And why don't they pay that much? Oh, because the writers take a smaller cut and then residuals. How is that possible? Because of copyright.
Unless my understanding is absolutely off, writers get paid less of base pay because they might get additional residuals that make up for it and that makes risk-taking easier on the part of the producers.
Composers would have to get used to writing songs as a service, instead of as a product
You mean like the patronage system Europe used to have? I'm unclear what you mean.
Expecting to get paid over and over for a single act of creation is just being greedy.
I have a problem with that statement. Suppose you have an idea for a TV show. You hire writers. With your assertion, writers should be paid for writing the show once, and that's it. Now, for writers to live, they need, say, 10K an episode each. So for your (untested) show, you have to spend about 100K just for writers.
That's an awfully big investment that seems to encourage nothing but copycat TV shows with no innovation because innovation is too risky.
Would this benefit society? If not, then we need to have the alternative: royalty-based payments (i.e., multiple payments for one work).
On one hand you have a product released by a small group of individuals who have rabid fans that know their names and the lyrics to their songs.
On the other hand, you have a large media company with hundreds (thousands?) of employees across the globe, and no one can name more than 2 writers for the NYT, if even that many.
We have precedent to support my assertion: people buy fake Raybans and fake Oakleys and fake Prada and fake Gucci all the time. All the time.
Re:I have mixed feelings about this.
on
Iron Man Released
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· Score: 1
Bull corn. I have "The Return of Superman" right here. I'm only a decade or two behind...
Typing away on Slashdot, I can imagine a free news service and one that "rips off" other news services. No one owns facts. The real service is matching reader interest with world events and that's something Slashdot does very well.
Ah, but in my hypo I suggested that the NYT was subscription based.
Without copyright, the NYT would have one subscriber: an admin of RipOffTheNYT.com. Everyone else would eschew paying for the NYT and get the exact same content for free from RipOffTheNYT.com.
Don't forget that the NYT and other investigative journalism organizations need to exist for places like Slashdot to exist. Slashdot doesn't investigate; it refers and contains discussion.
Speaking of which, couldn't the NYT just kill if it could get a critical mass of users to behave in a Slashdot way--their business model could be "come for the news, stay for the discussion." And if you had to subscribe in order to comment, they could ensure a relatively high level of discussion. Imagine Slashdot for people with Slashdot-comparable expertise in foreign affairs, or national politics rather than just tech (of course members of Slashdot know more than tech, but, e.g., not a substantial number of users are well-versed in the law--hence "IANAL, but") and with a mod system. I would pay (assuming I had a job) to participate in that sort of discussion on such far-reaching issues.
And subscriptions could be cancelled if people were flamers, thus ensuring good discussion.
You didn't address the livelihood of composers in your post, though, and that's my main concern. Of course performers can make money off performances and use their recordings as advertisements. But what of composers?
Must they charge 40K for the right for the first person to perform their work (because, naturally, without copyright once the first person has a copy of the work, everyone else would have a free copy)?
#1 - Definitely some metal/hard rock is difficult. The vast majority of it is not.
#2 - Lateralus has never really impressed me as being anything more than proof that their lyricist is a math geek. The only things that show up are the main riff being allegedly Fibonacci in nature (but it's 9-8-7 which isn't a Fibonacci sequence by any means), the syllables of the lyrics following a Fibonacci sequence (this is cool, but not technically difficult to do when compared to a lot of instrumental music; hell, musicians have been spelling their names in music for centuries, but that doesn't make it amazing), and that the tracks of Tool's album containing Lateralus is a Fibonacci sequence when you make the tracks follow a more "correct" order in which each track ends with the next track's beginning.
The vide you linked to gives this order and claims it to be Fibonacci.
6 7 5 8 4 9 13 1 12 2 11 3 10
First, 6, 7, 4, 9, 12, 11, and 10 are not in the sequence. Second, even when you remove those numbers, the rest of the actual Fibonaccis are out of order:
5 8 13 1 2 3
Finally, it's missing a #1. Granted, repeating track 1 would still fit, but still, the video's assertion about there being an amazing Fibonacci pattern in the track order seems very false to me. Anyone care to enlighten me as to why the aserted track order is Fibonacci in nature?
Hell, look at the sheet music we play from, which is regularly copied and distributed, all in violation of copyright. In fact despite the stink that music publishers make about copyright, the classical music world would basically stop functioning if everyone stopped violating copyright.
