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David Lowery On the Ethics of Music Piracy
New submitter Mystakaphoros writes "Musician David Lowery (of Cracker fame) takes NPR intern Emily White to task for her stance on paying for (or failing to pay for) music. Quoting: 'By allowing the artist to treat his/her work as actual property, the artist can decide how to monetize his or her work. This system has worked very well for fans and artists. Now we are being asked to undo this not because we think this is a bad or unfair way to compensate artists but simply because it is technologically possible for corporations or individuals to exploit artists work without their permission on a massive scale and globally. We are being asked to continue to let these companies violate the law without being punished or prosecuted. We are being asked to change our morality and principals to match what I think are immoral and unethical business models.'"
This system has worked very well for fans and artists.
No, it's been superb for the middleman, the famous MAFIAA.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
It's not property and never really was. So all of these arguments about devaluing music or not paying for it are all entirely bogus.
Besides: it was always gratis.
Video killed the radio star.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The summary is completely empty of the stance of either party. Who are they siding with? Does everyone hate the Labels? Based on the summary, nobody knows. What a waste.
Look: the world changed, and we now have computers and the Internet. They are the single greatest boon to productivity, creativity, knowledge and freedom in the past hundred years. The Internet relies, fundamentally, on its ability to make exact copies of data, nearly instantly, and nearly for free.
We have a choice between strong intellectual property protection and a functioning Internet. We cannot have both, as they are in direct conflict with each other.
Anybody making arguments for the ethics or piracy, or the benefits of intellectual property, is yelling at clouds. It doesn't matter if piracy is unethical. It doesn't matter if it hurts artists. It doesn't matter if it hurts the economy. The Internet is much more important.
interesting there is never any push back on that even though it screws artists a lot more than anything else.
I think he has made up his own definition of that term. Don't most other people associate "Free Culture movement" with things like Creative Commons?
Long, long ago, before there was equipment to record sound, musicians made money by playing live music for people.
the quintessential disrupted producer, complaining about how the world is not conforming to the way they want it to be, or worse yet, the way the world "should" be.
I'm sure the exact same essay was written somewhere upon the development of the phonograph. "but how will we get paid if they can play back our music a thousand times once it has been recorded?" probably the same argument, too, by playhouse actors when recording movies came along.
the artists/actors might not like it, but the development of technology drives down the price, massively opens the market up, and, if they're smart, allows them to make more money than their predecessors could ever have dreamed of.
writing letters complaining about how people are not paying enough to you is just so 1842.
It seems to me that this is the core of copyright abolitionism. As long as file sharing is illegal, we are expecting the government to enforce ethical behavior. The right thing to do is to pay for the things you value willingly. If you don't, they can and should go away.
The rest of the article, including blaming file sharing for musician suicides (as if musicians didn't commit suicide before) is pants on head retarded. The author isn't even aware that he's agreed with the basic assumption of copyright abolitionism.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
She has 11,000 songs on her iPod. If she had bought them, they'd have cost $10,890. Probably more than the car she drives (if she even has one).
Sorry my Sicilian friend, but that's just not going to happen.
He missed the entire point. I WANT to support the artists and I'm happy to pay for the music I like. But...I have no legal option to do so. I subscribe to Spotify, I pay for that, I get everything through it these days ... but he calls that out as something he doesn't like. He supplies NO legal alternative, just insists that I drop back to what I was doing ten years ago.
The rest of us want the music industry to catch up to what we are doing NOW.
"The best way to insure the money goes to artists? Buy it directly from their website or at their live shows." $10 to iTunes with Apple taking their $3 of that, or $10 at the concert where the only cost to the artist for the physical CD is $1?
I have a feeling this letter is going to come up in my project management class tonight, seeing how my professor is a colleague of Mr. Lowery...
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
That's just not the way media works anymore. Anyone with any ability to think rationally would see that the internet has made labels and paying for content completely unnecessary. The whole industry is an anachronism.
Couldn't agree more. I managed to get through the first 2 or 3 paragraphs without choking. What a crock. He is definitely some kind of RIAA shill.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
What do musicians know about morality or ethics or, in particular, technology, that the rest of us don't?
I'm sorry, but most music and other art is crap, and I don't see why they should get special treatment from the internet.
I'm not hostile, just trying to make a point.
expandfairuse.org
We are being asked to change our morality and principals to match what I think are immoral and unethical business models.
If morality can adapt to "immoral" models, do they become moral thereby?
I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. She wants to be able to access any song she wishes at any time. Basically something like youtube, but for music instead of videos.
Where's the harm in that? Just so long as I don't have to pay some rental fee. (Ownership is cheaper than renting, over the long term.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Er, they changed the law. What they do is legal. If you think legality should follow morality, you should probably move to another country not run by the Ferrengi.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I was with him to a degree until "There is no other explanation except for the fact that “fans” made the unethical choice to take their music without compensating these artists." Its not possible in this guy's mind that competing forms of entertainment, the economy, changes in music tastes, etc. are causes for his friends' sales drops. No, it has to be piracy. That is a total leap of faith and is the same leap the RIAA and MPAA make that infuriates people.
"We are being asked to continue to let these companies violate the law without being punished or prosecuted. We are being asked to change our morality and principals to match what I think are immoral and unethical business models.'"
Er, they changed the law. What they do is legal. If you think legality should follow morality, you should probably move to another country not run by the Ferrengi.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Per capita spending on music is 47% lower than it was in 1973!!
The number of professional musicians has fallen 25% since 2000.
Of the 75,000 albums released in 2010 only 2,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. Only 1,000 sold more than 10,000 copies. Without going into details, 10,000 albums is about the point where independent artists begin to go into the black on professional album production, marketing and promotion.
It is my opinion that the introduction of the "Top 40" and other lists of hot songs has recently lead to people who only want to hear the same hook over and over on the radio. Radio stations comply, the labels control what radio stations play and then that's what people buy. I listen to Radio K/MPR's The Current streaming online and I will tell you that the diversity of what's on those stations far outweighs any popular radio station I have access to. It seems more logical to me that the RIAA and bigger labels have done this to themselves and contributed to the decline of musicians. I have been in four bands in my life and aside from close friends that came to shows, nobody cared. No radio station wanted to play our songs (some said they legally could not play our songs) and people just wanted to hear The Killers or Radiohead or Britney Spears or whatever the hell the entire world is listening to these two weeks.
I spend plenty of money on music but it's definitely not to artists that belong to organizations that design their promotional and middleman fees off of a few major acts while absolutely dicking and ignoring everyone else. I pay my money directly to bands like Cloud Cult, to labels that are not members of the RIAA, to kickstarter projects of unsigned bands and use distribution channels like Bandcamp to pay for MP3s that come in any quality or format I want as many times as I want (although after kickstarting a project I now own twenty vinyl records of a punk bluegrass band that I frankly do not know with what to do). That's what stimulates diversity and number of musicians, I'm no longer even a hobby musician and I tried very hard to give my music away. We didn't make great music but there's just no place for it when everyone is trained to listen to the same damn shit on the radio. Have you considered the possibility that if record labels moved money around to starting acts, there would be more musicians? Instead the CEO of Universal Music Group has a new Bentley.
Enjoy your slow death, I'm taking my disposable income elsewhere.
My work here is dung.
Since it's in real time to tape record 11,000 songs that would take, at 3 minutes per song, roughly 3 weeks. I'm sure people wouldn't stay up doing this 24 hours a day, so let's say at 12 hours a day of sitting there copying 11,000 songs one at a time, inserting new cassettes, etc. would take about 2 months at least. Two really grueling months making you question the worth of what you were doing.
However to copy 11,000 mp3s from one computer to another, about 7 hours. Go to sleep, wake up, all done. And nobody got hurt, right?
It's all about the ease and the scale at this point radically affecting the bottom lines.
Wikipedia says [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law] that first copy right was in 1710 and we all know that before 1710 there were no successful artists.
In this article David Lowery attempts to get readers on his side of the fence by discussing what would have needed to be paid to "ethically and legally" support the artists, specifically for the 11,000 songs that Emily White has in her collection. His stated value for those songs, $2,139.50.
That is approximately $0.20 per song. I think everyone would agree that is a fair price. Unfortunately, there is nowhere that you can actually purchase music at anywhere near that price.
David Lowery suggests that $2,139.50 is fair, and yet then attempts to direct Emily to iTunes, where that collection would likely cost exactly $10,890, assuming an average cost of $0.99.
