Oh God. A reference to The Illuminati! Trilogy. The worst book I haven't bothered to finish in a long long time. Even after over a year of attempting to get to grips with wildly unreadable prose I still couldn't hack it.
Hagbard Celine. Doesn't get close to Hiro Protagonist as far as good names go.
Have a look at what BT said then...They might be talking crap, but I don't think that they'd take the risk in trying to bullshit the press when AV have just been caught out big time.
Have you seen the BT response at the register? They are basically saying that AV are still talking bollocks.
Now here is where I have a problem knowing who to believe. On the one hand, AV has been saying that it has been rolling its service out since June, which has turrned out to be a blatent lie. On the other hand BT hasn't exactly been willing to let go of its monopoly on the local loop, and has spouted just as much shite in the last year.
Why do you think that everything should be sorted out with guns? Do you not think that perhaps after thousands of years of evolution, and the lessons learned of countless wars we should be able to sort thinks out without bloodshed?
Remember, the Brits don't want to kill people. The Irish don't want Northern Ireland. The majority of the Northern Irish don't want to be Irish (because it would make them sifgnificantly poorer in an instant, amongst other reasons). Almost everyone just wants to stop people getting killed. It is only a tiny fraction that insists on forcing their violence in everyone else's face (and their town centres, businesses, birthday parties and under their cars).
Oh, and you are incorrect about the loyalists in EIRE. Over 90% of the citizens of EIRE voted to withdraw the claim on NI. Maybe you could check some facts and realise that not everything requires guns and semtex.
Please could the Americans who think that the IRA are a bunch of lovely cuddly folk in green costumes sipping on Guiness and fighting a politically just fight for independence please read a bit of British news. The end does not justify the means, especially when it involves killing thousands of innocent civilians and ensuring that a generation grow up in terror.
The British government in times past made huge and indelible mistakes when dealing with Ireland, and I am not advocating that the history is a good thing. What I am saying is that over 50% of the population in Northern Ireland wants to stay British, most are ambivalent and just want the fighting to stop, and a bunch are republican. Britain would get rid of Northern Ireland in a shot if it could as it would get rid of the terrorist problem (called TERRORist for a reason, you know), and eliminate the need for the enormous amount of subsidy that the mainland gives to NI.
Basically, for the uninformed amongst the Americans) the situation is a little more complicated than "Just give it back", and the IRA (and the factions) are almost totally evil in nature. Please try to get to grips with the entire situation before commenting, and PLEASE stop giving them money.
sorry, I'm a Brit so I know that words that end "-ising" use an 's' and not a 'z'. I also reserve that right to make up any word that I please, especially those that have an imediately obvious meaning through the use of a common prefix.
And I think that the correct use of apostrophes is worth more than £10 in this world of incorrect genitive singular's (sic).
That is a very good point. The fundamental idea is that revenue is only going to come from transactions since people are already used to the idea that information on the internet is free. I suspect that the most successful sites will follow a model that provides an information resource to get hits, and then offers the goods that are relevant to the audience that has been attracted. Customers will develop trust in the site and a brand affiliation due to the information resource that they are using, and will then be likely to purchase at that site because they have developed this brand affiliation.
This might have the inadvertant effect of relocalising commerce. Most people would prefer to shop locally with a company that they know and trust, but recently have started spending more at the multinationals because they are cheaper. If the internet allows small companies to cut the price gap again then customers would be tempted to shop locally again because of the service benefits. This is especially true when dealing with specialised or non-comodity products where the added value that a local dealer can provide in terms of service or the ability to provide customisation based on exact knowledge of the customer's requirements can easily outweigh the price benefit of buying from the big boys.
For example, I bought the computer I am now using from Dell about 15 months ago because they were well priced, allowed customised orders and had a reputation for good support. However this was when I was looking for a commodity PC. pretty standard configuration, and running Windows. If I were to buy a PC today I would use one of a couple of local companies that supply pre-configured Linux machines because they have expertise that I don't, and if anything went wrong then I could call the guy that built the machine and fire questions at him.