That's interesting and if it's true that there's already wholesale and complete copyright infringement going on, then my argument fails that the composers don't get compensated on any subsequent performance of their work (since it would get swapped between performers freely) under a copyright-free world.
However, I'm unsure about how the classical music world would collapse if everyone stopped violating copyright. It might become less profitable, but it wouldn't collapse.
Most theaters around the world are under similar arrangements: you pay a license to stage and perform a copyrighted work. Even poor community theaters still manage to pay their license fees.
I'm pulling this completely out of my ass here, but I suspect copyright is mostly irrelevant to most "classical" music modern and otherwise. Modern classical performers/composers still operate very much on a system not unlike patronage. I imagine record sales for any "new" classical music are quite low, the money is in the performance.
Except that the composer has absolutely no guarantee under a copyright-free world that he will ever recoup anything except for the very first performance (since subsequent performers could acquire the sheet music from the first performer for free).
My personal example: the LA Philharmonic. When there is a guest performer (especially a big name like Midori) the concert will sell out months in advance, yet you rarely see recordings of such events. Also our former conductor Esa Pekka Salonen has decided to pursue a career in composition. As far as I know not a single piece of his has been included in a recording for sale, but several have been performed here and he seems to be doing just fine.
That may be for performers, but composers only do the actual labor once, so they only have the force of "I did this and not somebody else" at one time, and that is upon the first sale. After that, the fact that the composer is the author may still draw crowds, but that doesn't benefit him if copyright doesn't require the performers to pay the composer his due.
Classical musicians have as much or more to gain from their performances being shared and appreciated as anyone else. They surely don't make any money from record sales and publicity drives ticket sales. Someone else has already posted a link to free classical music.
I'm not concerned just with the performers--I'm concerned with the composers. Without copyright to protect classical composers, we'd have a system in which as soon as the composer has his music performed once, anyone could do it without him being compensated (by acquiring the sheet music from the first performer).
So the composer would have to charge, say, $80K for the first copy. This is patronage in the old sense, basically, I'd rather our system over the old patronage system.
Thanks for the link, but I suppose I should have mentioned that I'm concerned not only with music actually from the Classical, Romantic, or Baroque periods, but also with contemporary classical music. To make an accessible example, would we have a Hans Zimmer without copyright on music? I don't feel comfortable with the idea that "well, he'd still get paid via movie scores."
Probably a clearer way of stating things would be that I'm worried that without copyright, we'd lose performers and composers of the highest technical caliber simply because they could not afford to achieve their greatness. This is similarly part of my concern with literature-without-copyright: I don't think we'd have a James Joyce without copyright to provide him with the financial wherewithal to write Finnegan's Wake. Similarly, could Tolstoy have written Anna Karenina or War and Peace over the course of years without copyright to ensure his lifestyle was sustainable? But I digress to music...
Contrast this with "regular" music (not necessarily pop, but heavy metal, rap, etc., as well), in which sufficient technical expertise can be had in a few months. I may be showing my ignorance, but I suspect performing Lizst or writing a Bach-equivalent work requires more musical or technical expertise and years of investment in the cultivation of that expertise than anything the, e.g., rap world has ever put out.
one of the most irrational things [he has] ever seen in [his] life in the law
Really Ray? I mean it IS egregious, but a fine, any fine, really doesn't compare to losing your liberty for simple possession of marijuana. And that happens to people every day.
OK, so your suggestion is another irrational thing. What you quoted didn't say the most irrational thing, but rather, one of the most irrational things.
I didn't see "questioning" in your original post. I saw flagrant ad hominems and attacks on an entire profession:
third rate lawyers seeking publicity by defending teens' right to download music they don't want to pay for . . . a nation of hoodlums . . . neither side has any respect for the law . . . that won't get you publicity, and the resultant $$$ that you, like a typical lawyer, see flashing before your eyes . . . those more senior than you have a better awareness of your very nature than you do
Or, to put it another way, If I have something, and anyone who sees it can steal it, claiming I have "made it available" how many cars would not be stolen in New York?
While I don't agree with the "making available = infringement" idea, I think your analogy is flawed.
Namely, there's a big difference: the only purpose of making available an MP3 over P2P is so someone can infringe it by acquiring it from you. There are clearly other uses for placing automobiles in plain view besides to permit them from being stolen--namely, so you can walk into a certain shop when you're in the area.
Except that you're assuming vicarious liability for copyright infringement or contributory infringement would come into play here, as that's the only way a 3d party can be responsible for another's copyright infringement.
