Someone should change the author of this book and re-distribute that way, then he will learn merits of piracy.
Oh yes, let's not forgot how JK Rowling's publishers also live in fear of the terrible damage it might do to their sales if copies of Harry Potter started being sold with the words "By Joe Freetard" written on them.
Seriously - since when has anyone (even the RIAA!) ever indicated that malicious mis-attribution of works was even remotely a problem?
Think about it: Would you be happy if, at the end of the week, your employer declares bankruptcy and doesn't pay your for the last two weeks/80 hours worth of work? Copyright infringement IS the same thing. It's theft of labor (an artist works to create a song; you take the product for your own enrichment).
By which analogy you mean that if a publisher goes out of business because of the freetards, then the artists they are publishing don't get any money?
Hmm. Not sure if that makes any sense in the context of this conversation when a) most artists' contracts pay the artist up front (book advances, record deals) and b) the net makes artists free either to sell to their fans directly and take all the money for themselves (Radiohead, Trent Reznor, and several thousands of others on MySpace, etc.), or simply change publisher.
Either way - they STILL have their work. They have NOT been "deprived" of it.
COPYING IS NOT THEFT. IT CANNOT AND WILL NEVER BE THEFT. THERE IS NO ARGUMENT THAT MAKES IT THEFT. CAN WE PLEASE ABANDON THE WHOLE IDEA OF IT NOW?
The reason why I am screaming this is that until we get over the ridiculous notion of copyright infringement being theft, we are never going to be able constructively to address the idea of what copyright infringement should be so as to fix the damn problems it throws up.
Christ - do you want to solve this problem or not?
Personally, I wasn't too bothered by 7/7, mainly because I'd pretty much convinced myself that the whole "terrorist" thing was (and mostly probably still is) a complete storm in a teacup. Nut jobs blow things up from time to time - 7/7 was just one of those times (remember the Soho bombings a few years before?)
WIf 4.2 million cameras (most with vehicle tracking and some with facial recognition) isn't a reaction, I'm not sure what qualifies.
I've no doubt it was the start of that. But that's not relevant to my point, which was that I didn't feel unsafe after the bombings, and neither did very many other British people. The political (and media) reaction was very different, and I think it was a better one for me (if not society) than the current American one.
Riiiight, you were too busy being a British elitist ass to concern yourself with reality!
... the memory of how I kept scanning the horizon for explosions when I was driving.
Interesting. I'm British, and born when the "Troubles" started in Northern Ireland. I lived through a number of mainland bombings during that time, one of which I was very nearly injured by (the Bishopsgate bombing on 24 April 1993). The sound of the blast temporarily deafened me and a couple of people I knew were hospitalised. No 9/11 to be sure - but look at that photo.
After the bombing, I don't recall feeling unsafe in London. The English political reaction to the IRA was markedly different to the way the Americans reacted to 9/11 though. There was no security theatre - if anything rather the opposite. The mood was basically that if the bombings changed the way we lived, the IRA would be winning. So we just put up some road blocks in London and deployed armed police around sensitive areas. I would say that made ordinary English people feel pretty good about their safety. Politicians didn't talk about the IRA very much, and we all just lived our lives as normal.
You guys have had it tough I think. Not by the hands of terrorists as much as by the hands of your politicians.
just stop buying stuff advertised by spam already.
"Jeez" yourself - the days when spam was about selling stuff ended about 5 years ago. Sure, it may look like they're selling meds or something, but it's much more likely to be just one step in a bigger plan they're running.
Really - if it was as simply as following the money then do you think we wouln't have nailed spam by now?
Sigh. The guy is about 30 years old. His company has 10 people after having existed through one of the biggest economic booms of all time, and they make software and sell it.
I ask you: how could you NOT run a company like that in the way he is describing? Nobody would attempt to run a whelk stall like IBM, so how is this news?
Be that as it may, he says they are about to become 12 people. Let's hope they're all as good at doing their jobs as they think they are, because pretty soon they will know the answer. Personally, I would not want to be Jason Fried, and I certainly wouldn't want his name.