Okay, so can YOU tell me, please, what are the ethics of software piracy, or unauthorised copying, or however you name it? Yes, indeed, the RIAA were swimming in money in the previous years, but the artist got paid something. Now, the artist gets considerably less not because there is a technical possibility of copying, but because people willfully choose not to pay for the music they enjoy, e.g. they copy. How do you justify that?
A true artist, creates art, for the sole purpose of having that art appreciated. By spreading the art to as many people as posible who would appreciate it, is helpng a true artist achive this goal. I Believe the term "entertainer" should be used for any such entity that creates works for monetary gain only.
No. The solution is not to pay cartels that want to destroy the rest of society to maintain their grip on their particular industry.
Pay the artist. Screw the gatekeeper.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"We are being asked to change our morality and principals to match what I think are immoral and unethical business models.'" If I read it correctly, according to page 20 this well citation-ed paper music was not copyrighted for most of human history. http://www.rbs2.com/copyrm.pdf
The ease and scale of the automobile mean I can no longer make money breeding horses. I guess we should tax cars and give me that money for my horse breeding.
I'd like Lowery to go back in time and explain his you-must-pay-to-hear approach to one young, incredibly poor Jimi Hendrix. That guy started out playing a broom for fuck's sake; his first guitar had one goddamn string. Where would we all be now if Jimi's access to music should have been limited to the amount he could pay?
Lowery's approach would be accurate, if he were talking about selling appliances, or even band merchandise. Without further addressing the multiple mistaken premises (replace every instance of "the vast majority" with "a tiny minority", for starters), the main area he fails is his equivocation of music with a physical product.
We've become used to this model. It has driven pop music culture for close to a century; it's given us the "music star" celebrity model that we've become comfortable with. This approach has progressed naturally, and now we've reached the current point of American Idol-voted celebrity products.
What he overlooks is the natural power of music. Music, when at its best, can give courage to the otherwise cowardly, joy to those in pain, even trigger mystical experiences in the otherwise mundane. It can cement memories and bring people closer together.
The problem is when you slap a price tag and marketing on something that serves as a vehicle for these transformative experiences, a few nasty things happen. For one thing, you inevitably see a homogenization of music as salespersons try to maximize profit. Music is reduced to the lowest common denominator to maximize mass appeal, just like fast food. Services exist that compare proposed compositions to past hits in terms of melodic, harmonic, rhythmic structure -- you have people just rewriting variations on the same old tune. Quality is subjective though, and there's no real basis to say one song is better than another -- all that matters is the experience of the listener.
But the most insidious part of slapping price tags on transformative experiences is that you keep poor people from experiencing them. Can't afford to pay up? Tough shit son, you don't get to experience an essential aspect of your culture. Too poor? Sorry, this joy is reserved for those who can afford it.
I'm sure Lowery means well, but people like him are one reason why I'm a librarian. There must be a way for people to access vital, possibly transformative parts of our culture regardless of ability to pay. For the time being it seems like taxing society to provide public access to repositories of music, art, and literature, while not perfect, is the best workaround.
I was expecting to roll my eyes at another Lowery anti-new-music-business screed, but after reading the intern's post, I'm kind of on David's side. 11,000 songs of mostly ripped CD's from her family, friends, and work? She's exactly the type of pirate Lowery always assumes everyone is defending, and it's right that she's being called out for it.
The internet, for better or worse, has turned the entire entertainment business on it's head. Personally I don't think it's a bad thing. $25-30 for a Blu-Ray disk? Give me a break. For some movie that I'm going to watch once and may or may not even enjoy? Maybe if those greedy Hollywood execs would start pricing the things at a reasonable level there would be a little less piracy. Have you ever seen the homes that these people live in (the Spelling mansion as an example)? As far as music goes I'm fine with buying it but don't ass-rape me at the checkout counter. $20 for a CD is way too much - and it's not the artist's fault. I read somewhere that Metallica gets a grand total of 89 cents from a $20 CD. Where does all the rest of the money go? Greedy middlemen. Take them out of the game and the artist gets to keep most of the money - as it should be.
So you will only pay your money directly to the artist? Can the artist hire someone to collect the money for him or her? That's sort of what the old music companies are. And if you see the Beatles' mansions, it's clear that they did pass some of that money along to the Beatles.
Most people simply either do not perceive who is affected by piracy, or else they simply do not care. There is no ethical quandry because they are indifferent enough about the consequences that it is a non-issue.
What piracy affects is the overall usefulness of copyright as a means to secure some of a creator's interest, while at the same time allowing the general public to appreciate that creator's work. Piracy reduces the confidence that creators place in copyright to protect their works, and they resort to other means, such as trying to restrict the circumstances under which their content can be used, or possibly even resorting to self-censorship, and not widely publishing at all.
In the end, I perceive that continued piracy takes something away from future generations that is a fundamental freedom that we have all been enjoying for centuries... which is freedom we all have to read and listen to what we want, and under the conditions that we all want. Some believe that abolition of copyright entirely would accomplish the same thing, but in the end, such an approach is little more than an anarchists approach, and in the long run, I believe would be more destructive to the intent of quality content availability than it would be ensuring that the public still had such access to it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
So what did the artic ice importers do when we infented freezers?
Stop relying on Recording companies.
You want to own your music and control how it's sold? Then produce it yourself.
This day and age, easy as all fucking hell.
Sure, you'll have to pony some money up for advertising, studio recording time, post production, album covers, even videos if you choose to make some.
But you'll be in control.
Here's a protip though, That piratebay is oddly a great source of getting your music heard. Sure, people are downloading it for free, but they are hearing it. Exposure is key.
And I have a hard time believing touring doesn't make you money unless you are a talentless, or a completely new act that isn't that good. Now some buddies of mine, when they were beginning,didn't make shit at shows. Why was that? No exposure, no one knew who they were. As they got more popular, put out some CD's with music on it, got more people hearing them, then they started getting bigger crowds and started making a little money at the shows. What worked for them? 3 Song CDR's that had the next couple of shows times on them.
Plus if touring didn't make money, why the fuck is there so many bands touring all the time? Seriously, no one wants to waste money like that if there is no return.
Be seeing you...
Lowry treats the music industry as if it exists separate from the rest of society and technology. But all of society is going through the computer revolution which is changing the nature of information. So for Lowry to insist that music continue to be treated according to the late-20th century consensus is to insist that all consumer computing products be locked-down according to the whims of the "record labels" (multinational corporations that are acting as though most of our culture needs to stay in a vault, to be re-marketed according to their leisure or greed). This is an all or nothing proposition because A) that industry have shown themselves to be copyright maximalists with a zeal for punishing its best customers, and B) there is no marketable alternative to digital formats - you cannot go back to analog except as a minor curiosity among collectors.
So Lowry needs to be reminded there is more at stake here than just how entertainment is copied. It is also about whether fully user-programmable computers can continue to exist, which IMHO is the larger consideration by far. Even if computers weren't more important, the data strongly suggest that artists would continue making art and lots of money (i.e. the continuation of the dubious celebrity subculture) without a strict copyright regime.
Speaking for myself of course, I dont.
Because of these absurd, stupid laws, its illegal to sing "Happy Birthday" at a resturant where the employees join in. Music made by John Lennon is still under copywright. The lifting of a CD from a store and 'stealing' the MP3's off a website carry with them punishments that range from "Slap on the wrist" to "Indentured Servitude" for effectivly the same offence. Because of the money they're making, or already made, they're buying laws and turning people into criminals for doing what comes naturally, like having a friend listen to something you like. They're trying to destroy things that make it easy and affordable to engage in my own culture. I consider these laws immoral, and as a result, I dont respect them.
Much like if it was against the law to give coins to the starving homelss beggers, or to provide photo ID every time I want to cross the street, or whatever absurd concepts you can come up with, i'd do the same. I pay for music, I subscribe to Pandora, and I own an iTunes account with plenty of purchased music. I also pirate things, music I cant seem to find to purchase for a price that isn't absurdly overvalued because its no longer activly printed on physical media or offered as a download somewhere I can be sure I can get another copy of at some point in the future. I dont justify it, because I dont respect the law as its written, as do most people who act like I do. I agree that people who produce music should be paid for it, the disagreement seems to be in how much they should be paid.
People will follow the path of least resistance, and right now that tends to be pirating music they cannot easily find. Some people will always do it, some will never do it. Most, do it as a show of force of will against something they dont understand. Much like I dont buy seasons of TV shows for a few hundred dollars that have been out of production for 30 years, I dont spend money on music that can be had easily via other means, legit or not. I dont need justification, and I dont need you to agree with me. Through such action does change happen, be it for the better or worse.
