becoming self-sufficient beings who can solve their problems..
Forgive my ignorance in things Libertarian, but isnt it like an ultimate "dog-eat-dog", "shoot him before he shoots you", "whomever has more power owns everything here", "weak deserve to be weeded out for the good of humanity", Nietzschean Ubermensch party?
Actually, it's a people's republic of Canada thing...
Not really, depends on what type of account you get and with whom. Canada has several huge banks that run an effective cartel complete with pseudo competition and millions of kinds of nickle-and-dime-to-death trasaction fees. Smaller places like the Credit Unions tend to be more competetive and offer accounts with certain number of free ATM/Debit Card transactions. All the banks and unions however seem to charge account maintanance fees of some sort (also depends on the amount of cash you maintain in the account).
So it has nothing to do with "people's" republic of Canada but quite a bit with "big banking competition free corporate oligarchy" Canada.
Nice try though. There is a number of Canadians posting here recently who believe that everything that is going wrong in the country is a result of some kind of leftist-commie-liberal conspiracy. My tin-foil hat is firmly pointed towards corporate greed and politicians' lust for power (regardless of party allegiance). Yes, greed and lust for power, the thousands-year-old paragons of human civilisation. And if that wasn't bad enough, we got conservatives trying to spice things up with religious dogmatism, warmongering and trickle-down economics claiming that will cure all ills. And since their opponents (the Liberals) are also pals to big business and in addition they seem to be hell bent on stealing all of the money from our public coffers, we are just about stuck when it comes to making choices for the next government...
Oh yea, we also have the NDP (regular hammer-and-sickle commies by US standards) but they scare the national business elites so badly that at a mere possiblity of that party being elected we would have all the billionaires leaving in panic with their yachts and limousines so full of chash that the proverbial banknotes would fly off of the decks and out of the car windows.
$200 billion, quite a lot of money went to rebuilding Iraq - that's charity, even if a US or US friendly company benefits from it. US money is being spent rebuilding Iraq.
No its an excuse to spend 180 billion on his pals, the military contractors, 19 billion on handouts to US businesses taking over Iraq and 1 billion to friendly Iraqi political forces (numbers approximate but the spirit accurate). Thats some charity all right.
They were lying for fear of execution. It's not uncommon
No, they were lying to line their own pockets as the article explained.
As for Iraqis killed by Saddam, you have to factor in the less tangible stuff as well as more direct killings. How many palaces did Saddam build while his people starved? How much money did he funnel to his personal wealth?
You just described what is going on in most of Africa, South America, Middle East and Asia as well as some former Soviet Republics. Perheaps you should enlist in the US army, they will need your help to go beat all those people up.
Alberta thrives, and Saskatchewan's economy suffers and our population is *shrinking*!
Perheaps other then agriculture there is no significant industry in that province and agriculture is going to hell world-wide due to the wonders of WTO. What makes you think Saskatchewan and not Bejing is the place to setup that next hi-tech plant thats being built? You cannot compete, since you want more than one bowl of rice per day, an insolent worker that you are.
"Personal attack" means an attack on one's character, as opposed to merely an attack that's personal
Maybe thats what they teach at the Conservative Academy of Twisted Wordplay but thats not what I and a vast majority of people you are likely to run into believe. It was an attack. On me. Personally. Which part of me is irrelevant. Could be my character or my left foot. I understood it the way nearly everyone would: "a personal attack = attack on my person". I responded. Next thing you will be using the enthymology of the word "fuck" to debate its meaning as a word used to attack people and try to convince me it was meant as a mild expletive of surprise. In that context of course. And if I fail to dissect every word, punctuation and whitespace of your reply, it will be taken as an implicit surrender.
Of course, you'll just call me a liar, but out of ignorance or spite, not because you know me to be wrong.
Oh wait, wouldn't this be, like, a personal attack? By your own definition too. Spite, ignorance? So you are right because anyone who disagrees is a liar or an idiot? I think I understand your position now. By some weird coincidence that is the same very world view that just about every believer of "conservative" philosophies I run into pronounces sooner or later. Go figure.
So what is the government doing up there? Setting up a bolshevik revolution, red flags waving and all? Nationalizing oil? Imprisoning anyone who has more then 10 bucks and sending them to a Gulag? You cannot be serious. I dont believe for a minute that the oil exploration would stop at the border, unless we are talking the type of oil that takes 80% of government grants and 20% of private funds to make a "profit". Then it should stop not only there but in Alberta also. Otherwise the money to be made is just too good, no matter how bad the taxes. You gotta understand that businesses are opportunistic by nature and the only things they want from a government are: grants for "business development", no taxes, no regulation, no minimum wages and use of police if the workers revolt. Thats it. Alberta is aiming in that direction and so some of the nastier types flock there. And so does China. And guess what? The supposedly communist country has got more Fortune 500 companies then you can shake a stick at. And their "communism" does not involve burdensome things like universal healthcare. But it does involve dirt cheap labour with no rights. Manitoba has NDP in charge, left as it gets in Canada and lo and behold the business dosnt flee in droves... except when its heading to China or some place like it. If there is anything that is going to do us all in, my money is on WTO.
Saddam was killing and torturing people up till the end
Please provide a credible impartial source stating that the number of people dying this way (I doubt there were many) would be greater then what the war brought on. And I dont mean sources like people who wanted to take Saddam's place at our expense, say, Chelabi and his pals. Even if you find one (which I doubt), factor in the huge increase of world-wide hate towards US because of the war, abandoning the search for Osama, rebounding of Taliban, abandoning of Afghanistan's rebuilding, abolishment of the international law dealing with aggression, $200 billion expenses, etc etc.
His gov't wasn't falling apart....
You must be kidding, his authority eroded so badly that his top level commanders were lying to him about their army's capabilities, scientists were
lying about weapons. He had no longer any clue what was going on. That is the final stage of a collapse of a dicatorship.
It's personal, but not a personal attack.
You are making me laugh. You should consider running for office. "The bottle is empty, but it is not an empty bottle". Kudos, you should be able to survive in politics with no trouble.
Alberta is doing OK with it, despite being a nasty horrible right wing government
Alberta has 20 billion tax revenue (2002), while Saskatchewan 6. Perheaps if fate has given you some oil wells...
So Alberta happened to be wealthier due to geographical and historical circumstances and on top of that, in addition to having an advantage of scale, Klein added fee based funding. Klein's government agenda is nothing short of total destruction of the public healthcare and replacing it with private insurance/private hospital system and he will stop at nothing to achieve that even if most Albertans oppose it (yea thats how wondeful it is). That is why Klein is talking about abandoning federal healthcare funds (even if it will hurt everybody in Alberta) just so he can privatize it for his friends. So you comparing yourself to Alberta is total crock. Compare to Manitoba. Much closer fit. Guess what, we are doing fine under NDP, thank you. And the public for the most part knows it, probably because the lying propagandists of privatisation were exposed publically a few times here, trying to make up waiting list numbers and putting chronic hypochondriacs on display whining about not being able to get an MRI every second week.
