'Intellectual property' is not an American concept. England is probably the most to blame
Actually, neither are to blame for the root of what is mostly wrong with Intellectual Property: moral entitlement. France and Germany were the first to push for a recognition of Intellectual Property as a moral right, which resulted in the Berne Convention.
i'll slap the shit out of the next person who says openldap. it is pretty easy to do stuff like point an entire OU to a WSUS server and specify how updates are done.
Why would you want OpenLDAP to do that? Things like Group Policy and WSUS are by and large kludges to do what most other systems manage with light scripting. I got so fed up of Group Policy's crappy application deployment that I was glad to find someone had written a lovely system written in Javascript called WPKG. I don't understand this fear of 'shitloads of work' on Linux, is it because not everything has a GUI? I long for the day that we can ditch Windows and move to Linux, I could pretty much make myself redundant after setting that up.
Hmm, you know, the RIAA uses that same logic, but there were a couple of studies that showed the opposite: people who downloaded music spent more money on music (either discs, concerts or other products) than people who didn't download music. I wonder if the same holds for movies? I kind of suspect it does. If indeed it does, not only would the studios be attacking their customers, but attacking their best customers. If I were them, I would have wanted to test that one before launching the lawsuits.
Perhaps what worries them is that those who are spending more may be doing so because they aren't having to pay members of the RIAA. I have a subscription to Magnatune and often buy music from services like Bandcamp. I may well spend more on music than the majority of those earning more than me, but I tend to be very concious of where that money goes.
Amanda Palmer was originally on a major label and I certainly listen to the album recorded under them; however, lacking any incentive on merchandise, or access to live performances I had no accessible way to support her directly. Eventually she started releasing projects distributed on Bandcamp and I was able to overspend on those albums in the knowledge that the money was not going through an abusive label.
The issue here is the lack of distinction between the music industry and the recording industry, I may be a great customer for the former but am a pretty lousy customer for the major players of the latter.
Using their 20mbit service I can also say that the download speed is constant, until you hit the cap anyway Then there is the issue of upload speeds, 768kbit upload makes me want to use carrier pigeons instead.
I see, so if the law isn't the way you want it to be, it is moronic.
On occasion, yes. What is your point?
The thing is that many artists want to share their work there way. If they can not be granted that right, they will not share their work.
There's a solution to that, not sharing their work.
I can use the work for my purpose and you can't use it for yours..
You seem oblivious to the proven exceptions such as for the purpose of parody. Perhaps you are suggesting that the L.H.O.O.Q version of the Mona Lisa would be unlawful under current law?
I just think it's scary that this guy is our hero. If you read the full debates then even those against the bill tend to be of the 'copying is bad!!!' sentiment.
The sorry thing is that many people love the BBC so much that they are in favour of the license. Often the same people who are annoyed with government overspending in other areas. Taxes bad! TV good!
But if I am the copyright holder, I might want my art to not appear in excerpts (say I think it destroys the feeling of the piece). Obviously this argument is stupid for a CS textbook but might make sense for a well crafted novel or a painting where I might not want others to make black and white copies of portions of it and distribute them with information about how to buy the work from me. While I can't stop excerpting for criticism, I should be able to stop it for other uses--it is my art after all.
The point is when you create art, you have control of its expression as art. You have not only the right to exclusive sale of it but also how your work is expressed. If I own, i.e., a play and I license it, a company that produces it can not legally change the words to the play without my permission--it is my play and I can choose how it is presented.
Did I wake up in bizzaro world again?
I can understand you being pissed if I changed your work and passed it off as a faithful representation, but to say that you have absolute control over expression is moronic. That isn't property rights, nor authorship rights, that is 'I don't wanna play with the other kids because they're drawing moustaches on my Mona Lisa'.
I can't believe hero status is bought so cheap these days. Perhaps if his kind weren't so greedy in the first place then average person might be in a better position to do something themselves.
You could have just said 'dual licensing is a valid option' without suggesting people who don't like dual licensing lack business experience. I would suggest this OSS Watch article for a more balanced explanation of dual licensing, both the pros and the cons.
