Copyright was created in reaction to a new society with new tools. It wasn't needed back in the medieval times, because there was no reasonable way that anyone could reproduce someone elses work in its entirety with complete ease. Michaelangelo didn't need to worry about someone resculpting his works, because it was physically impossible, without a mold, to create something that was 100% identical to the original. Anything made would be considered a derivative work and done under "fair use" if those laws had been thought out back then.
With all the crypto talks around here, people always bring up that the consititution needs to be updated or at least reunderstood because of all the loop holes left by things like electronic surveilance that the founding fathers had no way to foresee. Likewise, copyright was created when it hadn't existed in the past because of new technologies that undermined what people had come to understand about originals. If the tools didn't exist to easily reproduce someone elses work, then copyright would not need to exist today.
Those tools do exist. They have for quite some time now. Copyright tries to protect the artist from from those tools to an extent, by giving them say over what happens to their work.
No... if there was no copyright and no GPL, there'd be no way to enforce people who distributed changed versions of GPLed software to return the source. There'd probably be less going on in the free software movement, because everything would end up acting like the not-so-loved-around-here BSD license, where people could make changes and not return source. Without the GPL sitting around mandating what happens to GPLed code, the entire idea behind this "movement" would be dead in the water.
Their gripe isn't about backing up... its distributing. I'm not sure that Microsoft would be fond of people backing up their Win 2000 disks on machines they (the customers) didn't have physical control of. If all you want is a back up, there's plenty of ways to do it in a more accomodating fashion.
How much do you expect apple to take off the price tag for a machine without the OS? $50? Big savings...
Why arent' other manufacturers jumping into the void that's waiting to be filled of stock G4 systems? Because overall, the demand isn't there. x86 will always be the commodity platform. Past that, and you need to buy the machine from a workstation vendor. In this case, Apple is at least a low cost provider of said workstations.
Tell me, where can one buy stock PA-RISC systems? How about bare bone MIPS R10000 systems? Or even stock 32 CPU SPARC Systems? No where that I can tell.
FYI, Solaris on Intel systems pretty much will now cost the same as Linux, thanks to Suns new idea about licensing... $75 for a media kit, or i believe you can just download Solaris from Sun for free, supposing you register. It's only free up to 8 CPU's, though... But if you're going beyond 8 CPU's, you're pretty much in desperate need of a real machine anyhow. In this context, real will mean Sparc, Mips, or PowerPC... Though not Mac hardware.
You can back up your data however you'd like. I was more referring to people distributing copies of music... If i give you a tape of something, then you make a tape of that for someone else, each of those copies will successively get worse and worse. Not so with mp3's.
And let's face it, mp3's do have legitmate uses - i've got something like 96 hours of music on my hard drive at work... but it's all from cd's i own and brought in to rip... ANd other people do that to. But mechanisms for sharing mp3's open up so many more possiblitities that the legitmate users are in the very small minority of actual users. When that happens, something needs to be looked at...
Like microsoft - everyone says they never get it right on their first try. But they try and try and somehow get whatever they were doing "right". Mp3 users should do the same, rather than being so hellbent on making their first ideas be the ones that work.
Everntually, music will be distributed via the internet. But things need to be worked out so that everyone gets their fair cut. Artists get paid. Promototers, managers, producers, technicians, and yes, record labels. They all serve purposes in the world. And all the schemes people think of about reimbursing artists have a few flaws: They assume the only cost in making a cd is in the actual pressing, and that only the 4 or 5 band members are the ones that should be paid. There;s other people involved, besides just an artist, a cd pressing plant, and a record label.
Tapes and MP3's are completley different, here's why:
Tapes are impermanent... they degrade, as they don't exist in a digital sense.
The more times you make copies of tapes, the more they degrade.
MP3's degrade only once, when they're converted, and then can be copied enmasse forever.
That's the scary thing about digital. In the analog world, copies were worse than the original, there was no aarguing that point. But now, a digital copy is bit for bit a copy of the original... It's understandable that the industry doesn't like the repurcussions of that.
