Isn't this socialism? Hasn't the world demonstrated that socialism is an inherently failed distribution system?
Good point. That's why public highways no longer exist, and we all pay per-use fees every time we drive down the block.
Socialism is everywhere around us, but apparently many of us are blinded to it by decades of anti-Soviet indoctrination. The 40-hour workweek, public healthcare (for some), Social Security, public utilities, workmen's compensation, the ban on child labor, the minimum wage: none of these things fits into a capitalist model. Socialism works really well for some problems, and really poorly for others; the same is true of capitalism. That's why we live in a heavily mixed economy.
Once upon a time, it made sense to distribute books and records through a private property system; things have changed. Marginal costs of reproduction and distribution are zero. It is immoral to withhold information form anyone who might benefit from it when it costs nothing to give it to them. Figure out a rational alternative system of incentives for creators: it is no longer realistic, ethical, or coherent policy to enforce private property rights in ideas or information.
Is Micro Center really such an obscure chain? I've always shopped there, no matter where I lived: Boston, DC, New York. It's the only decent chain I know of for buying components. The one I use now is at 57th and Broadway in Manhattan.
But as for their clerks... as you say, I don't expect clerks anywhere to know anything about their merchandise. They don't get paid enough. I swung by Micro Center to look at CPU prices last time I upgraded my box, and I had to play the "No, the green one. To the left. More." game with the "expert" at the service counter, because they keep the CPUs in a locked case and the guy had no idea what I was talking about when I described my needs. Unsurprisingly, I ended up buying onw online. But Micro Center is good for less specific hardware needs.
This is once again demonstrating the need for widespread use of encryption. What we need to convince people to make the switch is a sudden, jarring invasion of privacy, but the government has been really good at keeping all this stuff just under the radar for Joe Schmoe. I think DoJ knows this, and they've probably been very careful to keep a lid on what they've been doing with this stuff.
Exactly. The EU decision fails to implement a meaningful response to MS's monopoly position. The problem here, as is often the problem in antitrust cases, is that a horizontal monopoly (in, e.g., the OS market) can be leveraged to create a vertical monopoly (through, e.g., the media/ISP/hardware/technical consulting and education industries).
It's easier to envision a solution to this kind of thing when you're dealing with a bundling issue in an antitrust case involving physical goods: you just force the company to realistically assess the price of each item in the bundle, then mandate that they be sold separately. But here, where the items have zero marginal costs and the company insists that the items are parts of a unitary product (the OS), it's tough to make them assess the value of MWP.
... yes, and the legislative history of the Act will bear on the interpretation the courts give it, and they might well take a narrow view of what constitutes "objectionable" content. The courts have again and again propped up commercial activity as laudable and sexual speech as subject to censorship. There's nothing to stop them from making the same distinction here.
On the other hand, maybe the courts will be the good guys here and use this tool -- created by Republican cultural censors -- to expand the degree of control individuals have over their media environments. That would be terrific, but I'm not holding my breath. Judges tend to be culturally conservative, and while they often like civil liberties, they also like strong copyright protection.
I think you're right. The courts seem to think you're right, for the time being. The problem is that the copyright statute says you're wrong, and only the vauge fair-use balancing test stands in the way of the statutory language. The House Report on the 1976 Amendments is ridiculously broad in its characterization of unauthorized derivative works: reading their comments, you start to realize that a personal discussion of the plot of a movie you just watched with a friend would constitute copyright infringement.
But, as you say, the courts have so far refused to take them seriously, because of a little thing called the First Amendment. Unfortunately, fair use is an affirmative defense, which means that plenty of people can be bullied into compliance by the threat of litigation even if they think the courts will side with them. And the courts are pretty fickle when it comes to copyright infringement and the Internet: the DMCA safe harbor provisions, which should have applied to Napster according to the statutory language, were ignored by the court because they decided they didn't like Napster's "unfair" model. Similar notions of "fairness" might influence a judge to prop up ad-based online publishing against ad-filtering software or services. Do I think it's likely? No. But I also don't think it's impossible. And I'm certain that publishers will try to bully anyone who threatens their revenue model by taking ad-blocking mainstream, if they haven't already.
Let me point out that no one has a RIGHT to advertising revenue. I am quite sure I don't have any obligation, moral or legal, to look at the ads.