It seems like only last week when they forced us all to use chip & pin, telling us how it would be soooo much better than the old magnetic swipe system. I even heard some people saying it would *reduce* credit card fraud. In fact, I think the level of non-Internet fraud hasn't changed much - may have even gone up a bit since then.
The ONLY reason you actually need one is to travel.
Well, that and to make money, if used in the following way:
1. Open a card account that lets you get cash out into a bank account for free (there are a couple of those here in the UK)
2. Apply for a credit card with a 0% introductory "balance transfer" offer (there are many of these, some charging no fees for the transfer, others about 2-3%)
3. Pretend you have massive debt. Until recently most companies would lend you about £10K if you had a decent credit rating.
4. Get them to "pay off" the card you opened in Step 1.
5. Move that money from the card in Step 1 into a high-interest bank account for the duration of the introductory offer (usually about 5-12 months)
6. Give the money back at the end of the period, and keep the interest. Rinse and repeat. You should be able to build up a huge amount of "debt" secretly making you money.
Of course, it kills your credit rating, and if you bank collapses, you may be utterly screwed if you're due to hand back a lot money, but it should pay for the odd plasma TV or quad bike now and then.
"The portable drive contains the names, addresses, passport numbers, dates of birth and driving licence details of around 100,000 serving personnel across the Army, Royal Navy and RAF, plus their next-of-kin details. "
Wow. Just... wow.
The person who finds this and wants to exploit it would become unimaginably rich on stolen identities for pretty much the rest of their lives. I suppose if the MoD have a record of exactly who's details were on the disk, they could re-issue things like national insurance numbers and driving licences to prevent that, but even then the possibilities for other avenues of exploitation using this information would be huge (next of kin, for pity's sake!!).
Data like this needs to be treated as if it were nuclear waste or a volatile explosive mixture. It would be just about OK to have a list of 100,000 driving licence numbers if these were kept physically separate from, say, names and addresses (eg keying them on a one-time ID), but when certain classes of data are kept TOGETHER like this, it should be every right-thinking person's reaction to scream the house down in panic.
We have to assume that at some point, all data will leak out somewhere. All we can do is to to ensure than when it does, it's not actionable. Oh, and by the way - you can forget encryption. People don't understand it and in most cases those who steal data will steal or otherwise obtain the keys as well.
this is the umpteenth time the UK gov't has lost data.
Are you reading impaired, or just an idiot?
No member of -- or person directly employed by -- the UK Government lost this data. EDS, a long-established, privately owned subsidiary of Hewlett Packard, lost this data.
If were the case, how on earth do you imagine the government would have any public accountability for anything?
It's completely beyond dispute that the buck stops with government on this. This fact that EDS is private, long-established, lives on Mars or is owned by Chuck Norris is *absolutely* irrelevant. British contract law, ethics and common sense all say that by contracting EDS, the GOVERNMENT is responsible to the PEOPLE for what EDS do.
I'm genuinely shocked that you would think otherwise!
"Probably for the same reason as I read the crappy free daily news sheets they hand out on the subway: they're free, they pass some time, and if they bore me I can throw them over my shoulder without a second thought. Nothing lost, nothing gained.
Oh, and nobody loses a sale:-)"
Copyright infringement/piracy is more like counterfeiting than stealing.:-)
They may not lose a direct sale, but over time, the original owner trying to sell the song/software, etc..will lose money. In people's minds, it's worthless...which is exactly what you have just proven with your statements.
What you say would be true, were it not for the fact that the free newspapers have a successful business model. I'd assumed that point was obvious - otherwise why would they undertake the costs of compiling, printing and distributing them?
Incidentally, your point about counterfeiting shows you may not have RTFA, which points out that it's far from clear if counterfeiting actually harms economies in the long run anyway.
If it's crappy, why is getting pirated? That doesn't make sense.
Probably for the same reason as I read the crappy free daily news sheets they hand out on the subway: they're free, they pass some time, and if they bore me I can throw them over my shoulder without a second thought. Nothing lost, nothing gained.
If everyone trades music, video, and software without paying for them, we will have heavily reduced funding for the creation of music and video, since the only potential income will be concerts/screenings/merchandising
You say that as if that would be a bad thing.