I realize it's loaded. But what would the correct term be then if I invited a plumber to my house to fix a leak, then didn't pay him (and I realize we have entire legal ideas of implied contracts, but I think they're codifying this exact problem)? There are expectations of payment and expectations of having to pay. It is not perhaps "stealing" in the traditional sense, but I am circumventing the expected transaction. If the artists puts a file online to be freely downloaded I am not circumventing this transaction. The implied transaction exists in both cases.
Copyright is not 'implied' it is codified. An implied contract is a mutual agreement. Copyright was supposed to be some sort of 'social contract' akin to taxes. If you really want to try and construct a compelling analogy then start at taxes.
You can certainly use the word stealing as a simile but don't be surprised when people ridicule you for the fact that the word already has a proper use in the context of copyright.
Except this isn't really true. The captialist system is very good at finding existing demand and filling it to the point where demand is effectively eliminated or static. The system is actually very bad at finding new markets. We are not good at putting capital into developing new markets. If what you were saying is true, we'd see thousands of hollywood movies trying to create new forms in hopes of creating a new market. Instead we get very few of those and lots of movies trying to exploit tried and true formulas (many failing expensively because the market is saturated). Our system is very good at filling demand for incremental and conservative change. It is horrible at creating innovation. Innovation is really only something that happens because the market is so good at oversaturating itself. And unfortunately most of the time the big players in a saturated market figure out ways to lock out new players, thus insuring no new markets will be created.
I'm struggling to see your point here, you're talking about making lots of films to 'make new markets' and other stuff that makes no sense in the context of what I'd said. The statement was about meeting demand, not creating markets. If there is demand to meet then there is a market because demand is part of the market process. I can only guess what you're really on about is innovation, you're worried that in a truly competitive market there will not be room for innovation because you somehow believe that competitive markets can't afford to innovate. All evidence points to the contrary however, competitive markets tend to encourage innovation because it increases demand.
While your idea of innovation might be The Matrix or Avatar, which happen to be big budget films, the fact that they were innovative allowed them to be expensive. Innovation doesn't mean making random films and hoping there's demand for them it's about finding some demand and using innovation to make sure your product is the one people choose. In a truly competitive market innovation is likely to be more common because it tends to aid success. The idea of creating new markets would really be addressing demand but using innovation to be competitive, much more efficient than the current system of having more money than sense.
I wish this was true, but it's patently false. Your success is still a mix of your ability to market yourself and your product. The cost of marketing is huge. That's why even though people keep talking about the move away from albums to singles the market has actually just moved to EPs. You simply can't justify the cost of marketing individual songs. This is one thing that we've been talking about in my community (theater) a lot. Now that we have this decentralized system that is so good at getting people started, how do we get the marketing efficiencies of scale that these large organizations have, and can we do so through some sort of coop even though the members of the coop are effectively competin
I'm honestly just trying to point out that people need to stop thinking of stealing music as ok, regardless of justification
Stealing music? bla bla bla, not stealing, bla bla bla. Let me rephrase that. The closest approximation to stealing you can get in terms of intellectual property is denial of the rights to use that property, e.g. the literal stealing of the copyright whereby you gain the rights in place of the original assignee. At 'worst' copyright infringement is unfair competition, no matter how much someone infringes they are not denying the artist use of their property. Peer to peer file sharing doesn't even necessarily mean competition because as you give your own example for, there is absolutely nothing stopping the person who downloads then buying a copy, not even a measurable cost associated with the transfer (unlike commercial piracy for instance).
It seems strange for you to use the word stealing as it is usually the 'don't break the law!' crowd that go down that route whereas you admit to the try before you buy scenario yourself.
That said, I think the current model is probably very efficient. It's exactly how all other branches of the arts now work. You have large producers who do things that are intellectually unexciting (or who get large government grants to do intellectually exciting risky works). You have medium sized producers who provide a marketing outlet for individual artists to utilize economies of scale, and you have individual artists selling directly to fans.
