Slashdot Mirror
UK Music Industry Calls For Truce With Technology
Stoobalou writes "The British music industry has called for a truce with the technology firms with whom it has till now fought a bitter battle over rights, royalties and file sharing. Feargal Sharkey, CEO of lobby group UK Music, told a conference in London this week that it was time for the music and technology industries to set aside their differences and strive instead toward a common goal: nothing less than the total global domination of British music."
Hilarious article
[referring to their 3-strikes law] 'This had helped restore the equilibrium between creativity and technology that had, said Sharkey, been out of kilter. It was but a single "stepping stone" toward the music industry's goal of having people "remunerated for their talent time, effort and ability".'
I'm pretty sure 'people' have been remunerated for their talent time, effort and ability before the internet existed, and continued to be up to the present day. I note they make no mention of how the music labels have in the past and continue to systematically rape their 'talent' in every possible way.
'Our future is now totally dependent, totally entwined, totally symbiotic'
Hmm, I'm not sure how exactly ISP's and/or the internet is in any respect dependent on any part of the music industry. If the music industry completely died tomorrow, the internet and ISP's would continue to function just as well if not be slightly faster. Now, the music industry executives coke and whore habits may live or die depending on how many people they can threaten with having their internet connection being disconnected.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
There seems to be damned little effort to fix the problems.
This is true, but it is because most people don't care about copyright. The people who care about it primarily are content creators, and people who deal with that industry. Many more people are worried about whether Obama is a muslim than the subtleties of copyright.
Even people here on Slashdot, who rage about copyright, often only are aware of a small subset of the copyright law. You may be one of those people. There is a centuries long history of fighting over royalties between song-writers, performers, and publishers. They approach copyright from a point of view that benefits them, just as you approach it from a point of view that benefits yourself. But you aren't willing to put your money on the line in campaign contributions, or by starting a PAC. Those people are, which is why the legislation ends up being slanted towards them.
Meanwhile most people don't care as long as they are able to listen to music or watch movies or whatever. And that's why the system is how it is.
Qxe4
there are a lot of benefits of copyright and patents.
Patents and copyrights are essentially taxation systems, and as with all such transfer systems there's some party benefiting and other parties paying the bill. Compared to other taxation systems, the efficiency grade of 5-20% is horrifically low; imagine if that percentage of funding for any other government scheme was all that actually went to the purpose (ie, the payoff/investment in the creators).
Outright having the state pay for the R&D or pay for music/writing/etc on a per-use base or similar would divert 5-20 times as much money towards the purpose at the same cost to the economy today. Or we could have the same level of production as we have today at a fifth to a twentieth of the cost.
That is fairly concisely summarized as an abject failure. And that doesn't even start to go into the really damaging parts of the system that create problems for derivative or combined works, which are the foundation of creativity. Imagine the number of works we wouldn't have today if Shakespeare or HC Andersen had had permanent copyright...
but it wasn't until patents made it profitable to invent things that people began applying them...
It's always profitable to invent improvements to your production. Saving money means more profit. Whether or not it's profitable to spin off a separate business around that improvement and/or publish it may vary.
But it's more likely that the spread of information is the main driver behind the accelerating pace of invention and creation; more inspiration, more access to necessary knowledge, more improvements by example, etc. Patents used to have a mitigating factor there, as they worked to disseminate knowledge in the previous century. Today, the chance that any invention for which there is an actual application would stay unknown and not get invented half a dozen more times for the duration of a patent is unlikely. Far below the chance that your average invention will be torpedoed by a half-dozen other patents that will prevent it from actually being monetized.
Personally I tend to advocate a system which removes the damaging aspects of copyrights and patents, ie, the exclusivity, and moving over the monetary incentives to something akin to a per-use automatic payout system/mandatory licensing scheme. Instead of getting the right to sue someone who uses your invention you'd get a check from the patent office if someone used your invention, and instead of getting screwed by the media corps you'd automatically get a set percentage of the revenue from anyone selling/profiting from the work. Such funds should further be managed within the government budget (so they can be audited and analysed for cost efficiency and tuned to maximize benefit (do people write more after they're getting $500k per year? or would a payout ceiling pushing the incentive further down the chain create more value for the economy?)) like any other tax/benefit scheme and not hidden away like the current ones are.