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Musicians Oppose Anti-Piracy Measures In the UK
BluePeppers writes "The Guardian has a story, primarily about a deal that allows YouTube to broadcast music videos again, but also covering a coalition of artist unions that are opposing new legislation in the UK that would punish file sharers more severely. From the article: 'A coalition of bodies representing a range of stars including Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John, and Damon Albarn attacks the proposals as expensive, illogical and "extraordinarily negative." The Featured Artists Coalition, the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, and the Music Producers Guild have joined forces to oppose the proposals to reintroduce the threat of disconnection for persistent file sharers, which was ruled out in the government's Digital Britain report in June.""
Aren't music videos supposed to be promotional material? Kind of like adverts for the albums/singles? Why would anyone NOT want people to see them?
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
So these artists are saying that now the stick is far larger than the carrot. What carrot? When have we ever been giving an incentive to pay for the music rather than download it, other than guilt?
I think at this point the stick is just getting larger and pointier and this carrot they may have used at one point has just rotted in the corner.
... to "The soon-to-be-ousted-middlemen continue to look for new ways to make money in the digital age" and the article is put in it's proper perspective.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
Forgive me but some of the richest artists are putting up token opposition just doesn't impress me. Fo rall I know behind closed doors they're patting the record execs on the back for pushing this legislation through. These are after all people who make their living as much by promoting themselves as celebrities as by making music. Forgive me if I am therefore skeptical.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Thinking it over, it seems that given a long struggle against copyrights and patents, piracy will benefit that struggle, but only to the extent it is openly recognized, looked at, reviewed, accepted, and of course practiced. If for example many influential people would start preaching 'piracy is ok', 'piracy is good', establishing that as a moral guideline first, that becomes a building point for proposing and approving new laws. New economic and legal models will follow what is being practiced already. It's too bad that decompiling doesn't work. My own guide is a humanist phrase I heard "nobody has ever created anything without using thousands of free, unpaid, uncontrolled, non-patented and non-copyrighted benefits from human history and nature" - such as language, the written word, tools, transportation, food, oxygen, electricity, copper, wires, chairs, cement, medicines, the list is endless. How can they claim to have individually created, own, and control a concept, an idea, a non-existing object, an inspiration, which stands to benefit all future mankind. An individual human being, isolated, with no contact with human beings, with no benefits of accumulated history, would be a primitive man, completely ignorant, the same as a man before human history, with no ability to invent much of anything new. To make contributions to society and human history is nothing more than a human being's purpose for being in the world, our place in time, in society. And not to one's exclusive benefit, financial or otherwise.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
because the companies hide behind their trade body names & are very active at promoting themselves to be just and right.
The Truth Is Out There:
Not sure why this is marked troll
Sony has a lot of employees, and a lot of them come here, and some get mod points. Any time I mention Sony's XCP rootkit I get modded troll or flamebait. But notice the system worked -- the Sony shill was out modded by better mods, and it's a 5 informative now.
I'm confused by magnatune they advertise that they give 50% to artists, but taking a 50% cut for hosting & selling music seams excessive
Everybody and their dog rips musicians off, and it's a damned shame. The record lables rip of their artists, the bars rip off your local guys who play live, etc. It's disgusting. "But Harry doesn't mind if he doesn't make the scene; he's got a full time job, he's doin' all right." (Sultans of Swing). Most musicians, no matter how talented, are either poor or working at some other job. I know a lot of musicians here in Springfield, and only a few are doing OK without a non-musical job. Many of them majored in music in college.
Free Martian Whores!
Consider the idea of boycotting all of SONY - by which I mean SONY Corporation - because SONY BMG screwed up.
That Bravia TV? Don't buy it. .. and so forth and so on.
That PS3? Don't buy it.
That Blu-Ray player from, say, JVC? Don't buy it - JVC pays SONY
That CD - any artist, even if it's you? Don't buy it - every CD and CD-R made at this point nets SONY a tiny amount of dosh.
Spiderman movie? Don't buy it.
