But perhaps more to the point, it has been observed that democracies only last until people realize that they can vote themselves "free" money out of the public coffers, and the government goes broke.
Obviously that is a disease that has taken hold to some degree in America, but it would have happened in 20 years, rather than 200, had America been a "democracy".
You could also put a constitutional cap on the budget which prevents adding expenses without removing others.
But people do go to concerts, even though it costs ten or twenty times more than buying an album, so apparently, it provides something a recording does not. So far, independent studies have shown that illegal file sharing has a zero net effect on music purchases, for example, the Industry Canada report from 2007.
I do agree a blanket fee on Internet access is a stupid idea, though.
The post I responded to was talking about recordings being 100% free. No copyright, no protection whatsoever. But free music does not make money for bands, which is why it is very rarely "given away" on the internet -- where it's free, it's free for streaming only so that you have to buy it if you want to listen to it without visiting the band's website.
Decidedly not true. Check out Jamendo, for example, which offers complete albums for free download in MP3 or Ogg format. Some of the bands there are great - I'm partial to Diablo Swing Orchestra myself.
SLRP: The suggested list retail price of a CD is currently $16.98, while the standard wholesale price -- what retail stores pay the label per CD -- is about $10. Once the retailer gets the CD, they can sell it for however much they'd like -- hence "suggested." Artist's royalties are a percentage of the retail price. Superstars can get 20 percent of the SLRP, but most get 12 percent to 14 percent.
I've seen other estimates which are lower, but this was the only citation I could find for now. Online sales through the record label usually pay a few percent units less.
Half-pint HAL wrote:
You may be interested to know that most musicians I know are still selling CDs. In fact, most musicians I know still say that direct sales of their CDs at concerts is the main source of income (they get over 50% from direct sales).
Perhaps, but a study from the Norwegian School of Management shows that CD sales have never accounted for more than 20% of the income of music artists, on the average. It's based on Norwegian artists, but the figures shouldn't be drastically different for other developed nations.
Half-pint HAL wrote:
Music is a musician's business, and taking away the ability to profit from music takes away their ability to profit.
I'd say that music is a way of life, and getting paid for it is just a way to be able to do it full-time. The supply of artists has always been greater than the demand for them, and most artists have never been able to support themselves from their music.
That being said, artists are able to produce more than twice as many albums today as ten years ago:
Overall production figures for the creative industries appear to be consistent with this view that file sharing has not discouraged artists and publishers. While album sales have generally fallen since 2000, the number of albums being created has exploded. In 2000, 35,516 albums were released. Seven years later, 79,695 albums (including 25,159 digital albums) were published (Nielsen SoundScan, 2008). (Harvard study cited by Michael Geist)
But all of his statement rests upon Tolkien and Evangelion. If his statement is that important, he should seek to make it more generic instead. That I would support.
While you were reading literature, I was watching Anime...simple, effective, not able to infringe on anybody's IP.
What do you think of scientists and engineers who earn money from using, for example, Newton's equations, without contributing any substantial creative qualities?
What do you think of publishers who earn money from printing the works of Shakespeare or Homeros?
Well, that would be covered under Right of Publicity, but in general the difference is that you are reporting real life events or at least adding your own creative qualities to it, in a more substantial fashion than this button. And really, do you imagine that somebody who wrote articles based on what other people reported would be well-advised to do it without permission? I guarantee that would be a journalism issue.
That's not the case. Journalists base news items on the reports of other journalists all the time. In some (but not all) cases, you can see the journalist has noted the source as another newspaper at the beginning of the article.
Popular science magazines usually do NO original work - they base ALL their reporting on research articles or articles in other popular magazines. Only the most prestigious magazines, like Scientific Ameican, hire researchers to write popular articles on their own research.
You just informed the world you have absolutely no idea what the hell you are talking about. This is defacto, how the entire world of literary print functions. Period. Unless you are already a big established name, you either work as described, entirely fund your own printing, or are never printed. Period.
Publishers who ask the writer to pay to get their book published are usually referred to as "vanity presses" in the industry. They often accept any manuscript, no matter how bad, since they make their money from the writer, not the reader. For the same reason, they often do a very bad job - for example, format the book incorrectly, misspell words on the title page, or don't bother to do any marketing.
Self-publishing is when you take on the role as publisher yourself - you submit a more or less finished book to the printer and do editing, marketing and sales yourself. Self-publishing *can* work out if you're prepared to do all the work and are really sure of the quality of the book.