Did you read the salon article yesterday? The one with artists finally standing up and saying they were pissed as hell about napster because they can't figure how they'll be paid? If not, go read it... Maybe when you see that all this squabling between MP3 afficianados and the music industry is not taking into account the artists wishes, you'll step back from the "me me me" mentality and try to figure a workable solution for all involved.
The GPL is based on copyright. People are believed to have to observe it as a valid license because of the copyright implications. IF you tear down the walls on copyright law, all of a sudden, that oh-so-precious GPL license is also equally meaningless.
But you can't decide how to recieve the data... I can't phone microsoft requesting they make Win2000 available through wrapster and i'll pay them for it, probably. I also can't buy windows 2000, again, put it on wrapster or an ftp server somewhere, and say "okay you can download this, but only if you already own it".
I don't agree with the music industry trying to tell people how they can listen to their music (trying to ban the rio, for instance), but i completely agree with them in wanting to have final say in how their music gets distributed. It's theirs, they own it. And no one here has come up with anything near a clear plan on how artists would get paid, except for things like an honor system.
CD's cost a lot more to produce than just the 25 cents to press a CD... everyone here appears to want to over look that fact, though.
Ahhh... After all the talks the past few days about how distributing MP3's couldn't possibly hurt an artist, and how it could only stand to increase their earnings, this comment arrives.
It doesn't matter how much money someone has... If he's being ripped off to the point where one can go "oh, maybe he'll have to...." then ever wonder what it means to the less successful artists? The ones that won't merely need to switch toilet papers, but maybe switch career aspirations as well?
Well... It is understandable, in that peacefire made claims based on it's understanding of the first 50 sites in the list. That's an absurdly small, unrandom sample size to base assumptions against a multi-million name list. And the way peacefire announced them "76% error rate" in all big letters and then in the body text "among the first 50.edu sites checked".... There's false advertising, and this is worse... false advertising about someone elses product...
YES, there were errors in the file... but I'm certain that Peacefire blew it completely out of proportion... IT's not that hard to click a link and go "oh... thats in appropriate... That's not" Peacefire should have, if they wanted to make and intellegent, credible analysis of the list, used a much larger sample size, selected sites at random (including.com's,.nets,.au's, etc...) and presented their findings that ways. The could then hone in on certain subsets of their RANDOM samplings, and say "the greatest magin for error was in the.gr domain, while the least appears to have been in the.com domain".
Libel. Slander. I'm not sure what it is when you make unfair representations about other peoples products. But it is a crime, hence the reason we see so few tv commercials from brand A about brand B, unless they're taste tests, where anyone can have any taste.
But see, the home is one place where a parent can hope to have some control over their kids surroundings... Let them find porn on the streets, if that's what they're looking for... But don't let them innocently reserach some paper on the internet and stumble across a well-meaning pron site. Yeah... There may have been some mistakes in there, but with Peacefire doing such a skewed analysis, i'd just assume forget the whole thing... Part of me would actually like to go buy their software and do a more in depth analysis, in the hopes of showing that they're more well meaning than they're being portrayed around here as being.
Well, it's a lot more outside the mainstream than most of america...
But back on topic... You're simply WAY off in thinking that bands recieve 7 cents per record sold... It's more around $1.00... Those dollars do add up pretty quickly.
I guess i have to post a link to this again in an effort to show the costs involved for a band to release a CD. Read through it and come back and tell me how much of that money could be averted by going to an MP3 based scheme? Not much, in the bigger picture... And yes, they are getting screwed over... we know that part already... But your bootlegging is NOT HELPING THEM IN THE SLIGHTEST.
Anyways... why don't you post some MP3's of those bands you like so much for me to download? I'm sure they won't mind, after all... Who knows, maybe I'll go to one of their shows and buy a T-shirt... That's where the bucks are, people around here say. Actually, it'd be nice if you'd email the names to me... It's near the end of my day and i'm feeling lazy!
How would the debate change if you sent the artist a check for a buck? Or the full $15? Would they cash it?
That's how the conversation started. That's why i brought up the idea of processing a million checks.
There's plenty of music out there that's worth my money. I've always told myself i'd rather lose my sight rather than hearing, because i think music is much more expresive than anything we can possibly see. I do spend my money, proudly, on CD's, because i want to see more become available.