Despite all the hype about the internet enabling large companies to build customer relationships I am sceptical. Dell were extremely professional when I used their support service and provide a model of how it should be done by big companies, but despite this they can't compete on service against companies that know the names of their clients' cats. And they definately can't compete against companies that and can remember supplying a new keyboard a few years back after the aforementioned cat decided that the keyboard would make a good toilet.
the other two correct responses were posted by AC so are not visible, so here it all is again: You can't be a very good latin nerd, since virus is either a neuter 2nd declension noun or a 4th declension noun. if it is 4th declension then the plural is virus, and since the 2nd dec. neuter is irregular it is anyone's guess as to what it might be. especialy as the latin meaning was a mass noun (slime), and there is no recorded plural in the classical texts.
no go and do you latin homework before you talk crap again.
blah blah blah virus was either a 2nd declension neuter (which is rare) or a 4th declension. blah blah blah so you're wrong blah blah blah. either way it makes no difference what people use because virii is in very common usage to mean the plural of computer virus blah blah blah. no can we all talk about something a bit more interesting and less redundant?
Why do they need a literacy program when the literacy rate is only just below that in the US? Do you actually know nothing about the subject you choose to discuss?
You do make an interesting point about the desire for information being irrespective of wealth, though most people could have told you that anyway.
Yat another bigotted and ignorant comment. Perhaps before you characterise the whole of south and central America as third world, you might take the time to find out what you are talking about. Costa Rican literacy rate is over 90% - only a couple of points behind America. Shucks, that means you were talking out of your arse. Better luck next time
Do you actually know where Costa Rica is? Have you ever been there? Have you read up on its literacy rate, GDP growth rate, culture, system of government or the ratio of physicians to population? Have you any idea about what you are talking about whatsoever?
Or did you just stereotype the whole of south and central America as one homogenous starving cesspit that you don't want to know about because it isn't America, doesn't have a mall in every town, and doesn't pump out 25% of the world's polution despite having only 5% of the population?
IBM make a device called the spaceball for use with CATIA (their high end CAD software developed in association with Dassault) on RS/6000 systems. Have a look here. As far as I can tell it is a magnetically supported ball that has all 6 degrees of freedom. i.e. movement and rotation in each of the three dimensions, and is used to manipulate the model on the screen. It also appears to heve a shed load of buttons, so presumably you can set it to pan or zoom when a "zoom key" is set - a bit like using caps lock I suppose. Pretty cool, but only available for RS/6000 workstations which is a bit strange. I would have thought many of their CATIA customers run Z-pro's or other NT machines.
errr. how do you mean owns? Actually ebay runs Sun hardware with Solaris (though they are changing to HP), and they use the Zeus 3.3 web server. They only use IIS for the graphics laden homepages. The real guts is search.ebay.com. see what that's running on netcraft if you don't believe me.
Me: How do you propose that the blacksmith, the stagecoach driver, the lamplighter, the town crier, or the milkman will pay >>for their food?
You:
They do work that is paid for.
You missed my point, I think.
Indeed. I thought you were using these as generic trades and making the point that musicians should go and get a "proper" job that they would then get paid for. This is a view that I completely disagree with, but it was not what you were arguing here.
The point is that as technology and society change, so do employment opportunities.
You are quite right. However there is a difference between the obsolecence of a lamplighter (there is still a town crier here, I know plenty of people back home who use the local blacksmith, and we still get the milk delivered by the milkman) is that the lamplighter lost purpose because his role was no longer required. The musician is still highly valued. Technology will just change the distribution methodology from physical to electronic (as you point out later in your comment). Why do we have a right to disallow the musician an income attributed to his work fairly by the market.
If IP protection is scrapped then there is no incentive for the musician or the record label (and there are many that aren't super-corporations) to produce the CD. As a result it won't be made, and many people worldwide will not get to enjoy the musician's work. I agree that a concert is better than a recording, but likewise a recording is better than nothing. How do suppose a child living is Sergiev Possad (north-north-east of Moscow) could get access to the latest spice girls or backstreet boys track? Even a wealthy family cannot afford to go abroad to see a band, and there isn't exactly much chance of a large act playing a provincial Russian town. The Prodigy played red square a few years ago, and the Russians went nuts because no western band had ever played there before. Why do we have a right to prevent these people from hearing their favourite music?