I like to believe it will lead to positive change, given enough time.
This system has worked very well for fans and artists.
Citation needed. Show me your numbers. On what basis are you positing that we are spending the correct portion of our GDP on the production of copyright works? The continuous expansion of the power and duration of public enforcement of copyright grants over the past 100 years has been done almost entirely without objective economic analysis of whether we are getting good value for our money.
It is at least arguable that we are spending too much on the production of copyright works. That we are dedicating too much of our federal resources to copyright enforcement, making copyright production too profitable, and thereby shifting too much of our productive resources into copyright work production. We have dozens of television channels filled with shows that plumb ever shallower depths. Popular music has shifted from Janis Joplin and Gracie Slick questioning the nature of humanity and the tragedies of the soul to Lady Gaga and Kesha telling us how fun it is -- or how difficult it is -- to be a pampered alcoholic party girl. Why do they not write about suffering to which we can relate? Because they are too rich to know what the life of a normal person is like.
Do we have a shortage of copyright production? Are we underfunding the production of cultural works? Or are we awash in cultural excess and funding corporate drivel art that expresses the most mundane of human desires?
If you are going to claim that we need to continue our expenditure of public funds on copyright grants and enforcement, and that we should continue to allocate so much of our productive resources to the production of copyright works, I want to see some numbers.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
He's actually the founder of an indie rock band and a college professor.
He's using math and real-world industry-specific experience to attempt to find real world solutions to complex arguements. He makes several valid points about the network of websites, software, and hardware surrounding the music-should-be-free and copying-is-not-a-crime debates, arguements that are difficult to find a valid rebuttal to. I know because I'm trying to do so.
Perhaps you should read more than the first few paragraphs. You may not agree with him, but he knows what he's talking about.
Supposing you want to support children living in poverty in Africa, and so you look up one of the many children's funds for such purposes. But then you learn that that foundation only ends up giving 10% of your donations to those children and it keeps 90% of donations for itself, "admin overhead", salaries for the foundation, etc, etc. Are you likely to give to such a foundation?
The figures that I have heard of the proportion of a $10 CD that *actually* gets sent to the musicians and artists is ABYSMALLY low, LESS than 10%, LESS that 5%. The standard metric for non-profit orgs is 85% should go to actual programs with only 15% overhead. Of course I realize that music is for profit, but if less than 5% of the revenue goes to the artists, well I *do* have a problem with it. Sorry I am not interested in 50-60% of the costs of a CD going to music exec salaries. I want to see at least 50% of the price of an album go to the artists. I don't think this is unreasonable...
This is a why I find it harder to connect with the notion that music piracy hurts the artists... of course it does, but it is diluted by that 0.05 factor and the most "hurt", 90-95%, is on the music execs, labels, MAFIAA, etc... which frankly I don't care about...
While I can understand David's point, I think he misses a critical aspect of the conversation: there is no fundamental 'right' that guarantees that a musician should be able to make money off of his or her work, just as there is no 'right' that guarantees that buggy whip manufacturers should always be paid for whips.
The simple fact of the matter is that we live in a post-scarcity economy when it comes to music. You cannot charge much money (if any) in a post-scarcity economy - it doesn't matter what your product is. Music is in no way different from buggy whips: the supply/demand ratio is nearly infinite. (Demand for buggy whips is near zero, supply of music is nearly unlimited.) With an extremely high supply/demand ratio, the cost of the supply nears the production cost - and there are plenty of musicians out there releasing music at zero cost.
The constitution doesn't say "musicians must always be compensated for their work", just like the constitution doesn't say "programmers must be compensated for their work" or "hairdressers must be compensated for their work". The market has changed out from under David, and the sooner he realizes that, the sooner he'll be able to make the transition to a new regime.
Until then, he's just another complainer on his way to obsolescence.
-dentin
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
You may disagree with her on a lot of things, but this is worth a read:
Courtney Love does the math:
Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist’s work without any intention of paying for it. I’m not talking about Napster-type software.
I’m talking about major label recording contracts.
I want to start with a story about rock bands and record companies, and do some recording-contract math:
This story is about a bidding-war band that gets a huge deal with a 20 percent royalty rate and a million-dollar advance. (No bidding-war band ever got a 20 percent royalty, but whatever.) This is my “funny” math based on some reality and I just want to qualify it by saying I’m positive it’s better math than what Edgar Bronfman Jr. [the president and CEO of Seagram, which owns Polygram] would provide.
What happens to that million dollars?
They spend half a million to record their album. That leaves the band with $500,000. They pay $100,000 to their manager for 20 percent commission. They pay $25,000 each to their lawyer and business manager.
That leaves $350,000 for the four band members to split. After $170,000 in taxes, there’s $180,000 left. That comes out to $45,000 per person.
That’s $45,000 to live on for a year until the record gets released.
The record is a big hit and sells a million copies. (How a bidding-war band sells a million copies of its debut record is another rant entirely, but it’s based on any basic civics-class knowledge that any of us have about cartels. Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service.)
So, this band releases two singles and makes two videos. The two videos cost a million dollars to make and 50 percent of the video production costs are recouped out of the band’s royalties.
The band gets $200,000 in tour support, which is 100 percent recoupable.
The record company spends $300,000 on independent radio promotion. You have to pay independent promotion to get your song on the radio; independent promotion is a system where the record companies use middlemen so they can pretend not to know that radio stations — the unified broadcast system — are getting paid to play their records.
All of those independent promotion costs are charged to the band.
Since the original million-dollar advance is also recoupable, the band owes $2 million to the record company.
If all of the million records are sold at full price with no discounts or record clubs, the band earns $2 million in royalties, since their 20 percent royalty works out to $2 a record.
Two million dollars in royalties minus $2 million in recoupable expenses equals … zero!
How much does the record company make?
They grossed $11 million.
It costs $500,000 to manufacture the CDs and they advanced the band $1 million. Plus there were $1 million in video costs, $300,000 in radio promotion and $200,000 in tour support.
The company also paid $750,000 in music publishing royalties.
They spent $2.2 million on marketing. That’s mostly retail advertising, but marketing also pays for those huge posters of Marilyn Manson in Times Square and the street scouts who drive around in vans handing out black Korn T-shirts and backwards baseball caps. Not to mention trips to Scores and cash for tips for all and sundry.
Add it up and the record company has spent about $4.4 million.
So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven.
Of course, they had fun. Hearing yourself on the radio, selling records, getting new fans and being on TV is great, but now the band doesn’t have enough money to pay the rent and nobody has any credit.
Wo
The comments have been entertaining. What I read the blog as saying, over and over again, is "Hey! You no longer have an excuse to download illegal music! Songs are available for a buck a song on Amazon and iTunes! There are plenty of ways to get your digital music legitimately. Why are you ripping borrowed CDs?"
The guy sounds like every other musician I know trying to make a living. At some point, you have to sell something. This guy had the "bad luck", if you can call it that, of getting his start in the music business (by being in a signed band) before the Iternet explosion and the ability to sell his stuff direct to the public and, if his business model is good enough, make a living doing it.
In short, this guy does get it: Sell 20k people $50 worth of stuff in a year and get by on, after costs, $50k a year. The guy is also under contract to sell his existing stock at a profit (to him) of ~$0.10 a copy. That means he has to sell 20k * 500 or 1 million units. Just to get a measly $50k a year.
Well, you know, rephrasing words of one not-so-famous musician, I'm not scared of pirate copies, I'm just scared of musicians never being paid. I am not exactly free from piracy myself, but I am more than willing to pay for tracks I enjoyed whenever I get money. Those who I do not like but listened to I just delete from my hard drive.
That's why slavery was once ok, but is now frowned upon.
Music sales are HIGHER now than ever before, thanks to teh convenience of iTunes. I don't know how anyone can say "artists are getting less" with a straight face when single sales are setting records.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
He is just another troll. He ignores basic facts, like the one that no jurisdiction treats copyrightable material as property. He says that the system worked really well for artists, even though from its very inception in the Statute of Anne, copyright was used by printers to rob artists, and the practice continues to this day. When he complains about corporations taking his profit, it is an ultimate strawman, since no reasonable copyright reformer calls for a free-for-all commercialization. Instead, we want reasonable terms of several years and acceptance of non-commercial sharing as a basic right guaranteed to us by the UN charter in the free expression article. Sure, there are some abolitionists out there, but arguing with them is just as productive as arguing with people who want to abolish civilization. Go back under the bridge, pal. If you are defending MAFIAA shaking down single moms, you are not an artist but a gangster.
besides–is it really that inconvenient to download a song from iTunes into your iPhone?