Seeing as I don't want US style health care - just a few private MRI clinics and the like - this is irrelevant.
No such thing as "just a few". With our proximity to the utimate in greed based health systems just next door and doctors just green with envy, just a few is all it takes to start the feeding frenzy of greed. "Just a few" is equivalent to "lets privatise progresively instead of all at once". So yes, by wanting "just a few" you do want a US system, even if you fail to realize it.
Pakistan is far from the totalitarian state that Iraq was
I know, that is why Musharraf was elected the President and thats why he lawfully retains absoulte control over lawmaking and executive branches of government. Right. Window dressing notwithstanding (Saddam had a parliament too, you know). I think you should look up the term "totalitarian". The only major difference is that Musharraf doesnt put his statue on every corner. Oh, and that he, unlike Saddam, actually has nukes. But I see, because Pakistanis do better economically that is the yardstick by which you measure "better off". I guess Saudi Arabia or Quatar are beacons of freedom then.
Removing him saved lives. The lives of Iraqis.
You mean that allowing that corrupt government to fizzle out (as everyone who bothered to investigate knows the regime was totally out of touch and falling apart on its own) and trying to stimulate a peaceful transition ala Eastern Europe would be more bloody? Did you seriously fall for all that claptrap about WMD's and Saddam poised to launch the World War III with his made-in-1965 ex-soviet peashooters? Or his Al-Queda membership? Him who Osama called the evil communist? War in Iraq had nothing to do with saving lives and everything to do with power games of domination and control. Lives are not a factor in such games other then a PR scoring point. If Saddam were in power still, his government would be at the brink of collapse and there wouldnt be tens of thousands dead and hundreds dying every week in explosions. And it is anyone's guess what the final tally will be. My bet is that following an Al-Queda sponsored, 3-way civil war between the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiias we will be talking millions. War to save lives... now, there is a distortion of reality if I ever saw one. Saddam's great killing sprees ended looong ago and he was in the twilight of his days of power just like all the attrocities of the Eastern Europe governments were decades old and what remained was corruption and harrasment of dissidents... level of opression very much like in Saudi Arabia or Quatar today.
"Fuck you" is not a personal attack.
Try that on your boss or a cop or some Hells Angels dude on the street. You will quickly find out how truly impersonal it is.
I live in Saskatchewan. You know what our left wing government does to us? I keeps our MRIs...
What you do not seem to realise that there are several factors at play here, some of which are:
- governments of any stripe just as any private enterprise (ever hear of bankrupcy?) can be incompetent and not being able to manage money or medical equipment
- many healthcare workers and doctors are greedy and quite willing to sabotage the whole system to make a killing when things go private and thus prone to keeping MRIs not running full capacity, overprescribing the test to fill the devices capacity etc etc.
- for the same reasons, the people who wish to make a killing on privatisation also tend to create an illusion of great efficiency by collaborating to make the "for pay" version seem speedy and affordable while the public one unuseable. As soon as this "for pay" version is the only option, while it remains speedy, the "affordable" part disappears in a hurry. Oh, and any two-tier manouvers always lead to all the medical workers wanting to work for the one which has greater pay. Guess what happens to the public one if they all spend 100% of their time trying to get out of it for their slice of the "bonanza".
- private clinics have to get paid by someone and would have to serve the same number of patients as current public ones and turn a profit. Tidy one at that. What do you suppose the overall cost will be? Add at least 50% to our current cost. Are you not aware of
efforts within US to reduce their truly gigiantic and costly (much more expensive then ours, nearly double per-capita) system by introducing Canadian style administration? See, turns out we spend a fraction (3%) of the money on administration while they spend 30%. Add 27% to our current cost. Small "use" fees? Thats how they start. Once you get that, its just a matter of "improving service" and "offerring new options" before the fees are on par with the US. You do realize that 1/7 (43 million) of all US citizens do not have any medical insurance or benefits? That dying from uncured illness is a normal thing among those people? But then on the other hand, doctors in the US are over
twice as
richas ours. I wonder if there is any connection. No... scratch that, actually I believe that this item alone is one of the leading causes of all of our equipment and resource "shortages".
While problems and wait lists and all sorts of other crap happens with our medicare, the solution is most certainly something other then throwing the whole thing over to the opportunistic hyenas lurking in the dark and waiting for easy spoils.
... at least not about the total number killed...
That is not the point. Noone claims that Saddam is a saint. Murderous, imbecillic dictator? Sure. Number of dead? Huge, 150.000 of them alone killed by allies in the first gulf war (remember the Highway of Death?). War to remove him? Impractical, ill-advised, badly planned, rush, worst alternative of all choices. Anyone with a brain knew this beforehand although the general public seems to be waking up only now and spin control is in full force. Iraq is just about gone. International laws fucked. Support for US world-wide abysmal. Osama Bin Laden? Having a field day setting up new network in previously near-unreachable to him Iraq, quite a comeback after actually getting near defeated in Afghanistan.
Bushists did make up so many imbecillic lies and overexaggerations that noone can tell if "gasing the Kurds" was a PR stunt (over an Iranian war crime) designed to enrage people into believing that Saddam is about to nuke New York.
Real agendas of neo-cons are suspected by many to be different and quite contrary to the public chest beating displays.
Also, then, because of their lack of physical nature, passwords, financial statements, and a whole host of other sensitive information that most of us would prefer to keep private is then suddenly available to the public by its very nature.
You are really desperate about trying to make this unworkable defense work. The fact that the information has no owner, does not prevent you from keeping it secret. Repeat after me: secrecy is not the same as ownership. Somethimng being secret does not equal having an owner. So when someone asks you for a PIN, you say "fuck off". But when you yourself write your PIN on the walls of every public toilet, you can no longer take advantage of its secrecy. Noone is making you give it to anyone. Noone is demanding that you produce information for all to see. But once it is in the open, it is no longer controllable. It is quite a simple concept and I cannot fathom why you cant comprehend it. Why is it that you think that if something has no owner that it means someone can come and demand that you deliver it? Think vacuum. It has no owner. When was the last time someone came to you and demanded that you give him vacuum? How about gravity? How many people harass you to give them more gravity? You are having serious difficulties with these concepts I see. That combined with some sort of persecution complex where you imagine everyone coming to you demanding that you deliver the 100 millionth digit of the number PI or get shot.
As a side note on the factory concept, you've assumed that we've paid for the owner. To keep the metaphor accurate to what I've been trying to say, we've never paid the factory owner a dime. You haven't paid the music maker, have you? You still have his stuff, however.
