No, because my analogy specifically includes the fact that someone who has put work into something has been deprived of their value-added-content, while yours doesn't. Someone at that store (or wholesaler or distributor; whoever) has intentionally made the effort to purchase the item in the first place, and to make sure that it's been placed on the shelves. That's effort.
OK, so would going into a shop and taking something and leaving behind the exact amount that the store paid for it be acceptable to you? After all, they could replace it at cost, so it would merely be distributing the item in a manner not agreeable to them, correct?
Would you mind if complete strangers used your computer when you weren't?
Copyright infringement denies the creator's the ability to earn a living (or distribute their work as they choose in the case of GPLed software), which is a very important thing in a civilized society. Virtually everything created and sold is based on the fact that labour is what creates the value, whether or not it is physical. My uncles sell corn, beans, and grains at an astronomical markup compared to what they pay for the seeds and the chemicals used on them. What gives their crops value is the time spent planting, caring for, harvesting, transporting, and selling them.
Physical objects aside, taking away someone's source of income because you just don't feel like paying for it is a pretty crummy thing to do. The slashdot crowd is largely safe because very little of them create anything that has value to anyone outside of the company they work for. I don't have to worry about having my code stolen, because it's boring business application stuff that's custom designed around our exact needs.
I see you post with dislike for outsourcing and the destruction of IT jobs. Is it different when it's your job being destroyed? And if you favour allowing faithful (but unpaid) reproductions, would you mind sending me a PDF of your childrens' books?
Good luck with physics. I'm not being smarmy, but the majority of the people I know with physics degrees ended up as sysadmins.
I can tell you're not a performer. There's a different than natural talent and being a good performer. Being an entertainer of Britney's level takes years of expensive lessons, hours of daily practice. I think her act is tripe, but I can respect the amount of effort she's put into herself.
Programming on the other hand definitely requires a certain amount of cognitive exercise.
Most programmers on the other hand, would be lost without standing on the backs of others - you say Britney can't write her own songs? Could you write your own compiler and libraries?
Probably because the person involved is a commercial pirate.
Actually, many of the/. groupthink posters rant and rave about how great allofmp3.com are, which is a blatantly commercial and exploitative enterprise.
In other words they are selling someone elses copyrighted work without permission.
So, as long as you don't profit from something, it's OK to do whatever you want without someone else's permission? Cool. So therefore, it would be acceptable to go to a store and take an item, and leave behind exactly wholesale cost, right? The store isn't loosing any money, and so long as I use the product myself, no one's hurt.
the difference between pure copyright infringement and copyright infringement plus making money from the infringement.
Not to the person who created the product, it isn't. In both cases, they're being taken advantage of.
1. Many fundimentalist christians (which is a large group of the VOTING citizens) will vote for Bush pretty much no matter what because of his public stance of being christian, his anti-abortion stance, etc.
2. Many people will vote against Kerry because of his anti-Vietnam war stance. There are still many unhealed wounds over the issue in this country, and there are many who believe that we were 100% right in the matter and therefore anyone who criticises is wrong.
3. Large portions of the populace that is damaged most by Bush's policies (particularly the 18-30 set) are the same group that historically don't vote. I was constantly fustrated in college by the vast amount of otherwise smart people who wouldn't bother to vote - I drove 9 hours roundtrip in a 12 hour time period to vote 4 years ago because I missed the deadline to vote by mail. Many of my friends could have cared less.
4. In the strongly two-party system that the US has, many people vote strictly on party lines without bothering to think about their choice.
5. Many people in the US are very ignorant and have no desire to change that. In the dorms, I was one of two or three people (out of ~90) who bothered to get a newspaper (this was before this interweb thing made it easy to get news online). A terrifyingly large portion of the populace believes that there was a direct connection between Sadam and 9-11, and that makes them feel that the invasion of Iraq was justified. Simularly, they hear statements from Bush about all the new manufacturing jobs that have been created, and never bother to find out that he's including fast food burger preparation as a manufacturing job.
The media has stoppped doing a good job of reporting, and the administration has done a good job of keeping information from the people and the press.
6. People are stupid. You'll find examples all over the world. Bush just happens to be our manifestation of it.
Except that Knoppix will happily install to your hard drive. It may not be pretty-shiney(tm) like some installers, but I don't find these to be "complex workarounds":
http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/debian-knoppix.h tm l http://www.freenet.org.nz/misc/knoppix-install. htm l
--- Historically and in some countries this has been the case. Is there evidence to support this statement now, in Britain? ---
I don't know, why don't you ask Japanese-Americans who were alive during WWII, or someone suspected of being involved with communism or labour during the 50s in the United States about how free citizens of the United States are? Or how about leaders of civil rights? You are aware of the fact that the *FBI* attempted to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr., are you not?