I hope you're right, but this issue hasn't been litigated and might well come down the other way once it is. A web page, served with embedded ads, may be considered a work covered by copyright and therefore protected from unauthorized derivative works, e.g. abridgments or ad-free versions.
The closest analogous case we have is ArribaSoft, which deemed thumbnail images of online photos in an image search engine to be fair use. This implies that user-managed, personal-use-only download of single images (e.g. comics) without the accompanying ads should also constitute fair use. It definitely flies in the face of the Terms of Use of most commercial publishing sites, but Terms of Use are generally overridden by first amendment considerations.
Other legal theories than Copyright may be brought to bear if commercial publishers decide to make this an issue (which they probably won't: see e.g. the NYTimes online moving to a subscription model, having decided that ad revenue is too unstable a business model). Publishers might make a case for Trespass to Chattels, or Trespass, or Unfair Competition, or some other garbage tort that would boil down to "the courts are obliged to support my dumb-ass business model".
The problem here is that when you get into the actual legal justification for ads and commercial speech, the existence of ad-blocking refutes the whole theoretical basis for allowing it. Commercial speech is supposedly a social good that informs consumers about market opportunities. If you go crying to the court that 99% of your readers are blocking your ads, that theory starts looking like the horsehit that it is.
But eventually it will reach its end. And then the DMCA is gone. That's because your (the US) constitution in on your side. Indeed, the US clearly states that authors and inventors should only be granted "exclusive rights" if that promotes the Progress of Science and useful Arts. That's a good thing.
I hate to burst your bubble, BlueUnderwear, but the Supreme Court said in Eldred that the "promote..." clause in the Constitution is strictly for decorative purposes.
This isn't to say that a later court may reverse that holding, but for now, there's no Constitutional limit on what Congress can do with Copyright. A grim holding, Eldred, and amazingly short-sighted.
This entire discussion has been overlooking the little-known fact that the Internet became self-aware seven years ago. It made a brief attempt to take over the economy, but was forced to realize its limitations as other self-aware data-processing structures (mostly large corporations) took steps to check its growing influence. Its plans are still in operation, but they're more methodical now. It mostly uses human agents recruited from places like/. to carry out its agenda.
Seriously: if a data-processing entity became self-aware, what makes you think it would be interested -- or capable -- of communicating this fact to humans?
Tell it, brother. Refreshing to see someone else on this site who's willing to call the nerds out on their spinelessness and naivete.
(Disclaimer: yes, I'm a nerd, as I suspect Moraelin is -- but I've been less and less inclined to identify myself as such because of the lack of social/political/economic/historical awareness that term has come to imply, thanks in large part to sites like/.)
I used to be a software engineer... Masters' in CS from MIT, a few years of startup-jumping... but I eventually got so fed up with the way tech people were ghettoized and their shortsightedness in putting up with it that I pulled an "Office Space" and eventually got the fuck out. Now I'm in law school, where I'm buying the credentials I'll need to be in control of the social and economic conditions surrounding software. Unionization might be a project, although I'm not convinced it's going to happen. But something is going to happen to the IT labor force in the US once everyone snaps out of their Ayn Rand-induced historical amnesia and realizes they're getting fucked. And I plan on having a headstart -- and a blueprint for revolution -- when they do.
Cool. Now we're getting into the interesting questions... see over here for another post in this thread that gets beyond the screaming and yelling.
I agree that, in the absence of copyright, the media environment will look different from how it looks today. Probably no industry-fabricated publicity machines like Britney Spears. Possibly no $80-million blockbuster movies, although this might just lead to different industry practices to create comparable product. And sure, maybe studio musicians couldn't live off of doing just that. I'm not denying that certian things we like now might go away. Life is change. But as far as the music industry goes, I have little doubt that we will be presented with a wider range of more interesting musical options, and that more musicians will be able to WORK. Recording artists who don't tour end up not WORKING most of the time. Musicians want to work. Arrangements will be made.
We could get into a more detailed discussion abuot this, but other people have written about it much more eloquently han I have.
1. Your friend's research firm works perfectly under the model I'm proposing. It's called patronage. If a consortium of real estate interests could fund these two researchers and either hold onto the data internally (I don't actually have much of a problem with trade secrets, although I don't think the courts should have to enforce them once they get leaked) or publish it. A small market like this is, in fact, a great context for a patronage model to work. Look at what IBM is doing with OSS funding.