I dont have anything because the "musician's stuff", unlike the one made by the factory, cannot be had. All I ended up with are some vibrations in the air from a car radio. Besides the factory analogy falls apart further down the line since the items the factory makes cannot be reproduced in millions by everyone at a flick of a switch in their CD-burners. Real items and real property are material and not easilly dupliacted in copious numbers by an 8-year old at no cost and with little effort.
The recording company then sells the *legal right to reproduce the performance under specified conditions*. Without that grant of license you have no *legal* right to reproduce the recorded performance, whatever you think your moral rights might be.
What you just described is the current legal nosense situation that leads to all the crap we were discussing ad nauseum earler. Yes thats what the state into which the laws were perverted. I am not sure what your point is, my position is that this situation is unacceptable, grants the studios sweeping powers out of line with any other industry, trumps everyones civil liberties and will lead to quite a bit more then loss of "moral rights" when applied to things like DNA sequencing. Not to mention a wee little bit that you as a purchaser do not sign any wavers removing your rights of "first sale" when you walk in to the music store to "buy" the music. Err.. no..actually to "enter into a one-sided, legally binding, changeable at any time, contract" with the recording company by just the act of breathing air. While you describe perfectly the attempts to control something that is not fitting the mold of "property" by legal manouvering and trickery, I fail to see how this is supposed to advance your argument.
The performance *is* property by definition.
Whose? Certainly not mine and many others. Not only by applying that definition we end up with all sorts of logical conundrums, we also end up with consequences that truly frighten those who have the foresight to see them.
The law defines a property right in original expression.
The laws used also to define the "rights" of a southern Plantation Owner to his slaves. The fact that something is described by law does not make it sensible, moral or exempt it from being put there at a bidding of greedy thieves with power. It is up to us to decide if these law edicts have the moral power to be any more respectable than toilet paper.
The people who build a house build it for the general contractor, who pays them for their performance and either provides the materials or reimburses the workers' materials expenditures. The workers have a claim on the general contractor for the goods and services provided to him, and in turn the general contractor has a property right in the finished house until you pay for it, even if it exists on land that you already own free and clear.
Please point out anything I said which contradicts any of that. The house is a physical property, distinct to that of a piece of land. The word "land" was not even mentioned by me. It would help if you were to try to refrain from making things up, only so that you can have something to refute.
A person has DNA. They have no choice in that matter. They have it
And if it is "modified" by someone to differ from the "natural" sequence, the "new" sequence is now, according to you , "a creation" and thus can be owned by the author and have royalties collected on.
Everything man-made starts with an individual, and as such, that individual should get credit for whatever it is that he or she has done..
Credit is not synonymous with instant cash. Money can come from creations but not via the "private property" route of thinking. I am not advocating not paying artists or inventors. I am advocating that the system by which such payments occur has to be radically refurbished because the current one has totally uncontrollable and frightening consequences. And that is because noone designed it with forethought, it just haphazardly happened by applying a simplistic notion of "property" to something that does not have the needed attributes to fit that mold.
You claim no right to the musician's guitar, only to whatever he produces with it.
Not at all. I claim that noone has the right to what he produces with it because what he produces is information that cannot have an "owner".
.. man's factory, but everything that he produces out of it is mine, without payment.
You see how desperately confused you get by trying to use the "property" mold to information? This is nothing like it, because as I repeatedly mentioned, the factory produces physical, tangible, individual items that are property and can be sold and bought. And so the owner is entitled to do with them what he wishes, including selling them to recoup his expense of labour, machinery and materials. But once he sells them, he no longer controls them and the new owners can go on selling them or doing whatever they want with them. Music is nothing remotely like it. In the current braindead system, once you "sell" it, you still own it because the "purchaser" has no right to do what he wants with it. If you were to apply it to the factory example, that would be like the factory owner selling his items, collecting his money and then believing he still owns the items he sold and subsequently go
busting people's doors down when they do something with them he does not approve of.
...scandal involving handing out $100 million of tax money in bribes.
I'd rather have a pack of thieves then a bunch of Bible-thumping, warmongering, healthcare-destroying, corporatist maniacs running the show.
How about gassing kurds? Saddam killed far more of his own people than this war ever will, and in far more brutal ways.
Says Bush.
CIA analysts
thought otherwise. Who is telling the truth and who is doing a snow job? Can you tell? I know you can, I am sure God speaks to you at night telling you what is fact and what is vicious propaganda. Your self-richeous and, oh soooo informed, attitude is a dead giveway.
You dont understand. This is not about piracy or recouping costs. These people are immoral parasites on society and they, like any good fraudster, are merely "probing" the victims willingness to get milked by slowly increasing the amount of their "take". Trying to find out how much they can get away with. No movie costs $100 million. These are their numbers, wholly made up, and dutifully reported by the gullible press. $100 million is the amount of foreign aid to Estonia in 2001 and more than that of Algeria or Guyana!. Think about it! Sure some dumbass can get paid $20 million by some idiot promoters to show her ass on screen. But that is an exception, even the overpriced primadonnas dont cost that much. Not to mention that movies rarely make money due to tax breaks on "losing" ventures the government offers to hard working movie studios who bring us classics like "Gigli".
I will keep repeating this over and over, but music, motion pictures are forms of information. Information is not property and thus cannot be bought, sold or "manufactured" like hammers and screwdrivers can. These movie shams are just more examples of an inadequate model for dealing with financial impact of information on a modern capitalist society. The current model of "information as property" is deeply flawed.
At the risk of self-promotion, I had a lively discussion here about it.
...however society decided that it was a GOOD IDEA to have copyright so that someone COULD...
No. Kings decided that an ability to copy politicaly charged works by the unwashed masses would spell trouble. Thus "A Right To Copy" aka. Copyright was born starting with joyous pieces of legislature like the
Licensing Act of 1662. Followed by a long line of opportunist profiteers who sought to mold the tool of oppression into their license to print money. Check your facts first.
You dont honsetly think that copyright is good for big compaines do you?.. Copyright is for the little guy...
Loooong laughter. Disney. Mickey Mouse. 90 years+ and counting.... Microsoft. Warner Brothers. Vivendi. MGM....
Oh brother, small guy he says!. Thank you, that was quite a funny joke.
Good slave is a dumb one who thinks he is free. Best slave is the dumbest one who not only thinks himself free but counts himself as a peer to the masters and actively defends their agenda... of keeping him a slave.
We recognize that the company only has rights to that series of numbers in a given context.
That has been long broken as anyone can witness from the advent of domain names. As soon as new places where one's "property" can bring money are invented, the "rights" are extended into them. So while true originally, the "contexts" of these properties are now so large that are beginning to border on being unlimited. Witness the patents for "business models" or on ideas of "using a mouse to click on things" etc.
Does that mean we should abandon all property rights
and go to intellectual anarchy or communism?
None of these socio-economical systems had anything to do with this originally. Information is simply not covered by them. These simplistic 19th century economic models (along with capitalism as Adam Smith would have it) are simply not equipped to deal with information and thus information is not subject to their rules. Round peg, square hole situation. I am attempting to offer some ideas on constucting some sane addendum to capitalist model that would cover the creation and flow of information in a capitalist society.