--- My suggestion to fix this problem is a minor change in copyright law. Change the law so that artists cannot sign away the copyright to their work. If you want to reduce the share of the middlemen and still get the artist paid what the market is will for the quaility of work you need to ensure the artist controls his product. ---
Middlemen are a necessarily evil for most people because they either lack the time, moxy, or ability to do many things themselves. I *could* grow veggies for much less than I pay for them in the grocery store, but I lack the time and desire to do that. Most musicians can't or won't deal with getting products to the stores, nor do stores have time to deal with all 100,000 bands that would like to sell their music.
No one forces bands to sign with big labels. It's been well known since the begining of the business how labels work.
I'm not talking corruption, I'm talking boring. Roads are inherently boring and uninteresting except to people who are into transportation systems. Roads have a simple purpose - get people places.
Books and music and films are supposed to be interesting. If everything was funded by politicians, anything that could potentially offend the moral majority would be right out. Anything having to do with womens' rights, deviant sex, alternative religions, drugs. Anything that would offend the uber-left would be out. The only thing that would be left would be cookie cutter fluff that's designed to offend people as little as possible rather than inspire and intrigue people.
And actually yes, I work in the music industry for the small guys, so I know exactly how the system works. So consider this - one of the bands I've worked with for years whose last two albums (on their own dime/label) sold ~50,000 copies each. Minus production, manufacturing, advertising cost, they were prolly making $10 profit per CD. That's $1,000,000 between the two albums.
And yet, they decided to sign on with a large indy for their new album, making substantially less money per unit. Maybe you don't know quite as much about the industry as you think you do.
Part of what you don't realize is that a large chunk of the money that comes in from sucessful bands goes to subsidizing the ones that don't make it. Perhaps it sucks for the sucessful bands, but it also means that the bands that never recoup the money invested in them walk away free without having a massive debt to pay off. The actual profit to the record labels is not overly large compared to other industries.
--- The problem is that it is forced upon them. ---
No one forces you to listen to certain music. You won't die without music. You have the option of not listening to music, or going to the modern decendants of mp3.com and downloading it for free, or buying from local musicians, or buying popular music.
This evening I've listened to The Elastic Purejoy, The Rapture, Utris, Sinead O'Connor, Leonard Cohen, the Waterboys, Josh Ritter, and Jim White. All of them worth every penny I paid for them (and often more), and all worth supporting. Considering the thousands of hours of pleasure that I've derived from them, the $100 or so I've spent on the albums is quite small.
--- Governments should therefore be stepping in to ensure most of the money goes to the creators, and that copyright monopoly only lasts until the creator receives the cost of production plus reasonable profit. ---
Why stop there? Why not have the government step in to ALL industries and make sure that no one makes more than a "reasonable" (what's that, 5%) profit? Oh wait, that's been tried, it's call communism, and it's one of those systems that while it might look good on paper is a horrible idea when put into practice because people are greedy and exploit situations whenever they can.
Would you work for cost of living plus a "reasonable" profit , or do you seek to get the best situation that you can?
--- Copyright only serves one purpose that I find value in-- it promotes people to create by giving them a limited-time monopoly on their creation. ---
To be a really good musician, or writer, or artist, or game designer takes a lot of time and effort (and often money). Just about everything in our entire world is based on adding value through labour. The seeds that my family's farm puts in the ground cost next to nothing. The markup is technically incredible. But the effort it takes to turn those seeds into fields of $PLANT, and harvest it, transport it, put it in your grocery store is tremendous, and that's what people pay for. The main difference with digital information is not that it requires a good deal of time to create, but that you can make endless perfect copies of it. The fact remains that if you want that product to be created in the first place, it has to be feasible to pay that person to create it in the first place.
It's very hard to be a top quality musician and not devote your life to it. My sister is a professional cellist. She practices six hours a day. Most musicians have to tour to make money and promote the albums. Most "real" jobs aren't friendly to their employees just hitting the road.
I work in the music industry doing live sound and recording. I work with musicians who work day jobs and I work with professional musicians (a few weeks ago I worked with one of the guys who taught Hendrix how to play. Guess who's better?
One question for you - you advocate against intellectual property laws/against long terms of protection. What exactly do you have to loose? How many songs and books have you written? Or are you just a consumer?
--- Wrong, human nature is that as long as you don't interfere with somebody else. ---
Take your wallet. Put $200 in it and drop it in the street. Do this a couple times and get back to me on how much you trust human nature.
You say that information should be based on a communistic system? That's great. Do you really trust the political system to fund a network of paid musicians, movie studios, and writers (plus whatever other forms of entertainment you lump in there)? Even if the public was willing to pay more in taxes (suggesting that taxes have to be raised==political death), would you really trust any political administration in the past 100 years to fund quality entertainment?