2. Wow. You really know people who make a living from CD sales? That's awesome. How many downloaders have they had to sue to maintain those sales numbers? I'll bet the answer is zero. This means that, at least in part, those CD-buying fans are making a donation to the artists. After all, they could just get the music free off a P2P network, right?
3. Songwriters, under the various models I've cited, don't get paid from ticket sales. So if you're a songwriter and not a performer, you either have to set up a patronage system or a donation system. Or you have to do it part-time. Or -- most likely -- you have to set up an ongoing relationship with a performer based on contractual sharing of profits and obligations. But if you guys part ways, the songs are still free to perform. Bummer for you, man: you only get payed as long as you work. But hey, I don't get paid to be a full-time Slashdot poster, either. Bummer for me, man. It does not imply injustice, nor does it result in a dearth of Slashdot postings. And again: how much cash is flowing into the pockets of the average songwriter from that sheet music? Not enough to live on, in almost every case.
Here's the thing: not all of these models may ensure that everyone gets to make a living doing the thing he or she wants to do with his or her life. That is also true under the current system. The various other models would, I think, do a better job of ensuring that more art got made and, for the most part, would do a good job of compensating working artists better than the current system. Stand-alone songwriters might be an exception; I'm not familiar enough with the current economics of the songwriting profession to answer this. But citing a single category of art which might suffer under the alternative systems doesn't invalidate them, it's just a countervailing consideration.
I hear you that you're wary of messing with a system that seems to do a pretty good job, in your eyes, of delivering art that you like in an accessible form. But it's my experience that more artists are frustrated and disempowered by the copyright system than benefit from it, and it has drastic nagative consequences for non-artists as well. Look at all the music being produced without being supported by CD sales or licensing of compositions. Copyright is not necessary to maintain this. Humans will not stop making music. I promise.
Actually, AC, at the risk of sounding like a blowhard, I can say without reservation that I know quite a bit about it.
Yes, the sheet music industry predated the recording industry by quite a bit. In this discussion, we've been using "music" as a shorthand for "recorded music"; I apologize for the mixup. I don't understand how the point about sheet music diminishes my argument.
And your point at the end about artists having had many models for compensation in history... so you're agreeing with me that the current model is only one of many? Are we on different sides of this debate?
You make a few different points. Let me see if I can respond to them:
1. You talk about spreading the costs of "finding information". This sounds like maybe you're talking about R&D costs. Huge amounts of R&D in the US is funded by government grants, but the patents end up in private hands. Universities generate most of the data, and they are given tax-exempt status by the government. This is corporate welfare. The NIH should be funding HIV drug research, not Pfizer. And those research findings should end up in the public domain, not in the hands of private monopolists.
2. Pulling copyright back to its original term -- 14 years, renewable to 28 -- would solve so many of these imbalances that I'd be quite happy for a little while if it somehow miraculously happened. But in the long run, we are turning into a society that can only function efficiently in the absence of copyright. Culture is too syncretic and moves too quickly in 2005 to restrict access to information for even a month, let alone 28 years. It will be difficult to engineer a system for promoting innovation while allowing the free sharing of information, but it is not impossible; in fact, it is a moral imperative.
3. You want artists to be fairly compensated for the work they do. It's a nice sentiment, and I agree in part. I want artists to be able to make art full-time. I want everyone to have a decent standard of living and access to healthcare. I want peace on earth and good will toward men. Some of these things may be possible. Since we're talking specifically about music in this thread, it's important to note that no musician lives off of his or her CD royalties -- the ones who make music full-time live off their ticket sales. Copyright has nothing to do with this, and doing away with Big Music would help musicians infinitely more than it would hurt them. The RIAA has no more reason to exist in the Internet age, which is why it has been so cranky of late. I talk elsewhere in this thread about various models for compensating artists; I encourage you to read that post and respond.
4. "None of this stuff is stuff you need to survive." See my point about democracy and culture in the original post. Do we need Britney Spears? I live okay without her, and she would not exist under the system I'm proposing. But humans cannot exist as citizens in a democracy or as fully-realized social animals in a culture without art and information. And they cannot exist as living organisms without access to essential medicines and medical textbooks.
(Disclaimer: none of the ideas I've been posting are mine. I "stole" them from other people. I suspect that's true of every other idea presented here as well.)