There is a difference between 'it works' which is what you describe and 'very efficient' which is what you claim. Perhaps we first need to make clear what we consider to be the goal, in terms of creating jobs and moving money around then the current system may be efficient indeed. In terms of the quantity of stuff produced the current system may also win out. In terms of providing people what they want and not wasting resources on excess the current system has adopted the limitations of selling tangible goods.
From my point of view, you can meet demand AND ensure that the demand is better matched to what people want by doing things differently. The bigger picture effect is that while the industry may be smaller that just leaves more resources to meet other demands. If there really is a demand for million dollar movies, rather than just a desire, then economics says that demand will be met.
The only real flaw to market based art is that conservative(not political, artistically) work is going to bubble up to the top. That's really the one thing that record companies had going for them. They have taste-makers who could see potential and could nurture bands until they became more skilled. That's the one thing that's been lost in most of the other arts. It's difficult to dedicated yourself to your art and work on developing your skill and so the aggregate quality goes down somewhat.
A reasonable explanation of the effect artificially setting prices has on a market. By forcing everyone to pay a price that does not reflect either cost or demand you get a market controlled by what people in suits think will be the next best thing. This happens because the amount of money they get isn't proportional to the actual demand for what they're producing. This happens because essentially they are competing with themselves. Even without different companies collaborating to fix prices, one record label might have thousands of popular artists on its books.
One example: who's going to let a band that had little investment to sell for a low price (even if that is their market value) when it would draw sales away from their big names when the little band probably has a less exclusive contract and might jump ship once they become popular. When prices are set artificially people end up paying more than what they're worth to the undeserving and not paying at all for the more deserving because they can't afford to.
Well put. The notion that people won't pay for music or such just because they can get it for free cannot be applied universally and is extremely short sighted. It is true that if someone acting in pure self interest (which is to be presumed for such economics), they are only likely to pay for convenience if they can get the same product elsewhere for free. However, they cannot access what has not been made yet and the likelihood is that someone who likes an artist's work will want to hear new stuff. If no one is giving the artist money then they cannot afford to keep producing, thus there is incentive for someone who might have bought that artist's music in the scarce goods world to give that artist money so they can produce more.
It's a simple concept, and widely understood, and the methods for encouraging people to part with their money for the selfish need for new music are not unknown or hard to implement. What seems to be the problem is that people who can make a living out of selling CD's are scared that they won't survive a change that makes talent (or rather, popularity, perhaps), infinitely more valuable than resources.
Free culture 'maximalists' have economics on their side because money isn't the end game, culture is. Even at its weakest non-commercial copyright only makes sense from a industry perspective, you can surely encourage the creation of more music by limited terms but all you're doing is filching money from people who don't care enough about culture to make a concious choice in the first place. I'd rather my money have more impact in influencing culture than having the otherwise fine economics distorted by artificial means just so the one-hit-wonder factory X-Factor can continue (or hundred million dollar films).
So encourage people to find agreeable ways to support artists. Forgetting all the issues of entitlement, money is power. Spending money is exercising power. Supporting one's favourite punk band while avoiding any money going to the next Britney Spears can be purely for self interest.
Entertainment is one of the most clear cut cases for economics there is. There's none of the universal welfare complications of healthcare or utilities, just pure economics where it works best - providing what people want by market forces. With the developments through the digital age we've come to the point where the primary scarcity is talent, yet people still want to quantify everything by record sales. Instead of encouraging everyone to continue to think of artists in terms of how many mp3's they've sold they should be encouraging people to think of artists in terms of how much more music they would like them to produce.
People keep bringing up the numbers of live shows, here is a key issue many are missing or not thinking about enough - not everyone is interested in live music. Most of the MONEY (not sales) the music industry has lost has likely been from people who aren't interested in live shows but are unhappy with whatever is being offered in the way of 'buying' music. All the time an artist spends at a live show they aren't spending making a new record, why aren't the record companies coming up with as many ways for people who want new music to spend money on it? Either because they're stupid or because they're not interested in more music being made, just how much money is being paid for what is being produced anyway.