This is where so many people seem to get stuck. It's NOT about selling music any more. It's about selling what goes *around* music. Call it a "tertiary" industry in music: just as in standard market economics, a primary industry is one that supplies a secondary one, and a tertiary industry is one that supplies services enabled by that. So, in music, the artists are the primary producers, and the publishers are the secondary producers.
What we are now seeing is the welling up of something that will become a tertiary industry. Quite what that is isn't clear, but it's happening.
I don't know anyone that will buy music again. It is available for free and that is how people get it.
Do you know people who will go to gigs? Do you know people who will see films with their favourite band's music in? Do you know people who will buy their bands t-shirts? Do you know people who will attend events at which their bands are signing autographs?
Most artists (as opposed to their publishers and labels) make very little from sales of recorded music. They make it from *other* stuff that those sales enable. Madonna signed up to Live Nation for this reason - she makes more money from gigging.
The problem with music sales is that it makes money not for artists but for the music industry that has nothing to do with creating music and everything to do with making money from it. In seeking to milk every penny from listeners from music sales, the industry leeches from established artists and prevents new ones from coming through.
You can put up your music for purchase just about anywhere, but "who's gonna buy it, kid - you?".
I suppose you've not heard of LastFM, MySpace, or bands like the Arctic Monkeys. What makes you think the net does not allow people to discover new music? If anything, it's *more* likely that new artists will gain an audience on MySpace or through P2P and recommendation networks than they will by signing a record contract. After that, their fortunes depend on whether they are in fact any good, of course.
I wasn't impressed when Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead released music for free, because they sure weren't doing that 10 years ago when they needed the money.
Well, to quote Rob Myers on this, answering some common criticisms of Radiohead's "In Rainbows" release.
"A less popular band would not make as much money:
This is trivially true. It is also true of recording-industry-based album releases. So it is not a specific criticism of this business model. Rather it is a fact of life regarding music: you need an audience to sell to in order to make money by selling music to your audience.
What is important is that more of the money from this business model goes to the band. So a less popular band would make more money this way than from receiving royalties for CDs, all other things being equal."
you still have to get anyone to want to listen to your music at all.
And that is where the net comes in. Sure, MySpace or Sellaband or The Pirate Bay may not give you free chicks and M&M's, but they do give you a way of allowing people to listen to you. Once *enough* people are listening to you, then I think you'll find other things happen which lead to getting paid (like gigs, merch, licensing deals, collaborations, films, etc.). If (and only if) you are good enough though.
One thing that I think often gets overlooked in all this is that just because you dedicate your life to music doesn't mean your music is any good. If you music is awful and nobody likes it then you deserve not to be a success.
"In the Pew study "Artists, musicians and the Internet" (2004), 78 percent of 2,755 responding musicians had a second job, while 41 percent earned less than twenty percent of their income from musicâ"related activities. According to a GEMA (German collecting society) insider, only about 1,200 German composers can live from their creative output."
Now, how many people working in the German music industry in 1992 who were *not* composers could live from their work in 2004?
they are undermining the market in which the artists' work is sold to the end consumer
You say "the market in which the artists' work is sold." I think you may be confusing artists with publishers. The point is that for artists, TPB clearly offers a new route to market. Artists (traditionally) don't bear costs of distribution - they sell some of their assumed worth to a separate industry (publishing) to bear that cost. Artists like Radiohead and Trent Reznor have perhaps made a great deal of money from bypassing their publishers and going to their fans directly over the net, but it's far too early to say whether that might work for others.
Be that as it may, do you have any evidence to show that the market is in fact being undermined? If so, please cite it. My own research indicates that it's still far from clear whether illegal downloads have brought about a decrease in revenues from music overall (as opposed to just one facet of it, like CDs).