--- That damn Victoria's Secret commercial with the first few notes of "Monkey Man" got that song stuck in my head and last night I had to clear it out. ---
I haven't had a TV signal in four years so I have no idea which "Monkey Man" you're refering to, but Real Rhapsody has ~25 tracks by that name (mostly the Toots and the Maytals versions, which is what I'm assuming you're refering to). So for $10/month you could listen to that and ~600,000 other on-demand tracks legally in a system that actually pays the artists (yeah, allofmp3 pays the artists $0.000001 cent per track. Yay). I'm willing to bet Napster Pro (the one that gives you the same ability to do unlimited streaming for $10/month) has the song you're looking for too. But I'm betting you have some self-rightious reason why $10/month is just toooo unreasonable to listen to whatever you want whenever you want (while attached to broadband).
(As a note, I work for a university, and have no financial ties to Real or Napster.)
--- Bottom line: it's not always about free, but it is now universally about freedom. ---
Oh bullshit. Peer2Peer is about the new LudiMaroonCentKim5sher songs.
--- In this case, the free market deprived the US industry of a buck while getting the Russians a dime. ---
No more so than me buying a car part from a known chop shop would be the free market depriving Ford of a buck. Just because you feel smug and justified for whatever reason doesn't make something "free market" based. You say you own a copy on LP. That's great, but there's no realistic way for anyone to verify that. Buy a record player for $5 at a yard sale (I got my rather nice one complete with two unused styluses that way) and go to town with an MP3 encoder.
Besides, there's just something inherently great about dropping the needle into some old Floyd.
--- If, due to government regulation, I was the only person in the country allowed to write software, you might have a point. But my employment is controlled by market economics. ---
And so is the music industry. Prices go all over the place. The government protection that you're complaining about isn't the same as saying that no one else can compete with you. It's the equivilant of saying that your boss can't take your work and then say, "I only feel that you're worth half of what you're supposed to get paid." You're free to buy music from people who sell it cheaply (if you live anywhere near an urban area, there's plenty of talented local musicians who'll sell you their CD for $5) or even give it away for free via mp3 or what-have-you. But if you want someone specific's music, pay what they ask for it. It's that simple.
What people want is often not a good thing. People wanted to stone adulterers in Iran. People wanted to execute thousands during/after the French revolution. People wanted to bad alcohol before the prohibition and drugs since then. People wanted to invade Iraq. People wanted to destroy the World Trade Center.
Just because some group of people wants something and there's no way to stop them doesn't necessarily make it a good thing.
The natural progression is to outsource work to cheaper countries because people want their OMGWTF$49WalmartDVDPlayer!!@! but there are substantial costs that the common people don't recognise. Free/as cheap as possible is a very poor business model for just about everything (yes, there are exceptions). Our love for everything to be cheap will cost millions of jobs (that Slashdoters are so fond of whining about), will erode our economy, and make this country a whole lot less pleasant to live in a decade or two from now. Demanding that information be "free" will have negative effects as well.
Lastly, the funny thing about the people who loudly advocate that music/software/information should be free often seem to be the ones that contribute little to that pool of free stuff they feel that they are owed. What have you contributed to the world?
Most consumers don't bother to go see shows. It's not something that most people are interested in. As a point of information, my company has worked with the Asylum Street Spankers providing sound reinforcement, so I know exactly who and what you're talking about.
If you don't want to pay for the music, fine, but don't listen to it without paying for it. It's that simple. There's plenty of non-stale, overproduced music out there to buy. But most people would rather rip other people off, assuming they can get away with it.
Quality shops deliver quite a bit of value. The staff of the two local indy shops know me by name and taste. They offer quality suggestions (far better than anything Amazon ever has) and even set aside stuff that comes in that they think I'll like. They offer information about area shows and often sponsor them.
They're doing better than the shops in the article, but they've definately taken a bad hit from piracy and the online box houses.
--- They had a server that hadn't needed a reboot for about a year and a half. At the time it was the company's only server, no backup servers, no redundancy because previous to this one they hadn't needed a server at all and it was still a reasonably small company. ---
So they didn't treat their IT needs as anything serious and got smacked down for it. From your description, I'm guessing they were running Windows or maybe Linux, which means that the year and a half would have left them with several unpleasant security holes. $2,000 is not a lot of money to invest in a backup server. The failure here was at the management and admin level, not failing to reboot.
I just advised a friend who's working at her first job in video production that once she gets some experience under her belt that she needs to prepare a C.V. to go with her resume.
