party and wanted to get some new
.25 to .50 per song. I wanted them right away, I wanted a big selection, I didn't want to have CD's to change and purchase and discard the packaging.
music for it the day before. I used Kazaa to
search and download some christmas songs by
Louis Armstrong, other older Jazz and Barrelhouse artists, and some contemporary ones.
I would have been happy to pay around
I would love to put money in the hands of the artists directly. I contribute to web sites such as dyndns.org , eff, granitecanyon, etc, that provide services, even though it is not required.
I think the music publishing industry are a bunch of thugs and parasites, by and large, and they have been crushing the smaller and independent
studios and artists, while calling the public thieves and pirates. They are now petitioning congress to install monitoring in all of our computing equipment.
People, this HAS TO STOP. Right now we fight back
through the EFF, and other public interest groups. Give them money and take the time to write to your congress people, before you are thrown in jail by the record companies.
Back when I first ventured into font design, I was a poor, starving college student and couldn't afford Fontographer. (Then, the only real choice for doing good font design work.) Hell, I wasn't even sure I wanted to do font design fulltime, but I didn't want to shell out $300+ for the program. So I downloaded a copy, found that yes, indeed, I did enjoy font design.
:-)
So I scraped, scrounged, begged, and borrowed, and bought a legitimate copy of the program. It would have been just as easy to keep the hacked copy, but why bother? When I purchased the package, I got the manuals, the knowledge that I'd get a decent price on upgrades (there have been no major upgrades since before I bought the software -- Macromedia seems to have let the software die on the vine).
In the end, though...I did the right thing because...well, it was the right thing to do. Macromedia provided me with a tool that I could use to make some money, and it was only fair that I repaid them for that.
This article is one of the most insightful that I've read on the subject. It's definitely made me think quite a bit...I have a B.A. in creative writing and I know that the stuff that I write is quality material. Like any other writer, I'm having a hard time breaking in... I think I'll take a few of my better works that don't seem to be going anywhere and publish them in PDF and e-Book formats for all to enjoy. And hopefully this will build a little bit of recognition for my work so I can actually start selling to the real publishers out there and then someone else will come along and do the right thing by me as an artist and buy my works off a bookshelf somewhere.
Maybe it's better to have a network of faith than a network of enforced trust.
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