I suspect the assumption that every illegal download is a lost sale is in fact incorrect. When it comes to music, and possibly other media too, it's a very substitutable commodity - if Duke Ellington doesn't do it then Fats Domino might just as well. Can you disprove the possibility that in having access to free and unregulated distribution, artists may find audiences, and more importantly, subsequent revenue streams, that they might otherwise not have had? Certainly, if you talk to most artists (as opposed to their publishers) about money, they'll tell you it's live performances and merchandising that makes them the bulk of their income. There also appears to be a great deal of music being made and listened to now - perhaps more than ever before if you include worldwide markets just getting a foothold (Korean metal, Indian pop, etc.). This is partly due to lower costs of recording and the rise of new genres - but also not doubt in some way cheap distribution. If the "lost sale" argument held, you would not expect that to be the case. Less profit for distributors maybe, but for many artists, selling recorded music isn't the be all and end all, and hasn't been for the last 20 years. We must also not forget other factors that the likes of TPB may facilitate such as the re-discovery of music that would otherwise be lost to traditional strictures of back catalogues and sales targets. All these things combine to enrich and diversify music and art to create more art, and ultimately more money for artists.
Bear in mind though I fully accept that in deregulated free distribution channels, many artists may find no audiences and no money. That, I am afraid, is life. There is no divine right to make money from your art if nobody pays it any attention. So, perhaps the opposite idea is also true: many established artists today would never have found audiences had they only been given the type of distribution that TPB allows. Who is to say that in a parallel world, Britney Spears is not working in McDonalds?
I think this is unlikely to happen, but if it does then the P2P networks will get rather more traffic, thereby providing even more proof that the publishing industry just doesn't understand what's happening. Every time they try to throw their weight around like this, it make them weaker and the darknet stronger.
Be that as it may, there is an inaccuracy in the BBC's reporting on this. They say:
"Apple pays an estimated 70% of digital music revenue to record companies which in turn pass on a percentage to artists [my emphasis]. It is that percentage that is expected to be changed on Thursday."
Actually, I think the National Music Publishers' Association pays this percentage to songwriters and composers of works via the publishers that the NMPA represents. And (surprise!) the publishers cream off between 3 to 15%. In many cases the composers are not the same as the artists that perform the works, and many will in fact be dead (the money goes to their relatives, estates or licensees, or nowhere if these cannot be found).
But who cares? The way the money works in music is - to say the least - opaque. With the exception of a tiny minority of super-stars like Cliff Richard and Simply Red, when you listen to your favourite band, you are listening to indentured servants. What will happen when we realise that the copyright system overall is completely iniquitous? In 1994 (MMC, 1996), 10 UK composers received more than £100,000 (from performing and mechanical royalties). How many people working in the UK music industry that year who were not composers earned more than £100,000?
These guys are leeches. Artificial middlemen not just creaming off the profit from others' labour, but removing every last penny and walking off with it.
Are you saying TPB divert money to themselves that would have otherwise gone to artists? How is that happening exactly?
Is there no case to say that by allowing free and highly efficient distribution of artists work, they are in fact facilitating the conditions in which artists can escape obscurity and stand a chance of earning money they would not have otherwise got?
I for one would prefer millionaires made from helping any and all artists reach an audience (or die trying) than millionaires made from deciding which artists I should know about and which I should not.
"If the only stuff that gets pirated is DRMed, they'll have to stop the DRM nonsense, now won't they?"
There's some logic in that. There's also some logic in this:
I would never buy Spore, simply because I'm not a gamer. I'd never heard of the game until now. The whole idea of spending hours in front of my screen pretending I'm an amoeba or whatever is ridiculous. BUT, seeing that there's all this fuss about the cracked version being available etc., I might just d/l it and give it a whirl. Hey, it'll be free!
Now, clearly they've not lost a sale, because I'd never buy it, BUT I might JUST get hooked. I might THEN become a fan, I might THEN give them some of my money. If not, they've still not lost a sale.
THAT is the logic these people need to understand. It's obscurity, not "piracy" they need to fear.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone should change the author of this book and re-distribute that way, then he will learn merits of piracy.
Oh yes, let's not forgot how JK Rowling's publishers also live in fear of the terrible damage it might do to their sales if copies of Harry Potter started being sold with the words "By Joe Freetard" written on them.
Seriously - since when has anyone (even the RIAA!) ever indicated that malicious mis-attribution of works was even remotely a problem?