While trends and logic would suggest their current business model is unsustainable that doesn't seem to have dissuaded them from continuing to milk the cash cow of copies as a commodity for as long as they can get away with it.
Atheism is a belief in the non-existence of a supreme entity.
No, atheism can merely be lack of belief in the existence of a supreme being. Hence my point. Atheism is no more a religion than illiteracy is. You could base a religion around illiteracy too, but it would not make illiteracy a religion. Some people may call Star Trek a religion to trekkies, but Star Trek the religion would be distinct from Star Trek the show. You could argue that christianity is a word that has meaning separate from being a religion but even my spell checker disagrees with you as it does not recognise the word without a capital 'C'. If you would like to argue that then fine, but it would not prove the point about atheism being a religion so why bother.
To try one last time, atheism is just a word, not a religion. There may be a religion based around atheism called Atheism but I do not know of it and it would not make all atheists part of the religion. I don't have enough qualifications in the English language to put it plainer than that but if you still don't get it try hitting yourself over the head with a cluebat a few times first.
If you have a change in circumstances that cause financial trouble, going overdrawn without first negotiating with your bank is frankly the most stupid thing you can do.
No, what is stupid is a bank charging £35 to an account that has no money in it for the privilege of bouncing a direct debit payment, then charging again for the account being overdrawn.
Overdrafts are one of the worse sources of credit available; unauthorised ones even worse.
I agree, you find me a bank that sells its customers basic bank accounts rather than super platinum 'I hope you can afford this' accounts and it might support your argument better.
Why should a bank take on significant business risk funding an overdrawn customer that's not only spending beyond their means (for whatever reason; that the spending is on rent and food doesn't alter the fact that they can't afford it and are thus unlikely to pay it back any time soon) but are also too stupid to actually come and discuss it with them.
Because if they weren't self interested or bigger idiots than their customers then they would use their judgement to provide a service designed to avoid these sorts of problems. Banks like people going overdrawn, they've admitted in court that their business is reliant on people going overdrawn. This is an idiotic system that encourages banks to make things as hard for customers as possible and should be exposed as such, not encouraged under the guise of free enterprise with the slogan 'only dumb people go overdrawn anyway'. The method for this is is debatable, if you don't like regulation then you are trampling on your own ideals by encouraging an unsustainable business model rather than shouting loudly that banks need to do better.
You set up a business giving out money to homeless people. Tell them you want it back as soon as they can afford to repay it, but that until then there's not interest or fees associated with it. Tell me, how much much profit are you expecting there?
Oh, now we descend into 'you just try feeding a mouse an lion' territory. Tell me, why should I respond with anything more than disdain? Go lend money to the homeless yourself, you brought it up.
People do get into issues, they can end up with higher expenditure than income, and they do need short term financial support to deal with that. However, blaming the banking industry for being unwilling to give money away doesn't acknowledge the other side of the situation.
Who said anything about blaming them for being unwilling to give money away? I'm blaming them for running their businesses in a way that makes things needlessly difficult for their own customers. If they can't afford to do without extortionate default charges then they shouldn't have jumped on the superficially competitive bandwagon by building their business around subsidising 'free' with what amounts to needless gambling for many people.
Christianity did not exist as a word before the religion. It is by definition a religion because it is the name of a religion, it is not the name of the state of believing in Jesus it just so happens that such belief is the basis for the religion. You could name a religion Atheism and base it around the idea of atheism but it would not make atheism a religion.
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'Intellectual property' is not an American concept. England is probably the most to blame
Actually, neither are to blame for the root of what is mostly wrong with Intellectual Property: moral entitlement. France and Germany were the first to push for a recognition of Intellectual Property as a moral right, which resulted in the Berne Convention.
i'll slap the shit out of the next person who says openldap. it is pretty easy to do stuff like point an entire OU to a WSUS server and specify how updates are done.