When she applies for positions in the future, there will be three documents that should be included. The cover letter will sell herself, telling in sentences how she thinks she can solve the company's problems. The resume will give a breakdown of the skills she has - software she's worked with, platforms, etc. The CV will be a list of shows, videos, and movies that she's made. A resume should not be cluttered with specific examples, but when hiring for a position where a variety of experience is needed, a list of what an applicant has worked on is extremely valuable.
Get over the OS X elitist attitude. I use Windows, Linux, and OS X on desktop machines. They all have good things about them. They all have bad things about them.
OS X's lack of a packaging system is a disaster as far as I'm concerned. There's no easy way to find out every program installed on the system. (No, not everything shows up in the "About this Mac" list.) There's no easy way for Joe user to know if anything other than the Apple provided software has a security flaw and automagically update it. The better Linux systems make this trivial. On my Mandrake systems, I can doubleclick an rpm file, and will automatically resolve any dependencies and install it for me. Unless Fink has come a long way since I played with it last summer, OS X can't even come close.
And many of us don't like the OS X interface (particularly the parts that they made different than OS 9/Windows/etc. just to be different). If you don't like using OS X exactly the way that Steve thinks you should, you're SOL. It's like buying a glove with four fingers. It's great if that fits your hand, but a pain if it doesn't. I know numerous novice users that hate OS X. My barely computer literate mother (~60yo) who hadn't really used a computer until five years ago or so is fine with KDE.
Sounds like a nice design. The page the user sees is primarily made up of iframes? And each iframe contains its own method of submitting a change (be it onclick or whatever) and the automagically refreshes itself to see the new information? I've done stuff like that for creating web based HTML generators, but never though of extending it to database functionality.
--- I read somewhere that all of the profit that is currently made in the record industry is based off of music fans buying an average of 6 compact disks per year (I guess they average that, some buy more, some buy less). ---
No offense, but "reading somewhere" doesn't make for a good argument or make it true. Most of the "music should be free" arguments come from people who have not contributed a thing to the music scene or have rode it to the top. It's funny that Courtney Love speaks out so strongly now on her rights, but didn't complain about the record company spending millions and millions of dollars transforming her public image from the drugged up widow of a musician to a pop star (though she's done a pretty good job of reversing that...).
The easy way to defeat your "same amount of money so why not" argument is in your own statement. Despite the fact that you could buy the majority of the tracks you referred to at one of the online music companies, you went with the dirt cheap, illegal source. Rather than making sure that the artists get some kind of money for their work and that the label gets some kind of money for their investing in the artists, you funnel money to either the russian mob or profiteers. So long as people like you will take the cheapest (or free) way out of a situation, regardless of legality or ethics, your argument will not work. The ease and cheapness of digital transmittion sees to that.
But if you want a longer version, here it is: going to an all-you-can-eat version doesn't work because it would require a significantly higher budget because a greater number of artists would have to be compensated.
The way the labels work is that they gamble on a number of artists. Some make it, some don't. The winners end up subsizing the losers, but that's part of the gamble. The vast majority of the artists never make back the money that the label put into them - browse the dollar bin of your favourite record store and marvel at how many groups you've never heard of.
Before you go off and ramble about how evil and bad this makes the label, consider this: One of the bands I've worked with hit the level that their past two albums sold ~50,000 each. Minus manufacturing cost, promos and the like, they were prolly making about $10 profit on each CD. $1 million split 5 ways over three years isn't bad. And yet, they just recently chose to sign on with a large indie label where they'll make much less per CD. If the label didn't provide real tangible benefits, why would they do that?
But back to the all-you-can-eat, the way that the winners and losers is determined is based on how the CD sells. The winners pay back the money invested in them, and then make their living off the rest. The losers pay back part of the investment, but never sell enough to recoup. The rest of that investment gets paid out of the record company's cut of the sucessful artists' sales.
However, if you made downloads free, the number of winners would shoot up dramatically, simply because there would no longer be any incentive not to download anything that had any interest to you. Even if the total pool of money stayed the same, dividing that by a larger number of artists would cut the payout. And unless you are a professional musician, don't tell me that it's easy to work a full time job and be a great musician. I work with great musicians, and they work their asses off to make the music that they do.
--- I have downloaded lots of stuff I used to own on cassette but got stolen from me in a break-in at a place I used to rent. I downloaded a lot of stuff I have on albums, but can't listen to anymore. ---
OK, so you've used the service semi-ethically (you're not taking into account that remastering an album for CD rather than tape or record costs a fair amount). If you trust most of humanity to do so, I've got a couple bridges to sell you.
--- There is enough there that I could easily spend 10.00 a month and download stuff just t
Slashdot Mirror
No, because my analogy specifically includes the fact that someone who has put work into something has been deprived of their value-added-content, while yours doesn't. Someone at that store (or wholesaler or distributor; whoever) has intentionally made the effort to purchase the item in the first place, and to make sure that it's been placed on the shelves. That's effort.