Think about it: Would you be happy if, at the end of the week, your employer declares bankruptcy and doesn't pay your for the last two weeks/80 hours worth of work? Copyright infringement IS the same thing. It's theft of labor (an artist works to create a song; you take the product for your own enrichment).
By which analogy you mean that if a publisher goes out of business because of the freetards, then the artists they are publishing don't get any money?
Hmm. Not sure if that makes any sense in the context of this conversation when a) most artists' contracts pay the artist up front (book advances, record deals) and b) the net makes artists free either to sell to their fans directly and take all the money for themselves (Radiohead, Trent Reznor, and several thousands of others on MySpace, etc.), or simply change publisher.
Either way - they STILL have their work. They have NOT been "deprived" of it.
COPYING IS NOT THEFT. IT CANNOT AND WILL NEVER BE THEFT. THERE IS NO ARGUMENT THAT MAKES IT THEFT. CAN WE PLEASE ABANDON THE WHOLE IDEA OF IT NOW?
The reason why I am screaming this is that until we get over the ridiculous notion of copyright infringement being theft, we are never going to be able constructively to address the idea of what copyright infringement should be so as to fix the damn problems it throws up.
Christ - do you want to solve this problem or not?
Personally, I wasn't too bothered by 7/7, mainly because I'd pretty much convinced myself that the whole "terrorist" thing was (and mostly probably still is) a complete storm in a teacup. Nut jobs blow things up from time to time - 7/7 was just one of those times (remember the Soho bombings a few years before?)
It sounds clichéd, but much of my immunity to the fear of terrorism stemmed from talking to my dad (who read modern history at Oxford). He made the obvious point that during the Blitz, upwards of 40,000 people died in the UK at the hands of extremely efficient and fanatical Nazis who bombed the crap out of Britain every night for eight months solid. He was baffled as to why we should be expected to even give the time of day to a bunch of clowns like Al Qaeda.
WIf 4.2 million cameras (most with vehicle tracking and some with facial recognition) isn't a reaction, I'm not sure what qualifies.
I've no doubt it was the start of that. But that's not relevant to my point, which was that I didn't feel unsafe after the bombings, and neither did very many other British people. The political (and media) reaction was very different, and I think it was a better one for me (if not society) than the current American one.
Riiiight, you were too busy being a British elitist ass to concern yourself with reality!
Ah, rudeness: the weak man's imitation of power.
... the memory of how I kept scanning the horizon for explosions when I was driving.
Interesting. I'm British, and born when the "Troubles" started in Northern Ireland. I lived through a number of mainland bombings during that time, one of which I was very nearly injured by (the Bishopsgate bombing on 24 April 1993). The sound of the blast temporarily deafened me and a couple of people I knew were hospitalised. No 9/11 to be sure - but look at that photo.
After the bombing, I don't recall feeling unsafe in London. The English political reaction to the IRA was markedly different to the way the Americans reacted to 9/11 though. There was no security theatre - if anything rather the opposite. The mood was basically that if the bombings changed the way we lived, the IRA would be winning. So we just put up some road blocks in London and deployed armed police around sensitive areas. I would say that made ordinary English people feel pretty good about their safety. Politicians didn't talk about the IRA very much, and we all just lived our lives as normal.
You guys have had it tough I think. Not by the hands of terrorists as much as by the hands of your politicians.
just stop buying stuff advertised by spam already.
"Jeez" yourself - the days when spam was about selling stuff ended about 5 years ago. Sure, it may look like they're selling meds or something, but it's much more likely to be just one step in a bigger plan they're running.
Really - if it was as simply as following the money then do you think we wouln't have nailed spam by now?
Sigh. The guy is about 30 years old. His company has 10 people after having existed through one of the biggest economic booms of all time, and they make software and sell it.
I ask you: how could you NOT run a company like that in the way he is describing? Nobody would attempt to run a whelk stall like IBM, so how is this news?
Be that as it may, he says they are about to become 12 people. Let's hope they're all as good at doing their jobs as they think they are, because pretty soon they will know the answer. Personally, I would not want to be Jason Fried, and I certainly wouldn't want his name.