Grrr, yes it is! It requires you to install memory eating proprietary software that doesn't work on all platforms.
The summary quote is about people rationalizing pirating content because "corporate America is evil." And, here they are posting rants with that exact sentiment. If two wrongs make a right, then stream on!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Now we are being asked to undo this not because we think this is a bad or unfair way to compensate artists but simply because it is technologically possible for corporations or individuals to exploit artists work without their permission on a massive scale and globally.
No, previously people bought music on physical media, or before that paid to see live performances, because that was the only way you could get music without doing something really unethical like physically depriving someone of something (stealing their record/tape/disc) or something even worse (like kidnapping a musician and forcing them to play at gunpoint).
Now, it is technologically possible to listen to music for free without doing anything unethical like stealing or kidnapping. A musician can willingly make a recording of their music, and willingly sell copies of that recording, and I can willingly trade some money for one of those copies, and then I can willingly make an identical copy of it on equipment that I willingly traded someone else money for, and then willingly give that identical copy to a friend, and... wow, now my friend has free music, and nobody had to do anything coercive at all. No violence, no threats, just normal sales and gifts, with some fancy technology in the middle enabling the gifts.
Logically, the place where musicians have an ethical right to stop that completely ethical process is not recording their music, or not selling copies of that recording. That's their choice to make, if they like. Sure, that will mean fewer professional musicians producing music, and that those former musicians will have to go and do something else for a living. Other people will continue making music either because they can somehow find a market for it, or just for the love of it. I think the free software community is ample evidence that people will develop and practice skills that they enjoy for free just for the love of the art, not to mention all the people playing music for the sake of music across all of human history. The music will not die.
Nobody is forcing musicians to give away music for free; they are free to stop playing music any time, if they find there is not a market for their goods, and marketability is the only reason they play. What they may not do is use the coercive force law to artificially create a market for their goods.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Or those mansions could all be about concert proceeds and have little to do with actual album sales. Although the Beatles did have enough #1 singles to fill an entire album.
If that's the best you can come up with then it's really not a compelling reason for the gatekeepers and it's certainly no good justification for subverting the rest of our laws and technology to suit them.
Also, the entire Beatles catalog should be in the public domain now.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Lowery confuses the need for compensation with rationalizing some truly evil thuggery.
Let's say (survivors of) Adolf Hitler, under his Reich orders, wanted a royalty for slave laborers' work on European train tracks seventy years later. Sure they deserved to be paid, but paying Adolf et al only rewards the evil part, we know what happened to the slaves. I would be would be willing to help former slaves, but Adolf not so much. In fact I probably am angry with those that do.
As I recall, Cracker was one of those 1990's Nirvana rip off bands that were snatched up by the dozens and thrown all over the airwaves by the music industry in it's hayday. Now he's a producer in that same industry, likely trying to do the same thing with 2010's MGMT rip off bands. This is like asking a fox whether or not he should be able to guard a hen house...
I admit to being shocked to read what Lowery wrote about how advances work. Maybe on the small labels he presumably recorded on it worked that way, but none of the major labels work that way in general. Advances were used specifically to keep musicians in servitude to the recording company by running up debts that they could rarely pay. You can read about the practice here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recoupment
I don't remember his name but one US Senator called the recording industry something like buying a house and having the bank continue to own it after you paid off the mortgage.
I did read through the first few paragraphs. He is mostly right with respect to what he chooses to write about. If someone is downloading over ten thousand songs in blatant violation of copyright laws then that is wrong. There is little wrong with asking people to pay for their entertainment. He says that he does not want to build a straw man, but that is exactly what he does. I cannot argue that the person downloading all those songs for personal use without reimbursement is in the wrong.
What he does not write about is the obscene length of time assigned to a copyrighted work in the US. Also, the steady erosion of fair use rights is a big problem. The people that he is trying to defend are doing everything they can to turn copyright into a weapon and make it near impossible for people to make use of and share ideas and concepts.
He is right that there is a problem with some people ignoring copyright, and they should reconsider their behavior. At the same time he should be calling to task the people who have turned copyright into a scary mess. Part of the reason there is a generation of people who think copyright is something to ignore is because it has been used as a way to control people rather than simply be used to compensate people for their efforts. Copyright is becoming meaningless primarily because it is being used in ways that are self destructive.
The author of that piece needs to think about the bigger picture and realize that there is plenty of blame to go around. Anytime anyone starts defending the current situation it only weakens their case even when they are right. A quick glimpse across this thread will confirm that for you.
Comic author Rob Reid unveils Copyright Math (TM), a remarkable new field of study based on actual numbers from entertainment industry lawyers and lobbyists. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZadCj8O1-0
The ethics of 'IP piracy', software or otherwise is that 100% of the works under copyright are derivative of someone else's creative work. Thus 100% of all works under copyright is pulled from a poisoned well. There are no ethics concerning copyright. Copyright is strictly a pragmatic system that attempts to generate new, hopefully improved, derivative works.
Thus, asking for the ethics of software piracy is as loaded as asking if you still beat your wife.
It's kinda fun to see all of the typical dodges and rationalizations so totally and utterly obliterated, and the apologists sitting there in a daze, with nothing better to say.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
A lot of musicians on my facebook newsfeed are passing around a link to this article. Lowry speaks the truth. It's time to stop making it excusable to download music without making an attempt to compensate the artist who created the music. A lot of the comments here are trying to argue that copyright is not property, copyright exists to promote public good ... and then what? Is it for public good to download music for free? As long as the copyright term has not expired, it is exactly like property.
As Thomas Babington Macaulay said in a brilliant speech on copyright back in 1841 "The public seldom make nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the words of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."
American corporations of the 20th and 21st centuries, thanks to their endless quest for profit and control with scant regard for anything else, have succeeded in thoroughly discrediting the very idea of copyright. While I empathize with David Lowery and the artists on whose behalf he speaks, he is missing the point. Until the corporate-instigated abuse of copyright is ended, there is no chance of rehabilitating it in the public mind. Even then, I expect doing so will take generations if it can be done at all.
P.S. In case you missed it, the same corporate abuses that destroyed faith and trust in copyright are being applied to America's entire legal system.
I dont' disagree with you in the least. There is a large hole in the author's arguement where he simply glosses over the extreme length-of-time that copyright exists, and that there is no end in sight.
nobody's perfect, and there is no perfect defense of his side of the debate (or of our side, really).
I'm saying that his other arguements, many of them valid points of consideration in the debate, are being completely swept under the rug by people who want to put their fingers in their ears and say "la la la I can't hear you you're wrong!".
This is a complex debate and anybody willing to completely disregard either side of it doesn't truly understand the debate. I'm saying that the author of TFA is presenting intelligent and articulate examples of his side of the debate, and they are worth discussing, not dismissing. you can never truly win a debate by dismissing, only by explaining where the oposition is wrong.
I skimmed the comments on wordpress. Didn't see any disagreeing with the lengthy post. The comments on /. look quite a bit different from the 300+ shills on there...
/coughs artists /coughsagain, producers, and executives taking home enough money to feed entire countries. While much the world lives without running water, electricity, or food; millionaires are created in the USA based on who they know, not what they produce. The digital revolution has threatened some of these powerful people. And they have responded with aggressive legislation that infringes on the constitution, legal bullying by high priced lawyers, and fiery politicized posts like this.
I will say that I don't think music recordings should be monetized other than to cover production costs. Artists should be paid, and paid well, for live performances. But I don't see any reason that someone in a band playing gigs, that works maybe 10-20 hours a week, should make more than $100k a year. If a musician is playing to make tons of money, it usually shows in their work (like the band, Cracker). Most of the mainstream music I listen to these days is hiphop because at least those guys admit they are all about the money.
The content industries in this country are incredibly inefficient, with a select few
I work for the man, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna give him a hand job behind the building.
The blog tackled that statement a while ago.
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
Seriously, don't be absurd. Different types of property are taxed differently. For example, I own a car. I paid tax when I purchased the car. I also pay a licensing cost (a type of tax, in that it goes to the governement for the purpose of supporting public services) to legally operate the car. However, I certianly don't pay tax on it every year. I also own a number of books, which were subject to sales tax when I bought them but nothing else (and certianly no ongoing tax).
