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Recording Industry's Unexpected Benefit from P2P
Matthew Schultheis writes: "Yahoo / AP is reporting that the record industry is using the files traded on Kazza et al. to track where music is popular. It turns out that they even pay for this information. 'It's the most vast and scalable sample audience that the world has ever seen'" Now if they could only use this data to somehow put out better music...
I have absolutely no legal background (that statement goes way beyond IANAL), but I'm sort of thinking that benefitting from a crime must be illegal. If the RIAA considers filetrading (of their copyrighted files) to be illegal, and the legal system agrees, then nobody should be using that data to then profit.
(Just as we do not, for ethical reasons, use information that the Nazis gleaned from their experimentation on the Jews in World War II. Clearly the magnitude is nowhere near the same, but the underlying ethical principle is similar.)
work on creating a community site where bands can pay $5-$10 a business quarter to be listed with samples that can be streamed, that connects the bands to venues for say..... 5% of the proceeds and that lets users post comments about the band and rate their music? Then said label gets out of the old business of being a content producer and a service company for musicians providing them everything from merchandising to recording studios to instruments to music software? Basically become a service/product Walmart for musicians and fans as opposed to the current model of milking bands for records.
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If telephones had never been broken up, would we have ever had cellphones today except maybe in Europe? A powerful media outlet company has even more and broader powers than other sorts of monopolies, because of better access and because they're business is controlling what people want and think. I truly don't think that the music industry is evil, but they're as inertia-bound as any other large incestuously linked series of codependent corporations. If suing customers and softcore porn Britney clones make shareholders happy then thats what we get.
Now there's an idea, we could create a company that indy groups pay to have their songs spike higher in the download charts. Nothing illegal about it (well Kazaa's owners might not like it), since you wouldn't actually download the files. Ahhh, to toy with the minds of the RIAA, it'd be such fun. :)
Also, with these lawsuits going on, isn't that also going to affect the sample pool (by selecting out those computer savvy enough to change their shared folders, and increasing the proportion of people outside the USA)?
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
For once, I am going to have to side with the RIAA. Don't you DARE think this is goign to become a habit! Anyhow, just because there is an unexpected benefit form illegal filesharing doesn't make it right to share files. Don't get me wrong - i share files 24/7, and I am proud to do so. That doesn't mean i think it is ethical.
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I dunno, but I might just be willing to give them all the marketing data/interviews they need if I didn't have to worry about lawsuits or anything like that and got to continue to download all the free music I want.
Oh wait, they can get the marketing data AND sue us, so I guess its more profitable that way.
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There are several companies providing this new service which they refer to as 'online media measurement'. One is BigChampagne . According to DMusic ,the labels pay upwards of $40,000 a month for these services!
The hypocracy of the RIAA to condemn P2P as an illegal activity and then actually use it towards its own gains just further confirms its selfish motives.
I'm not an expert in US law by any means, but can't this be useful in court against the RIAA somehow?
gotta marvel at the RIAA's ability to come up with new and innovative ways to shit all over us. just when I though I couldn't possibly be more disgusted with the recording industry, they come up with something new. the funny thing is, though, that the joke is still on them... I haven't bought a single CD in at least four years, and I really don't think that there's anything they can do to stop P2P, much less illegal music sharing in general. Any digital media which you are able to play back using a PC is inherently not copy-proof, and short of storming my home and confiscating my machine and my cable modem, I just don't see how they can actually stop me or anyone else from swapping music with someone else.
- unitzero Who needs sleep, or food, or daylight, or human interaction, when you have a handful of ritalin.
I think you'll find that we're genetically hardwired to be co-operative social animals, even when it's not in our best interest to be.
Scientific studies have shown [and I'm sure someone can find links] that people want to co-operate with others, despite it making better sense to be selfish.
Selfishness may provide benefits, but these are generally short-term. To claim it's a virtue, is crass.
You claim the poster to whom you respond doesn't understand what drives the world, but I doubt you have any a clearer view.
Selfish acquisition drives some people, but to claim that that's all there is by way of world-wide motivation is ignorant.
Solidarity does indeed exist, and is responsible for the great pool of knowledge we have; science, medicine, spirituality and culture.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
A few weeks back I pointed a friend to the creative commons website, so that he could look up information on copyright and see how it was moving forward. He was quite surprised and glad to see that things aren't the way he knew them to be in that area.
The same happens with musicians. They don't tend to know about this. Especially young, talented people who don't necessarily get much chance to get on the internet. I remember as a teenager I would read in all the music magazines about the dream of one day being signed to a major. Nowadays to me that means mostly negative things - problems. Like a big bank loan and surviving on gigs, giving away your rights etc. But to others the dream goes on.
Is there a good URL to point people to so that they can get clear concise guidance on why *not* to sign for one of the RIAA companies? Or even that showed what the options are, and examples of people like Ani DiFranco or companies like magnatunes and how to achieve their musical dreams and still avoid bad business decisions.
The URLs I find are always centred on how bad the RIAA is, or on the consumer side but there isn't to my knowledge a good musician centred site...
Ale
Social cooperation does exist and selfishness is detrimental in some cases. An example are vampire bats.
Vampire bats have notorious energy demands. They can die if they do not feed on a daily basis. Now occasionally there are nights when a vampire bat fails to find food. So what normally happens is that the bat is able to bum food off of a non-related buddy. Obviously, that buddy is losing resources when it gives food away. But the lost in the buddy is trivial compare to the gain in the bat that didn't find food that night.
People who say selfishness is a virtue implicitly assume that resources and need-fulfillment are linear. In nature, the resources and need-fulfillment relationship is asymptotic; if you already have amount of resources, the need that each additional resource fulfill is marginal. In other words, $1 to a person who only has $1 is a big deal but $1 to a person who has $4 is less of a big deal especially if the cost of not have $1 is death.
Going back to our bat example, let's say night two rolls along and the buddy bat fails to find food that night. Let's also say that the bat who didn't find food the first night was successful. Buddy bat tries to bum food off of the latter bat. The latter bat can either give or not give. If the latter bat chooses to give, then all is well for the buddy bat. However, if the latter bat decides not to give, then the buddy bat dies. The latter bat will invariably give. The reason is because the rest of bat community will black-list the latter bat for being selfish. There will come a night where the latter bat will not find food and will not be able to get help from others. On an individual level, selfishness is a bad thing. I leave it up to you to draw the parallels in humans.
Do a search on google for "vampire bats altruism" for more details. If you are interested on the evolution of altruism, go google for "david sloan wilson". Evolution is not always about being selfish.