It seems to me that, as usual, both sides have good points here. Consumers demand the right to try before they buy with music and other entertainment products. The entertainment industry sees that as being a way to avoid buying at all because today's technology allows people to easily make copies of the product. One of the things industry needs to do is figure out how to track popularity via something other than album sales.
A big problem is that the artists are caught in the middle on this one. They want wide exposure, which can come through bootlegged copies of their works being available on the 'Net. However, they also want to be able to make money with their works, which doesn't happen anytime someone decides to grab an MP3 file and burn it onto a CD.
It seems to me that one way around this problem is to allow artists a larger percentage of the revenues accrued via their concert appearances. The problem with that is the recording industry is notorious for using accounting rules that allow charging almost all of an artist's expense against the gate receipts of that artist's concerts, leaving little or nothing for the artist to put in his/her pocket at the end of the tour.
Somehow we must devise incentives for organizations such as the RIAA to stop opposing the advance of technology. Also, accounting rules need to be changed so that artists see a larger proportion of the income from concert tours, etc. What the incentives are I don't know. We need to come up with something soon or Ernest Hollings and friends will force us to continue to live in the past via legislation that will also have the side-effect of outlawing Linux and the Open Source movement.
I look at this from the opposite side of the coin in some ways. I support the Open Source movement and contribute to it when I can because I feel it's a way of paying back my debt to all those people on the Internet that made my life as a UNIX sysadmin so much easier. Back when I was first a sysadmin I didn't know a lot about the subject so I spent hours reading newsgroups for helpful UNIX tidbits (this was back in the early 90's when the signal to noise ratio was quite high.) I think that by sharing code, ideas, and tips I'm helping to support the community from which I have derived a great deal of help and pleasure in the past.
I also think that Open Source is a great vehicle for helping people understand that true hackers, not the juvenile "crackers" so often mistaken by news organizations for people with a clue, are driven by a desire/need to create solutions to problems. I try to point out to people that hackers are by nature constructive and are not the destructive little vermin that have made life on the net difficult for those of us who remember the "good old days" before the widespread use of viruses, worms, and DDOS attacks made us fearful of contact with our neighbors. The Internet used to be a place in which you could make new friends without having to worry (so much) about your systems being taken over and used for nefarious purposes. I think it behooves those of us who are involved in Open Source to make the point that true hackers are the good guys as often as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that, as usual, both sides have good points here. Consumers demand the right to try before they buy with music and other entertainment products. The entertainment industry sees that as being a way to avoid buying at all because today's technology allows people to easily make copies of the product. One of the things industry needs to do is figure out how to track popularity via something other than album sales.
A big problem is that the artists are caught in the middle on this one. They want wide exposure, which can come through bootlegged copies of their works being available on the 'Net. However, they also want to be able to make money with their works, which doesn't happen anytime someone decides to grab an MP3 file and burn it onto a CD.
It seems to me that one way around this problem is to allow artists a larger percentage of the revenues accrued via their concert appearances. The problem with that is the recording industry is notorious for using accounting rules that allow charging almost all of an artist's expense against the gate receipts of that artist's concerts, leaving little or nothing for the artist to put in his/her pocket at the end of the tour.
Somehow we must devise incentives for organizations such as the RIAA to stop opposing the advance of technology. Also, accounting rules need to be changed so that artists see a larger proportion of the income from concert tours, etc. What the incentives are I don't know. We need to come up with something soon or Ernest Hollings and friends will force us to continue to live in the past via legislation that will also have the side-effect of outlawing Linux and the Open Source movement.
Just my $.02,
Ron
I look at this from the opposite side of the coin in some ways. I support the Open Source movement and contribute to it when I can because I feel it's a way of paying back my debt to all those people on the Internet that made my life as a UNIX sysadmin so much easier. Back when I was first a sysadmin I didn't know a lot about the subject so I spent hours reading newsgroups for helpful UNIX tidbits (this was back in the early 90's when the signal to noise ratio was quite high.) I think that by sharing code, ideas, and tips I'm helping to support the community from which I have derived a great deal of help and pleasure in the past.
I also think that Open Source is a great vehicle for helping people understand that true hackers, not the juvenile "crackers" so often mistaken by news organizations for people with a clue, are driven by a desire/need to create solutions to problems. I try to point out to people that hackers are by nature constructive and are not the destructive little vermin that have made life on the net difficult for those of us who remember the "good old days" before the widespread use of viruses, worms, and DDOS attacks made us fearful of contact with our neighbors. The Internet used to be a place in which you could make new friends without having to worry (so much) about your systems being taken over and used for nefarious purposes. I think it behooves those of us who are involved in Open Source to make the point that true hackers are the good guys as often as possible.
Just my $.02,
Ron