On the flip side, you have the various producers of copyrightable works ("artists" for brevity). To an artist, their (intellectual) property is their source of income. That is, of course, taxed (on a continuous basis... assuming they are selling anything from it). Nothing special about that. In the case of the modern publishing industry, artists receive royalties for the copies of their property that the artists have allowed a publisher to create and sell. Those royalties are taxed as income. Often, there's also a contract (occasionally, there's a contract but no royalties) where the artist is paid a lump sum up front. Those payments are also taxed as income.
Your argument is completely empty. A warehouse doesn't pay tax on everything it contains on an annual basis. A farm doesn't pay an annual tax on its livestock, despite those unequivocally being the property of farm. Why in the world should artists pay an annual tax on their intellectual property? Forget empty; your argument is ludicrous...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
This is the second Slashdot article linking to his blog in the last few weeks. Like the other one, this one is full of bad logic, bad "facts", and bad analysis. Pro tip: If you need to say "I’m not trying to set up a “strawman”", it's because YOU ARE SETTING UP A STRAW MAN. When you mention downloading, impoverished artists, and musician friends of yours who committed suicide, you are OBVIOUSLY trying to get your reader - who ADMITS to downloading music - to draw the line. And yet "I present these two stories to you not because I’m pointing fingers or want to shame you." Really? Because that seems like the only conceivable way to interpret the way you laid out the story... and let me tell you, you had to stretch pretty dang far to point the finger AWAY from untreated mental illness and drug problems, and towards downloading music.
So who is this guy? He was in some okay bands, twenty years ago... why does Slashdot care about his fairly uninformed - and seemingly uninterested in BECOMING informed - opinion? I feel bad for the poor intern at NPR he's beating up - but hey, he's a college professor too, it seems. I'm sure he has a ton of experience beating up 20 year olds he disagrees with. (Okay, that was a bit unfair... but I'm afraid I couldn't read the piece without thinking about what he must be like in class.)
Also... way to go on your comments section, dude. You "don't have time" to approve all the comments... and unsurprisingly, unlike the... um... lively, as always, debate on Slashdot... everyone on your site seems to agree with you! You must be brilliant.
HEY INTERNET: Can we all agree that Jonathan Coulton's perfectly reasonable, moderate position on this issue is the right one, and move on?
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2012/01/21/megaupload/
Who says any particular song I download I would have bought? Maybe I am just checking you out and decided you suck, good thing I didn't give you any money then because I wouldn't want to hear anything else you made. Not trying to be rude to anyone in particular, but that is just economic basics.
Who says I haven't already "bought" the song(s) and the shitty CDs /tapes stopped working? This has happened multiple times, with no scratches / spills anything physically wrong by any appearance on the CDs / DVDs. There is NO reason why I should pay multiple times for the same thing.
Who says your song is worth $1+ / $20 / CD? especially since almost all CD releases have one or 2 "good" songs and the rest is either mediocre or downright crap.
Who says I want DRM if I do decide to buy a song? I don't want to be tied to a specific device that may or may not stay working for the next day / month / year - see the paying multi time for the same thing. THIS is why it's easier to just go and download a ( generally shittier lower bitrate ) song. It's much easier to deal with lower quality than the hassle of DRM ridden crapware.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
Guess what? A house is not someone's property either except for the fact that congress made it so. How about we get congress to void all deeds (or simply not enforce them) and see what remains your property.
The American system is based on the idea that we are endowed *by our Creator* with certain unalienable rights, and that governments are instituted among men to *secure* those rights. - aj
What's funny is how myopic many /.ers are: if a software developer comes on and talks about getting screwed over by a client (the recent article on someone wanting support forever) or by a distributor (the recent article on someone getting screwed over by Amazon's app store), there's sympathy, solid advice (including legal advice), and links to resources. If a musician comes on and talks about getting screwed over by Google (Google publishes DMCA takedown notices that list offending URLs; YouTube doesn't, AFAIK, pay royalties), Apple (Apple acts as a middle man, only, and does next to nothing to produce works or discover new artists), or by Torrent sites, he "doesn't get it" or is told to find "new ways to monetize your work". I.e., the lamest and most non-specific comments (not even advice) possible.
What makes me shake my head is how lacking in empathy most of these posters are towards people who work in non-geek fields. The same suite of laws that protect software licenses like BSD and the GPL also protects artists. While it's OK for a software developer to put strings on software and how it gets distributed, it's bad for a musician to put similar strings on his work?
At the end of the day, Lowery's argument boils down to, "I did the work of making music. I assumed the risk (financial liability) of producing this piece of music, I paid for the engineer, I paid the factory to manufacture the CD. Why shouldn't I get paid for work I did? Why can't I control how it gets disseminated? How is it that there are cases where download sites make money from making my work available, without my permission?" And have a look at the last /. article mentioning Lowery -- he was an early adopter of using the Internet to connect to fans AND give away music he chose to give away.
Why is it OK to tell a software developer to lawyer up if he's getting screwed, but not OK to give the musician the same piece of advice? Again, it really is all about people getting paid for work they did AND having control over distribution.
It is, IME, fair game to argue over the details (like how long copyright should be), but it should be a non-starter to argue that someone should have no control over, and chance to benefit from, their own work once it's in the wild.
FWIW, I think software developers are AWFULLY lucky that they have the choice to squirrel away their source code and only distribute binaries. That puts an absolute limit on how widely and easily bits of code can be moved.
Producing the music and advertizing it costs money.
The main reason why producing and advertising costs so much is because the people who write the checks and the people who cash the checks are the same people. Here, read this.
What do you think would happen if you had a manager and you told him, "Hey, we think these advertising costs are a bit much. I'd like to hit a few ad agencies on my own for quotes and see if I can find a better bargain." Do you think that would be met with, "Okay and jolly good! Let's try to save some money!" I'm betting not.
The real issue here is the middlemen. They've had a fantastic time of it so far, haven't they? They lock down bands with contracts as the barrier of entry into a closed system. It's closed because they have lobbied for it to be closed. That's why it's closed. Then they set the rules for who gets paid and how much. Then they write checks to themselves in whatever amount pleases them. Then they have the audacity to claim they are "protecting the artists". Then finally in a move of unmitigated gall they complain about the ethical implications of people who try to avoid their protection racket!
I'd love to pay the artists, but currently there isn't a legal way to do so without paying these parasites in the middle. And I think you'll find this to be a fairly popular idea. But the current system is so broken you can't sing Happy Birthday in public. Or how SoundExchange can collect royalties on songs they don't own. Even one you make up and stream yourself - they want royalties for that, and they are legally entitled to them.
It's like telling someone saying how important it is to obey the law. And then realizing Emperor Palpatane is running things. Makes the ethics a little fuzzy.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
if you don't, you really don't have to have it.
if you steal it, the artist will not make any more for you. they need to eat, curiously enough.
as for the middlemen, I am still surprised that the artists have not headed for the cloud with their masters and are not getting their geld directly. so many artists have been ripped off over the years by the upstanding Protector Of The Genre, the record companies in collusion as the RIAA.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
"Congratulations, your generation is the first generation in history to rebel by unsticking it to the man and instead sticking it to the weirdo freak musicians!"
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
You promise that you will support - and do your best to encourage - a return to some historical copyright term. Something sub-50 years - I could live with a 49-year copyright. In return, I will support - and do my best to encourage - the legal purchase of music as opposed to the downloading of it, and I will go back and make sure I have the legal right to every song on my various devices.
I think that seems fair, don't you? Internet? Could you deal with that trade? A return to copyright sanity, in return for a return to purchasing sanity?
It seems to me that this is the core of copyright abolitionism. As long as file sharing is illegal, we are expecting the government to enforce ethical behavior.
Actually, personal ethics come from within yourself because that is how you are built. Morals are externally imposed by society, and usually adhered to for fear of the penalties for not adhering to them. Those can be the promise of legal penalties, or the promise of burning in hell. This is why the sociopath is considered immoral; their fear of the penalties is broken.
One of the strangest lies we've been told is that there is such a thing as professional ethics, rather than professional morals. It allows self-policing of groups to continue despite their actions clearly being immoral in the context of the larger society, as if that somehow lets them out of the social contract which binds the rest of us.