Why would you want OpenLDAP to do that? Things like Group Policy and WSUS are by and large kludges to do what most other systems manage with light scripting. I got so fed up of Group Policy's crappy application deployment that I was glad to find someone had written a lovely system written in Javascript called WPKG. I don't understand this fear of 'shitloads of work' on Linux, is it because not everything has a GUI? I long for the day that we can ditch Windows and move to Linux, I could pretty much make myself redundant after setting that up.
Anti-porn is one of the few things that ultra-liberals ("objectifies women") and ultra-conservatives ("makes Jesus cry") can agree on.
The only liberal thing about being anti-porn is that you are allowed to hold that view.
Look into the ACTA treaty and you see you could be in a world of hurt for those "fell of the truck" goods...
I think they meant stolen rather than counterfeit.
Hmm, you know, the RIAA uses that same logic, but there were a couple of studies that showed the opposite: people who downloaded music spent more money on music (either discs, concerts or other products) than people who didn't download music. I wonder if the same holds for movies? I kind of suspect it does. If indeed it does, not only would the studios be attacking their customers, but attacking their best customers. If I were them, I would have wanted to test that one before launching the lawsuits.
Perhaps what worries them is that those who are spending more may be doing so because they aren't having to pay members of the RIAA. I have a subscription to Magnatune and often buy music from services like Bandcamp. I may well spend more on music than the majority of those earning more than me, but I tend to be very concious of where that money goes.
Amanda Palmer was originally on a major label and I certainly listen to the album recorded under them; however, lacking any incentive on merchandise, or access to live performances I had no accessible way to support her directly. Eventually she started releasing projects distributed on Bandcamp and I was able to overspend on those albums in the knowledge that the money was not going through an abusive label.
The issue here is the lack of distinction between the music industry and the recording industry, I may be a great customer for the former but am a pretty lousy customer for the major players of the latter.
Using their 20mbit service I can also say that the download speed is constant, until you hit the cap anyway Then there is the issue of upload speeds, 768kbit upload makes me want to use carrier pigeons instead.
it's all the middle men kicking each other back in between.
You may be interested in the RIAA Radar to avoid the majority of offending middlemen.
Know any good sites that of course will have samples of the music to help guide me?
Jamendo, Magnatune, Bandcamp, Amie Street, TheSixtyOne and Zunior; to name a few.
I see, so if the law isn't the way you want it to be, it is moronic.
On occasion, yes. What is your point?
The thing is that many artists want to share their work there way. If they can not be granted that right, they will not share their work.
There's a solution to that, not sharing their work.
I can use the work for my purpose and you can't use it for yours..
You seem oblivious to the proven exceptions such as for the purpose of parody. Perhaps you are suggesting that the L.H.O.O.Q version of the Mona Lisa would be unlawful under current law?
I just think it's scary that this guy is our hero. If you read the full debates then even those against the bill tend to be of the 'copying is bad!!!' sentiment.
The sorry thing is that many people love the BBC so much that they are in favour of the license. Often the same people who are annoyed with government overspending in other areas. Taxes bad! TV good!
But if I am the copyright holder, I might want my art to not appear in excerpts (say I think it destroys the feeling of the piece). Obviously this argument is stupid for a CS textbook but might make sense for a well crafted novel or a painting where I might not want others to make black and white copies of portions of it and distribute them with information about how to buy the work from me. While I can't stop excerpting for criticism, I should be able to stop it for other uses--it is my art after all.
The point is when you create art, you have control of its expression as art. You have not only the right to exclusive sale of it but also how your work is expressed. If I own, i.e., a play and I license it, a company that produces it can not legally change the words to the play without my permission--it is my play and I can choose how it is presented.
Did I wake up in bizzaro world again?
I can understand you being pissed if I changed your work and passed it off as a faithful representation, but to say that you have absolute control over expression is moronic. That isn't property rights, nor authorship rights, that is 'I don't wanna play with the other kids because they're drawing moustaches on my Mona Lisa'.
So, we have to be rich before we can criticise them? How about no.
Since when does a rich person giving away money qualify them for respect?