Right. Meaning, you just completely invalidated your own position and validated my own. If most books are largely not profitable, this only means the sole hope of reaping a return is longer copyright and lower payouts up front; forcing everyone to benefit, where possible, in the long term.
I think the hope of reaping a return in the long run is a vain one. If the book doesn't have significant sales in the first three years, it's most likely a failure and will never have significant sales.
The sad truth is that competition on the writing market is very tough, and most writers are destined to fail - as it has always been. You either need to belong to the very most talented writers, do a great job at marketing, or be very lucky to have any success.
I know you're just a troll, but for the benefit of anyone who reads this...
Artists have seen an average increase in revenues because of many factors and trends, none of which have to do with piracy.
Well, I'm not saying artists are better off *because* of pirating - there's not sufficient evidence for that. I'm just saying that if filesharing has a negative effect, it's so small that it's overshadowed by other factors.
Pirating *can* have a positive effect on the income of artists, if the money people save by pirating is spent on goods and services from which the artist receives a larger percentage. There are studies showing that the people who pirate the most music are also those who go to the most concerts and spend the most money on music overall. It seems that people don't pirate to save money, they pirate to get access to a wider assortment of music for the same money.
Of course you can - when you have a huge fan base who was willing to fund you up front thusly allowing the luxury of not charging.
Actually, the small artists are likely to benefit the most from offering their music for free. It allows music to be shared freely between listeners, which works as a form of viral marketing.
The biggest artists can afford traditional marketing (TV commercials, newspaper ads, paying radio stations to play their songs, etc) and are more likely to benefit from copyright.
Today, there are a number of artists who release their music for free and earn enough to get by. They're not getting rich from it - but neither were they before. It has always been the case that most artists earn very little and do it because they enjoy it, not because the money is good.
Then again, unless you're an absolutely idiot, why would anyone want to give up 10%. When you have nothing, 10% can be the difference of surviving or not.
It's not 10% of the artist's income. It's 10% of the sales price of the CD. (Although there's a Norwegian study showing that Norwegian artists on average earn between 10% and 20% of their income from CD sales.)
Well, I'd like to give Tolkien's heirs the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they're just following their lawyers' advice, and believe they HAVE to sue everyone who uses Tolkien's name in a commercial context or risk losing the trademark.
The guy is just making buttons with a statement *about* Tolkien's books. It's not like he's trying to pass it off as a genuine Tolkien quote, much less an actual Tolkien book.
If that was illegal, shouldn't it also be illegal to write unauthorised biographies (capitalising on the fame of other people), reviews (capitalising on other people's works of fiction), or news reports (capitalising on events one did not create)?
He could have solved the problem by licensing the right to use the name and content for a symbolic fee. He actually did something similar when a British school forgot to ask permission to base a play on one of his books - Pratchett asked for a ticket to the play and promised to waive the fee if he liked it (which he did).
Actually, I'm against copyright because I believe it's unnecessary; on the whole, it doesn't make much difference for the incomes of creators. In fact, music artists have on the average seen their revenues increase since filesharing took off ten years ago, since more musicians now bypass the record companies and offer their music for free on the Internet. Since only roughly 10% of the sales price of a CD goes to the artist, it's possible to earn more money by offering the music for free and getting your fans to buy merchandise and go to concerts instead.
No, I don't think you do understand. Are you willing to pay $100 per book, or more, for what currently costs $5? Didn't think so. Its likely that what you're bitching about is what allowed his works to be printed in the first place. Basically you're ignorantly arguing that his works should have never been published.
Tolkien wrote his books partly as a distraction from the war, and partly as a distraction from his work as a language professor. Did the possibility that his books would become a world-wide success and enable his inheritors to collect a steady rent over several decades, really motivate him to write more or better?
Extremely unlikely that statement is true. If you hold a patent, you are required to defend it else you lose the patent.
That's only true for trademarks. And it's unlikely the Tolkien trademark would be threatened by a button which refers to him.
I have a friend who is an author of several books. He'll be lucky to clear $30,000 over the next TWENTY YEARS on a book which took him over a year to write. Get it through your heads, authors, like almost all who depend on copyright, accept much, much lowers fees up front so as to allow them to hopefully make something on the back end, which in turn allows for an accessible price point for the masses.
Books rarely make any money beyond the initial printing. If your friend accepts a lower up-front payment in the hopes of earning it back later, there's a possibility he's being scammed.
For the vast majority of books, copyright doesn't need to last longer than it takes to print the book, because there's never a second printing. If copyright was reduced to, say, three years, most authors wouldn't be affected at all.