Writing, performing, recording music, that's effort too.
OK, so would going into a shop and taking something and leaving behind the exact amount that the store paid for it be acceptable to you? After all, they could replace it at cost, so it would merely be distributing the item in a manner not agreeable to them, correct?
Would you mind if complete strangers used your computer when you weren't?
Copyright infringement denies the creator's the ability to earn a living (or distribute their work as they choose in the case of GPLed software), which is a very important thing in a civilized society. Virtually everything created and sold is based on the fact that labour is what creates the value, whether or not it is physical. My uncles sell corn, beans, and grains at an astronomical markup compared to what they pay for the seeds and the chemicals used on them. What gives their crops value is the time spent planting, caring for, harvesting, transporting, and selling them.
Physical objects aside, taking away someone's source of income because you just don't feel like paying for it is a pretty crummy thing to do. The slashdot crowd is largely safe because very little of them create anything that has value to anyone outside of the company they work for. I don't have to worry about having my code stolen, because it's boring business application stuff that's custom designed around our exact needs.
I see you post with dislike for outsourcing and the destruction of IT jobs. Is it different when it's your job being destroyed? And if you favour allowing faithful (but unpaid) reproductions, would you mind sending me a PDF of your childrens' books?
Good luck with physics. I'm not being smarmy, but the majority of the people I know with physics degrees ended up as sysadmins.
I can tell you're not a performer. There's a different than natural talent and being a good performer. Being an entertainer of Britney's level takes years of expensive lessons, hours of daily practice. I think her act is tripe, but I can respect the amount of effort she's put into herself.
Programming on the other hand definitely requires a certain amount of cognitive exercise.
Most programmers on the other hand, would be lost without standing on the backs of others - you say Britney can't write her own songs? Could you write your own compiler and libraries?
Probably because the person involved is a commercial pirate.
/. groupthink posters rant and rave about how great allofmp3.com are, which is a blatantly commercial and exploitative enterprise.
Actually, many of the
In other words they are selling someone elses copyrighted work without permission.
So, as long as you don't profit from something, it's OK to do whatever you want without someone else's permission? Cool. So therefore, it would be acceptable to go to a store and take an item, and leave behind exactly wholesale cost, right? The store isn't loosing any money, and so long as I use the product myself, no one's hurt.
the difference between pure copyright infringement and copyright infringement plus making money from the infringement.
Not to the person who created the product, it isn't. In both cases, they're being taken advantage of.
Piracy is different when you start selling pirated works online.
So? In either case, the rights, permissions, and desires of the person who worked hard to create whatever it is are trampled underfoot.
Would a bank robbery be "different" if the theives merely flushed the money down the toilet rather than spending it?
1. Many fundimentalist christians (which is a large group of the VOTING citizens) will vote for Bush pretty much no matter what because of his public stance of being christian, his anti-abortion stance, etc.
2. Many people will vote against Kerry because of his anti-Vietnam war stance. There are still many unhealed wounds over the issue in this country, and there are many who believe that we were 100% right in the matter and therefore anyone who criticises is wrong.
3. Large portions of the populace that is damaged most by Bush's policies (particularly the 18-30 set) are the same group that historically don't vote. I was constantly fustrated in college by the vast amount of otherwise smart people who wouldn't bother to vote - I drove 9 hours roundtrip in a 12 hour time period to vote 4 years ago because I missed the deadline to vote by mail. Many of my friends could have cared less.
4. In the strongly two-party system that the US has, many people vote strictly on party lines without bothering to think about their choice.
5. Many people in the US are very ignorant and have no desire to change that. In the dorms, I was one of two or three people (out of ~90) who bothered to get a newspaper (this was before this interweb thing made it easy to get news online). A terrifyingly large portion of the populace believes that there was a direct connection between Sadam and 9-11, and that makes them feel that the invasion of Iraq was justified. Simularly, they hear statements from Bush about all the new manufacturing jobs that have been created, and never bother to find out that he's including fast food burger preparation as a manufacturing job.
The media has stoppped doing a good job of reporting, and the administration has done a good job of keeping information from the people and the press.
6. People are stupid. You'll find examples all over the world. Bush just happens to be our manifestation of it.
Except that Knoppix will happily install to your hard drive. It may not be pretty-shiney(tm) like some installers, but I don't find these to be "complex workarounds":
h tm l. htm l
http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/debian-knoppix.
http://www.freenet.org.nz/misc/knoppix-install
---
Historically and in some countries this has been the case. Is there evidence to support this statement now, in Britain?
---
I don't know, why don't you ask Japanese-Americans who were alive during WWII, or someone suspected of being involved with communism or labour during the 50s in the United States about how free citizens of the United States are? Or how about leaders of civil rights? You are aware of the fact that the *FBI* attempted to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr., are you not?