Sure, people will still use a blacksmith for nostalgia and to preserve the historical practice, but no one considers it a viable career choice.
As above: unless we protect IP against piracy using new technology, no one will become a musician any more. Isn't that a bit of a shame?
Are you saying that the market, or the concert venue infrastructure cannot support more live concerts? That would be as difficult to prove as my claim that regional music would flourish if intellectual property laws were abolished. So let's say the jury's still out on that one.
I am saying that if you effectively make recorded music obsolete by killing off IP protection then the damand for live music would go up, driving the price up. This would make access to the most recent music even more elitist since only the rich would be able to afford going to see bands who can no longer be heard on CD. Great, lets prevent the masses from ever hearing any new music until it is recorded at a concert and bootlegged. Do you not think it is a bit better to let people hear the music they want to hear as they want to hear it - properly recorded in a studio? You will no doubt go on to say that if the prices and profit margins rose, then there would be an inflow of providers into the market thereby raising supply to meet demand. I would counter that with two points. There are two restrictions that prevent anyone putting on a concert - you need a venue and a band. The two points are that thetre are large barriers to entry to setting up a venue such as the costs of buying the place, licencing requirements, securitry, promotion. It takes a lot of money to set a place up from scratch and get a good reputation and hence an ability to get the customers in. Secondly, by saying that the supply side would expand to fill demand and bring prices back down is clearly rubbish. I happen to like some of the stuff that the french band Air produce. Let's say that CD's become unavailable, and the only way to hear Air is to see them live. Could anyone seriously sugest that once the demand has rocketed another Air will miraculously appear to fill its place? I don't think so. This example also demonstrates a previous point. I am not often in Paris at the same time as them.
To "charge people for [e.g. musical] skills" is entirely consistent with the abolishment of intellectual property laws. As I said, live performances would be even more lucrative than they are today.
And so no one but the rich who happen to live in the right part of the world could hear their chosen band. Good plan. I guess I'll just have to give up on any chance that I might hear any of DJ Shadow's stuff ever again because I can't afford to go to San Francisco so hear him play, and even if I was somehow in the same place at the same time then I couldn't affort the ticket price. Compare this to the present where I can buy a quality recording of most music I am ever likely to be interested in for a one off fee of about $15. This then enables me to hear it whenever I want.
The market economics would probably increase the supply if the demand (and the price) were to increase dramatically. Many artists who would otherwise not be able to play before large crowds would have that opportunity.
See above for argument against the "increase of supply" rubbish. ("Hey everybody, I've just pulled another Metallica out of my arse"). Just because you cannot buy CD's of some band that sell 5000 copies worldwide anymore, would they have the opportunity to play to a large audience? People aren't going to say, "shucks, I can't listen to the new [insert band you like here] album, so I guess I'll just go and listen to this shit band that happen to be ahving a concert nearby because I don't have any other option.".
Charging for skills is very different than being granted property rights in the works generated with those skills. If I work in an auto factory, I may be very skilled, but I have no residual property rights in the fruits of my labour. That is, I don't have the right to dictate the terms of the sale or resale of the object I created. I am paid for my time. The same could be the case with a musician. Like lawyers, they could charge a very high hourly fee. The market would determine whether that was an appropriate fee or not.
You are not making the fundamental distinction between making goods that can only be used by one individual at a time, and that have a set marginal cost, and goods that have zero marginal cost and can be used my many people simultaneously. this distinction makes your analogy incorrect. The skill that you apply to making the car, in conjunction with the capital and materials necessary to make it determines the value to the consumers, and the consumers than determine a market value. Because the marginal cost of copying an MP3 is nominal (ie order of cents), and that cost is borne by the copier rather than the producer, the marketable value is set solely by the skills that have gone into making the data. I am prepared to pay £5 for a record, so why shouldn't a musician be entitled to make that £5 off me? As I have said many times befre, If musicians charged a very high hourly fee than that would inhibit access to their music by the public, and that is the antithesis of the free information sharing that you are proposing. Paradoxically by increasing the legal abaility that an individual has to share information for free, you are in the long term inhibiting the ability of the individual to get hold of that data.