Anyways... Here's my cd collection. You'll see that not much mainstream stuff has been "shoved down my throat". I do hold that not much good music has arrived this decade...
As far you go... in one sentence, you state you stopped buying any CD's... but you like these other bands... how are they to support themselves? Do you feverishly go to their websites and hit reload to earn them a few bucks from advertising banners?
Read up some... The only thing that Quantum Computing has that relates to Quantum Encryption is the fact that they both have Quantum in their name. They're two completely separate technologies... Quantum computing theoretically could render most of todays cryptography useless, but it won't enable Quantum Encryption...
So, in 5 years a quantum computer will triple todays fastest computers in performance?
But according to moores law (or not really, because that's all about transisitors...) processors double in power every 18 months... so:
if todays fastest computers are 5's, then quantum computers 5 years from now will be (5*3) 15's, while regular super computers will be (5*2*2*2) 40's... Doesn't sound very exciting to me in that time frame.
Why don't you take a peak at what it costs to make a CD? Studio time. Equipment purchases or rentals. Prodcuters. Engineers. Mixers. That, plus management, promotion (how will you hear of these guys?) etc... all pile up to being much more than just the actual PROFIT that a band sees. There's costs that the labels just pay and then give the artists a piece of what's left.
Either way, the way it looked to me in the parent post was that you would go to the bands website and get what you wanted... Not a musical clearing house website... If a bunch of artists teamed up, it might be workable, if you were fairly sure you'd attract some cross-over fans that'd make larger purchases... or just demand a $10 minimum...
The grateful dead had, and the phish has, a huge drug scene involved in their shows...Lots of people go to the shows with the sole intention of getting fucked up beyond belief... Yes there are some fans there... but if you pulled out all the wannabes' you'd probably see them lose 1/2 their audience... And remember, those two bands are exceptions on a few counts... for one, they WANT to be live bands... And they're HUGE... Not every band can legitimately hope that they'll one day be as large as teh dead were.
As for your $18 dollar CD:
Record store: $6 Distributor: $3 Pressing: $1 Printing: $.10 Studio time $.50 (it gets amortized across the number of CD's sold, though) Manager: $.50 Producer: $1
The list goes on... It's not like the band sees $1 and the label gets $16.50... Think about it some... there's a LOT of costs involved with making a CD and getting it out.... A lot of those costs wouldn't occur with MP3's, but a lot more of them would never be able to be paid without the money made from records and CD's... No ones going to pay $9 for a download only version of a CD... That's a LOT of money for something that's not at all tangible... IF your hard drive crashes, your're toast.
promotion production (like engineering, mixing, etc...) studio time
and all the rest of the costs that artists never have to worry about? The money they get is after all the rest of the expenses have been paid...
And yes, the labels are money grubbers... but as of late, it seems that slashdotters and napster fans are just a bunch of penny pinchers ("Ooooh! I'll spend $2000 on a new computer, but $15 for a new CD? That's absurd!")
No offense intended to those who shouldn't be offended.
Who's everyone that agrees? Redhat, VA, Corel, are all tanking as of recently... They have no profits... They keep talking about this "service" business model, but there really is no proof that it's going to work.
Personally, i think that VA will live, because they've got hardware to generate revenue, Redhat will either shrink immensley or die out altogether, while Linux itself flourishes...
What's that say about music? Not much... oh the labels will die... But they're the ones that pay the artists. Most programmers who work on Linux probably have real programming jobs that finance their spare time activities... If all of a sudden no one paid programmers more than minimum wage any more, they wouldn't have the time or energy to work on Linux, in that they'ed all be working MUCH MORE than they do already, or else move into another profession altogether.
How about look to other labels? There are LOTS of bands out there, in my opinion, that churn out record after record of quality material... They're not on the major labels though. You know, you can like stuff besides what they tell you you should like. And some of the smaller ones treat artists much nicer...There's even one that's fabled to sign off on contracts with handshakes rather than pens.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright was created in reaction to a new society with new tools. It wasn't needed back in the medieval times, because there was no reasonable way that anyone could reproduce someone elses work in its entirety with complete ease. Michaelangelo didn't need to worry about someone resculpting his works, because it was physically impossible, without a mold, to create something that was 100% identical to the original. Anything made would be considered a derivative work and done under "fair use" if those laws had been thought out back then.