The United States is far different culturally and politically than either Europe or Cuba.
And how many honest critiques of the Cuban government have you seen that were state funded?
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My suggestion to fix this problem is a minor change in copyright law. Change the law so that artists cannot sign away the copyright to their work. If you want to reduce the share of the middlemen and still get the artist paid what the market is will for the quaility of work you need to ensure the artist controls his product.
---
Middlemen are a necessarily evil for most people because they either lack the time, moxy, or ability to do many things themselves. I *could* grow veggies for much less than I pay for them in the grocery store, but I lack the time and desire to do that. Most musicians can't or won't deal with getting products to the stores, nor do stores have time to deal with all 100,000 bands that would like to sell their music.
No one forces bands to sign with big labels. It's been well known since the begining of the business how labels work.
I guess your indy shops aren't staffed by the alt-rock hotties that mine are.
I'm not talking corruption, I'm talking boring. Roads are inherently boring and uninteresting except to people who are into transportation systems. Roads have a simple purpose - get people places.
Books and music and films are supposed to be interesting. If everything was funded by politicians, anything that could potentially offend the moral majority would be right out. Anything having to do with womens' rights, deviant sex, alternative religions, drugs. Anything that would offend the uber-left would be out. The only thing that would be left would be cookie cutter fluff that's designed to offend people as little as possible rather than inspire and intrigue people.
And actually yes, I work in the music industry for the small guys, so I know exactly how the system works. So consider this - one of the bands I've worked with for years whose last two albums (on their own dime/label) sold ~50,000 copies each. Minus production, manufacturing, advertising cost, they were prolly making $10 profit per CD. That's $1,000,000 between the two albums.
And yet, they decided to sign on with a large indy for their new album, making substantially less money per unit. Maybe you don't know quite as much about the industry as you think you do.
Part of what you don't realize is that a large chunk of the money that comes in from sucessful bands goes to subsidizing the ones that don't make it. Perhaps it sucks for the sucessful bands, but it also means that the bands that never recoup the money invested in them walk away free without having a massive debt to pay off. The actual profit to the record labels is not overly large compared to other industries.
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The problem is that it is forced upon them.
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No one forces you to listen to certain music. You won't die without music. You have the option of not listening to music, or going to the modern decendants of mp3.com and downloading it for free, or buying from local musicians, or buying popular music.
This evening I've listened to The Elastic Purejoy, The Rapture, Utris, Sinead O'Connor, Leonard Cohen, the Waterboys, Josh Ritter, and Jim White. All of them worth every penny I paid for them (and often more), and all worth supporting. Considering the thousands of hours of pleasure that I've derived from them, the $100 or so I've spent on the albums is quite small.
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Governments should therefore be stepping in to ensure most of the money goes to the creators, and that copyright monopoly only lasts until the creator receives the cost of production plus reasonable profit.
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Why stop there? Why not have the government step in to ALL industries and make sure that no one makes more than a "reasonable" (what's that, 5%) profit? Oh wait, that's been tried, it's call communism, and it's one of those systems that while it might look good on paper is a horrible idea when put into practice because people are greedy and exploit situations whenever they can.
Would you work for cost of living plus a "reasonable" profit , or do you seek to get the best situation that you can?
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Copyright only serves one purpose that I find value in-- it promotes people to create by giving them a limited-time monopoly on their creation.
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To be a really good musician, or writer, or artist, or game designer takes a lot of time and effort (and often money). Just about everything in our entire world is based on adding value through labour. The seeds that my family's farm puts in the ground cost next to nothing. The markup is technically incredible. But the effort it takes to turn those seeds into fields of $PLANT, and harvest it, transport it, put it in your grocery store is tremendous, and that's what people pay for. The main difference with digital information is not that it requires a good deal of time to create, but that you can make endless perfect copies of it. The fact remains that if you want that product to be created in the first place, it has to be feasible to pay that person to create it in the first place.
It's very hard to be a top quality musician and not devote your life to it. My sister is a professional cellist. She practices six hours a day. Most musicians have to tour to make money and promote the albums. Most "real" jobs aren't friendly to their employees just hitting the road.
I work in the music industry doing live sound and recording. I work with musicians who work day jobs and I work with professional musicians (a few weeks ago I worked with one of the guys who taught Hendrix how to play. Guess who's better?
One question for you - you advocate against intellectual property laws/against long terms of protection. What exactly do you have to loose? How many songs and books have you written? Or are you just a consumer?
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Wrong, human nature is that as long as you don't interfere with somebody else.
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Take your wallet. Put $200 in it and drop it in the street. Do this a couple times and get back to me on how much you trust human nature.