First, there is nothing inherently better about recorded music, even if the recordings are of great performers. Recorded music is like canned meat -- it's edible, but not as tasty as the real thing.
Perfectly true, but this doesn't stop millions, and probably billions, of [people enjoying recorded music. Why should we deny them that joy?
Secondly, part of the technological change that is a threat to corporate power is the replacement of "hard media" with virtual, digitized media. The distribution of digital information over networks is less costly and more flexible than the distribution system now used by record store chains.
Perfectly true. In fact I am advocating the music industry moving towards electronic distribution (and they are doing that at the moment - the lat time I went nto an HMV store they had a terminal where I can select some tracks and it then downloads them off some central server and burns me a CD. the next stage is to do this at home). Electronic distribution would, as you say, increase the efficiency and cut costs thereby allowuing the price of music to fall whilst maintaining the margin for the record company and the artist.This is a good thing (tm).
Ultimately, this should mean that music can be enjoyed by even more people than it is now. International distribution of digital data should pose many fewer barriers than distribution of hard media. Look to DVD's for an example of barriers to distributon. DVD's have locale codes burned into them to prevent non-WIPO treaty nations from viewing copy protected material. This is another case where I'd say that at the very least both sides are arguable.
But, as I have said, if IP is not protected then no one will make quality recordings any more, so there will be nothing to distribute. You'd be able to send millions of copies of the latest album of some-band-nobody-listens-to around the world instantaneously, but that's not muc use whan the only way you can see Radiohead is to be in Hull on some particular date.
If megacorporations stopped producing CD's, that would suit me just fine. And what's more, it would probably be a welcome change for all but the tiniest minority of musicians. Selling CD's is no longer necessary to promote music. Even if you really wanted to sell CD's, you could, but you just couldn't earn as much from them as you could from a live performance.
Ricky Martin sold 660,807 albums in the first week of release, at an average of about $15 per disc. That is over 9.9 million dollars in a week. Let's say he sold 20,000 tickets to a statium gig at $30 a piece, and let's say that the cost of putting on the gig (renting the venue, security, licencing, lighting, crew, audio system, crowd control etc etc) is $100,000 then he has made half a million. Don't try to say that there is as much money in live performences as there is in CDs, it is utter crap.
I have long been a fan of Norman Cook, most recently incarnating himself as Fatboy Slim. The record label he records for (Skint) was started up about a decade ago by one of his mates who was sorking at that time in a small record shop in Canterbury in the south-east of England called Richard's records. This label grew steadily for most of the 90's and was at the forefront of the popularisation of Big-Beat. In 1999 it was bought up by Sony. It would therefore not suit me fine if Sony, and hence Skint, stopped producing records. This is a similar story to many of Britain's dance record labels.
I can see a flourishing trade in "Custom-made" recordings which are not mass-marketed, but recorded individually, each recording representing a unique "session". This kind of market would cater to those who would rather own Jimi Hendrix's guitar than one of his recordings.
And these would cost a fortune and deny the typical fan access to the music
I am entirely unconcerned with the fate of big-name music acts, and I submit that if the transnational polycorporate cannons suddenly fell silent, no one else would notice either. "Big-name" acts were invented to rationalize the production and distribution of mass-market music. The only really big name star is "inspiration" and the "muse". And last I heard, no one had a monopoly on those "resources".
If people like the acts, then it is not your place or mine to prevent them from hearing them. I personally cannot stand shrink-wrapped pop starlet cuties like the spice girls of Britney of Backstreet boys or whoever. I would rather that I never had to hear them. Nevertheless others want to and it is their perogative. My dad hates my music (though his is quite cool). He has no say that I can't listen to it, and the government certainly doesn't.