The Internet was funded by governments and universities, not commercial companies, and the technology which enables it has always been free (as in speech).
Trademarks do not grant the right to profits made from the trademark. For example, if I draw a satirical cartoon of someone famous, they are not entitled to part of the profit when I sell the cartoon, just because I make use of their likeness. If I write a biography over someone, and it sells well just because the person is well-known, it doesn't entitle them to a percentage of the sales, even if I use their name in the title.
Trademark protection exists in order to make it easier for consumers to distinguish competing brands. It doesn't exist to protect a company's investment into marketing. Why would society bear the cost for that? If a company makes investments that are not profitable, it's their responsibility to make better investments.
It's a very limited form of censorship since it only affects commercial use, but it still looks like an abuse of the trademark system to me.
The purpose of trademarks is to make it easier for consumers to recognise products of a certain brand. If a competing product has a similar name or look, it may confuse the customers, and it's believed that the market works better if consumers can clearly distinguish brands.
The purpose of trademarks is not to grant companies or persons the exclusive right to use certain words, symbols or phrases - that's only a means to the end. Trademarking a word, phrase or symbol does not entitle the trademark holder to income from commercial use of them. It's not like copyright or patents.
Which leads to the question, in what way does a button using the word "Tolkien" confuse consumers? Nobody is likely to believe the text on the button was written by Tolkien - it only has the word "Tolkien" in it because it is a comment on Tolkien. Saying it's trademark infringement is like saying a biography over Walt Disney is infringing because it has the word "Disney" in the title.
No? What if it was commercials of a computer-simulated Martin Luther King, urging everyone to vote Republican?
What if it was a porno featuring Marilyn Monroe doing a "2 boys 1 cup" with Bobby and JFK?
That would certainly be offensive, but I wonder if publicity rights really are needed to prevent it. For example, Abraham Lincoln's, George Washington's or Thomas Jeffersson's publicity rights are not being protected by anyone, and they're not being used in offensive commercials either. A company which did that would likely be subject to public outrage and maybe even boycotts.
Slashdot Mirror
But perhaps more to the point, it has been observed that democracies only last until people realize that they can vote themselves "free" money out of the public coffers, and the government goes broke.
Obviously that is a disease that has taken hold to some degree in America, but it would have happened in 20 years, rather than 200, had America been a "democracy".
You could also put a constitutional cap on the budget which prevents adding expenses without removing others.
Or if you're a lawyer.
Please mod parent Insightful.
But people do go to concerts, even though it costs ten or twenty times more than buying an album, so apparently, it provides something a recording does not. So far, independent studies have shown that illegal file sharing has a zero net effect on music purchases, for example, the Industry Canada report from 2007.
I do agree a blanket fee on Internet access is a stupid idea, though.
I'm sure glad things like that don't happen here in the West!
Hm, the help for VMWare Workstation said it wasn't possible, at least in earlier versions.
Great idea.
You may already know this, but there's an open source clone of Civlization 2 called FreeCiv. Works great on Windows XP and Linux.
It doesn't have the advisor videos, of course.
Sorry, VMWare can't run inside VMWare.
The post I responded to was talking about recordings being 100% free. No copyright, no protection whatsoever. But free music does not make money for bands, which is why it is very rarely "given away" on the internet -- where it's free, it's free for streaming only so that you have to buy it if you want to listen to it without visiting the band's website.
Decidedly not true. Check out Jamendo, for example, which offers complete albums for free download in MP3 or Ogg format. Some of the bands there are great - I'm partial to Diablo Swing Orchestra myself.
The Root:
SLRP: The suggested list retail price of a CD is currently $16.98, while the standard wholesale price -- what retail stores pay the label per CD -- is about $10. Once the retailer gets the CD, they can sell it for however much they'd like -- hence "suggested." Artist's royalties are a percentage of the retail price. Superstars can get 20 percent of the SLRP, but most get 12 percent to 14 percent.
I've seen other estimates which are lower, but this was the only citation I could find for now. Online sales through the record label usually pay a few percent units less.
Half-pint HAL wrote:
You may be interested to know that most musicians I know are still selling CDs. In fact, most musicians I know still say that direct sales of their CDs at concerts is the main source of income (they get over 50% from direct sales).
Perhaps, but a study from the Norwegian School of Management shows that CD sales have never accounted for more than 20% of the income of music artists, on the average. It's based on Norwegian artists, but the figures shouldn't be drastically different for other developed nations.
Half-pint HAL wrote:
Music is a musician's business, and taking away the ability to profit from music takes away their ability to profit.