And so you propose to throw out a system that finds true value fantasically well, and replace it..
Fantastically well? You mean to tell me that Britney Spears contributed more then Einstein to the advancement of humanity? She certainly made more money! How about Madonna? Or Bill Gates versus someone like Turing or Babage? You must be kidding me. All the current McMusic system produces is medioker "product" to be "consumed" by the masses. "Product" they dont need and would not likely have bought were it not for continuous and all-pervasive advertising of it, artificial cultural pressures and myriad of other underhanded trickery. "Art" is but a tiny fraction of what is going on. Patronage system will produce art because it has done so for millenia past. McMusic system will produce a huge pile of plastic waste and gigiantic, undeserved profits for the few conmen who run it.
Or inclination, since I've been forced to work in a factory rather than as a professional programmer by the open source people.
If the demand for your labour as a progammer was artificially inflated by abuse of the law, then you need to find other job. If not, then you still get paid for the service of customizations and consulting, and if you are really, really good, you can get a sponsor and donate to high-profile projects while being paid for it. You work, you get paid for your time. You dont get paid a million times for working once.
Really? Please specify then which Canadian or US TV network has more of it. CBC is not perfect by a long shot. I just dare you to show me some major TV news outlet which was not waving flags while competing as to who is going to come up with the most slimey way to herd the public into the neocon's wet dream of conquest and bloodletting.
I grow tired of repeating myself to all those who are not clever enough to read the link that was posted in my first article of this thread not to mention all those other times I mentioned "tiny" problems with ownership of DNA, integer numbers, mathematical formulas, ownership of your body by someone else, taxpayer subsidies for the "information" industies, private taxes on storage media, law mandated DRM systems that result in removal of computer media from the realm of free-speech and put under full control of totalitarian moguls. I could go on but its a waste of time. Some people are just to dense and no matter how many times this is mentioned by me and countless others, they will be stuck on their pet song: "Mine! All mine! I! ME! ME! I! I Deserve! I have right to all I see! Pay me! Pay me! Everything is property! And its all mine!". It has nothing to do with "free" stuff, and everything to do with the fact that some things cannot be subject of the capitalist model. Property is physical. I dont advocate getting "free" stuff by taking your neighbours car. Or the musicians guitar.
...novel aloud, that does not suddenly put it public domain..
How about reading it aloud on radio? TV? From a tower with a megaphone? No you dont own the thoughts you put down on paper. If you cant get to grips with that, dont put them down. We dont want to read them anyway because they will be in most likelyhood: "Me! Mine! All mine! Pay!"
In the case of a recording, the artist sold the performance to the recording company. The recording company then sells the ability to reproduce...
No , because the "ability to reproduce" is freely obtainable (or at next to no cost) to everyone with a PC, tape recorder etc. The "service" is wothless and that is not what is being sold. Pieces of plastic are being sold while supposedly all the data on them is "intellectual property" and not yours to be had. All you pay for is the plastic or in case of pay-as-you-go downloads... nothing. This process is more commonly known as swindling the gullible. If the performance is not live that means the musician is no longer working and no loner entitled to pay. Something like a carpenter who after building a house for you (and getting paid for it) would try to move in and demand that you feed him for life while he bums around.
The artist could not have "sold" the performance in the first place because the performance is not a piece of property, all he coul have sold is his labour while performing.
Do you think that, just because the carpenters and plumbers have already done their work, you can tell your general contractor, "thanks for the house," and take the house without paying him?
You are supposed to pay them for their labour (just like a musicians performance) and the physical materials of the house. The general contractor is their represantitive, presumably after entering with a contract with them to dispense the pay. They both do "live" performance of building the house and managing the paperwork/materials and what have you. I fail to see what are you trying to point out here that supposedly deviates from what I already described.
thats crap.. I have been in the music industry... 90% of my income came from... SOLD ON CD... as pay is CRAP for live performances... How..?
By realizing there is no such thing as "music industry". There are only musical artists and performers and these are few and far in between. Appeal of their art and its rarity is what brings people to their concerts. You are indoctrinated into believing that having a million bands all making a living on 1 song re-sold for centuries is a normal and desirable state of affairs. It is not.
Yes! Bring back the patron system! Nuts to our democratic free market of information!
I hate to dissapoint, but not everything in the universe falls neatly into Adam Smith's capitalist model. Some things are not property or labour and thus cannot be marketed, free market style or otherwise. And an attempt by zealot believers in the Deity of Capitalism to do so in this case is becoming more and more ridiculously unmanagable.
A professional CD can take hundreds of hours by all band members and several technicians, and costs several tens of thousands of dollars to compose. Add to this the cost of artwork, CD duplication, packaging, shipping, storage, and you've got one whopper of a figure.
If it is true than there is no market for such CDs other then specialty collector market. Having a feed from a stage mixer going into a digital recorder and being cleaned up via software by some expert kid in order to create "better sounding" mp3 for promotion/distribution is a fraction of this. You are trying to make it sound like all these insane costs are absolutely neccessary, forgetting that this stuff is supposed to capture live performance (if its any good). Packaging/shipping and related duplication costs will be the same for all (including unauthorized bootlegers) and will be a part of the media price everyone competes evenly on. If noone buys this, it shouldnt have been made in the first place and an mp3 on a website is all thats needed. If someone wants "studio" sound, some other arrangements would have to be made (like pre-payment for the specialty item). The band does not own the music data (as information is not property) and should reconsider if it wants to be in CD duplication business at all. Greed is what makes musicians go that route because, as the perverted laws stand now, with a CD you can spend 2 weeks + 20 grand and record a disk that will pay you handsomely for the next 40 years. The minor problem of fucking up everybody with DRM and draconian copy protection laws that we all end up paying for is not their concern.
Or I could get into the thousands of hours, sleepless nights, loans for equipment, fights, failed/cancelled gigs, auditions, demo tapes (production costs entirely stomached by the aspiring musician(s)) and countless other expenses entailed with beginning your career.
Which of course are all recouped by admission fees to the event if the band is any good. If they are lousy and cant draw the crowd, tough shit. All of that is the cost of gambling on a business like any other. The world is littered with remains of failed businesses on which someone spent their retirement money (equipment loans, fights, failed/cancelled contracts, sales demos etc etc). Again, we are supposed to feel sorry for musicians who choose to gamble in high-risk area with huge potential rewards. After all they are sooo much more special then a someone trying to open a donut shop. Next.
This good example perfectly illustrates that information (in this case the market research for the location etc) does not behave in the same fashion as physical objects that can be called "private proprerty".
Unfortunately, examples like this are a legion, but those who see greed ahead of logic will find them not convincing. They have "something" they think is "theirs" and they gonna "keep it" even after they "sell" it to you. Multiple times, preferrably. That is the logic of greed.