You say that information should be based on a communistic system? That's great. Do you really trust the political system to fund a network of paid musicians, movie studios, and writers (plus whatever other forms of entertainment you lump in there)? Even if the public was willing to pay more in taxes (suggesting that taxes have to be raised==political death), would you really trust any political administration in the past 100 years to fund quality entertainment?
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That damn Victoria's Secret commercial with the first few notes of "Monkey Man" got that song stuck in my head and last night I had to clear it out.
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I haven't had a TV signal in four years so I have no idea which "Monkey Man" you're refering to, but Real Rhapsody has ~25 tracks by that name (mostly the Toots and the Maytals versions, which is what I'm assuming you're refering to). So for $10/month you could listen to that and ~600,000 other on-demand tracks legally in a system that actually pays the artists (yeah, allofmp3 pays the artists $0.000001 cent per track. Yay). I'm willing to bet Napster Pro (the one that gives you the same ability to do unlimited streaming for $10/month) has the song you're looking for too. But I'm betting you have some self-rightious reason why $10/month is just toooo unreasonable to listen to whatever you want whenever you want (while attached to broadband).
(As a note, I work for a university, and have no financial ties to Real or Napster.)
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Bottom line: it's not always about free, but it is now universally about freedom.
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Oh bullshit. Peer2Peer is about the new LudiMaroonCentKim5sher songs.
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In this case, the free market deprived the US industry of a buck while getting the Russians a dime.
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No more so than me buying a car part from a known chop shop would be the free market depriving Ford of a buck. Just because you feel smug and justified for whatever reason doesn't make something "free market" based. You say you own a copy on LP. That's great, but there's no realistic way for anyone to verify that. Buy a record player for $5 at a yard sale (I got my rather nice one complete with two unused styluses that way) and go to town with an MP3 encoder.
Besides, there's just something inherently great about dropping the needle into some old Floyd.
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If, due to government regulation, I was the only person in the country allowed to write software, you might have a point. But my employment is controlled by market economics.
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And so is the music industry. Prices go all over the place. The government protection that you're complaining about isn't the same as saying that no one else can compete with you. It's the equivilant of saying that your boss can't take your work and then say, "I only feel that you're worth half of what you're supposed to get paid." You're free to buy music from people who sell it cheaply (if you live anywhere near an urban area, there's plenty of talented local musicians who'll sell you their CD for $5) or even give it away for free via mp3 or what-have-you. But if you want someone specific's music, pay what they ask for it. It's that simple.
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People want information to be free
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What people want is often not a good thing. People wanted to stone adulterers in Iran. People wanted to execute thousands during/after the French revolution. People wanted to bad alcohol before the prohibition and drugs since then. People wanted to invade Iraq. People wanted to destroy the World Trade Center.
Just because some group of people wants something and there's no way to stop them doesn't necessarily make it a good thing.
The natural progression is to outsource work to cheaper countries because people want their OMGWTF$49WalmartDVDPlayer!!@! but there are substantial costs that the common people don't recognise. Free/as cheap as possible is a very poor business model for just about everything (yes, there are exceptions). Our love for everything to be cheap will cost millions of jobs (that Slashdoters are so fond of whining about), will erode our economy, and make this country a whole lot less pleasant to live in a decade or two from now. Demanding that information be "free" will have negative effects as well.
Lastly, the funny thing about the people who loudly advocate that music/software/information should be free often seem to be the ones that contribute little to that pool of free stuff they feel that they are owed. What have you contributed to the world?
Most consumers don't bother to go see shows. It's not something that most people are interested in. As a point of information, my company has worked with the Asylum Street Spankers providing sound reinforcement, so I know exactly who and what you're talking about.
If you don't want to pay for the music, fine, but don't listen to it without paying for it. It's that simple. There's plenty of non-stale, overproduced music out there to buy. But most people would rather rip other people off, assuming they can get away with it.
Quality shops deliver quite a bit of value. The staff of the two local indy shops know me by name and taste. They offer quality suggestions (far better than anything Amazon ever has) and even set aside stuff that comes in that they think I'll like. They offer information about area shows and often sponsor them.
They're doing better than the shops in the article, but they've definately taken a bad hit from piracy and the online box houses.
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They had a server that hadn't needed a reboot for about a year and a half. At the time it was the company's only server, no backup servers, no redundancy because previous to this one they hadn't needed a server at all and it was still a reasonably small company.
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So they didn't treat their IT needs as anything serious and got smacked down for it. From your description, I'm guessing they were running Windows or maybe Linux, which means that the year and a half would have left them with several unpleasant security holes. $2,000 is not a lot of money to invest in a backup server. The failure here was at the management and admin level, not failing to reboot.