However, vicarious liability requires that the 3d party (the original uploader) have a financial interest in the infringement. This is clearly not true in the case of P2P, as no one has a financial interest. You'd have to make an extremely tenuous argument that by others infringing the song that you already infringed upon, they're making the service more popular and therefore increasing the number of other songs you want to download, and therefore that's a financial interest on your part to have others infringe. I think that's a lot of links in the chain considering that the classic case of vicarious infringement is a swap meet owner in which one vendor renting space is bootlegging music and therefore driving traffic to the swap meet, where the swap meet owner makes money on ticket sales at the door.
Contributory infringement would be an easier case than vicarious infringement, but I think it would fail in that giving someone an infringing MP3 is no more contributory to infringement than what Apple does when they sell you a non-DRM audio file that you can turn around and pirate.
Specifically for the music field, I've been coming to this conclusion for a short while now, simply because I haven't paid for music in a long time, and I've not broken the law in doing so despite the fact that I listen to new music all the time.
Between free nerdcore and free mashup albums (specifically the Best of Bootie series that pretty neatly fall into the fair use category) and free podcasts and on and on, there's more legal and free audio online than one could ever listen to in a lifetime. Copyright might not be necessary in the field of music to promote the progress of the arts.
The only problem is that I can't see specific genres of music (namely, "classical") carrying on without copyright, as it takes a high level of skill to produce these works of art (debate all you want with me, but for me, free music online pales in comparison to something like Rhapsody in Blue or Tristan und Isolde. And I'm not willing to sacrifice opera and other great "proficient" works, I don't think.
I'm also not so sure about literature and movies, and I'm definitely not sure about news. I mean, can you imagine if anyone could just make a website called RippingOffTheNYT.com and just mirrored the site but with their own branding and ads (assuming the NYT was subscription-based and not free-for-all)?
In any case, this line of thought is very unexplored for me, but I've been toying around with the implications of excluding musical works from 17 USC for a bit.
I don't want to sound like a hater here, but what are the benefits other than saying it looks nifty? A keyboard is nice in that anyone can interact, but does it have to enable simultaneous keypresses? Do multiple people need to navigate on the same computer at once?
There, I clarified why your question was short-sighted.
My girlfriend was born in, and grew up in Venezuela. We've had this discussion multiple times when people I know pull that stuff about how calling US citizens "Americans" is offensive to Canadians and such.
She has repeatedly confirmed that no one in Venezuela would ever use the word "Americano" for anyone other than an American. In fact, that's the word she says that is preferred for Americans. And her parents were diplomats in Venezuela as well, so I suspect her usage of the word might carry a lot of proof, as I'd imagine being a daughter of diplomats, she'd have been using the "correct" words (or, at least, know what the "correct" words are).
My Argentinean, Colombian, and Mexican friends have confirmed this. I suppose they could inwardly resent the usage of "Americano" to refer to US citizens, but they've never once told me this.
My one final complaint is the people who keep saying "America" is a continent. No, it is not, and saying otherwise reveals a fundamental ignorance about geography. The relevant continents in Western Hemisphere are North and South America. America is the block of two continents at best.
My understanding is that the file transfers don't work because of firewall issues. At least one party has to not be behind a firewall (or have ports forwarded) for them to work.
There's a Security Now! podcast explaining NAT traversal that addresses this issue, I think.
I don't really agree with that. I'm quite sure the devs of Pidgin derive a lot of personal satisfaction from the fact that they've created something popular. Also, one of them leveraged his work into a job at (I think) Google. Another one wrote a book about his experiences.
If no one used their product, this would never have happened. You may not have as much justification to complain as if you had paid 30 bones for it, but you get to complain some, as without complaints there can be no improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
Those points are distinguishable.
Fakes aren't free. And fakes aren't copyable for free. And people don't like to use fakes because of inferior quality.
All these are totally different from a website that would be creating a 100% perfect and exact clone of a subscription-based NYT.
And why don't they pay that much? Oh, because the writers take a smaller cut and then residuals. How is that possible? Because of copyright.
Unless my understanding is absolutely off, writers get paid less of base pay because they might get additional residuals that make up for it and that makes risk-taking easier on the part of the producers.
That's an awfully big investment that seems to encourage nothing but copycat TV shows with no innovation because innovation is too risky.
Would this benefit society? If not, then we need to have the alternative: royalty-based payments (i.e., multiple payments for one work).
I think those situations are distinguishable.