And if the information-producers don't like the terms
We are talking capitalist societies. If the "artist" himself finds it "beneath him" to bother then a crowd of 3rd party discount operators will step in offering "faster downloads then the next dude!", "0.10 cents per album with 10x download speed or free at snails pace!", "Custom CDs with funky labels for $5!" etc etc. The "producers" will deliver because there are still huge money to be raked in from concerts and merchendise and what not. Its just that their mega-billion-dollar, cookie-cutter, overexposed, overpromoted, "music-idol" (think Miss Spears) gravvy train has come to its final destination. Not it will merely rake in 10s of millions instead.
Nothing wrong with this but thats not what they are doing. They charge for the information on the media instead and demand that the laws of the land protect that information as if it were a physical, unique object.
And that is what leads to all the other nonsense and explosive effects in other parts of the social landsacape.
Abolishing the virtual-contracts is not in our mutual interrest: they want to produce music, we want to listen to it
What I describe, can be put in your terms simply as a new contract, stating that performance of music is what is being paid for by the consumer and not the numerical sound wave data on a piece of plastic. This doesnt alter my fundamental premise.
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I believe that was the assumption when Germans voted for the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.
Forgive my ignorance in things Libertarian, but isnt it like an ultimate "dog-eat-dog", "shoot him before he shoots you", "whomever has more power owns everything here", "weak deserve to be weeded out for the good of humanity", Nietzschean Ubermensch party?
Not really, depends on what type of account you get and with whom. Canada has several huge banks that run an effective cartel complete with pseudo competition and millions of kinds of nickle-and-dime-to-death trasaction fees. Smaller places like the Credit Unions tend to be more competetive and offer accounts with certain number of free ATM/Debit Card transactions. All the banks and unions however seem to charge account maintanance fees of some sort (also depends on the amount of cash you maintain in the account).
So it has nothing to do with "people's" republic of Canada but quite a bit with "big banking competition free corporate oligarchy" Canada.
Nice try though. There is a number of Canadians posting here recently who believe that everything that is going wrong in the country is a result of some kind of leftist-commie-liberal conspiracy. My tin-foil hat is firmly pointed towards corporate greed and politicians' lust for power (regardless of party allegiance). Yes, greed and lust for power, the thousands-year-old paragons of human civilisation. And if that wasn't bad enough, we got conservatives trying to spice things up with religious dogmatism, warmongering and trickle-down economics claiming that will cure all ills. And since their opponents (the Liberals) are also pals to big business and in addition they seem to be hell bent on stealing all of the money from our public coffers, we are just about stuck when it comes to making choices for the next government...
Oh yea, we also have the NDP (regular hammer-and-sickle commies by US standards) but they scare the national business elites so badly that at a mere possiblity of that party being elected we would have all the billionaires leaving in panic with their yachts and limousines so full of chash that the proverbial banknotes would fly off of the decks and out of the car windows.
No its an excuse to spend 180 billion on his pals, the military contractors, 19 billion on handouts to US businesses taking over Iraq and 1 billion to friendly Iraqi political forces (numbers approximate but the spirit accurate). Thats some charity all right.
They were lying for fear of execution. It's not uncommon
No, they were lying to line their own pockets as the article explained.
As for Iraqis killed by Saddam, you have to factor in the less tangible stuff as well as more direct killings. How many palaces did Saddam build while his people starved? How much money did he funnel to his personal wealth?
You just described what is going on in most of Africa, South America, Middle East and Asia as well as some former Soviet Republics. Perheaps you should enlist in the US army, they will need your help to go beat all those people up.
Alberta thrives, and Saskatchewan's economy suffers and our population is *shrinking*!
Perheaps other then agriculture there is no significant industry in that province and agriculture is going to hell world-wide due to the wonders of WTO. What makes you think Saskatchewan and not Bejing is the place to setup that next hi-tech plant thats being built? You cannot compete, since you want more than one bowl of rice per day, an insolent worker that you are.
"Personal attack" means an attack on one's character, as opposed to merely an attack that's personal
Maybe thats what they teach at the Conservative Academy of Twisted Wordplay but thats not what I and a vast majority of people you are likely to run into believe. It was an attack. On me. Personally. Which part of me is irrelevant. Could be my character or my left foot. I understood it the way nearly everyone would: "a personal attack = attack on my person". I responded. Next thing you will be using the enthymology of the word "fuck" to debate its meaning as a word used to attack people and try to convince me it was meant as a mild expletive of surprise. In that context of course. And if I fail to dissect every word, punctuation and whitespace of your reply, it will be taken as an implicit surrender.
Of course, you'll just call me a liar, but out of ignorance or spite, not because you know me to be wrong.
Oh wait, wouldn't this be, like, a personal attack? By your own definition too. Spite, ignorance? So you are right because anyone who disagrees is a liar or an idiot? I think I understand your position now. By some weird coincidence that is the same very world view that just about every believer of "conservative" philosophies I run into pronounces sooner or later. Go figure.
So what is the government doing up there? Setting up a bolshevik revolution, red flags waving and all? Nationalizing oil? Imprisoning anyone who has more then 10 bucks and sending them to a Gulag? You cannot be serious. I dont believe for a minute that the oil exploration would stop at the border, unless we are talking the type of oil that takes 80% of government grants and 20% of private funds to make a "profit". Then it should stop not only there but in Alberta also. Otherwise the money to be made is just too good, no matter how bad the taxes. You gotta understand that businesses are opportunistic by nature and the only things they want from a government are: grants for "business development", no taxes, no regulation, no minimum wages and use of police if the workers revolt. Thats it. Alberta is aiming in that direction and so some of the nastier types flock there. And so does China. And guess what? The supposedly communist country has got more Fortune 500 companies then you can shake a stick at. And their "communism" does not involve burdensome things like universal healthcare. But it does involve dirt cheap labour with no rights. Manitoba has NDP in charge, left as it gets in Canada and lo and behold the business dosnt flee in droves... except when its heading to China or some place like it. If there is anything that is going to do us all in, my money is on WTO.
Saddam was killing and torturing people up till the end
Please provide a credible impartial source stating that the number of people dying this way (I doubt there were many) would be greater then what the war brought on. And I dont mean sources like people who wanted to take Saddam's place at our expense, say, Chelabi and his pals. Even if you find one (which I doubt), factor in the huge increase of world-wide hate towards US because of the war, abandoning the search for Osama, rebounding of Taliban, abandoning of Afghanistan's rebuilding, abolishment of the international law dealing with aggression, $200 billion expenses, etc etc.
His gov't wasn't falling apart....
You must be kidding, his authority eroded so badly that his top level commanders were lying to him about their army's capabilities, scientists were lying about weapons. He had no longer any clue what was going on. That is the final stage of a collapse of a dicatorship.
It's personal, but not a personal attack.