With all the crypto talks around here, people always bring up that the consititution needs to be updated or at least reunderstood because of all the loop holes left by things like electronic surveilance that the founding fathers had no way to foresee. Likewise, copyright was created when it hadn't existed in the past because of new technologies that undermined what people had come to understand about originals. If the tools didn't exist to easily reproduce someone elses work, then copyright would not need to exist today.
Those tools do exist. They have for quite some time now. Copyright tries to protect the artist from from those tools to an extent, by giving them say over what happens to their work.
No... if there was no copyright and no GPL, there'd be no way to enforce people who distributed changed versions of GPLed software to return the source. There'd probably be less going on in the free software movement, because everything would end up acting like the not-so-loved-around-here BSD license, where people could make changes and not return source. Without the GPL sitting around mandating what happens to GPLed code, the entire idea behind this "movement" would be dead in the water.
Their gripe isn't about backing up... its distributing. I'm not sure that Microsoft would be fond of people backing up their Win 2000 disks on machines they (the customers) didn't have physical control of. If all you want is a back up, there's plenty of ways to do it in a more accomodating fashion.
How much do you expect apple to take off the price tag for a machine without the OS? $50? Big savings...
Why arent' other manufacturers jumping into the void that's waiting to be filled of stock G4 systems? Because overall, the demand isn't there. x86 will always be the commodity platform. Past that, and you need to buy the machine from a workstation vendor. In this case, Apple is at least a low cost provider of said workstations.
Tell me, where can one buy stock PA-RISC systems? How about bare bone MIPS R10000 systems? Or even stock 32 CPU SPARC Systems? No where that I can tell.
FYI, Solaris on Intel systems pretty much will now cost the same as Linux, thanks to Suns new idea about licensing... $75 for a media kit, or i believe you can just download Solaris from Sun for free, supposing you register. It's only free up to 8 CPU's, though... But if you're going beyond 8 CPU's, you're pretty much in desperate need of a real machine anyhow. In this context, real will mean Sparc, Mips, or PowerPC... Though not Mac hardware.
You can back up your data however you'd like. I was more referring to people distributing copies of music... If i give you a tape of something, then you make a tape of that for someone else, each of those copies will successively get worse and worse. Not so with mp3's.
And let's face it, mp3's do have legitmate uses - i've got something like 96 hours of music on my hard drive at work... but it's all from cd's i own and brought in to rip... ANd other people do that to. But mechanisms for sharing mp3's open up so many more possiblitities that the legitmate users are in the very small minority of actual users. When that happens, something needs to be looked at...
Like microsoft - everyone says they never get it right on their first try. But they try and try and somehow get whatever they were doing "right". Mp3 users should do the same, rather than being so hellbent on making their first ideas be the ones that work.
Everntually, music will be distributed via the internet. But things need to be worked out so that everyone gets their fair cut. Artists get paid. Promototers, managers, producers, technicians, and yes, record labels. They all serve purposes in the world. And all the schemes people think of about reimbursing artists have a few flaws: They assume the only cost in making a cd is in the actual pressing, and that only the 4 or 5 band members are the ones that should be paid. There;s other people involved, besides just an artist, a cd pressing plant, and a record label.
Tapes and MP3's are completley different, here's why:
Tapes are impermanent... they degrade, as they don't exist in a digital sense.
The more times you make copies of tapes, the more they degrade.
MP3's degrade only once, when they're converted, and then can be copied enmasse forever.
That's the scary thing about digital. In the analog world, copies were worse than the original, there was no aarguing that point. But now, a digital copy is bit for bit a copy of the original... It's understandable that the industry doesn't like the repurcussions of that.
Did you read the salon article yesterday? The one with artists finally standing up and saying they were pissed as hell about napster because they can't figure how they'll be paid? If not, go read it... Maybe when you see that all this squabling between MP3 afficianados and the music industry is not taking into account the artists wishes, you'll step back from the "me me me" mentality and try to figure a workable solution for all involved.
