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Steve Albini: The Music Industry Is a Parasite -- and Copyright Is Dead
journovampire sends word of another thought-provoking rant from Steve Albini (mentioned here last a few years back for his
paean to the beauty of analog tape for recording): The veteran producer addressed an audience in Barcelona on Saturday: "The old copyright model – the person who creates something owns it and anyone else that wants to use it or see it has to pay them – has expired."
I love Steve. He's freaking ridiculous. I've known him for a few years. That being said, he's a niche at best. I've never agreed that he is the mainstay, nor that his mentality is even remotely standard for the industry, but I love the way he goes. He's literally never taken "points" (percentage points) as a producer of a song/album. He sees it as he gets paid out right for it and that's that. I love that about this guy!
I can't say I agree that his mentality of musicians not holding copyright is normal or correct, but I respect the guy and love seeing him and his articles/arguments.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." ~ John Lennon
No.... I think it's actually pretty accurate to make the basic statement that "copyright is not working". I'm not saying the entire concept needs to vanish. But I think it's pretty clear that the way it works today, copyright only benefits a relative few people at the top of the "pecking order" for a given business pedaling intellectual property.
As we see the increase in popularity of streaming music services/subscriptions, for example? Copyright as a means to ensure an artist gets compensated fairly for his/her work starts looking like an utter joke. What compensation do they really receive? Fractions of a penny each time a song of theirs is streamed! The only people who stand to do well with this model are the services doing the streaming itself, who collect money for the subscriptions no matter what the subscribers listen to (and a rate that's the same whether they listen to a lot or barely anything at all in a given month).
And who is copyright working for when you have people simply trying to build emulators so people can run 20+ year old games again for nostalgia, but it's technically illegal to distribute the software collections due to a (now non-productive) copyright preventing it?
IMO, the only real value of copyright for a creator of a work is in providing some INITIAL protection when the work is still new. The lion's share of income is normally when a work is brand new and nobody has access to it yet. You want to encourage people to keep creating new things by letting them earn that big, initial profit when the new movie, book, video game or music album/single is a "new release" without it being hijacked .... But once the I.P. gets "stale", meaning almost everyone who wants to view/read/listen to it has pretty much done so? It's time for copyright protection on it to wind down.
Copyright will be here for quite awhile. It's just how it's used will change. More and more will shift into the creative commons and copyright will be used to control which version of the creative commons license is used.
He's also wrong about contracts. They are important. Penn Gillette said it best when he said, never sign a contract with someone you wouldn't trust with just a handshake. The purpose of the contract is to write everything down so if one party thinks the other isn't following the deal, they can refer to the contract and figure out who is correct.
The current contract mess has been created by lawyers to try to either screw one party, prevent anyone from being screwed, or comply with some regulation or another. The second two cases are actually worthy uses of a law degree. Unfortunately too many lawyers think it's all about the first.
The artist who is doing well is the exception and not the rule.
'Doing well' isn't necessarily a good metric to use. A few years ago, I was listening to a piece on PBS about musicians and self-publishing, and they had one artist who was talking about their switch to self-publishing; they had cut an album for a commercial label, and despite it having sold several tens of thousands of CDs over a span of three years, the label claimed that they were still 'in the hole' for production and advertising costs, and the artist had not seen a dime beyond their initial advance. Meanwhile, an album that they had produced themselves and sold through their website directly via a service (the music equivalent of an 'instant print' service) gave them about $7 per CD sold, and in one year had already produced income more than triple the value of their advance from the commercial label. Now, that artist's income from marketing their work directly may not have been 'doing well' in an overall sense, but the relative payout from working with a commercial label and independent publishing certainly qualifies, for the return on their work, as 'doing well', even if it's not of itself enough to support a 'well off' lifestyle.
Also checkout jamendo
I found some real cool stuff in there
I'd suggest that picking law related to just about anything and you're likely to find a similar result - it's complex, difficultly worded, open to interpretation, usually slow-moving, and probably thought of as pretty boring to a lot of people, including those it covers.
The problem with copyright (or any other law) is that lobby groups and industries are nearly always more powerful than their consumers, and it's not a level or even the same playing field when engaging in any debate. The internet has raged for years about music copyright, patents, copyright infringement/piracy, but the various industries hardly engage directly. Instead, they exercise their power by lobbying, getting laws made to protect their changing industries and business models, and then taking their consumers (I'll use that term quite loosely) to court.
Like many others, I wonder what will become of it all. Can everyone just get along? No, probably not.