Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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!
OMG unbiased reporting on Slashdot that doesn't tell me what to think? The horror.
You're free to make a copy of it and live in that one.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The musicians who are very talented and easy to work with became popular and were paid more, and the musicians who weren't quite as talented would just play music in their spare time, with friends at pubs and family gatherings in exchange for dinner and drinks -- and work in other trades to make a livelihood. There is no law on the books that states "Anyone who decides they're an 'artist' should therefore be able to make a living at it."
Your response nicely sums up the entire gatekeeper position on this situation.
You are trying to conflate actual natural rights with a temporary statutory grant that exists for the sole purpose of achieving some public good. There is simply no inalienable right to a copyright or a patent. Intellectual property is a legal fiction that's better described as artificial property.
It gets really interesting when people like you want to trample actual natural rights (like speech and personal property) in order to defend an expansive view of copyright that doesn't even exist in the law.
That particular problem was directly by the authors of the Constitution.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Here is a longer summary for those too lazy to read TFA.
An NPR intern named Emily White did a piece where she mentioned that she has downloaded over 11,000 songs, but has only ever paid for about 15 CDs. She justifies this with the same rationale that many slashdotters use: the labels are just ripping off the artists and the artists don't get the money anyway, and artists have always made more money touring than through sales, so they such just tour and not worry about sales.
A musician named David Lowery has responded to her. As to her first point (the the labels are just ripping off the artists), he says that despite a few well-known abuses, in the "vast majority" of cases that is false. As to her second point, he says that touring is generally a money-losing operation, and that only the very top acts make any money at all touring.
The "companies" he is complaining about are not the labels, they are The Pirate Bay and MegaUpload.
And in most cases, they probably are. The problem is there are way, WAY too many musicians nowadays for them to all make a living with their music. It's just flat impossible. For every venue (this is including hole-in-the-wall bars) there are a hundred garage bands trying to make a living.
Bottom line, if you're not able to make money selling your current product, the problem is not your customers. It's time for these unsuccessful artists to get a day job, and recognize their "musical career" for what it really is: a hobby.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
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.
Some food for thought: All property is a legal fiction.
It just so happens that most property is tangible. Copyright is intangible, but the legal fiction of property as it applies to qualifying artistic works is no different than the legal fiction of home ownership, stock ownership or life insurance ownership. All these forms of property are granted by legislation.
Whether copyright in its present form is morally objectionable or adequately serves the social utility for which it was created is another question. Given the mortgage crisis, one could entertain the same question about home ownership.
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.
All these arguments are predicated on the false assumption that because someone calls themselves and artist, that they should then be able to make a solid livelihood from it. And even further, if someone gets some level of fame, that they are somehow entitled to maintain that. The world doesn't work that way. I play guitar in a band, and I have a lot of fun. Sometimes I get paid a little cash. Most of my income comes from an unrelated career that I also built for myself.
what an ignorant statement.
Venue owners believe they are doing the musician a favour by letting them play in their venue. Now go explain how to make a living off that mentality?
I think you're the one guilty of making ignorant statements.
I'm a semi-pro musician. Although the pay rates haven't been great, every bar/club/venue I know of that has live music pays to book bands/musicians to perform. Unless it's a "coffee house" type thing where anyone can just get up and perform.
I and many of my fellow not-signed-with-a-big-label musicians/bands give away recordings (CDs and free downloads). We live in the reality of today where recordings are only promotional tools, not an end product themselves.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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.
Here is a novel thought: if you can't pay for something that is a 100% luxury (and having your own copies of songs is exactly that), do without!
..., people supported the artist because they wanted him or her to generate future content.
That and bragging rights. My artist in residence is better than your artist in residence.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
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.
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.
Native Americans didn't consider land to be 'property' either.
This is probably off topic but what you say is factually incorrect. The reason that the Indians sold and gave away their land for a pittance is because the Indians the colonials were buying/taking from weren't the one's that owned the land. Like saying that guy you met on 1st avenue must not understand real estate very well since he was willing to sell you the Brooklyn bridge for just $500.
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.
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!
I have a reasonable expectation that people should respect my wishes when it comes to how the song should be copied, played, or otherwise consumed.
I disagree, your expectations are completely unreasonable. What is reasonable is for you to expect that I won't sell copies of it.
Your right to listen to my song ends where my right to protect my work begins.
No, your rights to control what I have in my possession are extremely limited, except by artificial constructs. Which is a good thing for you, if you have any talent. If I give your stuff to someone who has never heard it, they may become your customer. If they never hear it you'll never get their money.
Doctorow puts it succinctly: nobody ever lost money from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity. As long as it isn't pure crap, the more people that are exposed to your work, the more people will shovel money your way.
IMO any artist who doesn't embrace noncommercial piracy is a damned fool.
Good day, sir. Enjoy your obscurity.
Now, of course the realities are that the internet makes it so that many people can get their fill of listening to my song once it's been recorded and distributed without paying compensation.
If I "get my fill" of hearing your song, it sucks. I see why you're so anti-pirate, talentless hacks are always against piracy.
Free Martian Whores!
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.
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
Some food for thought: All property is a legal fiction.
No it's not. Try yanking a purse from a girl on a street and see whether she opts to scream or to calmly go home and have her lawyer contact you. Personal property is way, way older than any law or religion, and is understood on a visceral level. The fact that chimps own personal tools should be a dead giveaway.
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...
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.