Tom & Jerry on TV? Don't watch it (Tom & Jerry = MGM+Turner. MGM = 20% owned by SONY. Your watching it makes it more attractive for advertisers to put their ads around the show for good sums of money, a slice of which goes to.. voila).
That laptop you're buying? Double-check it doesn't use a SONY panel.
That digital camera you're buying? Make sure it doesn't use a SONY sensor (e.g. Nikon has SONY sensors in many models).
Let's face it - unless you want to be bordering on paranoia whenever you buy something, there's absolutely no good way to boycott a megacorp like SONY even if the idea that long-term boycotting SONY for the short-term actions of a - all things considered - tiny part of the conglomerate wasn't preposterous to begin with. Let me restate that.. I'm not saying that a boycott should be easy - of course it shouldn't, if we could all be lazy in boycotts then a boycott wouldn't work either. What I am saying is, it is nigh-on impossible to boycott a megacorp 100%. Even if -you- decide to no longer buy any product that has a SONY logo on it - a boycott that -is- quite doable, they'll still be getting money from you through the multitude of other channels they have, and through their main channels from the people who don't go along with your boycott.
SONY's bottom line, and that of any other truly big company (let alone the likes of Unilever, Procter & Gamble and the like), is hardly ever hurt by a (call for a) boycott (see e.g. the Nestlé boycott, going on since the 70's, and check out the financial charts for Nestlé.. could they have made an even bigger profit if it weren't for the boycott? sure. Are they in dire straits because of the boycott? Don't be silly.) They're typically more hurt by their own ineptitude and/or loss of appeal for their products/business in general (e.g. Circuit City, sadly), and bad press in specific.
Perhaps this is just a pessimistic view, but it's based on what I see around me. A small baker had to close shop because people boycotted him for selling factory-created pastries - simply because his two children buggered off and he had no time to do that in addition to the fresh breads, cakes, pies, etc. So now people have to buy factory-created breads at the local supermarket as well. The same supermarket (Albert Heijn) that has been 'boycotted' time and again for a multitude of things.. but is still going strong and opening up new stores left and right.
These days, a 'public outcry' is far more efficient than a boycott; the public outcry and subsequent bad press over the SONY BMG rootkit, from people who were still actively buying SONY products -and- people who had no intention of buying SONY products anyway alike, was enough to have them remove any plans to add it to any new CDs, and even lead to them pulling the existing CDs in some areas, while no formal boycott ever materialized and people are still buying SONY products; just like people are still buying Volgswagens and drool over Bugatti Veyrons.
Not sure why this is marked troll, without a rebuttal?
Welcome to slashdot2009!
There are a lot of activist groups with multiple slashdot accounts running around these days.
When they find a user posting something they dislike, they will spend the next couple weeks going through their comment history, and using their other accounts to mod every post as troll by that user.
You can see this by viewing the users history, and seeing all their past 10 posts modded as troll, but not a single trollish comment to be found.
Typically if the article subject is copyright, apple, microsoft, or any government related subject, any facts posted that don't align with the lies in the summary are flagged as troll.
Even quoting the very article linked to from slashdot will gain troll mods, unless by the rare chance the summary quotes that part of the article. Generally quotes are either made as partial (only took the first 4 of 25 words of the persons sentence), or are 100% fabricated. Pointing such out is an instant troll mod.
Hell, my accounts last two posts had NO comments by me what so ever.
Someone asked for a citation to a point, and I simply pasted a couple URLs with those points (and in one URL case, quoted the section in the page, to search for since there was no direct #link)
3 urls, one quote from the page, zero words of my own. I must be really talented to troll with zero words!
Posting anon because this post is pure pissed off flamebait, combined with fact.
Of course it will be modded incorrectly as troll too, instead of correctly as flamebait, but that has become normal too and will just go to prove my point.
Way too many mods have out right posted and SAID they purposely ignore all moderation rules slashdot lays down, and make up their own rules to mod by. With fairness like that, you can't expect much else.