I agree that what he said about anonymity is total crap, na dthet most of what he said was draped in so much hyperbole and spin it came out as unitelligible crap at that, but he does have one good point.
Copyright infringement IS theft. You are depriving a musician or developer or whatever of their due licence fee, by taking a copy of their work without their permission. That IS theft.
How do you propose that the blacksmith, the stagecoach driver, the lamplighter, the town crier, or the milkman will pay for their food?
They do work that is paid for.
Simple. Get another job
And have no more time to make music/software/any other information product. Bear in kind also that they are making music (etc) because thay are good at it. Why shouldn't they have a right to pursue their chosen trade that they are skilled in. If you were a great programmer, but now found that there you could not make money out of it because no one was obliged to pay for your work you wouldn'r like being told that you should continue writing software in your spare time when you were not working as a garbage man.
Or make your living playing live gigs. I imagine that if the music industry were to shut its loud beak for a few moments, the demand for live gigs would be overwhelming. Think what a boon it would be to regional music everywhere
As I have said, most musicians do make their living playing live gigs in addition to selling their recordings. The demand for good live music is already very large as is evidenced that all the concerts and gigs I have been to this year have been sold out, and all but one in the last 6 months have been in Cambridge where I study. Sounds like there is already high demand for regional performances to me.
Stop talking bollocks and realise that musicians have a right to charge people for their skills just as programmers do, and that recordings allow many people to enjoy music that they would otherwise not get the chance to hear because they live in different contries to the artist. Also realise that if all information was free, then people would stop producing CDs as they could get no remuneration and concert ticket prices would skyrocket as the market demand to hear the otherwise unaccessible top bands forced them up (basic supply/demand economics)
Slashdot Mirror
well I thought it was quite funny.
so why are/were they protesting then?
each unto their own, I suppose.
Hagbard Celine. Doesn't get close to Hiro Protagonist as far as good names go.
Now here is where I have a problem knowing who to believe. On the one hand, AV has been saying that it has been rolling its service out since June, which has turrned out to be a blatent lie. On the other hand BT hasn't exactly been willing to let go of its monopoly on the local loop, and has spouted just as much shite in the last year.
Anyone know the whole story?
we continue...
Remember, the Brits don't want to kill people. The Irish don't want Northern Ireland. The majority of the Northern Irish don't want to be Irish (because it would make them sifgnificantly poorer in an instant, amongst other reasons). Almost everyone just wants to stop people getting killed. It is only a tiny fraction that insists on forcing their violence in everyone else's face (and their town centres, businesses, birthday parties and under their cars).
Oh, and you are incorrect about the loyalists in EIRE. Over 90% of the citizens of EIRE voted to withdraw the claim on NI. Maybe you could check some facts and realise that not everything requires guns and semtex.
Please could the Americans who think that the IRA are a bunch of lovely cuddly folk in green costumes sipping on Guiness and fighting a politically just fight for independence please read a bit of British news. The end does not justify the means, especially when it involves killing thousands of innocent civilians and ensuring that a generation grow up in terror.
The British government in times past made huge and indelible mistakes when dealing with Ireland, and I am not advocating that the history is a good thing. What I am saying is that over 50% of the population in Northern Ireland wants to stay British, most are ambivalent and just want the fighting to stop, and a bunch are republican. Britain would get rid of Northern Ireland in a shot if it could as it would get rid of the terrorist problem (called TERRORist for a reason, you know), and eliminate the need for the enormous amount of subsidy that the mainland gives to NI.
Basically, for the uninformed amongst the Americans) the situation is a little more complicated than "Just give it back", and the IRA (and the factions) are almost totally evil in nature. Please try to get to grips with the entire situation before commenting, and PLEASE stop giving them money.
oh really?
have a look at this
And I think that the correct use of apostrophes is worth more than £10 in this world of incorrect genitive singular's (sic).