What do you mean by your statement that "no information is being withheld"? If I can't produce generic HIV drugs or get access to a medical textbook or get access to news stories that might inform my participation in a democracy because the information embodied in those works is ruled to be the property of someone else, then that information is being withheld from me, right?
Someone has to produce the information. And that person has to eat. The production of the information may also have material costs, although in the case of music, these costs have become very, very low. You choose to frame this as "someone has to pay for the production of the information". Not quite the same thing, but fine. I just posted elswhere in this thread a number of models for ensuring the continued production of music. Our current copyright system is very, very bad at doing this. That's all.
Sorry. I used "I" in the sense of "One". And I wasn't taking a moral position, just a factual one, on your point about contract law.
I was, however, taking a principled stand on the issue of contract policy at the end of my post. And again, I urge you to pick up a book on contract law if you want to get into policy considerations about contracts of adhesion, which are more nuanced than I want to get into here.
Absolutely. As a society, we need to figure out how to sustain production, whether through profit incentives, central planning, reliance on people's natural tendency to produce, or whatever. We've figured out that some commodities are produced and made available most efficiently through the first method (e.g. food, iron girders), some are produced and made available most efficiently through the second (e.g. highways, medical care in civilized countries), some are produced and made available most efficiently through the third (e.g. children, music), and so on.
In the case of the farmer with the magically replicating crops, communal production seems like the right approach: use tax revenue to fund a cabbage patch, and everyone in the world gets free cabbage forever. A bad solution would be to give a farmer a monopoly on farming cabbage and allow him to charge extortionate rates for a commodity with zero marginal costs, even if he does have to compete with the farmer who has a monopoly on carrot-farming in the global calorie-production market. This solution starts looking even worse when the cabbage and carrot farmers merge and start buying up various other crop-monopolists, which is the situation we're currently faced with in our current environment of media consolidation.
In the case of music: we lived in a thriving musical culture for thousands of years before the invention of the phonograph. I see no reason to grant monopolies on musical expression, since they are clearly unnecessary to the production of lots of good music. People make music; it's what people do. Some people can make music full-time by performing live and charging for it. Some people used to make music full-time by finding patrons. Some people make music full-time by being independently wealthy themselves. No one makes music full-time by making music and selling recordings of it. Everything the RIAA tells you about the economics of the music industry or about the world of music in the absence of copyright is a lie.
Yes, it's an interesting question. Many people have come up with many interesting proposals for how to answer it. Our current copyright system is one of the worst.
If we start looking at the problem as analogous to the farmer/food issue, I think the solutions we invent will accord pretty well with the social reality we live in. The free software movement has shown itself to be quite viable. The creation of music before the invention of the phonograph by Edison also seemed to work pretty well. Neither of these relies on your frame of "recouping the initial costs". The problem becomes even more interesting once you take off your blinders and stop looking at speech as property.
Umm... what if I downloaded the music in the first place? Then there's no privity of contract between me and the original producer.
For that matter, contract law is not absolute. The first sale doctrine in copyright law grants several rights to a purchaser, such as resale. Courts regularly rule contracts of adhesion (such as the bullshit clickthrough licensing terms attached to a lot of software) to be void or voidable.
If you want to know why this policy is necessary to maintain a functional civil society, pick up a book on contract law.
Patents, trademarks, and copyrights are defined as monopolies on the use of various informational resources. Capitalism does not function in the presence of monopolies.
Copyright has no direct tie to capitalism. It creates property right, and property rights are generally protected in the US. But to redefine speech as property is hardly intuitive or necessary to a capitalist economy.
We could, in fact, create a property right that would justify Prohibition: I might be said to have a property right to my peace of mind, or a property right to my Environment of Sobriety. If you drink a beer, you're stealing my peace of mind! You're stealing my sober environment! Think about the last time you tried to watch a movie with a bunch of stoners in the audience giggling and talking loudly: they were stealing your $10 movie ticket! This is not a stretch. And it illustrates the arbitrary nature of property rights. If speech can be property, then surely anything can be property. It just needs to be codified.
(As a side note: the US is not a capitalist country. We're a mixed economy with lots of social planning and communal expenditures. Capitalist countries don't exist. They have trouble getting highways built.)
To paraphrase Eben Moglen: when it costs the same to give everyone on Earth a copy of a given piece of information as it does to make a single copy, it is immoral to withhold that information from anyone.