Forget that, and just put it in "geek speak":
The GPL is based on copyright. People are believed to have to observe it as a valid license because of the copyright implications. IF you tear down the walls on copyright law, all of a sudden, that oh-so-precious GPL license is also equally meaningless.
But you can't decide how to recieve the data... I can't phone microsoft requesting they make Win2000 available through wrapster and i'll pay them for it, probably. I also can't buy windows 2000, again, put it on wrapster or an ftp server somewhere, and say "okay you can download this, but only if you already own it".
I don't agree with the music industry trying to tell people how they can listen to their music (trying to ban the rio, for instance), but i completely agree with them in wanting to have final say in how their music gets distributed. It's theirs, they own it. And no one here has come up with anything near a clear plan on how artists would get paid, except for things like an honor system.
CD's cost a lot more to produce than just the 25 cents to press a CD... everyone here appears to want to over look that fact, though.
Ahhh... After all the talks the past few days about how distributing MP3's couldn't possibly hurt an artist, and how it could only stand to increase their earnings, this comment arrives.
It doesn't matter how much money someone has... If he's being ripped off to the point where one can go "oh, maybe he'll have to...." then ever wonder what it means to the less successful artists? The ones that won't merely need to switch toilet papers, but maybe switch career aspirations as well?
Well... It is understandable, in that peacefire made claims based on it's understanding of the first 50 sites in the list. That's an absurdly small, unrandom sample size to base assumptions against a multi-million name list. And the way peacefire announced them "76% error rate" in all big letters and then in the body text "among the first 50 .edu sites checked".... There's false advertising, and this is worse... false advertising about someone elses product...
.com's, .nets, .au's, etc...) and presented their findings that ways. The could then hone in on certain subsets of their RANDOM samplings, and say "the greatest magin for error was in the .gr domain, while the least appears to have been in the .com domain".
YES, there were errors in the file... but I'm certain that Peacefire blew it completely out of proportion... IT's not that hard to click a link and go "oh... thats in appropriate... That's not" Peacefire should have, if they wanted to make and intellegent, credible analysis of the list, used a much larger sample size, selected sites at random (including
Libel. Slander. I'm not sure what it is when you make unfair representations about other peoples products. But it is a crime, hence the reason we see so few tv commercials from brand A about brand B, unless they're taste tests, where anyone can have any taste.
But see, the home is one place where a parent can hope to have some control over their kids surroundings... Let them find porn on the streets, if that's what they're looking for... But don't let them innocently reserach some paper on the internet and stumble across a well-meaning pron site. Yeah... There may have been some mistakes in there, but with Peacefire doing such a skewed analysis, i'd just assume forget the whole thing... Part of me would actually like to go buy their software and do a more in depth analysis, in the hopes of showing that they're more well meaning than they're being portrayed around here as being.
Well, it's a lot more outside the mainstream than most of america...
But back on topic... You're simply WAY off in thinking that bands recieve 7 cents per record sold... It's more around $1.00... Those dollars do add up pretty quickly.
I guess i have to post a link to this again in an effort to show the costs involved for a band to release a CD. Read through it and come back and tell me how much of that money could be averted by going to an MP3 based scheme? Not much, in the bigger picture... And yes, they are getting screwed over... we know that part already... But your bootlegging is NOT HELPING THEM IN THE SLIGHTEST.
Anyways... why don't you post some MP3's of those bands you like so much for me to download? I'm sure they won't mind, after all... Who knows, maybe I'll go to one of their shows and buy a T-shirt... That's where the bucks are, people around here say. Actually, it'd be nice if you'd email the names to me... It's near the end of my day and i'm feeling lazy!
Do you pay rent? Utilities? Anything? Checks are still needed in the world i live in! :)
advocating sending the artist(s) money directly?
How would the debate change if you sent the artist a check for a buck? Or the full $15? Would they cash it?
That's how the conversation started. That's why i brought up the idea of processing a million checks.
There's plenty of music out there that's worth my money. I've always told myself i'd rather lose my sight rather than hearing, because i think music is much more expresive than anything we can possibly see. I do spend my money, proudly, on CD's, because i want to see more become available.
Anyways... Here's my cd collection. You'll see that not much mainstream stuff has been "shoved down my throat". I do hold that not much good music has arrived this decade...