This might have the inadvertant effect of relocalising commerce. Most people would prefer to shop locally with a company that they know and trust, but recently have started spending more at the multinationals because they are cheaper. If the internet allows small companies to cut the price gap again then customers would be tempted to shop locally again because of the service benefits. This is especially true when dealing with specialised or non-comodity products where the added value that a local dealer can provide in terms of service or the ability to provide customisation based on exact knowledge of the customer's requirements can easily outweigh the price benefit of buying from the big boys.
For example, I bought the computer I am now using from Dell about 15 months ago because they were well priced, allowed customised orders and had a reputation for good support. However this was when I was looking for a commodity PC. pretty standard configuration, and running Windows. If I were to buy a PC today I would use one of a couple of local companies that supply pre-configured Linux machines because they have expertise that I don't, and if anything went wrong then I could call the guy that built the machine and fire questions at him.
Despite all the hype about the internet enabling large companies to build customer relationships I am sceptical. Dell were extremely professional when I used their support service and provide a model of how it should be done by big companies, but despite this they can't compete on service against companies that know the names of their clients' cats. And they definately can't compete against companies that and can remember supplying a new keyboard a few years back after the aforementioned cat decided that the keyboard would make a good toilet.
no go and do you latin homework before you talk crap again.
You do make an interesting point about the desire for information being irrespective of wealth, though most people could have told you that anyway.
Or did you just stereotype the whole of south and central America as one homogenous starving cesspit that you don't want to know about because it isn't America, doesn't have a mall in every town, and doesn't pump out 25% of the world's polution despite having only 5% of the population?
You:
They do work that is paid for.
You missed my point, I think.
Indeed. I thought you were using these as generic trades and making the point that musicians should go and get a "proper" job that they would then get paid for. This is a view that I completely disagree with, but it was not what you were arguing here.
The point is that as technology and society change, so do employment opportunities.
You are quite right. However there is a difference between the obsolecence of a lamplighter (there is still a town crier here, I know plenty of people back home who use the local blacksmith, and we still get the milk delivered by the milkman) is that the lamplighter lost purpose because his role was no longer required. The musician is still highly valued. Technology will just change the distribution methodology from physical to electronic (as you point out later in your comment). Why do we have a right to disallow the musician an income attributed to his work fairly by the market.
If IP protection is scrapped then there is no incentive for the musician or the record label (and there are many that aren't super-corporations) to produce the CD. As a result it won't be made, and many people worldwide will not get to enjoy the musician's work. I agree that a concert is better than a recording, but likewise a recording is better than nothing. How do suppose a child living is Sergiev Possad (north-north-east of Moscow) could get access to the latest spice girls or backstreet boys track? Even a wealthy family cannot afford to go abroad to see a band, and there isn't exactly much chance of a large act playing a provincial Russian town. The Prodigy played red square a few years ago, and the Russians went nuts because no western band had ever played there before. Why do we have a right to prevent these people from hearing their favourite music?
Sure, people will still use a blacksmith for nostalgia and to preserve the historical practice, but no one considers it a viable career choice.
As above: unless we protect IP against piracy using new technology, no one will become a musician any more. Isn't that a bit of a shame?
Are you saying that the market, or the concert venue infrastructure cannot support more live concerts? That would be as difficult to prove as my claim that regional music would flourish if intellectual property laws were abolished. So let's say the jury's still out on that one.
I am saying that if you effectively make recorded music obsolete by killing off IP protection then the damand for live music would go up, driving the price up. This would make access to the most recent music even more elitist since only the rich would be able to afford going to see bands who can no longer be heard on CD. Great, lets prevent the masses from ever hearing any new music until it is recorded at a concert and bootlegged. Do you not think it is a bit better to let people hear the music they want to hear as they want to hear it - properly recorded in a studio? You will no doubt go on to say that if the prices and profit margins rose, then there would be an inflow of providers into the market thereby raising supply to meet demand. I would counter that with two points. There are two restrictions that prevent anyone putting on a concert - you need a venue and a band. The two points are that thetre are large barriers to entry to setting up a venue such as the costs of buying the place, licencing requirements, securitry, promotion. It takes a lot of money to set a place up from scratch and get a good reputation and hence an ability to get the customers in. Secondly, by saying that the supply side would expand to fill demand and bring prices back down is clearly rubbish. I happen to like some of the stuff that the french band Air produce. Let's say that CD's become unavailable, and the only way to hear Air is to see them live. Could anyone seriously sugest that once the demand has rocketed another Air will miraculously appear to fill its place? I don't think so. This example also demonstrates a previous point. I am not often in Paris at the same time as them.