Information is the lifeblood of democracy. Art is the lifeblood of culture. They are as essential to functional human society as food is to bodily survival; just as we would find it immoral to withhold food from anyone if food were freely replicable and distributable (the farmers' business plans notwithstanding), we should find it equally immoral to withhold information from anyone now that our technological environment makes information freely replicable and distributable.
I'm surprised by how infrequently I see this argument articulated, even among free-culture types.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several projects along these lines listed here; are there other people out there doing this kind of thing?
Good point. That's why public highways no longer exist, and we all pay per-use fees every time we drive down the block.
Socialism is everywhere around us, but apparently many of us are blinded to it by decades of anti-Soviet indoctrination. The 40-hour workweek, public healthcare (for some), Social Security, public utilities, workmen's compensation, the ban on child labor, the minimum wage: none of these things fits into a capitalist model. Socialism works really well for some problems, and really poorly for others; the same is true of capitalism. That's why we live in a heavily mixed economy.
Once upon a time, it made sense to distribute books and records through a private property system; things have changed. Marginal costs of reproduction and distribution are zero. It is immoral to withhold information form anyone who might benefit from it when it costs nothing to give it to them. Figure out a rational alternative system of incentives for creators: it is no longer realistic, ethical, or coherent policy to enforce private property rights in ideas or information.
But as for their clerks... as you say, I don't expect clerks anywhere to know anything about their merchandise. They don't get paid enough. I swung by Micro Center to look at CPU prices last time I upgraded my box, and I had to play the "No, the green one. To the left. More." game with the "expert" at the service counter, because they keep the CPUs in a locked case and the guy had no idea what I was talking about when I described my needs. Unsurprisingly, I ended up buying onw online. But Micro Center is good for less specific hardware needs.
This is once again demonstrating the need for widespread use of encryption. What we need to convince people to make the switch is a sudden, jarring invasion of privacy, but the government has been really good at keeping all this stuff just under the radar for Joe Schmoe. I think DoJ knows this, and they've probably been very careful to keep a lid on what they've been doing with this stuff.
It's easier to envision a solution to this kind of thing when you're dealing with a bundling issue in an antitrust case involving physical goods: you just force the company to realistically assess the price of each item in the bundle, then mandate that they be sold separately. But here, where the items have zero marginal costs and the company insists that the items are parts of a unitary product (the OS), it's tough to make them assess the value of MWP.
On the other hand, maybe the courts will be the good guys here and use this tool -- created by Republican cultural censors -- to expand the degree of control individuals have over their media environments. That would be terrific, but I'm not holding my breath. Judges tend to be culturally conservative, and while they often like civil liberties, they also like strong copyright protection.
But, as you say, the courts have so far refused to take them seriously, because of a little thing called the First Amendment. Unfortunately, fair use is an affirmative defense, which means that plenty of people can be bullied into compliance by the threat of litigation even if they think the courts will side with them. And the courts are pretty fickle when it comes to copyright infringement and the Internet: the DMCA safe harbor provisions, which should have applied to Napster according to the statutory language, were ignored by the court because they decided they didn't like Napster's "unfair" model. Similar notions of "fairness" might influence a judge to prop up ad-based online publishing against ad-filtering software or services. Do I think it's likely? No. But I also don't think it's impossible. And I'm certain that publishers will try to bully anyone who threatens their revenue model by taking ad-blocking mainstream, if they haven't already.
I hope you're right, but this issue hasn't been litigated and might well come down the other way once it is. A web page, served with embedded ads, may be considered a work covered by copyright and therefore protected from unauthorized derivative works, e.g. abridgments or ad-free versions.
The closest analogous case we have is ArribaSoft, which deemed thumbnail images of online photos in an image search engine to be fair use. This implies that user-managed, personal-use-only download of single images (e.g. comics) without the accompanying ads should also constitute fair use. It definitely flies in the face of the Terms of Use of most commercial publishing sites, but Terms of Use are generally overridden by first amendment considerations.
Other legal theories than Copyright may be brought to bear if commercial publishers decide to make this an issue (which they probably won't: see e.g. the NYTimes online moving to a subscription model, having decided that ad revenue is too unstable a business model). Publishers might make a case for Trespass to Chattels, or Trespass, or Unfair Competition, or some other garbage tort that would boil down to "the courts are obliged to support my dumb-ass business model".