-- Terry
Here's a fundamental question:
If I am enjoying some music, do I owe the artist for that enjoyment? (Owe in the sense of "some money or obligation is due" rather then the sense of "resulting from".)
saying that some people dont get paid for valuable services highlights the errors in capitalism, not errors in the ethics of piracy. I couldn't even list all the things that people need but can't get because of money, the least important of which is music, movies, and software.
Sure. let's start with few of the more interesting ones he makes:
Why are we willing to pay for the hardware (sometimes exorbinant prices) to play music on/with, but not willing to pay for the music itself if we don't have to? Spending the kind of money we do on ipods, bose, and beats would imply we value the musical experience (even if we have poor taste)... but why do we not place a value on the music itself and those creating it?
Why are we as a generation willing to pay a little bit more for fair trade coffee, or purchase clothing from sweatshop-free clothing manufactuers, in order to make sure that the people working in those industries are fairly compensated, yet we don't feel the same way about compensating our musical artists?
I'm now being asked to pay for non-live music. Before recording technology was invented musicians actually had to show up for work. Sorry, your recording isn't worth 10-20$, or more, to have some disk crap out on me in a year or so. I'll gladly pay to see musicians and other performers on stage, in a hall or at a bar. At a bar I might even buy them a round.
My point... yes, just as technology gave you the ability to charge for recordings it also made it difficult to get paid for recordings eventually. You want to make sure you get paid? Show up to work like everyone else does.
Maybe all programmers should start charging royalties for their code being used. ;)
He's actually the founder of an indie rock band and a college professor.
No. Just no. He may have started another indie band after making money off of Cracker in the 1990s, but Lowery is most certainly not a college professor. Until an associate professor (requires a PhD 99% of the time) is granted tenure, which can take OVER A DECADE , they are not called a professor. As stated in the article, he has been a LECTURER for 2 years at the University of Georgia. That means he is currently a guest of the department head. While the top dog of that music program has been able to bring this guy in, along with some other industry shills from the 1990s who are probably cheap and need the work, I seriously doubt Lowery will ever be a professor unless he gets his doctorate (4+ years of work, and tens of thousands of dollars). Even then it would likely take him 5-10 years of additional lecturing and researching to become a professor (which, again, requires tenure).
Perhaps you should read more than the first few paragraphs. You may not agree with me, but I know what I'm talking about.
...will not be the day the RIAA and all of the middlemen die. Music and musicians will live on, regardless of who is in control. So boohoo, nice tearjerking story, but at the end of the day the reason the music industry is flat lining is because it hasn't adapted to the way things are. Instead it continues to pound the sand hoping for the way things were.
It started back in Team Fortress Classic
So property doesn't exist because it can be stolen?? Logic fail.
Are your pro gun or is this supposed to be anti gun?
Just one small problem with that: most of what he posted is factually incorrect, and the rest is irrelevant.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
There are no ethics. Copyright is not a system of ethics or morality. If you think there are ethics or morality involved in copyright or violation thereof, you are an idiot.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Nice to see the troll shills have mod points again.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Because the hardware has a fixed per unit cost, meaning each new piece of hardware takes additional labor and resources. The cost of creating an additional copy of music is negligible, and we do pay those costs, through hard drives, internet connections, electricity, etc. The copyright holder doesn't do any additional work, so why should they receive additional funds. If I want to make money as a musician, I'll play a show.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I don't agree with everything Lowery said, but his overarching point is valid: a content creator gets to set the terms of use for the content. A content consumer has the choice of complying with those terms or doing without the content. Any alternative choices are unethical.
The fact that the **AA's frequently act unethically in an attempt to enforce those terms has absolutely no bearing on that argument.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Why not pay artists for their work in the way the rest of us get paid? Agree to do a project for a certain price, agreed upon beforehand? Artists that delivered good stuff would be sought after to do more projects for more money. Technology has certainly made this way of doing things easier.
Bits aren't a commodity... and they aren't worth money, sorry. However I fully believe that people's work is worth money.
Based on their wording, it appears they are blatantly painting it as if because she's only purchased 15 CDs, her 11,00 songs must all be pirated. However, she clearly states:
Yes, she admits she might have some ill gotten music, but most of it was bought and paid for. All of Mr Lowery's math seems to be based on this retarded conclusion that all of her music is pirated, when it isn't. His whole argument is based on the same incorrect conclusion. At this point, I have already stopped reading what he has to say, because he's a moron. All of the people singing his praises clearly can't read either, or they'd have caught this too.
When is violating someone's rights considered ethical?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Music is a useful contribution. Music improves your quality of life. If it didn't people wouldn't listen to it. Sure, it's not a design for a working fusion reactor, but if that was easy, everyone would be doing it. It has value, or no-one would pay for it. The same goes for movies and games. After all, if all your material needs are served, what else is there but entertainment? It would be great to live in a world where that was the only concern, but until then, I can listen to music to lift my spirits a little.
People don't ignore copyright because it's a failed social contract. People ignore copyright because it's easier and cheaper to copy things than it ever was before. I remember when I was a kid, copying Spectrum games using a dual tape deck, or a memory dumper. It was a pain in the butt. You had to buy C60 cassettes. You had to wait MINUTES to copy each thing. Then I copied Amiga games using two disc drives. The hardware was much more expensive, but you could get more copied in much less time. I stopped copying in my "PC" era, mostly because I was in gainful employment and could afford my games, didn't have a social circle that included PC gamers, and because the internet sucked (modems, yuck). I still don't copy PC games, but I did accept a few GB of NDS ROM images from a colleague at work ; I don't feel really guilty about it, because I don't play any of them - most of them suck. It would have sucked even more spending £30 a pop to find that out. Most of the games I actually bought for DS I played extensively, because I chose games I knew were good. But it was trivially easy to copy them ; shove in a USB stick, run one command, hey presto. Not once did I think "Hey, I'm sticking it to those damn publishers and their evil lobbying to destroy the social contract of copyright". I just buy fewer DS games because I know so many of them suck.
I agree that they are destroying the social contract though. You see these creaking old pop stars lobbying to continue earning a living off a piece of work they did 50 or 60 years ago, and think "wouldn't it be great if I could earn money for every piece of code I write every year". The reality is that their label fucked them, and now they are lobbying for their label to retain the right to fuck them a little longer.
What they don't get is that if the copyright expired on their recordings, nothing would stop them releasing them for themselves ; unlike right now, where the label controls what you do with your work, you might have a chance of making a few bucks without having most of it clawed back as recoupable expenses. As TFA points out, people will pay extra cash for coffee if they thought the farmer got a fair shake - well, I'm willing to bet that the same applies to music. It definitely applies to games - I know people who will pay extra for Indy games, buy them direct from the developer, rather than pay a discounted rate on Steam, because it puts more cash in the pocket it belongs in. Well, if you sell CDs without the cut for the label, you could easily cut the price and still make more than you were getting in royalties - and make sure you sell it as the "real" album, "Fair Trade" for the artist.
...is, as Lars Ulrich pointed out all those years ago it's the artists' music, legally and morally, and if someone chooses to give it away more power to 'em, but if they say no, no amount of rationalization can change the fact that it's no one else's to give away/take.
Discussing the ethics of music piracy is like discussing the ethics of speeding over the speed limit. In the end, there probably is no real ethics to do it in the light of society, yet lots of people, possibly the majority to everybody are still going to do it. Hell, like speeding, it's quite possible that people end up doing it without even knowing they are doing anything wrong. In the end, the chances of being caught no matter what the punishment are next to nil, so people are going to continue to do it. There's not much society will ever be able to do but police it, hit people who get caught with some sort of fine, and hit those repeat offenders with increasingly large fines or other punishments.
Right. All of the hardware manufacturers are operating as charities, and only charge the actual BOM+labor cost for their products. None of them make any profit selling those devices.
does this imply that as soon as we have 3d printers in our homes capable of reproducing said hardware, their costs will also plummet to 0? Is the expertise in designing a new pair of sennheisers that is better than the old model worth nothing?
especially this - If there are no or insufficient record sales, the advance is written off by the record company.
my experience (in the mid 1990s)
We didn't sell enough records, so the locks on our studio door were changed and a court order tacked onto the door saying all equipment inside has been repossessed to pay debt owed to studio. Anything that couldn't be proven as personally owned within one week (with the purchase receipt, mind you) would be auctioned off. I lost $2000 in gear that I personally owned (before getting an auction cut - see next sentence), mainly in a set of bass speaker cabinets (I had the receipt for the head, so I was able to recover that, but I had to have the property owner and police there when I took possession of that property and was sadly not able to convince the officer that the head and speakers went together). They actually only "lost" about $4000 (It may have been a little less than that, but it's been so long I'll just use $4k), so I had a check cut out to me after the sale for $800 after the auction. Note that the auction was actually held 3 days earlier than it was supposed to be, and nobody in the band even notified it was happening because they were dirty rotten lying bastards and we couldn't afford to sue them and they knew it. The gear, especially our PA and light system, must have been auctioned off at a massive loss, because they were easily worth 8-10k each, both being relatively new. To this day I don't know how the recording studio even found our practice studio, but I imagine they had one of us followed or something shady. This same studio stole (or in their words, repo'd) another band's tour bus loaded with gear while they were on tour for the same reason. The studio did close a short time later, so I can only assume the behavior was debt driven, but you REALLY need to know who you're getting in bed with in the music industry - it's brutal.