As far you go... in one sentence, you state you stopped buying any CD's... but you like these other bands... how are they to support themselves? Do you feverishly go to their websites and hit reload to earn them a few bucks from advertising banners?
Read up some... The only thing that Quantum Computing has that relates to Quantum Encryption is the fact that they both have Quantum in their name. They're two completely separate technologies... Quantum computing theoretically could render most of todays cryptography useless, but it won't enable Quantum Encryption...
So, in 5 years a quantum computer will triple todays fastest computers in performance?
But according to moores law (or not really, because that's all about transisitors...) processors double in power every 18 months... so:
if todays fastest computers are 5's, then quantum computers 5 years from now will be (5*3) 15's, while regular super computers will be (5*2*2*2) 40's... Doesn't sound very exciting to me in that time frame.
Why don't you take a peak at what it costs to make a CD? Studio time. Equipment purchases or rentals. Prodcuters. Engineers. Mixers. That, plus management, promotion (how will you hear of these guys?) etc... all pile up to being much more than just the actual PROFIT that a band sees. There's costs that the labels just pay and then give the artists a piece of what's left.
My lung collapsed twice in 18 months and yet I still smoke. That's dedication! Perseverence!
(err... maybe stupidity)
No one likes a quitter, i tell myself in a comforting way...
Are you the same AC that came up with this idea?
Either way, the way it looked to me in the parent post was that you would go to the bands website and get what you wanted... Not a musical clearing house website... If a bunch of artists teamed up, it might be workable, if you were fairly sure you'd attract some cross-over fans that'd make larger purchases... or just demand a $10 minimum...
25 cents just seems WAY TOO CHEAP, as well...
The grateful dead had, and the phish has, a huge drug scene involved in their shows...Lots of people go to the shows with the sole intention of getting fucked up beyond belief... Yes there are some fans there... but if you pulled out all the wannabes' you'd probably see them lose 1/2 their audience... And remember, those two bands are exceptions on a few counts... for one, they WANT to be live bands... And they're HUGE... Not every band can legitimately hope that they'll one day be as large as teh dead were.
As for your $18 dollar CD:
Record store: $6
Distributor: $3
Pressing: $1
Printing: $.10
Studio time $.50 (it gets amortized across the number of CD's sold, though)
Manager: $.50
Producer: $1
The list goes on... It's not like the band sees $1 and the label gets $16.50... Think about it some... there's a LOT of costs involved with making a CD and getting it out.... A lot of those costs wouldn't occur with MP3's, but a lot more of them would never be able to be paid without the money made from records and CD's... No ones going to pay $9 for a download only version of a CD... That's a LOT of money for something that's not at all tangible... IF your hard drive crashes, your're toast.
Well, with that $2, how does the artist pay for:
promotion
production (like engineering, mixing, etc...)
studio time
and all the rest of the costs that artists never have to worry about? The money they get is after all the rest of the expenses have been paid...
And yes, the labels are money grubbers... but as of late, it seems that slashdotters and napster fans are just a bunch of penny pinchers ("Ooooh! I'll spend $2000 on a new computer, but $15 for a new CD? That's absurd!")
No offense intended to those who shouldn't be offended.
Who's everyone that agrees? Redhat, VA, Corel, are all tanking as of recently... They have no profits... They keep talking about this "service" business model, but there really is no proof that it's going to work.
Personally, i think that VA will live, because they've got hardware to generate revenue, Redhat will either shrink immensley or die out altogether, while Linux itself flourishes...
What's that say about music? Not much... oh the labels will die... But they're the ones that pay the artists. Most programmers who work on Linux probably have real programming jobs that finance their spare time activities... If all of a sudden no one paid programmers more than minimum wage any more, they wouldn't have the time or energy to work on Linux, in that they'ed all be working MUCH MORE than they do already, or else move into another profession altogether.
How about look to other labels? There are LOTS of bands out there, in my opinion, that churn out record after record of quality material... They're not on the major labels though. You know, you can like stuff besides what they tell you you should like. And some of the smaller ones treat artists much nicer...There's even one that's fabled to sign off on contracts with handshakes rather than pens.