I can't believe hero status is bought so cheap these days. Perhaps if his kind weren't so greedy in the first place then average person might be in a better position to do something themselves.
You could have just said 'dual licensing is a valid option' without suggesting people who don't like dual licensing lack business experience. I would suggest this OSS Watch article for a more balanced explanation of dual licensing, both the pros and the cons.
We don't believe in grammar either, hence the screw-up.
Well, chalk one up for anecdotal evidence that Christianity goes hand in hand with not being able to understand English.
I realize it's loaded. But what would the correct term be then if I invited a plumber to my house to fix a leak, then didn't pay him (and I realize we have entire legal ideas of implied contracts, but I think they're codifying this exact problem)? There are expectations of payment and expectations of having to pay. It is not perhaps "stealing" in the traditional sense, but I am circumventing the expected transaction. If the artists puts a file online to be freely downloaded I am not circumventing this transaction. The implied transaction exists in both cases.
Copyright is not 'implied' it is codified. An implied contract is a mutual agreement. Copyright was supposed to be some sort of 'social contract' akin to taxes. If you really want to try and construct a compelling analogy then start at taxes.
You can certainly use the word stealing as a simile but don't be surprised when people ridicule you for the fact that the word already has a proper use in the context of copyright.
Except this isn't really true. The captialist system is very good at finding existing demand and filling it to the point where demand is effectively eliminated or static. The system is actually very bad at finding new markets. We are not good at putting capital into developing new markets. If what you were saying is true, we'd see thousands of hollywood movies trying to create new forms in hopes of creating a new market. Instead we get very few of those and lots of movies trying to exploit tried and true formulas (many failing expensively because the market is saturated). Our system is very good at filling demand for incremental and conservative change. It is horrible at creating innovation. Innovation is really only something that happens because the market is so good at oversaturating itself. And unfortunately most of the time the big players in a saturated market figure out ways to lock out new players, thus insuring no new markets will be created.
I'm struggling to see your point here, you're talking about making lots of films to 'make new markets' and other stuff that makes no sense in the context of what I'd said. The statement was about meeting demand, not creating markets. If there is demand to meet then there is a market because demand is part of the market process. I can only guess what you're really on about is innovation, you're worried that in a truly competitive market there will not be room for innovation because you somehow believe that competitive markets can't afford to innovate. All evidence points to the contrary however, competitive markets tend to encourage innovation because it increases demand.
While your idea of innovation might be The Matrix or Avatar, which happen to be big budget films, the fact that they were innovative allowed them to be expensive. Innovation doesn't mean making random films and hoping there's demand for them it's about finding some demand and using innovation to make sure your product is the one people choose. In a truly competitive market innovation is likely to be more common because it tends to aid success. The idea of creating new markets would really be addressing demand but using innovation to be competitive, much more efficient than the current system of having more money than sense.
I wish this was true, but it's patently false. Your success is still a mix of your ability to market yourself and your product. The cost of marketing is huge. That's why even though people keep talking about the move away from albums to singles the market has actually just moved to EPs. You simply can't justify the cost of marketing individual songs. This is one thing that we've been talking about in my community (theater) a lot. Now that we have this decentralized system that is so good at getting people started, how do we get the marketing efficiencies of scale that these large organizations have, and can we do so through some sort of coop even though the members of the coop are effectively competin
I'm honestly just trying to point out that people need to stop thinking of stealing music as ok, regardless of justification
Stealing music? bla bla bla, not stealing, bla bla bla. Let me rephrase that. The closest approximation to stealing you can get in terms of intellectual property is denial of the rights to use that property, e.g. the literal stealing of the copyright whereby you gain the rights in place of the original assignee. At 'worst' copyright infringement is unfair competition, no matter how much someone infringes they are not denying the artist use of their property. Peer to peer file sharing doesn't even necessarily mean competition because as you give your own example for, there is absolutely nothing stopping the person who downloads then buying a copy, not even a measurable cost associated with the transfer (unlike commercial piracy for instance).