You are making me laugh. You should consider running for office. "The bottle is empty, but it is not an empty bottle". Kudos, you should be able to survive in politics with no trouble.
Alberta has 20 billion tax revenue (2002), while Saskatchewan 6. Perheaps if fate has given you some oil wells ...
So Alberta happened to be wealthier due to geographical and historical circumstances and on top of that, in addition to having an advantage of scale, Klein added fee based funding. Klein's government agenda is nothing short of total destruction of the public healthcare and replacing it with private insurance/private hospital system and he will stop at nothing to achieve that even if most Albertans oppose it (yea thats how wondeful it is). That is why Klein is talking about abandoning federal healthcare funds (even if it will hurt everybody in Alberta) just so he can privatize it for his friends. So you comparing yourself to Alberta is total crock. Compare to Manitoba. Much closer fit. Guess what, we are doing fine under NDP, thank you. And the public for the most part knows it, probably because the lying propagandists of privatisation were exposed publically a few times here, trying to make up waiting list numbers and putting chronic hypochondriacs on display whining about not being able to get an MRI every second week.
Seeing as I don't want US style health care - just a few private MRI clinics and the like - this is irrelevant.
No such thing as "just a few". With our proximity to the utimate in greed based health systems just next door and doctors just green with envy, just a few is all it takes to start the feeding frenzy of greed. "Just a few" is equivalent to "lets privatise progresively instead of all at once". So yes, by wanting "just a few" you do want a US system, even if you fail to realize it.
Pakistan is far from the totalitarian state that Iraq was
I know, that is why Musharraf was elected the President and thats why he lawfully retains absoulte control over lawmaking and executive branches of government. Right. Window dressing notwithstanding (Saddam had a parliament too, you know). I think you should look up the term "totalitarian". The only major difference is that Musharraf doesnt put his statue on every corner. Oh, and that he, unlike Saddam, actually has nukes. But I see, because Pakistanis do better economically that is the yardstick by which you measure "better off". I guess Saudi Arabia or Quatar are beacons of freedom then.
Removing him saved lives. The lives of Iraqis.
You mean that allowing that corrupt government to fizzle out (as everyone who bothered to investigate knows the regime was totally out of touch and falling apart on its own) and trying to stimulate a peaceful transition ala Eastern Europe would be more bloody? Did you seriously fall for all that claptrap about WMD's and Saddam poised to launch the World War III with his made-in-1965 ex-soviet peashooters? Or his Al-Queda membership? Him who Osama called the evil communist? War in Iraq had nothing to do with saving lives and everything to do with power games of domination and control. Lives are not a factor in such games other then a PR scoring point. If Saddam were in power still, his government would be at the brink of collapse and there wouldnt be tens of thousands dead and hundreds dying every week in explosions. And it is anyone's guess what the final tally will be. My bet is that following an Al-Queda sponsored, 3-way civil war between the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiias we will be talking millions. War to save lives... now, there is a distortion of reality if I ever saw one. Saddam's great killing sprees ended looong ago and he was in the twilight of his days of power just like all the attrocities of the Eastern Europe governments were decades old and what remained was corruption and harrasment of dissidents... level of opression very much like in Saudi Arabia or Quatar today.
"Fuck you" is not a personal attack.
Try that on your boss or a cop or some Hells Angels dude on the street. You will quickly find out how truly impersonal it is.
What you do not seem to realise that there are several factors at play here, some of which are:
- governments of any stripe just as any private enterprise (ever hear of bankrupcy?) can be incompetent and not being able to manage money or medical equipment
- many healthcare workers and doctors are greedy and quite willing to sabotage the whole system to make a killing when things go private and thus prone to keeping MRIs not running full capacity, overprescribing the test to fill the devices capacity etc etc.
- for the same reasons, the people who wish to make a killing on privatisation also tend to create an illusion of great efficiency by collaborating to make the "for pay" version seem speedy and affordable while the public one unuseable. As soon as this "for pay" version is the only option, while it remains speedy, the "affordable" part disappears in a hurry. Oh, and any two-tier manouvers always lead to all the medical workers wanting to work for the one which has greater pay. Guess what happens to the public one if they all spend 100% of their time trying to get out of it for their slice of the "bonanza".
- private clinics have to get paid by someone and would have to serve the same number of patients as current public ones and turn a profit. Tidy one at that. What do you suppose the overall cost will be? Add at least 50% to our current cost. Are you not aware of efforts within US to reduce their truly gigiantic and costly (much more expensive then ours, nearly double per-capita) system by introducing Canadian style administration? See, turns out we spend a fraction (3%) of the money on administration while they spend 30%. Add 27% to our current cost. Small "use" fees? Thats how they start. Once you get that, its just a matter of "improving service" and "offerring new options" before the fees are on par with the US. You do realize that 1/7 (43 million) of all US citizens do not have any medical insurance or benefits? That dying from uncured illness is a normal thing among those people? But then on the other hand, doctors in the US are over twice as richas ours. I wonder if there is any connection. No... scratch that, actually I believe that this item alone is one of the leading causes of all of our equipment and resource "shortages".
While problems and wait lists and all sorts of other crap happens with our medicare, the solution is most certainly something other then throwing the whole thing over to the opportunistic hyenas lurking in the dark and waiting for easy spoils.
That is not the point. Noone claims that Saddam is a saint. Murderous, imbecillic dictator? Sure. Number of dead? Huge, 150.000 of them alone killed by allies in the first gulf war (remember the Highway of Death?). War to remove him? Impractical, ill-advised, badly planned, rush, worst alternative of all choices. Anyone with a brain knew this beforehand although the general public seems to be waking up only now and spin control is in full force. Iraq is just about gone. International laws fucked. Support for US world-wide abysmal. Osama Bin Laden? Having a field day setting up new network in previously near-unreachable to him Iraq, quite a comeback after actually getting near defeated in Afghanistan.
Bushists did make up so many imbecillic lies and overexaggerations that noone can tell if "gasing the Kurds" was a PR stunt (over an Iranian war crime) designed to enrage people into believing that Saddam is about to nuke New York.
Real agendas of neo-cons are suspected by many to be different and quite contrary to the public chest beating displays.
You are really desperate about trying to make this unworkable defense work. The fact that the information has no owner, does not prevent you from keeping it secret. Repeat after me: secrecy is not the same as ownership. Somethimng being secret does not equal having an owner. So when someone asks you for a PIN, you say "fuck off". But when you yourself write your PIN on the walls of every public toilet, you can no longer take advantage of its secrecy. Noone is making you give it to anyone. Noone is demanding that you produce information for all to see. But once it is in the open, it is no longer controllable. It is quite a simple concept and I cannot fathom why you cant comprehend it. Why is it that you think that if something has no owner that it means someone can come and demand that you deliver it? Think vacuum. It has no owner. When was the last time someone came to you and demanded that you give him vacuum? How about gravity? How many people harass you to give them more gravity? You are having serious difficulties with these concepts I see. That combined with some sort of persecution complex where you imagine everyone coming to you demanding that you deliver the 100 millionth digit of the number PI or get shot.