Also I have a hard time feeling sympathy for the studio "loss" - after all, they made thousands of dollars on us and easily recouped the cost of recording, but the way the system works is everyone at the studio gets paid and then the artist pays all expenses including recording time on their cut (it isn't up front). Our songwriter made something like $15k (because songwriting cut is off the top), and I believe that meant the studio head himself made around $20-25k, because I think his cut was 5-10% higher. The band owed $4000. Yep, that's studio math for a "loss" - as the old musician adage goes, everyone makes money except the band. It wouldn't surprise me if they wrote off the $4000 when they went chapter 7.
I don't think they plummet to zero, since it still requires the same material, but yes, the costs would fall precipitously.
No, I'm not sure why you'd think it is. If someone has the expertise, they can be commissioned to design a new pair. They can also teach others. If they have a skill, and they make use of that skill via a service, and that service is in demand, they can make money by doing that service.
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Who said anything about charity? They are doing actual work. When Alice copies a song for Bob that Carol wrote and recorded, Alice is doing the work, not Carol. If Alice wants to charge Bob and Bob is willing to pay, that's fine.
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If a content creator doesn't want the world to use his content, then he shouldn't release his content to the public. This is the world we live in. How's that for you?
Ignorant.
Let's just get rid of all property laws then. If you don't want someone living in your house, you shouldn't own a house. If you don't want someone driving your car, you shouldn't own a car. That's the world we will live in if we follow your ideals. How's that for you?
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Thank you. Too bad my mod points expired a couple days ago. In any case, I'm glad at least one other person noticed the new Slashdot low of the article not RTFA it's talking about. Didn't only not read it but completely missed the point of it. She was saying the she and her generation were not all that interested in owning Physical Media. She never said she wouldn't pay for music. In fact the whole point of her article was that there needs to be a service that made having access to songs easy and able to sync with any device While paying the artists! I know nothing of David Lowery prior to this but he now strikes me as a reactionary prick with low reading comprehension. He's a perfect example of my biggest pet peeve. People who don't read what you wrote or listen to what you say but instead read or hear what they think you were going to say. And it seems like 95% of people who do that are unwilling to go look at it again because "I already know what it says!" Whew, got a little ranty there.
Ever hear of profit? It is what is left over after paying for the 'actual work'. It represents things like the fact that you had a good idea for a product, which could have been a very long time ago. The profit made from selling a copy of a song is no different than the profit made selling anything else.
And which blog would that be? The same feces-covered rag featured in this story? Some blogger posting something doesn't make it true. I can make a blog myself tomorrow, posting the polar opposite of everything David Lowe claims, and it'd be closer to the truth.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Yes, but the profit is made by doing actual work. In the given scenario, Carol did not do any work for Bob, so it doesn't make sense for Bob to pay Carol. I have no problem with selling a copy of a song for profit. It doesn't matter to me if Alice, Bob, or Carol does that. It's also fine in Alice, Bob, or Carol gives a copy of the song away.
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but his overarching point is valid:
No it's not.
a content creator gets to set the terms of use for the content.
No, he doesn't. Copyright law sets that. Content creators conveniently like to forget how copyright originated, and what its true purpose is. But that's already been posted many times in the comments on this story before. The fact that you choose to ignore it changes nothing.
A content consumer has the choice of complying with those terms or doing without the content. Any alternative choices are unethical.
Wrong again. Copyright law in its current state is what's unethical.
Copyright law is so twisted and perverted we truly would be better off with no IP laws at all.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Who do you think makes more profit off an iPod, Apple or Foxconn? Who did the actual work? Profit has nothing to do with actual work
Troll. And you know it.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Let me clarify, I don't care if you make money without doing any work. In fact, if you want to send me money for doing nothing, I would enjoy that. However, if you aren't doing any actual work, you are generally very easy to replace. We've managed to get making copies of songs down to something that can be done for free, doing just as good a job, and often a better job than the record companies, iTunes, etc., so they've lost out competitively.
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http://mises.org/daily/2632/
"A clue to the copyright fallacy should be obvious from wandering through a typical bookstore chain. You will see racks and racks of classic books, presented with beautiful covers, fancy bindings, and in a variety of sizes and shapes. The texts therein are "public domain," which isn't a legal category as such: it only means the absence of copyright protection."
"But they sell. They sell well. And no, the authors are not misidentified on them. The Bronte sisters are still the authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Victor Hugo still wrote Les Miserables. Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer. The much-predicted disaster of an anti-IP world is nowhere in evidence: there are still profits, gains from trade, and credit is given where credit is due."
"music is not property, because it is not tangible". No, music is tangible, it is written on paper, like a novel, with symbols being the musical notes instead of letters. When played, music is vibrations of molecules, so it is very tangible.
"piracy does not hurt profit". If one produced a song that was 100% pirated, profit would be 0. So, piracy does hurt profit.
"a pirated song is not a lost sale". It is a lost sale, because it denies profit to the owner of the song.
"copyright exists for the promotion of arts and culture". No, no matter how it is being said, copyright exists to protect profit. Encouraging an artist to create more works is only meaningful if the artist can make a profit from its works in order to sustain him/herself.
"piracy is not immoral because corporations are evil". But you could fight the evil corporations by not using/buying their products, which you obviously do not do. So, that is just and excuse for not paying.
"I may pirate things, but I always buy them later, and most other people do so". Pirates who do not buy the products later will not say so in any poll, or on the internet.
"copyright should not exist because it hinders the promotion of culture". No, it does not, because, by your own admission, you are willing to pay for culture.
"before recording was possible, musicians earned a living only by live performances". No, they did not, being musicians was their hobby, they all had jobs. Those that did not have jobs were protected by the weathy, mostly royalty or church.
"copyright should only be for 15 years, anything beyond that is stupid". No, it is not. You would pay money for a 30 year old car, why not for a 30 old song?
"artificial scarcity should not be allowed". The ability to copy a song does not mean that scarcity is artificial, because before the copy, the song did not exist. Artficial scarcity is when a product does exist but it is not being sold in order to keep its price high. In the case of a song, an instance of it does not exist before being created.
"piracy is out there, the internet cannot be stopped". Nuclear weapons are also out there, shouldn't we make an attempt to stop them? the availability of something does not make that something legal or good, just because it exists.
"why should we pay X dollars for a song, when the cost of reproducing it is almost zero?" because that is what the song's creator wants, and the right to sell one's product at the price he/she wants is a fundamental principle of our economic system. If you find the price too high, you can ignore the product or negotiate a lower price.
Though the real answers may be subtle, I propose the following questions to be used in evaluation of the idea of "compensating" artists:
If an artist spends x time and effort making a work of art, should she be compensated at least y remuneration, where y remuneration is some reasonable market price for x time and effort?
Okay, now consider if only one other person ever experiences said art. Is the cost solely theirs? Okay, now consider if all the world experiences said art. Does that mean each human only owes y/6,000,000,000 when they experience the full glory of the (digitally reproducible) work?
What, really, does each recipient of the art experience "owe" the artist?
If musicians want to get paid they should perform their music. Not write or record it once and expect to get paid for the rest of their lives (and then some) without having to lift a finger. Does a plumber get paid every time you take a shower? No. The plumber gets paid for performing their physical job.
An example of "working" musicians is Underworld. They're not the kind of band that knocks out an album and plays a "concert tour" to promote sales. These guys are in their 50s and have been gigging almost constantly for two decades - That's how they get paid. Their recorded music is an advertisement for the band itself. The internet is full of Underworld bootlegs & videos and they don't give a crap.
Of course, they're smart enough to own the copyright to their own stuff, no middlemen involved.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
I am not arguing about copyright, I am talking about people. I hear that they have ethics.