It seems like only last week when they forced us all to use chip & pin, telling us how it would be soooo much better than the old magnetic swipe system. I even heard some people saying it would *reduce* credit card fraud. In fact, I think the level of non-Internet fraud hasn't changed much - may have even gone up a bit since then.
The ONLY reason you actually need one is to travel.
Well, that and to make money, if used in the following way:
1. Open a card account that lets you get cash out into a bank account for free (there are a couple of those here in the UK)
2. Apply for a credit card with a 0% introductory "balance transfer" offer (there are many of these, some charging no fees for the transfer, others about 2-3%)
3. Pretend you have massive debt. Until recently most companies would lend you about £10K if you had a decent credit rating.
4. Get them to "pay off" the card you opened in Step 1.
5. Move that money from the card in Step 1 into a high-interest bank account for the duration of the introductory offer (usually about 5-12 months)
6. Give the money back at the end of the period, and keep the interest. Rinse and repeat. You should be able to build up a huge amount of "debt" secretly making you money.
Of course, it kills your credit rating, and if you bank collapses, you may be utterly screwed if you're due to hand back a lot money, but it should pay for the odd plasma TV or quad bike now and then.
From TFA:
"The portable drive contains the names, addresses, passport numbers, dates of birth and driving licence details of around 100,000 serving personnel across the Army, Royal Navy and RAF, plus their next-of-kin details. "
Wow. Just... wow.
The person who finds this and wants to exploit it would become unimaginably rich on stolen identities for pretty much the rest of their lives. I suppose if the MoD have a record of exactly who's details were on the disk, they could re-issue things like national insurance numbers and driving licences to prevent that, but even then the possibilities for other avenues of exploitation using this information would be huge (next of kin, for pity's sake!!).
Data like this needs to be treated as if it were nuclear waste or a volatile explosive mixture. It would be just about OK to have a list of 100,000 driving licence numbers if these were kept physically separate from, say, names and addresses (eg keying them on a one-time ID), but when certain classes of data are kept TOGETHER like this, it should be every right-thinking person's reaction to scream the house down in panic.
We have to assume that at some point, all data will leak out somewhere. All we can do is to to ensure than when it does, it's not actionable. Oh, and by the way - you can forget encryption. People don't understand it and in most cases those who steal data will steal or otherwise obtain the keys as well.
Are you reading impaired, or just an idiot?
No member of -- or person directly employed by -- the UK Government lost this data. EDS, a long-established, privately owned subsidiary of Hewlett Packard, lost this data.
If were the case, how on earth do you imagine the government would have any public accountability for anything?
It's completely beyond dispute that the buck stops with government on this. This fact that EDS is private, long-established, lives on Mars or is owned by Chuck Norris is *absolutely* irrelevant. British contract law, ethics and common sense all say that by contracting EDS, the GOVERNMENT is responsible to the PEOPLE for what EDS do.
I'm genuinely shocked that you would think otherwise!
"Probably for the same reason as I read the crappy free daily news sheets they hand out on the subway: they're free, they pass some time, and if they bore me I can throw them over my shoulder without a second thought. Nothing lost, nothing gained.
Oh, and nobody loses a sale :-)"
Copyright infringement/piracy is more like counterfeiting than stealing. :-)
They may not lose a direct sale, but over time, the original owner trying to sell the song/software, etc..will lose money. In people's minds, it's worthless...which is exactly what you have just proven with your statements.
What you say would be true, were it not for the fact that the free newspapers have a successful business model. I'd assumed that point was obvious - otherwise why would they undertake the costs of compiling, printing and distributing them?
Incidentally, your point about counterfeiting shows you may not have RTFA, which points out that it's far from clear if counterfeiting actually harms economies in the long run anyway.
If it's crappy, why is getting pirated? That doesn't make sense.
Probably for the same reason as I read the crappy free daily news sheets they hand out on the subway: they're free, they pass some time, and if they bore me I can throw them over my shoulder without a second thought. Nothing lost, nothing gained.
Oh, and nobody loses a sale :-)
If everyone trades music, video, and software without paying for them, we will have heavily reduced funding for the creation of music and video, since the only potential income will be concerts/screenings/merchandising
You say that as if that would be a bad thing.