I just advised a friend who's working at her first job in video production that once she gets some experience under her belt that she needs to prepare a C.V. to go with her resume.
When she applies for positions in the future, there will be three documents that should be included. The cover letter will sell herself, telling in sentences how she thinks she can solve the company's problems. The resume will give a breakdown of the skills she has - software she's worked with, platforms, etc. The CV will be a list of shows, videos, and movies that she's made. A resume should not be cluttered with specific examples, but when hiring for a position where a variety of experience is needed, a list of what an applicant has worked on is extremely valuable.
Get over the OS X elitist attitude. I use Windows, Linux, and OS X on desktop machines. They all have good things about them. They all have bad things about them.
OS X's lack of a packaging system is a disaster as far as I'm concerned. There's no easy way to find out every program installed on the system. (No, not everything shows up in the "About this Mac" list.) There's no easy way for Joe user to know if anything other than the Apple provided software has a security flaw and automagically update it. The better Linux systems make this trivial. On my Mandrake systems, I can doubleclick an rpm file, and will automatically resolve any dependencies and install it for me. Unless Fink has come a long way since I played with it last summer, OS X can't even come close.
And many of us don't like the OS X interface (particularly the parts that they made different than OS 9/Windows/etc. just to be different). If you don't like using OS X exactly the way that Steve thinks you should, you're SOL. It's like buying a glove with four fingers. It's great if that fits your hand, but a pain if it doesn't. I know numerous novice users that hate OS X. My barely computer literate mother (~60yo) who hadn't really used a computer until five years ago or so is fine with KDE.
Sounds like a nice design. The page the user sees is primarily made up of iframes? And each iframe contains its own method of submitting a change (be it onclick or whatever) and the automagically refreshes itself to see the new information? I've done stuff like that for creating web based HTML generators, but never though of extending it to database functionality.
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I read somewhere that all of the profit that is currently made in the record industry is based off of music fans buying an average of 6 compact disks per year (I guess they average that, some buy more, some buy less).
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No offense, but "reading somewhere" doesn't make for a good argument or make it true. Most of the "music should be free" arguments come from people who have not contributed a thing to the music scene or have rode it to the top. It's funny that Courtney Love speaks out so strongly now on her rights, but didn't complain about the record company spending millions and millions of dollars transforming her public image from the drugged up widow of a musician to a pop star (though she's done a pretty good job of reversing that...).
The easy way to defeat your "same amount of money so why not" argument is in your own statement. Despite the fact that you could buy the majority of the tracks you referred to at one of the online music companies, you went with the dirt cheap, illegal source. Rather than making sure that the artists get some kind of money for their work and that the label gets some kind of money for their investing in the artists, you funnel money to either the russian mob or profiteers. So long as people like you will take the cheapest (or free) way out of a situation, regardless of legality or ethics, your argument will not work. The ease and cheapness of digital transmittion sees to that.
But if you want a longer version, here it is: going to an all-you-can-eat version doesn't work because it would require a significantly higher budget because a greater number of artists would have to be compensated.
The way the labels work is that they gamble on a number of artists. Some make it, some don't. The winners end up subsizing the losers, but that's part of the gamble. The vast majority of the artists never make back the money that the label put into them - browse the dollar bin of your favourite record store and marvel at how many groups you've never heard of.
Before you go off and ramble about how evil and bad this makes the label, consider this: One of the bands I've worked with hit the level that their past two albums sold ~50,000 each. Minus manufacturing cost, promos and the like, they were prolly making about $10 profit on each CD. $1 million split 5 ways over three years isn't bad. And yet, they just recently chose to sign on with a large indie label where they'll make much less per CD. If the label didn't provide real tangible benefits, why would they do that?
But back to the all-you-can-eat, the way that the winners and losers is determined is based on how the CD sells. The winners pay back the money invested in them, and then make their living off the rest. The losers pay back part of the investment, but never sell enough to recoup. The rest of that investment gets paid out of the record company's cut of the sucessful artists' sales.
However, if you made downloads free, the number of winners would shoot up dramatically, simply because there would no longer be any incentive not to download anything that had any interest to you. Even if the total pool of money stayed the same, dividing that by a larger number of artists would cut the payout. And unless you are a professional musician, don't tell me that it's easy to work a full time job and be a great musician. I work with great musicians, and they work their asses off to make the music that they do.
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I have downloaded lots of stuff I used to own on cassette but got stolen from me in a break-in at a place I used to rent. I downloaded a lot of stuff I have on albums, but can't listen to anymore.
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OK, so you've used the service semi-ethically (you're not taking into account that remastering an album for CD rather than tape or record costs a fair amount). If you trust most of humanity to do so, I've got a couple bridges to sell you.
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There is enough there that I could easily spend 10.00 a month and download stuff just t