Why are we as a generation willing to pay a little bit more for fair trade coffee, or purchase clothing from sweatshop-free clothing manufactuers, in order to make sure that the people working in those industries are fairly compensated, yet we don't feel the same way about compensating our musical artists?
The examples you list are smallish mass-luxury markets. Many of those same consumers also pay for copies of music from iTunes.
Now as to the question of whether I would pay extra to see the performance of a fair trade, sweatshop-free musician... well, maybe if she were also all organic and free range..
Well, lets play a bit of Reductio ad absurdum and say that it becomes legal to use digital media and you can get it however you want ("pirate" media - though I doubt it would be piracy if legal in my thought experiment). I mean, not just private but commercial use - i.e. abolition of intellectual property in all it's forms - at least as regards digital media.
You might see an immediate collapse of the industry as we know it. But then what? No new music, novels, shows?
What will all the websites and hardware purveyors do? They still have stuff they can flog for ad dollars or actual payments for physical goods. They might well fund content to draw in people to buy upgrades or new users.
Also, Kickstarter. Seems to work well for many projects, I see no reason it couldn't be used for an episode or a season of a "TV" show...
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
The moron posts one form 990 and suddenly the entire Free Culture movement is corporate funded? What a moron.
You are talking about the ethics of people copying without paying or without permission. There is obviously nothing unethical about that. Copying is vital to human advancement and survival, so it's ridiculous to call it unethical.
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I wasn't calling him(?) ignorant, I was answering the question (s)he posed. His argument was ignorant. I could perhaps have made the distinction a little more clear, and for that I apologize. But no, I am not trolling, although I have very little patience for the self-absorbed, entitlement mentality coupled with extremely poor reasoning skills that so many people in this discussion are displaying. Radres then followed it up by being snotty ("How's that for you?"), and perhaps I got a little testy as a result. Again, I apologize.
However, saying that a content creator shouldn't release content to the public if he doesn't want it posted on file-sharing sites is every bit as absurd a statement as the counter-examples I provided. And if you want to say that file-sharing is okay because "that's the world we live in," then I guess you are okay with the **AA's doing what they do because "that's the world we live in" too?
If you would like to provide a logical argument to rebut the points I have made, I am all ears. See Capt. Kangarooski's counter-arguments for a good example of how to debate someone -- I don't entirely agree with him (her?), but (s)he has certainly earned my respect for far, far above average reasoning and logic skills.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Basically his argument is that everyone who makes any money off of a product that is used in illegal file sharing is morally culpable for the decline of the music industry. This is ridiculous.
First, realize where I'm coming from. I have the CD for all of the songs on my MP3 player, mainly because I encode to FLAC. I am not the type that morally condones acquiring music from illegal downloads.
The author argues that we already pay for music, we just pay Dell/HP for our laptop, Apple for our iPod, Sun for the servers, Google for the advertisements, AT&T/Time Warner for the bandwidth, etc. He also argues that all of these companies are as morally culpable as Napster or The Pirate Bay.
For the consumer products, these products have substantial non-infringing uses. I use my laptop for a myriad of other things that are not illegal file sharing. This is true even for the people who do share files illegally. To imply the entire cost of the laptop constitutes a cost of acquiring music is silly. I can at least partially accept this argument for the iPod (not for me, see above), but not for any of the other consumer costs.
Similarly, the server-side suppliers who are paid by the illegal sharing site are also not morally culpable. Someone offered to buy their computer, and so they sold it to them. Why does that make them morally culpable if someone uses that computer to do something illegal? Furthermore, complaining that they make a profit on illegal file sharing is like complaining that the person who works at a restaurant near the server farm is morally culpable. They're just doing honest work. That someone doing something bad happens to purchase their work does NOT make them morally culpable for that person's actions. Taking music without compensating the artists is bad. It's bad no matter if it's the record companies or the consumer doing it. That doesn't make everyone who's ever sold anything to someone in the illegal file sharing business immoral or a criminal.
Further, there is no conspiracy among electronics companies to try and extract music industry profits, as the author implies. Most electronics companies are just as happy to sell you a laptop whether you get your music from iTunes or Napster. Similarly, the server manufacturers are just as happy to sell to Apple or The Pirate Bay. They don't have a horse in this race. I'll accept the argument that Spotify does, but that's a symptom of the larger problem, and they ARE behaving legally.
I hate to say it, but the only ones who have betrayed the music industry are their own customers, the ones who used to buy music and now download it instead. There is no global conspiracy among electronics companies to support file sharing, only among consumers who want cheap music. It sucks to be a musician in this environment, and I realize the author wants someone to blame for poor music sales besides the fans. However, I refuse to be held morally culpable for the illegal or immoral actions that others take using computers simply because I work in the technology industry.
This is what we would love to happen.
However, there's one problem. Artists traditionally suck at anything in the process beyond making the art. Or they simply don't have the time. Creating content can be quite resource intensive, at least in terms of time. If the little time that's left over has to be split between marketing, distro, IT support keeping the wesbite running, packaging, order fulfillment, AND a robust and healthy touring schedule...well, something's gotta give.
The reason the music industry exists with as many middlmen and parasitic organizations as it has is becasue there's a real need for these services. The problem is these middlemen basically have the artist - and to an extent the consumer - by the neck, and can bleed both sides dry. If you got rid of them all right now, something new and equally horrible would evolve to take its place.
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"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."
I agree that the duration of copyright is ridiculous. The lack of any kind of automatic "abandonment" for it (such as exists for trademarks) is also perhaps part of the problem. Of course, to pull from your (counter)examples, most countries do appear to have fair-use terms in their copyright laws.
Not all countries have VAT, but even where they do, that's completely tangential to what I was talking about. The tax is on sale of the goods, not on continuing posession of them (like the person I was responding to was suggesting). Some places do apparently tax ongoing posession (so claims another responder, but the country named was the UA which does not have VAT) but in general, posession of most types of property is not taxed - only the transfer of posession, or gain of wealth.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Generally I believe that the artist (or perhaps the rights holder) should be able to ask for what ever price he/she wants and if it's worth it to the consumer he should have to pay that price to have the right to play the music or read the book and so on.
In Germany, however, the GEMA demands a tax on anything capable of storing, transporting or playing music. It started with CD's and they have now expanded that to cell phones, memory cards, computers and so on. And it's not cheap. For a higher end Smart Phone, they take 46 euros, 2 euros on an SD card. In otherwords, they make more profit on all of these devices than the manufactures of those devices do.
So, if I've already paid for music in the form of a tax, does that mean, in a moral sense, that I have the right to copy music, at least for my own enjoyment? I'm not recommending that and I don't do it because it is against the law, but the moral question remains.
Piracy is theft. Period.
Prove it. Saying "it is" doesn't prove it. Putting "period" in your sentence doesn't make it factual.
"piracy does not hurt profit". If one produced a song that was 100% pirated, profit would be 0. So, piracy does hurt profit
First off, aside from most people not actually arguing something like this, your argument is really bad. You make one clearly exaggerated scenario that is not entirely realistic AT ALL as proof.
"a pirated song is not a lost sale". It is a lost sale, because it denies profit to the owner of the song.
Circumstantial - not buying [OR pirating] the song, not listening to the song in the first place, for example, does the same thing.
copyright exists for the promotion of arts and culture". No, no matter how it is being said, copyright exists to protect profit.
RTFC [read the fucking constitution]. It is to promote the progress of the arts, bu securing a limited period of time of absolute control over the work after which it becomes fair game for anyone to use. Period. THAT'S ALL. Whether the creator uses it for a revenue stream, or not, it boils down the the control.
"piracy is not immoral because corporations are evil"
Red herring [or strawman]- people arguing against the notion of piracy == theft don't argue this.
"copyright should only be for 15 years, anything beyond that is stupid". No, it is not. You would pay money for a 30 year old car, why not for a 30 old song?
That question dodges the point of those arguing for a limited copyright term. Let me try to spell it out for you. COPYRIGHT is meant to be for a LIMITED TIME, maybe 15 is too short, maybe not, but 50, 70, 100, 200 years is way beyond anything the founding fathers intended,, and the wording in the constitution shows it.
Honestly, if you're gonna argue, argue points actually be made, don't generalize, don't characterize, you'll look like less of a stuck up asswipe... and you still have yet to prove your point of "piracy is theft," so I'll wait.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120620/03552119398/business-model-failure-is-not-moral-issue.shtml