On one hand you have a product released by a small group of individuals who have rabid fans that know their names and the lyrics to their songs.
On the other hand, you have a large media company with hundreds (thousands?) of employees across the globe, and no one can name more than 2 writers for the NYT, if even that many.
We have precedent to support my assertion: people buy fake Raybans and fake Oakleys and fake Prada and fake Gucci all the time. All the time.
Bull corn. I have "The Return of Superman" right here. I'm only a decade or two behind...
Without copyright, the NYT would have one subscriber: an admin of RipOffTheNYT.com. Everyone else would eschew paying for the NYT and get the exact same content for free from RipOffTheNYT.com.
Don't forget that the NYT and other investigative journalism organizations need to exist for places like Slashdot to exist. Slashdot doesn't investigate; it refers and contains discussion.
Speaking of which, couldn't the NYT just kill if it could get a critical mass of users to behave in a Slashdot way--their business model could be "come for the news, stay for the discussion." And if you had to subscribe in order to comment, they could ensure a relatively high level of discussion. Imagine Slashdot for people with Slashdot-comparable expertise in foreign affairs, or national politics rather than just tech (of course members of Slashdot know more than tech, but, e.g., not a substantial number of users are well-versed in the law--hence "IANAL, but") and with a mod system. I would pay (assuming I had a job) to participate in that sort of discussion on such far-reaching issues.
And subscriptions could be cancelled if people were flamers, thus ensuring good discussion.
You didn't address the livelihood of composers in your post, though, and that's my main concern. Of course performers can make money off performances and use their recordings as advertisements. But what of composers?
Must they charge 40K for the right for the first person to perform their work (because, naturally, without copyright once the first person has a copy of the work, everyone else would have a free copy)?
#1 - Definitely some metal/hard rock is difficult. The vast majority of it is not.
#2 - Lateralus has never really impressed me as being anything more than proof that their lyricist is a math geek. The only things that show up are the main riff being allegedly Fibonacci in nature (but it's 9-8-7 which isn't a Fibonacci sequence by any means), the syllables of the lyrics following a Fibonacci sequence (this is cool, but not technically difficult to do when compared to a lot of instrumental music; hell, musicians have been spelling their names in music for centuries, but that doesn't make it amazing), and that the tracks of Tool's album containing Lateralus is a Fibonacci sequence when you make the tracks follow a more "correct" order in which each track ends with the next track's beginning.
The vide you linked to gives this order and claims it to be Fibonacci.
6 7 5 8 4 9 13 1 12 2 11 3 10
First, 6, 7, 4, 9, 12, 11, and 10 are not in the sequence. Second, even when you remove those numbers, the rest of the actual Fibonaccis are out of order:
5 8 13 1 2 3
Finally, it's missing a #1. Granted, repeating track 1 would still fit, but still, the video's assertion about there being an amazing Fibonacci pattern in the track order seems very false to me. Anyone care to enlighten me as to why the aserted track order is Fibonacci in nature?
However, I'm unsure about how the classical music world would collapse if everyone stopped violating copyright. It might become less profitable, but it wouldn't collapse.
Most theaters around the world are under similar arrangements: you pay a license to stage and perform a copyrighted work. Even poor community theaters still manage to pay their license fees.
Except that the composer has absolutely no guarantee under a copyright-free world that he will ever recoup anything except for the very first performance (since subsequent performers could acquire the sheet music from the first performer for free).That may be for performers, but composers only do the actual labor once, so they only have the force of "I did this and not somebody else" at one time, and that is upon the first sale. After that, the fact that the composer is the author may still draw crowds, but that doesn't benefit him if copyright doesn't require the performers to pay the composer his due.
So the composer would have to charge, say, $80K for the first copy. This is patronage in the old sense, basically, I'd rather our system over the old patronage system.
Thanks for the link, but I suppose I should have mentioned that I'm concerned not only with music actually from the Classical, Romantic, or Baroque periods, but also with contemporary classical music. To make an accessible example, would we have a Hans Zimmer without copyright on music? I don't feel comfortable with the idea that "well, he'd still get paid via movie scores."
Probably a clearer way of stating things would be that I'm worried that without copyright, we'd lose performers and composers of the highest technical caliber simply because they could not afford to achieve their greatness. This is similarly part of my concern with literature-without-copyright: I don't think we'd have a James Joyce without copyright to provide him with the financial wherewithal to write Finnegan's Wake. Similarly, could Tolstoy have written Anna Karenina or War and Peace over the course of years without copyright to ensure his lifestyle was sustainable? But I digress to music...