To "charge people for [e.g. musical] skills" is entirely consistent with the abolishment of intellectual property laws. As I said, live performances would be even more lucrative than they are today.
And so no one but the rich who happen to live in the right part of the world could hear their chosen band. Good plan. I guess I'll just have to give up on any chance that I might hear any of DJ Shadow's stuff ever again because I can't afford to go to San Francisco so hear him play, and even if I was somehow in the same place at the same time then I couldn't affort the ticket price. Compare this to the present where I can buy a quality recording of most music I am ever likely to be interested in for a one off fee of about $15. This then enables me to hear it whenever I want.
The market economics would probably increase the supply if the demand (and the price) were to increase dramatically. Many artists who would otherwise not be able to play before large crowds would have that opportunity.
See above for argument against the "increase of supply" rubbish. ("Hey everybody, I've just pulled another Metallica out of my arse"). Just because you cannot buy CD's of some band that sell 5000 copies worldwide anymore, would they have the opportunity to play to a large audience? People aren't going to say, "shucks, I can't listen to the new [insert band you like here] album, so I guess I'll just go and listen to this shit band that happen to be ahving a concert nearby because I don't have any other option.".
Charging for skills is very different than being granted property rights in the works generated with those skills. If I work in an auto factory, I may be very skilled, but I have no residual property rights in the fruits of my labour. That is, I don't have the right to dictate the terms of the sale or resale of the object I created. I am paid for my time. The same could be the case with a musician. Like lawyers, they could charge a very high hourly fee. The market would determine whether that was an appropriate fee or not.
You are not making the fundamental distinction between making goods that can only be used by one individual at a time, and that have a set marginal cost, and goods that have zero marginal cost and can be used my many people simultaneously. this distinction makes your analogy incorrect. The skill that you apply to making the car, in conjunction with the capital and materials necessary to make it determines the value to the consumers, and the consumers than determine a market value. Because the marginal cost of copying an MP3 is nominal (ie order of cents), and that cost is borne by the copier rather than the producer, the marketable value is set solely by the skills that have gone into making the data. I am prepared to pay £5 for a record, so why shouldn't a musician be entitled to make that £5 off me? As I have said many times befre, If musicians charged a very high hourly fee than that would inhibit access to their music by the public, and that is the antithesis of the free information sharing that you are proposing. Paradoxically by increasing the legal abaility that an individual has to share information for free, you are in the long term inhibiting the ability of the individual to get hold of that data.
First, there is nothing inherently better about recorded music, even if the recordings are of great performers. Recorded music is like canned meat -- it's edible, but not as tasty as the real thing.
Perfectly true, but this doesn't stop millions, and probably billions, of [people enjoying recorded music. Why should we deny them that joy?
Secondly, part of the technological change that is a threat to corporate power is the replacement of "hard media" with virtual, digitized media. The distribution of digital information over networks is less costly and more flexible than the distribution system now used by record store chains.
Perfectly true. In fact I am advocating the music industry moving towards electronic distribution (and they are doing that at the moment - the lat time I went nto an HMV store they had a terminal where I can select some tracks and it then downloads them off some central server and burns me a CD. the next stage is to do this at home). Electronic distribution would, as you say, increase the efficiency and cut costs thereby allowuing the price of music to fall whilst maintaining the margin for the record company and the artist.This is a good thing (tm).
Ultimately, this should mean that music can be enjoyed by even more people than it is now. International distribution of digital data should pose many fewer barriers than distribution of hard media. Look to DVD's for an example of barriers to distributon. DVD's have locale codes burned into them to prevent non-WIPO treaty nations from viewing copy protected material. This is another case where I'd say that at the very least both sides are arguable.
