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Musician Lobby Terms Balanced Copyright "Disgusting"
An anonymous reader writes "While most of the attention at Thursday's Canadian copyright town hall was on the recording industry's strategy to pack the room and exclude alternate voices, the most controversial activity took place outside the hall. It has now been revealed that security guards threatened students and a Member of Parliament for distributing leaflets, and the American Federation of Musicians termed the MP's leaflet, which called for balanced copyright, 'disgusting' and demanded a retraction and apology. At this point, such an admission seems unlikely."
By describing "balanced copyright" as "disgusting, the musician's lobby has admitted publicly that current copyright law is unbalanced in their favor.
The artists, the songwriters need to be the ONLY people represented there.
They are, after all, the people who create the music. RIAA and their ilk
need not be present at all. They are merely thugs who take the lion's share
of the money that should go to the artists directly.
it doesn't matter what laws they pay to get passed
copyright has been treated as damage to the network and has been appropriately routed around
thousands of
industry lawyer goons
versus
millions of
1. technically superior,
2. media hungry and
3. POOR teenagers
the game is already over
it doesn't matter in the least what the law says, in any country
copyright has been rendered functionally defunct and unenforceable
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So if you support a policy in line with a large segment of the people you represent, that's "shamelessly buy"ing votes?
Well, if so, than I wholeheartedly condemn the American Federation of Musician's shameless perversion of Democracy.
When I was learning to play the saxophone and later , guitar,
I would purchase sheet music for the songs I wanted to learn.
I assumed that my purchase of the music, essentially allowed
me to play that music. Not for profit, but to learn.
School bands, the orchestral and marching bands, all did the
same thing until Xerography became commonplace. Now I suspect
they buy ONE copy and burn as many copies as they need.
That would be a copyright violation, easily.
What's really disgusting is that the RIAA/CRIA, in this case through their lapdogs in the AFM, are still firmly convinced that they speak for all musicians everywhere.
It ain't true. Really.
Shame them? These people have no shame. Otherwise, they wouldn't be doing what they are doing.
Then again, the dinosaurs probably had no shame either.
There's still a big market for copyrighted material that people are willing to pay for - but the writing is on the wall - games already exceed movies in terms of total sales. People only have a certain budget for entertainment, and they're allocating it - and that means less for "old-skool" media such as movies and music.
I mean seriously, when you pull stunts like this, barring even the other view from being fielded, how in the hell do you expect us to take you seriously? This kind of thing disgusts me. I'm actually for copyright and protections and the like, but every time they do this kind of thing I lose that much more of my support for their position as they are obviously not even trying to be reasonable.
As to the MP and students distributing the flier, good job. The other side has to be heard. Don't let these guys get away with this BS. And don't even think about apologizing. They are the ones that should be apologizing to you. They obviously aren't interested in real discussion.
It's not the wants and needs of teenagers that is bringing the end of copyright. It's the simple forces of reality.
You know the song "Happy Birthday". It's copyrighted. The song itself is a mere 95 bytes in size. The data overheads involved in transmitting the file probably outweigh the file itself. Yet copyright law essentially tells us that Time Warner "owns" this song. That the act of copying it is a sacred right, reserved only for those whom the privilage is conferred upon by the rightful owner. The rightful owner of 95 bytes of data. An amount so small that no currency exists that can measure its worth.
But Happy Birthday represents only the purest and most absurd form of copyrighted work. As Moore's law has progressed, and continues progressing, and as our networks get faster and faster and disc space cheaper and cheaper, even music files 5MB in size have become trivial amounts of data. Soon even 50GB Blu Ray movies will be considered too paltry to be worth protecting. For some, they already are. This isn't a simply a consequence of people being too cheap. It's a consequence of the data being too cheap to buy.
People realise this. They're not stupid. They see how easy, accessible and trivial data is in our digital age. The internet is a deluge and trying to tell them that certain datas cannot be copied because they are under some sacred divination is like telling people in a thunderstorm that they cannot collect rain water(This is in fact done in certain places). You can pass such laws, but ultimately resonable people will not obey them. They will not obey the law, not because it is unjust, but because it is entirely irrational. In ten years time, claiming the latest 5MB pop song should be protected will be as ludicrous as claiming the same for "Happy Birthday".
As the realities of the digital of make the concept of copyright more and more irrational, I find it increasingly difficult to even find arguments justifying its continued existence. With the de facto perpetual copyright that has evolved, its irrational claims and the draconian measures used to enforce it, more and more I find myself viewing copyright as a system that will be inherently gamed by its proponents and which will, inevitably evolved to the absurd position we now find ourselves in. Frankly, I think copyright is akin to the system of direct democracy and propositions run in California. A noble goal, and even a worthwhile one in the beginning, but which in the end became a destructive farce and totally unworkable.
I'd like to hear some justifications for copyright that aren't 300 years old. While I see some benefit to the system, ultimately, I am like someone seeing the benefits of Prohibition while also seeing the great harm it has done to society, politics and the legal system. My current position is that copyright needs drastic reform and moreover, if that reform is impossible or unworkable then we need to scrap the system entirely.
May the Maths Be with you!
Thursday's Canadian copyright town hall was on the recording industry's strategy to pack the room and exclude alternate voices
Hey, they're taking a page from the Republican play book. Packing town hall meetings with partisans to shout down opposing points of view. Then justify it by accusing the other side of doing the same thing, while steadfastly maintaining those are just "real" citizens voicing their opposition. Real citizens being bused in with box lunches from other districts, many of whom happen to work for companies with an interest in the debate, but who's really going to check?
Next they'll have talking heads on sympathetic cable news networks suggesting that Canada is being taken over by Socialists and "real patriots" should start showing up at meetings with guns.
And don't forget to mock the messenger if you're losing the debate. Anyone who doesn't see things your way is a traitor and a Nazi, call them ignorant, "moonbats" and "liberals". I'm not sure why that last one is a bad thing but it seems to play pretty well down here, so give it a shot. Maybe suggest anyone not adopting strict copyright interpretation is killing old people. If that doesn't work, accuse them of not supporting the military. Suggest that lax copyright will lead to "death panels" for musicians.
Got all that? You're off to good start up there, just have to get with the rest of the program.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
There is a fair amount to be said about the idea of copyright and copyright law. I'd like to take a moment to think about the idea of copyright and something that I always think about when dealing with the idea.
There are works in the public domain that nobody can claim copyright on. And some of them are still very popular today. I'll submit that they are popular not only because they are free as in beer but because they have stood the test of time and are just that good. And because of all of this that our society is a better place for it.
However imagine for a moment if all works were under a perpetual copyright type setup. A system that the **AA's wish. Would our society be better because of such a system? I seriously doubt it.
It's hard to quantify such ideas and as such the **AA's have had a pretty easy time in pushing their addenda. Being that it's easy to show that if Micky Mouse is released into the public domain that $X will be lost, or some such nonsense.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
> A lot more people (about 20 million) are wealthy enough to get insurance
> but don't want it (like me).
I find it hard to believe that the reason that most of them don't want it is ideological in nature.
Which means in turn that it is too expensive.
This leads me to believe that what is necessary is reform or some other way to lower the cost of health care which, unfortunately, would hit a lot of people's income (doctors, medical schools). And since those people are highly influential, it is unlikely to happen.