I'd say that music is a way of life, and getting paid for it is just a way to be able to do it full-time. The supply of artists has always been greater than the demand for them, and most artists have never been able to support themselves from their music.
That being said, artists are able to produce more than twice as many albums today as ten years ago:
Overall production figures for the creative industries appear to be consistent with this view that file sharing has not discouraged artists and publishers. While album sales have generally fallen since 2000, the number of albums being created has exploded. In 2000, 35,516 albums were released. Seven years later, 79,695 albums (including 25,159 digital albums) were published (Nielsen SoundScan, 2008). (Harvard study cited by Michael Geist)
But all of his statement rests upon Tolkien and Evangelion. If his statement is that important, he should seek to make it more generic instead. That I would support.
While you were reading literature, I was watching Anime...simple, effective, not able to infringe on anybody's IP.
What do you think of scientists and engineers who earn money from using, for example, Newton's equations, without contributing any substantial creative qualities?
What do you think of publishers who earn money from printing the works of Shakespeare or Homeros?
Well, that would be covered under Right of Publicity, but in general the difference is that you are reporting real life events or at least adding your own creative qualities to it, in a more substantial fashion than this button. And really, do you imagine that somebody who wrote articles based on what other people reported would be well-advised to do it without permission? I guarantee that would be a journalism issue.
That's not the case. Journalists base news items on the reports of other journalists all the time. In some (but not all) cases, you can see the journalist has noted the source as another newspaper at the beginning of the article.
Popular science magazines usually do NO original work - they base ALL their reporting on research articles or articles in other popular magazines. Only the most prestigious magazines, like Scientific Ameican, hire researchers to write popular articles on their own research.
You just informed the world you have absolutely no idea what the hell you are talking about. This is defacto, how the entire world of literary print functions. Period. Unless you are already a big established name, you either work as described, entirely fund your own printing, or are never printed. Period.
Publishers who ask the writer to pay to get their book published are usually referred to as "vanity presses" in the industry. They often accept any manuscript, no matter how bad, since they make their money from the writer, not the reader. For the same reason, they often do a very bad job - for example, format the book incorrectly, misspell words on the title page, or don't bother to do any marketing.
Self-publishing is when you take on the role as publisher yourself - you submit a more or less finished book to the printer and do editing, marketing and sales yourself. Self-publishing *can* work out if you're prepared to do all the work and are really sure of the quality of the book.
Right. Meaning, you just completely invalidated your own position and validated my own. If most books are largely not profitable, this only means the sole hope of reaping a return is longer copyright and lower payouts up front; forcing everyone to benefit, where possible, in the long term.
I think the hope of reaping a return in the long run is a vain one. If the book doesn't have significant sales in the first three years, it's most likely a failure and will never have significant sales.
The sad truth is that competition on the writing market is very tough, and most writers are destined to fail - as it has always been. You either need to belong to the very most talented writers, do a great job at marketing, or be very lucky to have any success.
I know you're just a troll, but for the benefit of anyone who reads this...
Artists have seen an average increase in revenues because of many factors and trends, none of which have to do with piracy.
Well, I'm not saying artists are better off *because* of pirating - there's not sufficient evidence for that. I'm just saying that if filesharing has a negative effect, it's so small that it's overshadowed by other factors.
Pirating *can* have a positive effect on the income of artists, if the money people save by pirating is spent on goods and services from which the artist receives a larger percentage. There are studies showing that the people who pirate the most music are also those who go to the most concerts and spend the most money on music overall. It seems that people don't pirate to save money, they pirate to get access to a wider assortment of music for the same money.
Of course you can - when you have a huge fan base who was willing to fund you up front thusly allowing the luxury of not charging.
Actually, the small artists are likely to benefit the most from offering their music for free. It allows music to be shared freely between listeners, which works as a form of viral marketing.
The biggest artists can afford traditional marketing (TV commercials, newspaper ads, paying radio stations to play their songs, etc) and are more likely to benefit from copyright.
Today, there are a number of artists who release their music for free and earn enough to get by. They're not getting rich from it - but neither were they before. It has always been the case that most artists earn very little and do it because they enjoy it, not because the money is good.
Then again, unless you're an absolutely idiot, why would anyone want to give up 10%. When you have nothing, 10% can be the difference of surviving or not.
It's not 10% of the artist's income. It's 10% of the sales price of the CD. (Although there's a Norwegian study showing that Norwegian artists on average earn between 10% and 20% of their income from CD sales.)
Well, I'd like to give Tolkien's heirs the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they're just following their lawyers' advice, and believe they HAVE to sue everyone who uses Tolkien's name in a commercial context or risk losing the trademark.