It seems strange for you to use the word stealing as it is usually the 'don't break the law!' crowd that go down that route whereas you admit to the try before you buy scenario yourself.
That said, I think the current model is probably very efficient. It's exactly how all other branches of the arts now work. You have large producers who do things that are intellectually unexciting (or who get large government grants to do intellectually exciting risky works). You have medium sized producers who provide a marketing outlet for individual artists to utilize economies of scale, and you have individual artists selling directly to fans.
There is a difference between 'it works' which is what you describe and 'very efficient' which is what you claim. Perhaps we first need to make clear what we consider to be the goal, in terms of creating jobs and moving money around then the current system may be efficient indeed. In terms of the quantity of stuff produced the current system may also win out. In terms of providing people what they want and not wasting resources on excess the current system has adopted the limitations of selling tangible goods.
From my point of view, you can meet demand AND ensure that the demand is better matched to what people want by doing things differently. The bigger picture effect is that while the industry may be smaller that just leaves more resources to meet other demands. If there really is a demand for million dollar movies, rather than just a desire, then economics says that demand will be met.
The only real flaw to market based art is that conservative(not political, artistically) work is going to bubble up to the top. That's really the one thing that record companies had going for them. They have taste-makers who could see potential and could nurture bands until they became more skilled. That's the one thing that's been lost in most of the other arts. It's difficult to dedicated yourself to your art and work on developing your skill and so the aggregate quality goes down somewhat.
A reasonable explanation of the effect artificially setting prices has on a market. By forcing everyone to pay a price that does not reflect either cost or demand you get a market controlled by what people in suits think will be the next best thing. This happens because the amount of money they get isn't proportional to the actual demand for what they're producing. This happens because essentially they are competing with themselves. Even without different companies collaborating to fix prices, one record label might have thousands of popular artists on its books.
One example: who's going to let a band that had little investment to sell for a low price (even if that is their market value) when it would draw sales away from their big names when the little band probably has a less exclusive contract and might jump ship once they become popular. When prices are set artificially people end up paying more than what they're worth to the undeserving and not paying at all for the more deserving because they can't afford to.
Well put. The notion that people won't pay for music or such just because they can get it for free cannot be applied universally and is extremely short sighted. It is true that if someone acting in pure self interest (which is to be presumed for such economics), they are only likely to pay for convenience if they can get the same product elsewhere for free. However, they cannot access what has not been made yet and the likelihood is that someone who likes an artist's work will want to hear new stuff. If no one is giving the artist money then they cannot afford to keep producing, thus there is incentive for someone who might have bought that artist's music in the scarce goods world to give that artist money so they can produce more.
It's a simple concept, and widely understood, and the methods for encouraging people to part with their money for the selfish need for new music are not unknown or hard to implement. What seems to be the problem is that people who can make a living out of selling CD's are scared that they won't survive a change that makes talent (or rather, popularity, perhaps), infinitely more valuable than resources.
Free culture 'maximalists' have economics on their side because money isn't the end game, culture is. Even at its weakest non-commercial copyright only makes sense from a industry perspective, you can surely encourage the creation of more music by limited terms but all you're doing is filching money from people who don't care enough about culture to make a concious choice in the first place. I'd rather my money have more impact in influencing culture than having the otherwise fine economics distorted by artificial means just so the one-hit-wonder factory X-Factor can continue (or hundred million dollar films).
So encourage people to find agreeable ways to support artists. Forgetting all the issues of entitlement, money is power. Spending money is exercising power. Supporting one's favourite punk band while avoiding any money going to the next Britney Spears can be purely for self interest.
Entertainment is one of the most clear cut cases for economics there is. There's none of the universal welfare complications of healthcare or utilities, just pure economics where it works best - providing what people want by market forces. With the developments through the digital age we've come to the point where the primary scarcity is talent, yet people still want to quantify everything by record sales. Instead of encouraging everyone to continue to think of artists in terms of how many mp3's they've sold they should be encouraging people to think of artists in terms of how much more music they would like them to produce.