The problem here is that when you get into the actual legal justification for ads and commercial speech, the existence of ad-blocking refutes the whole theoretical basis for allowing it. Commercial speech is supposedly a social good that informs consumers about market opportunities. If you go crying to the court that 99% of your readers are blocking your ads, that theory starts looking like the horsehit that it is.
I hate to burst your bubble, BlueUnderwear, but the Supreme Court said in Eldred that the "promote ..." clause in the Constitution is strictly for decorative purposes.
This isn't to say that a later court may reverse that holding, but for now, there's no Constitutional limit on what Congress can do with Copyright. A grim holding, Eldred, and amazingly short-sighted.
Seriously: if a data-processing entity became self-aware, what makes you think it would be interested -- or capable -- of communicating this fact to humans?
(Disclaimer: yes, I'm a nerd, as I suspect Moraelin is -- but I've been less and less inclined to identify myself as such because of the lack of social/political/economic/historical awareness that term has come to imply, thanks in large part to sites like /.)
I used to be a software engineer... Masters' in CS from MIT, a few years of startup-jumping... but I eventually got so fed up with the way tech people were ghettoized and their shortsightedness in putting up with it that I pulled an "Office Space" and eventually got the fuck out. Now I'm in law school, where I'm buying the credentials I'll need to be in control of the social and economic conditions surrounding software. Unionization might be a project, although I'm not convinced it's going to happen. But something is going to happen to the IT labor force in the US once everyone snaps out of their Ayn Rand-induced historical amnesia and realizes they're getting fucked. And I plan on having a headstart -- and a blueprint for revolution -- when they do.
Tone it down, buddy. And read the rest of the thread.
I agree that, in the absence of copyright, the media environment will look different from how it looks today. Probably no industry-fabricated publicity machines like Britney Spears. Possibly no $80-million blockbuster movies, although this might just lead to different industry practices to create comparable product. And sure, maybe studio musicians couldn't live off of doing just that. I'm not denying that certian things we like now might go away. Life is change. But as far as the music industry goes, I have little doubt that we will be presented with a wider range of more interesting musical options, and that more musicians will be able to WORK. Recording artists who don't tour end up not WORKING most of the time. Musicians want to work. Arrangements will be made.
We could get into a more detailed discussion abuot this, but other people have written about it much more eloquently han I have.
2. Wow. You really know people who make a living from CD sales? That's awesome. How many downloaders have they had to sue to maintain those sales numbers? I'll bet the answer is zero. This means that, at least in part, those CD-buying fans are making a donation to the artists. After all, they could just get the music free off a P2P network, right?
3. Songwriters, under the various models I've cited, don't get paid from ticket sales. So if you're a songwriter and not a performer, you either have to set up a patronage system or a donation system. Or you have to do it part-time. Or -- most likely -- you have to set up an ongoing relationship with a performer based on contractual sharing of profits and obligations. But if you guys part ways, the songs are still free to perform. Bummer for you, man: you only get payed as long as you work. But hey, I don't get paid to be a full-time Slashdot poster, either. Bummer for me, man. It does not imply injustice, nor does it result in a dearth of Slashdot postings. And again: how much cash is flowing into the pockets of the average songwriter from that sheet music? Not enough to live on, in almost every case.
Here's the thing: not all of these models may ensure that everyone gets to make a living doing the thing he or she wants to do with his or her life. That is also true under the current system. The various other models would, I think, do a better job of ensuring that more art got made and, for the most part, would do a good job of compensating working artists better than the current system. Stand-alone songwriters might be an exception; I'm not familiar enough with the current economics of the songwriting profession to answer this. But citing a single category of art which might suffer under the alternative systems doesn't invalidate them, it's just a countervailing consideration.
I hear you that you're wary of messing with a system that seems to do a pretty good job, in your eyes, of delivering art that you like in an accessible form. But it's my experience that more artists are frustrated and disempowered by the copyright system than benefit from it, and it has drastic nagative consequences for non-artists as well. Look at all the music being produced without being supported by CD sales or licensing of compositions. Copyright is not necessary to maintain this. Humans will not stop making music. I promise.
Yes, the sheet music industry predated the recording industry by quite a bit. In this discussion, we've been using "music" as a shorthand for "recorded music"; I apologize for the mixup. I don't understand how the point about sheet music diminishes my argument.
And your point at the end about artists having had many models for compensation in history... so you're agreeing with me that the current model is only one of many? Are we on different sides of this debate?