As a side note on the factory concept, you've assumed that we've paid for the owner. To keep the metaphor accurate to what I've been trying to say, we've never paid the factory owner a dime. You haven't paid the music maker, have you? You still have his stuff, however.
I dont have anything because the "musician's stuff", unlike the one made by the factory, cannot be had. All I ended up with are some vibrations in the air from a car radio. Besides the factory analogy falls apart further down the line since the items the factory makes cannot be reproduced in millions by everyone at a flick of a switch in their CD-burners. Real items and real property are material and not easilly dupliacted in copious numbers by an 8-year old at no cost and with little effort.
What you just described is the current legal nosense situation that leads to all the crap we were discussing ad nauseum earler. Yes thats what the state into which the laws were perverted. I am not sure what your point is, my position is that this situation is unacceptable, grants the studios sweeping powers out of line with any other industry, trumps everyones civil liberties and will lead to quite a bit more then loss of "moral rights" when applied to things like DNA sequencing. Not to mention a wee little bit that you as a purchaser do not sign any wavers removing your rights of "first sale" when you walk in to the music store to "buy" the music. Err.. no ..actually to "enter into a one-sided, legally binding, changeable at any time, contract" with the recording company by just the act of breathing air. While you describe perfectly the attempts to control something that is not fitting the mold of "property" by legal manouvering and trickery, I fail to see how this is supposed to advance your argument.
The performance *is* property by definition.
Whose? Certainly not mine and many others. Not only by applying that definition we end up with all sorts of logical conundrums, we also end up with consequences that truly frighten those who have the foresight to see them.
The law defines a property right in original expression.
The laws used also to define the "rights" of a southern Plantation Owner to his slaves. The fact that something is described by law does not make it sensible, moral or exempt it from being put there at a bidding of greedy thieves with power. It is up to us to decide if these law edicts have the moral power to be any more respectable than toilet paper.
The people who build a house build it for the general contractor, who pays them for their performance and either provides the materials or reimburses the workers' materials expenditures. The workers have a claim on the general contractor for the goods and services provided to him, and in turn the general contractor has a property right in the finished house until you pay for it, even if it exists on land that you already own free and clear.
Please point out anything I said which contradicts any of that. The house is a physical property, distinct to that of a piece of land. The word "land" was not even mentioned by me. It would help if you were to try to refrain from making things up, only so that you can have something to refute.
And if it is "modified" by someone to differ from the "natural" sequence, the "new" sequence is now, according to you , "a creation" and thus can be owned by the author and have royalties collected on.
I am not kidding here. This is already happening.
Everything man-made starts with an individual, and as such, that individual should get credit for whatever it is that he or she has done..
Credit is not synonymous with instant cash. Money can come from creations but not via the "private property" route of thinking. I am not advocating not paying artists or inventors. I am advocating that the system by which such payments occur has to be radically refurbished because the current one has totally uncontrollable and frightening consequences. And that is because noone designed it with forethought, it just haphazardly happened by applying a simplistic notion of "property" to something that does not have the needed attributes to fit that mold.
You claim no right to the musician's guitar, only to whatever he produces with it.
Not at all. I claim that noone has the right to what he produces with it because what he produces is information that cannot have an "owner".
You see how desperately confused you get by trying to use the "property" mold to information? This is nothing like it, because as I repeatedly mentioned, the factory produces physical, tangible, individual items that are property and can be sold and bought. And so the owner is entitled to do with them what he wishes, including selling them to recoup his expense of labour, machinery and materials. But once he sells them, he no longer controls them and the new owners can go on selling them or doing whatever they want with them. Music is nothing remotely like it. In the current braindead system, once you "sell" it, you still own it because the "purchaser" has no right to do what he wants with it. If you were to apply it to the factory example, that would be like the factory owner selling his items, collecting his money and then believing he still owns the items he sold and subsequently go busting people's doors down when they do something with them he does not approve of.
I'd rather have a pack of thieves then a bunch of Bible-thumping, warmongering, healthcare-destroying, corporatist maniacs running the show.
How about gassing kurds? Saddam killed far more of his own people than this war ever will, and in far more brutal ways.
Says Bush.
CIA analysts thought otherwise. Who is telling the truth and who is doing a snow job? Can you tell? I know you can, I am sure God speaks to you at night telling you what is fact and what is vicious propaganda. Your self-richeous and, oh soooo informed, attitude is a dead giveway.
Pull your head out of your rectum please.
I will keep repeating this over and over, but music, motion pictures are forms of information. Information is not property and thus cannot be bought, sold or "manufactured" like hammers and screwdrivers can. These movie shams are just more examples of an inadequate model for dealing with financial impact of information on a modern capitalist society. The current model of "information as property" is deeply flawed.
At the risk of self-promotion, I had a lively discussion here about it.
No. Kings decided that an ability to copy politicaly charged works by the unwashed masses would spell trouble. Thus "A Right To Copy" aka. Copyright was born starting with joyous pieces of legislature like the Licensing Act of 1662. Followed by a long line of opportunist profiteers who sought to mold the tool of oppression into their license to print money. Check your facts first.
You dont honsetly think that copyright is good for big compaines do you? .. Copyright is for the little guy...
Loooong laughter. Disney. Mickey Mouse. 90 years+ and counting .... Microsoft. Warner Brothers. Vivendi. MGM. ...
Oh brother, small guy he says!. Thank you, that was quite a funny joke.
Good slave is a dumb one who thinks he is free. Best slave is the dumbest one who not only thinks himself free but counts himself as a peer to the masters and actively defends their agenda ... of keeping him a slave.
That has been long broken as anyone can witness from the advent of domain names. As soon as new places where one's "property" can bring money are invented, the "rights" are extended into them. So while true originally, the "contexts" of these properties are now so large that are beginning to border on being unlimited. Witness the patents for "business models" or on ideas of "using a mouse to click on things" etc.
Does that mean we should abandon all property rights and go to intellectual anarchy or communism?
None of these socio-economical systems had anything to do with this originally. Information is simply not covered by them. These simplistic 19th century economic models (along with capitalism as Adam Smith would have it) are simply not equipped to deal with information and thus information is not subject to their rules. Round peg, square hole situation. I am attempting to offer some ideas on constucting some sane addendum to capitalist model that would cover the creation and flow of information in a capitalist society.
Fantastically well? You mean to tell me that Britney Spears contributed more then Einstein to the advancement of humanity? She certainly made more money! How about Madonna? Or Bill Gates versus someone like Turing or Babage? You must be kidding me. All the current McMusic system produces is medioker "product" to be "consumed" by the masses. "Product" they dont need and would not likely have bought were it not for continuous and all-pervasive advertising of it, artificial cultural pressures and myriad of other underhanded trickery. "Art" is but a tiny fraction of what is going on. Patronage system will produce art because it has done so for millenia past. McMusic system will produce a huge pile of plastic waste and gigiantic, undeserved profits for the few conmen who run it.