The guy is just making buttons with a statement *about* Tolkien's books. It's not like he's trying to pass it off as a genuine Tolkien quote, much less an actual Tolkien book.
If that was illegal, shouldn't it also be illegal to write unauthorised biographies (capitalising on the fame of other people), reviews (capitalising on other people's works of fiction), or news reports (capitalising on events one did not create)?
Sounds like they're trying to copyright ideas, which isn't, and shouldn't be, possible.
He could have solved the problem by licensing the right to use the name and content for a symbolic fee. He actually did something similar when a British school forgot to ask permission to base a play on one of his books - Pratchett asked for a ticket to the play and promised to waive the fee if he liked it (which he did).
Actually, I'm against copyright because I believe it's unnecessary; on the whole, it doesn't make much difference for the incomes of creators. In fact, music artists have on the average seen their revenues increase since filesharing took off ten years ago, since more musicians now bypass the record companies and offer their music for free on the Internet. Since only roughly 10% of the sales price of a CD goes to the artist, it's possible to earn more money by offering the music for free and getting your fans to buy merchandise and go to concerts instead.
No, I don't think you do understand. Are you willing to pay $100 per book, or more, for what currently costs $5? Didn't think so. Its likely that what you're bitching about is what allowed his works to be printed in the first place. Basically you're ignorantly arguing that his works should have never been published.
Tolkien wrote his books partly as a distraction from the war, and partly as a distraction from his work as a language professor. Did the possibility that his books would become a world-wide success and enable his inheritors to collect a steady rent over several decades, really motivate him to write more or better?
Extremely unlikely that statement is true. If you hold a patent, you are required to defend it else you lose the patent.
That's only true for trademarks. And it's unlikely the Tolkien trademark would be threatened by a button which refers to him.
I have a friend who is an author of several books. He'll be lucky to clear $30,000 over the next TWENTY YEARS on a book which took him over a year to write. Get it through your heads, authors, like almost all who depend on copyright, accept much, much lowers fees up front so as to allow them to hopefully make something on the back end, which in turn allows for an accessible price point for the masses.
Books rarely make any money beyond the initial printing. If your friend accepts a lower up-front payment in the hopes of earning it back later, there's a possibility he's being scammed.
For the vast majority of books, copyright doesn't need to last longer than it takes to print the book, because there's never a second printing. If copyright was reduced to, say, three years, most authors wouldn't be affected at all.
*sigh*
The Internet was funded by governments and universities, not commercial companies, and the technology which enables it has always been free (as in speech).
Trademarks do not grant the right to profits made from the trademark. For example, if I draw a satirical cartoon of someone famous, they are not entitled to part of the profit when I sell the cartoon, just because I make use of their likeness. If I write a biography over someone, and it sells well just because the person is well-known, it doesn't entitle them to a percentage of the sales, even if I use their name in the title.
Trademark protection exists in order to make it easier for consumers to distinguish competing brands. It doesn't exist to protect a company's investment into marketing. Why would society bear the cost for that? If a company makes investments that are not profitable, it's their responsibility to make better investments.
It's a very limited form of censorship since it only affects commercial use, but it still looks like an abuse of the trademark system to me.
The purpose of trademarks is to make it easier for consumers to recognise products of a certain brand. If a competing product has a similar name or look, it may confuse the customers, and it's believed that the market works better if consumers can clearly distinguish brands.
The purpose of trademarks is not to grant companies or persons the exclusive right to use certain words, symbols or phrases - that's only a means to the end. Trademarking a word, phrase or symbol does not entitle the trademark holder to income from commercial use of them. It's not like copyright or patents.
Which leads to the question, in what way does a button using the word "Tolkien" confuse consumers? Nobody is likely to believe the text on the button was written by Tolkien - it only has the word "Tolkien" in it because it is a comment on Tolkien. Saying it's trademark infringement is like saying a biography over Walt Disney is infringing because it has the word "Disney" in the title.
No? What if it was commercials of a computer-simulated Martin Luther King, urging everyone to vote Republican?
What if it was a porno featuring Marilyn Monroe doing a "2 boys 1 cup" with Bobby and JFK?
That would certainly be offensive, but I wonder if publicity rights really are needed to prevent it. For example, Abraham Lincoln's, George Washington's or Thomas Jeffersson's publicity rights are not being protected by anyone, and they're not being used in offensive commercials either. A company which did that would likely be subject to public outrage and maybe even boycotts.
You're right, it has nothing to do with copyright.