But, as I have said, if IP is not protected then no one will make quality recordings any more, so there will be nothing to distribute. You'd be able to send millions of copies of the latest album of some-band-nobody-listens-to around the world instantaneously, but that's not muc use whan the only way you can see Radiohead is to be in Hull on some particular date.
If megacorporations stopped producing CD's, that would suit me just fine. And what's more, it would probably be a welcome change for all but the tiniest minority of musicians. Selling CD's is no longer necessary to promote music. Even if you really wanted to sell CD's, you could, but you just couldn't earn as much from them as you could from a live performance.
Ricky Martin sold 660,807 albums in the first week of release, at an average of about $15 per disc. That is over 9.9 million dollars in a week. Let's say he sold 20,000 tickets to a statium gig at $30 a piece, and let's say that the cost of putting on the gig (renting the venue, security, licencing, lighting, crew, audio system, crowd control etc etc) is $100,000 then he has made half a million. Don't try to say that there is as much money in live performences as there is in CDs, it is utter crap.
I have long been a fan of Norman Cook, most recently incarnating himself as Fatboy Slim. The record label he records for (Skint) was started up about a decade ago by one of his mates who was sorking at that time in a small record shop in Canterbury in the south-east of England called Richard's records. This label grew steadily for most of the 90's and was at the forefront of the popularisation of Big-Beat. In 1999 it was bought up by Sony. It would therefore not suit me fine if Sony, and hence Skint, stopped producing records. This is a similar story to many of Britain's dance record labels.
I can see a flourishing trade in "Custom-made" recordings which are not mass-marketed, but recorded individually, each recording representing a unique "session". This kind of market would cater to those who would rather own Jimi Hendrix's guitar than one of his recordings.
And these would cost a fortune and deny the typical fan access to the music
I am entirely unconcerned with the fate of big-name music acts, and I submit that if the transnational polycorporate cannons suddenly fell silent, no one else would notice either. "Big-name" acts were invented to rationalize the production and distribution of mass-market music. The only really big name star is "inspiration" and the "muse". And last I heard, no one had a monopoly on those "resources".
If people like the acts, then it is not your place or mine to prevent them from hearing them. I personally cannot stand shrink-wrapped pop starlet cuties like the spice girls of Britney of Backstreet boys or whoever. I would rather that I never had to hear them. Nevertheless others want to and it is their perogative. My dad hates my music (though his is quite cool). He has no say that I can't listen to it, and the government certainly doesn't.
Copyright infringement IS theft. You are depriving a musician or developer or whatever of their due licence fee, by taking a copy of their work without their permission. That IS theft.
They do work that is paid for.
Simple. Get another job
And have no more time to make music/software/any other information product. Bear in kind also that they are making music (etc) because thay are good at it. Why shouldn't they have a right to pursue their chosen trade that they are skilled in. If you were a great programmer, but now found that there you could not make money out of it because no one was obliged to pay for your work you wouldn'r like being told that you should continue writing software in your spare time when you were not working as a garbage man.
Or make your living playing live gigs. I imagine that if the music industry were to shut its loud beak for a few moments, the demand for live gigs would be overwhelming. Think what a boon it would be to regional music everywhere
As I have said, most musicians do make their living playing live gigs in addition to selling their recordings. The demand for good live music is already very large as is evidenced that all the concerts and gigs I have been to this year have been sold out, and all but one in the last 6 months have been in Cambridge where I study. Sounds like there is already high demand for regional performances to me.
Stop talking bollocks and realise that musicians have a right to charge people for their skills just as programmers do, and that recordings allow many people to enjoy music that they would otherwise not get the chance to hear because they live in different contries to the artist. Also realise that if all information was free, then people would stop producing CDs as they could get no remuneration and concert ticket prices would skyrocket as the market demand to hear the otherwise unaccessible top bands forced them up (basic supply/demand economics)