This is where so many people seem to get stuck. It's NOT about selling music any more. It's about selling what goes *around* music. Call it a "tertiary" industry in music: just as in standard market economics, a primary industry is one that supplies a secondary one, and a tertiary industry is one that supplies services enabled by that. So, in music, the artists are the primary producers, and the publishers are the secondary producers.
What we are now seeing is the welling up of something that will become a tertiary industry. Quite what that is isn't clear, but it's happening.
I don't know anyone that will buy music again. It is available for free and that is how people get it.
Do you know people who will go to gigs? Do you know people who will see films with their favourite band's music in? Do you know people who will buy their bands t-shirts? Do you know people who will attend events at which their bands are signing autographs?
Most artists (as opposed to their publishers and labels) make very little from sales of recorded music. They make it from *other* stuff that those sales enable. Madonna signed up to Live Nation for this reason - she makes more money from gigging.
The problem with music sales is that it makes money not for artists but for the music industry that has nothing to do with creating music and everything to do with making money from it. In seeking to milk every penny from listeners from music sales, the industry leeches from established artists and prevents new ones from coming through.
You can put up your music for purchase just about anywhere, but "who's gonna buy it, kid - you?".
I suppose you've not heard of LastFM, MySpace, or bands like the Arctic Monkeys. What makes you think the net does not allow people to discover new music? If anything, it's *more* likely that new artists will gain an audience on MySpace or through P2P and recommendation networks than they will by signing a record contract. After that, their fortunes depend on whether they are in fact any good, of course.
I wasn't impressed when Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead released music for free, because they sure weren't doing that 10 years ago when they needed the money.
Well, to quote Rob Myers on this, answering some common criticisms of Radiohead's "In Rainbows" release.
"A less popular band would not make as much money:
This is trivially true. It is also true of recording-industry-based album releases. So it is not a specific criticism of this business model. Rather it is a fact of life regarding music: you need an audience to sell to in order to make money by selling music to your audience.
What is important is that more of the money from this business model goes to the band. So a less popular band would make more money this way than from receiving royalties for CDs, all other things being equal."
you still have to get anyone to want to listen to your music at all.
And that is where the net comes in. Sure, MySpace or Sellaband or The Pirate Bay may not give you free chicks and M&M's, but they do give you a way of allowing people to listen to you. Once *enough* people are listening to you, then I think you'll find other things happen which lead to getting paid (like gigs, merch, licensing deals, collaborations, films, etc.). If (and only if) you are good enough though.
One thing that I think often gets overlooked in all this is that just because you dedicate your life to music doesn't mean your music is any good. If you music is awful and nobody likes it then you deserve not to be a success.
the system exists primarily to support itself, compensating the artists is a secondary objective
And that's not just conjecture. Have a look at this study.
"In the Pew study "Artists, musicians and the Internet" (2004), 78 percent of 2,755 responding musicians had a second job, while 41 percent earned less than twenty percent of their income from musicâ"related activities. According to a GEMA (German collecting society) insider, only about 1,200 German composers can live from their creative output."
Now, how many people working in the German music industry in 1992 who were *not* composers could live from their work in 2004?
Nuff said.
they are undermining the market in which the artists' work is sold to the end consumer
You say "the market in which the artists' work is sold." I think you may be confusing artists with publishers. The point is that for artists, TPB clearly offers a new route to market. Artists (traditionally) don't bear costs of distribution - they sell some of their assumed worth to a separate industry (publishing) to bear that cost. Artists like Radiohead and Trent Reznor have perhaps made a great deal of money from bypassing their publishers and going to their fans directly over the net, but it's far too early to say whether that might work for others.
Be that as it may, do you have any evidence to show that the market is in fact being undermined? If so, please cite it. My own research indicates that it's still far from clear whether illegal downloads have brought about a decrease in revenues from music overall (as opposed to just one facet of it, like CDs).