People keep bringing up the numbers of live shows, here is a key issue many are missing or not thinking about enough - not everyone is interested in live music. Most of the MONEY (not sales) the music industry has lost has likely been from people who aren't interested in live shows but are unhappy with whatever is being offered in the way of 'buying' music. All the time an artist spends at a live show they aren't spending making a new record, why aren't the record companies coming up with as many ways for people who want new music to spend money on it? Either because they're stupid or because they're not interested in more music being made, just how much money is being paid for what is being produced anyway.
While trends and logic would suggest their current business model is unsustainable that doesn't seem to have dissuaded them from continuing to milk the cash cow of copies as a commodity for as long as they can get away with it.
You're begging the question.
And you're a teapot. Next please.
Atheism is a belief in the non-existence of a supreme entity.
No, atheism can merely be lack of belief in the existence of a supreme being. Hence my point. Atheism is no more a religion than illiteracy is. You could base a religion around illiteracy too, but it would not make illiteracy a religion. Some people may call Star Trek a religion to trekkies, but Star Trek the religion would be distinct from Star Trek the show. You could argue that christianity is a word that has meaning separate from being a religion but even my spell checker disagrees with you as it does not recognise the word without a capital 'C'. If you would like to argue that then fine, but it would not prove the point about atheism being a religion so why bother.
To try one last time, atheism is just a word, not a religion. There may be a religion based around atheism called Atheism but I do not know of it and it would not make all atheists part of the religion. I don't have enough qualifications in the English language to put it plainer than that but if you still don't get it try hitting yourself over the head with a cluebat a few times first.
If you have a change in circumstances that cause financial trouble, going overdrawn without first negotiating with your bank is frankly the most stupid thing you can do.
No, what is stupid is a bank charging £35 to an account that has no money in it for the privilege of bouncing a direct debit payment, then charging again for the account being overdrawn.
Overdrafts are one of the worse sources of credit available; unauthorised ones even worse.
I agree, you find me a bank that sells its customers basic bank accounts rather than super platinum 'I hope you can afford this' accounts and it might support your argument better.
Why should a bank take on significant business risk funding an overdrawn customer that's not only spending beyond their means (for whatever reason; that the spending is on rent and food doesn't alter the fact that they can't afford it and are thus unlikely to pay it back any time soon) but are also too stupid to actually come and discuss it with them.
Because if they weren't self interested or bigger idiots than their customers then they would use their judgement to provide a service designed to avoid these sorts of problems. Banks like people going overdrawn, they've admitted in court that their business is reliant on people going overdrawn. This is an idiotic system that encourages banks to make things as hard for customers as possible and should be exposed as such, not encouraged under the guise of free enterprise with the slogan 'only dumb people go overdrawn anyway'. The method for this is is debatable, if you don't like regulation then you are trampling on your own ideals by encouraging an unsustainable business model rather than shouting loudly that banks need to do better.
You set up a business giving out money to homeless people. Tell them you want it back as soon as they can afford to repay it, but that until then there's not interest or fees associated with it. Tell me, how much much profit are you expecting there?
Oh, now we descend into 'you just try feeding a mouse an lion' territory. Tell me, why should I respond with anything more than disdain? Go lend money to the homeless yourself, you brought it up.
People do get into issues, they can end up with higher expenditure than income, and they do need short term financial support to deal with that. However, blaming the banking industry for being unwilling to give money away doesn't acknowledge the other side of the situation.
Who said anything about blaming them for being unwilling to give money away? I'm blaming them for running their businesses in a way that makes things needlessly difficult for their own customers. If they can't afford to do without extortionate default charges then they shouldn't have jumped on the superficially competitive bandwagon by building their business around subsidising 'free' with what amounts to needless gambling for many people.
Christianity did not exist as a word before the religion. It is by definition a religion because it is the name of a religion, it is not the name of the state of believing in Jesus it just so happens that such belief is the basis for the religion. You could name a religion Atheism and base it around the idea of atheism but it would not make atheism a religion.