If the demand for your labour as a progammer was artificially inflated by abuse of the law, then you need to find other job. If not, then you still get paid for the service of customizations and consulting, and if you are really, really good, you can get a sponsor and donate to high-profile projects while being paid for it. You work, you get paid for your time. You dont get paid a million times for working once.
Really? Please specify then which Canadian or US TV network has more of it. CBC is not perfect by a long shot. I just dare you to show me some major TV news outlet which was not waving flags while competing as to who is going to come up with the most slimey way to herd the public into the neocon's wet dream of conquest and bloodletting.
I grow tired of repeating myself to all those who are not clever enough to read the link that was posted in my first article of this thread not to mention all those other times I mentioned "tiny" problems with ownership of DNA, integer numbers, mathematical formulas, ownership of your body by someone else, taxpayer subsidies for the "information" industies, private taxes on storage media, law mandated DRM systems that result in removal of computer media from the realm of free-speech and put under full control of totalitarian moguls. I could go on but its a waste of time. Some people are just to dense and no matter how many times this is mentioned by me and countless others, they will be stuck on their pet song: "Mine! All mine! I! ME! ME! I! I Deserve! I have right to all I see! Pay me! Pay me! Everything is property! And its all mine!". It has nothing to do with "free" stuff, and everything to do with the fact that some things cannot be subject of the capitalist model. Property is physical. I dont advocate getting "free" stuff by taking your neighbours car. Or the musicians guitar.
How about reading it aloud on radio? TV? From a tower with a megaphone? No you dont own the thoughts you put down on paper. If you cant get to grips with that, dont put them down. We dont want to read them anyway because they will be in most likelyhood: "Me! Mine! All mine! Pay!"
In the case of a recording, the artist sold the performance to the recording company. The recording company then sells the ability to reproduce...
No , because the "ability to reproduce" is freely obtainable (or at next to no cost) to everyone with a PC, tape recorder etc. The "service" is wothless and that is not what is being sold. Pieces of plastic are being sold while supposedly all the data on them is "intellectual property" and not yours to be had. All you pay for is the plastic or in case of pay-as-you-go downloads ... nothing. This process is more commonly known as swindling the gullible. If the performance is not live that means the musician is no longer working and no loner entitled to pay. Something like a carpenter who after building a house for you (and getting paid for it) would try to move in and demand that you feed him for life while he bums around.
The artist could not have "sold" the performance in the first place because the performance is not a piece of property, all he coul have sold is his labour while performing.
Do you think that, just because the carpenters and plumbers have already done their work, you can tell your general contractor, "thanks for the house," and take the house without paying him?
You are supposed to pay them for their labour (just like a musicians performance) and the physical materials of the house. The general contractor is their represantitive, presumably after entering with a contract with them to dispense the pay. They both do "live" performance of building the house and managing the paperwork/materials and what have you. I fail to see what are you trying to point out here that supposedly deviates from what I already described.
By realizing there is no such thing as "music industry". There are only musical artists and performers and these are few and far in between. Appeal of their art and its rarity is what brings people to their concerts. You are indoctrinated into believing that having a million bands all making a living on 1 song re-sold for centuries is a normal and desirable state of affairs. It is not.
I hate to dissapoint, but not everything in the universe falls neatly into Adam Smith's capitalist model. Some things are not property or labour and thus cannot be marketed, free market style or otherwise. And an attempt by zealot believers in the Deity of Capitalism to do so in this case is becoming more and more ridiculously unmanagable.
If it is true than there is no market for such CDs other then specialty collector market. Having a feed from a stage mixer going into a digital recorder and being cleaned up via software by some expert kid in order to create "better sounding" mp3 for promotion/distribution is a fraction of this. You are trying to make it sound like all these insane costs are absolutely neccessary, forgetting that this stuff is supposed to capture live performance (if its any good). Packaging/shipping and related duplication costs will be the same for all (including unauthorized bootlegers) and will be a part of the media price everyone competes evenly on. If noone buys this, it shouldnt have been made in the first place and an mp3 on a website is all thats needed. If someone wants "studio" sound, some other arrangements would have to be made (like pre-payment for the specialty item). The band does not own the music data (as information is not property) and should reconsider if it wants to be in CD duplication business at all. Greed is what makes musicians go that route because, as the perverted laws stand now, with a CD you can spend 2 weeks + 20 grand and record a disk that will pay you handsomely for the next 40 years. The minor problem of fucking up everybody with DRM and draconian copy protection laws that we all end up paying for is not their concern.
Or I could get into the thousands of hours, sleepless nights, loans for equipment, fights, failed/cancelled gigs, auditions, demo tapes (production costs entirely stomached by the aspiring musician(s)) and countless other expenses entailed with beginning your career.
Which of course are all recouped by admission fees to the event if the band is any good. If they are lousy and cant draw the crowd, tough shit. All of that is the cost of gambling on a business like any other. The world is littered with remains of failed businesses on which someone spent their retirement money (equipment loans, fights, failed/cancelled contracts, sales demos etc etc). Again, we are supposed to feel sorry for musicians who choose to gamble in high-risk area with huge potential rewards. After all they are sooo much more special then a someone trying to open a donut shop. Next.
This good example perfectly illustrates that information (in this case the market research for the location etc) does not behave in the same fashion as physical objects that can be called "private proprerty".
Unfortunately, examples like this are a legion, but those who see greed ahead of logic will find them not convincing. They have "something" they think is "theirs" and they gonna "keep it" even after they "sell" it to you. Multiple times, preferrably. That is the logic of greed.
We are talking capitalist societies. If the "artist" himself finds it "beneath him" to bother then a crowd of 3rd party discount operators will step in offering "faster downloads then the next dude!", "0.10 cents per album with 10x download speed or free at snails pace!", "Custom CDs with funky labels for $5!" etc etc. The "producers" will deliver because there are still huge money to be raked in from concerts and merchendise and what not. Its just that their mega-billion-dollar, cookie-cutter, overexposed, overpromoted, "music-idol" (think Miss Spears) gravvy train has come to its final destination. Not it will merely rake in 10s of millions instead.
Nothing wrong with this but thats not what they are doing. They charge for the information on the media instead and demand that the laws of the land protect that information as if it were a physical, unique object. And that is what leads to all the other nonsense and explosive effects in other parts of the social landsacape.
Abolishing the virtual-contracts is not in our mutual interrest: they want to produce music, we want to listen to it
What I describe, can be put in your terms simply as a new contract, stating that performance of music is what is being paid for by the consumer and not the numerical sound wave data on a piece of plastic. This doesnt alter my fundamental premise.