I suspect the assumption that every illegal download is a lost sale is in fact incorrect. When it comes to music, and possibly other media too, it's a very substitutable commodity - if Duke Ellington doesn't do it then Fats Domino might just as well. Can you disprove the possibility that in having access to free and unregulated distribution, artists may find audiences, and more importantly, subsequent revenue streams, that they might otherwise not have had? Certainly, if you talk to most artists (as opposed to their publishers) about money, they'll tell you it's live performances and merchandising that makes them the bulk of their income. There also appears to be a great deal of music being made and listened to now - perhaps more than ever before if you include worldwide markets just getting a foothold (Korean metal, Indian pop, etc.). This is partly due to lower costs of recording and the rise of new genres - but also not doubt in some way cheap distribution. If the "lost sale" argument held, you would not expect that to be the case. Less profit for distributors maybe, but for many artists, selling recorded music isn't the be all and end all, and hasn't been for the last 20 years. We must also not forget other factors that the likes of TPB may facilitate such as the re-discovery of music that would otherwise be lost to traditional strictures of back catalogues and sales targets. All these things combine to enrich and diversify music and art to create more art, and ultimately more money for artists.
Bear in mind though I fully accept that in deregulated free distribution channels, many artists may find no audiences and no money. That, I am afraid, is life. There is no divine right to make money from your art if nobody pays it any attention. So, perhaps the opposite idea is also true: many established artists today would never have found audiences had they only been given the type of distribution that TPB allows. Who is to say that in a parallel world, Britney Spears is not working in McDonalds?
I think this is unlikely to happen, but if it does then the P2P networks will get rather more traffic, thereby providing even more proof that the publishing industry just doesn't understand what's happening. Every time they try to throw their weight around like this, it make them weaker and the darknet stronger.
Be that as it may, there is an inaccuracy in the BBC's reporting on this. They say:
"Apple pays an estimated 70% of digital music revenue to record companies which in turn pass on a percentage to artists [my emphasis]. It is that percentage that is expected to be changed on Thursday."
Actually, I think the National Music Publishers' Association pays this percentage to songwriters and composers of works via the publishers that the NMPA represents. And (surprise!) the publishers cream off between 3 to 15%. In many cases the composers are not the same as the artists that perform the works, and many will in fact be dead (the money goes to their relatives, estates or licensees, or nowhere if these cannot be found).
But who cares? The way the money works in music is - to say the least - opaque. With the exception of a tiny minority of super-stars like Cliff Richard and Simply Red, when you listen to your favourite band, you are listening to indentured servants. What will happen when we realise that the copyright system overall is completely iniquitous? In 1994 (MMC, 1996), 10 UK composers received more than £100,000 (from performing and mechanical royalties). How many people working in the UK music industry that year who were not composers earned more than £100,000?
I'm betting that it was rather more than 10.
There was a time when sex was interesting. Now it's just boring.
These guys are leeches. Artificial middlemen not just creaming off the profit from others' labour, but removing every last penny and walking off with it.
Are you saying TPB divert money to themselves that would have otherwise gone to artists? How is that happening exactly?
Is there no case to say that by allowing free and highly efficient distribution of artists work, they are in fact facilitating the conditions in which artists can escape obscurity and stand a chance of earning money they would not have otherwise got?
I for one would prefer millionaires made from helping any and all artists reach an audience (or die trying) than millionaires made from deciding which artists I should know about and which I should not.
"Music is being killed "
Not from where I'm standing. There's more live music, more bands, more creation of music and musical forms now than ever before as far as I can tell.
Did you mean "CD sales by old, shit, or otherwise irrelevant artists" are being killed? If so, I'd agree with that - and long may that death continue.
"If the only stuff that gets pirated is DRMed, they'll have to stop the DRM nonsense, now won't they?"
There's some logic in that. There's also some logic in this:
I would never buy Spore, simply because I'm not a gamer. I'd never heard of the game until now. The whole idea of spending hours in front of my screen pretending I'm an amoeba or whatever is ridiculous. BUT, seeing that there's all this fuss about the cracked version being available etc., I might just d/l it and give it a whirl. Hey, it'll be free!
Now, clearly they've not lost a sale, because I'd never buy it, BUT I might JUST get hooked. I might THEN become a fan, I might THEN give them some of my money. If not, they've still not lost a sale.
THAT is the logic these people need to understand. It's obscurity, not "piracy" they need to fear.