Contrast this with "regular" music (not necessarily pop, but heavy metal, rap, etc., as well), in which sufficient technical expertise can be had in a few months. I may be showing my ignorance, but I suspect performing Lizst or writing a Bach-equivalent work requires more musical or technical expertise and years of investment in the cultivation of that expertise than anything the, e.g., rap world has ever put out.
Namely, there's a big difference: the only purpose of making available an MP3 over P2P is so someone can infringe it by acquiring it from you. There are clearly other uses for placing automobiles in plain view besides to permit them from being stolen--namely, so you can walk into a certain shop when you're in the area.
Except that you're assuming vicarious liability for copyright infringement or contributory infringement would come into play here, as that's the only way a 3d party can be responsible for another's copyright infringement.
However, vicarious liability requires that the 3d party (the original uploader) have a financial interest in the infringement. This is clearly not true in the case of P2P, as no one has a financial interest. You'd have to make an extremely tenuous argument that by others infringing the song that you already infringed upon, they're making the service more popular and therefore increasing the number of other songs you want to download, and therefore that's a financial interest on your part to have others infringe. I think that's a lot of links in the chain considering that the classic case of vicarious infringement is a swap meet owner in which one vendor renting space is bootlegging music and therefore driving traffic to the swap meet, where the swap meet owner makes money on ticket sales at the door.
Contributory infringement would be an easier case than vicarious infringement, but I think it would fail in that giving someone an infringing MP3 is no more contributory to infringement than what Apple does when they sell you a non-DRM audio file that you can turn around and pirate.
Between free nerdcore and free mashup albums (specifically the Best of Bootie series that pretty neatly fall into the fair use category) and free podcasts and on and on, there's more legal and free audio online than one could ever listen to in a lifetime. Copyright might not be necessary in the field of music to promote the progress of the arts.
The only problem is that I can't see specific genres of music (namely, "classical") carrying on without copyright, as it takes a high level of skill to produce these works of art (debate all you want with me, but for me, free music online pales in comparison to something like Rhapsody in Blue or Tristan und Isolde. And I'm not willing to sacrifice opera and other great "proficient" works, I don't think.
I'm also not so sure about literature and movies, and I'm definitely not sure about news. I mean, can you imagine if anyone could just make a website called RippingOffTheNYT.com and just mirrored the site but with their own branding and ads (assuming the NYT was subscription-based and not free-for-all)?
In any case, this line of thought is very unexplored for me, but I've been toying around with the implications of excluding musical works from 17 USC for a bit.
Thoughts?
Can't be: Ubuntu uses alliteration. It would be Permafrosty Piss or Pissy Porcupine or something.
What??? Captain America is dead??!?! Thanks for the SPOILER ALERT!!
At least the rest of the media world had the decency to not ruin it for us like you just did...
My girlfriend was born in, and grew up in Venezuela. We've had this discussion multiple times when people I know pull that stuff about how calling US citizens "Americans" is offensive to Canadians and such.
She has repeatedly confirmed that no one in Venezuela would ever use the word "Americano" for anyone other than an American. In fact, that's the word she says that is preferred for Americans. And her parents were diplomats in Venezuela as well, so I suspect her usage of the word might carry a lot of proof, as I'd imagine being a daughter of diplomats, she'd have been using the "correct" words (or, at least, know what the "correct" words are).
My Argentinean, Colombian, and Mexican friends have confirmed this. I suppose they could inwardly resent the usage of "Americano" to refer to US citizens, but they've never once told me this.
My one final complaint is the people who keep saying "America" is a continent. No, it is not, and saying otherwise reveals a fundamental ignorance about geography. The relevant continents in Western Hemisphere are North and South America. America is the block of two continents at best.
When it demonstrates why Open Source is superior--if the users don't like something, they can fix it themselves.
My understanding is that the file transfers don't work because of firewall issues. At least one party has to not be behind a firewall (or have ports forwarded) for them to work.
There's a Security Now! podcast explaining NAT traversal that addresses this issue, I think.
I don't really agree with that. I'm quite sure the devs of Pidgin derive a lot of personal satisfaction from the fact that they've created something popular. Also, one of them leveraged his work into a job at (I think) Google. Another one wrote a book about his experiences.
If no one used their product, this would never have happened. You may not have as much justification to complain as if you had paid 30 bones for it, but you get to complain some, as without complaints there can be no improvement.