Slashdot Mirror
BBC In Trouble Over Free Music
Take a Byte Out of Crime writes "According to this article, British classical labels are claiming that the BBC giving away the these symphonies, which were performed by the BBC Orchestra for free, constitutes unfair government competition. Apparently all free music really is illegal these days, or soon will be, public domain be damned."
That no good deed goes unpunished.
The complaint that this is unfair strikes me as being very nearly as absurd as the situation in the US where there are private companies complaining that only they should be allowed to have the data collected and generated by the taxpayer-funded National Weather Service, and that taxpayers should not be able to get the data directly from the government.
At first I thought this was ridiculous because music isn't a commodity, it's not like the government is selling the same thing as the music companies. But when I thought about it some more, in ways, most classical music is a commodity. I mean, when you're looking for Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody #2, for the most part people don't care about who plays it, the just care that it's a recording of the piece they're looking for. That said, it's not entirely commoditized, I mean, there are differences between recordings, there are different arrangements, different qualities of recording, etc.
It seems very odd though that record companies dealing in classic music would be of the opinion that classical recordings are commodities or that even if they weren't of that opinion, that they would encourage people to think of it that way. It just seems like bad business.
Is there any intrinsic difference between making the performances available for download and broadcasting the performances on digital radio.
If you have the right equipment (such as a Psion Wavefinder) and a reliable signal (not so easy for digital) you can record all the Proms at MP3 equivalent quality.
The difference is the governments aren't funding those people! Oh wait, Governments around the world routinely do things like that. In fact local governments often put a lot of money into funding symphonies etc.--without that funding the "Classical Labels" who are complaining in this case would have a much crappier talent pool to pick from. This same issue came up when some town was releasing its GIS data a while back... I don't see how it is even an issue if it has already been paid for (as with that data and these performances).
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
or could it be because they haven't got a leg to stand on and the BBC is perfectly within it's rights to have done this... having copyright anyway in the performance that they did, and therefore, they could dispose of it exactly as they wished, including making it available for free download so nya... nya...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Lawsuits of this type aren't always without merit. The idea is that in a capatalism, the government isn't allowed to unfairly compete with private corperations. I mean the government can basically always win out in a price war if they want since they can cover costs through taxes, which people don't count in the price since they aren't a direct charge. Since in a capatalism it is undesirable to have the government run everything (wouldn't be a capatalism if they did) it is generally illegal for them to unfairly compete with the private sector.
Now I see this as very differnet. The government isn't competing, they are doing a public service. They aren't trying to have CDs put in stores next to other classical works but for a lower price, they are just releasing some electronic music to the masses. Private entities aren't precluded form competing, they can produce different/better versions of these symphonies (like a DVD-A or DTS CD or something). This is just record companies being whiny.
Personally I say distribute more classical music, or shut the fuck up. It's truly pathetic the selection of classical available. Record labels don't like it very much since it's fairly expensive to produce (an orchestra has a lot of musicians, all who need to be paid, usually up front) and it doesn't sell nearly as much as pop music.
Governments are put in place to do the things that private citizens and corporations can't do on their own: enforce order, build roads, provide for the common defense, etc.
Says who? You deftly slide this by as though it's a statement of fact. How about:
Governments are put in place to do things that private citizens or corproations won't do, but that most private citizens wish somebody would do.
or:
Governments are put in place to make golf courses.
Just what "governments are put in place to do" is a central debate of modernity that has shaped much of the history of the twentieth century. It is what this entire story is about, and why it is so controversial.
I'd be just as happy with:
Governments are put in place to do whatever it is they do and to encourage and facilitate the near-free distribution of valuable works by long-dead people that can benefit the public at large.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I fear we are beginning to see the problems of diseases on capitalism really rearing their heads these days. The greed recently is overwhelming! Perhaps it is because most Western nations have lost their tangible manufacturing base to countries like India, Taiwan and China. Now instead of manufacturing goods, all that Western companies can do is manufacture "intellectual property". Since such "property", be it movies or music, isn't tangible in any way, it is often quite easy to reproduce and distribute. As such, these corporations and groups must resort to legalities to make a living.
Indeed, what we are seeing is a disease on capitalism and the free market. Our capitalism has been infected with intangible goods that are being treated as if they were tangible by the forces of law. The free market is not being allowed to work, and trouble is the result. Indeed, one cannot have an effective capitalistic society without a free market. Our free market has become diseased with intellectual property legalities, and as such fails to work to the benefit of society.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Likewise, I'm sure you are aware that the Global Positioning System is funded wholly by an income tax levyed on my personal income and paid to the Department of Defense.
it smacks a little bit of unfairness if my US based cousins can enjoy what is arguably the best part of the BBC (BBC Online) without having to contribute a penny.
And likewise unfair that you can enjoy a precision navigation system paid for entirely on the dime of the U.S. taxpayer.
BBC Online should be protected in-line with the rest of the BBC, the content should be un-lockable via entry of my license number.
And you should have to use a smart card with a paid-up subscription to activate any GPS receiver you may want to use -- oh wait, isn't that what you have in mind for the Galileo system?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Here's an analogy for the Slashdot crowd:
The BBC is like Microsoft, except its power to force consumers to pay up comes not from sleazy deals and market penetration but the well-polished heel of a bobby's boot. The classical recordings, then, are like Internet Explorer, which they are giving away for "free" (though in reality subsidized by the rents created from their power position), and this record industry exec is like Netscape, trying to protect a stagnant, failing product space while whining about how consumers are harmed by delivery of a free product.
So the question for you is: are you consistent in your application of principles in these cases? Because I have a feeling that if you said:
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
My goodness, but what a small, greedy, mean-spirited world we've become if the BBC is attacked for giving to the public its performances of the great musical masters. Perhaps we should weed through university computers to make sure that there are no copies of Shakespeare or Chaucer (ala Project Gutenberg), because heaven forbid that a government-funded institution should ever compete with a bookseller.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Then he said "SYKE! I never got paid royalties. Like most composers, the government (the king) paid me to do what I do, and my music was performed for the paeons to keep them happy. My music was passed around for free for generations after that through the earliest form of open source P2P , music lessons and badly copied versions of sheet music"
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.