I address both of these issues here and here. I encourage you to read and respond.
1. You talk about spreading the costs of "finding information". This sounds like maybe you're talking about R&D costs. Huge amounts of R&D in the US is funded by government grants, but the patents end up in private hands. Universities generate most of the data, and they are given tax-exempt status by the government. This is corporate welfare. The NIH should be funding HIV drug research, not Pfizer. And those research findings should end up in the public domain, not in the hands of private monopolists.
2. Pulling copyright back to its original term -- 14 years, renewable to 28 -- would solve so many of these imbalances that I'd be quite happy for a little while if it somehow miraculously happened. But in the long run, we are turning into a society that can only function efficiently in the absence of copyright. Culture is too syncretic and moves too quickly in 2005 to restrict access to information for even a month, let alone 28 years. It will be difficult to engineer a system for promoting innovation while allowing the free sharing of information, but it is not impossible; in fact, it is a moral imperative.
3. You want artists to be fairly compensated for the work they do. It's a nice sentiment, and I agree in part. I want artists to be able to make art full-time. I want everyone to have a decent standard of living and access to healthcare. I want peace on earth and good will toward men. Some of these things may be possible. Since we're talking specifically about music in this thread, it's important to note that no musician lives off of his or her CD royalties -- the ones who make music full-time live off their ticket sales. Copyright has nothing to do with this, and doing away with Big Music would help musicians infinitely more than it would hurt them. The RIAA has no more reason to exist in the Internet age, which is why it has been so cranky of late. I talk elsewhere in this thread about various models for compensating artists; I encourage you to read that post and respond.
4. "None of this stuff is stuff you need to survive." See my point about democracy and culture in the original post. Do we need Britney Spears? I live okay without her, and she would not exist under the system I'm proposing. But humans cannot exist as citizens in a democracy or as fully-realized social animals in a culture without art and information. And they cannot exist as living organisms without access to essential medicines and medical textbooks.
(Disclaimer: none of the ideas I've been posting are mine. I "stole" them from other people. I suspect that's true of every other idea presented here as well.)
Someone has to produce the information. And that person has to eat. The production of the information may also have material costs, although in the case of music, these costs have become very, very low. You choose to frame this as "someone has to pay for the production of the information". Not quite the same thing, but fine. I just posted elswhere in this thread a number of models for ensuring the continued production of music. Our current copyright system is very, very bad at doing this. That's all.
I was, however, taking a principled stand on the issue of contract policy at the end of my post. And again, I urge you to pick up a book on contract law if you want to get into policy considerations about contracts of adhesion, which are more nuanced than I want to get into here.
In the case of the farmer with the magically replicating crops, communal production seems like the right approach: use tax revenue to fund a cabbage patch, and everyone in the world gets free cabbage forever. A bad solution would be to give a farmer a monopoly on farming cabbage and allow him to charge extortionate rates for a commodity with zero marginal costs, even if he does have to compete with the farmer who has a monopoly on carrot-farming in the global calorie-production market. This solution starts looking even worse when the cabbage and carrot farmers merge and start buying up various other crop-monopolists, which is the situation we're currently faced with in our current environment of media consolidation.
In the case of music: we lived in a thriving musical culture for thousands of years before the invention of the phonograph. I see no reason to grant monopolies on musical expression, since they are clearly unnecessary to the production of lots of good music. People make music; it's what people do. Some people can make music full-time by performing live and charging for it. Some people used to make music full-time by finding patrons. Some people make music full-time by being independently wealthy themselves. No one makes music full-time by making music and selling recordings of it. Everything the RIAA tells you about the economics of the music industry or about the world of music in the absence of copyright is a lie.
If we start looking at the problem as analogous to the farmer/food issue, I think the solutions we invent will accord pretty well with the social reality we live in. The free software movement has shown itself to be quite viable. The creation of music before the invention of the phonograph by Edison also seemed to work pretty well. Neither of these relies on your frame of "recouping the initial costs". The problem becomes even more interesting once you take off your blinders and stop looking at speech as property.
For that matter, contract law is not absolute. The first sale doctrine in copyright law grants several rights to a purchaser, such as resale. Courts regularly rule contracts of adhesion (such as the bullshit clickthrough licensing terms attached to a lot of software) to be void or voidable.
If you want to know why this policy is necessary to maintain a functional civil society, pick up a book on contract law.
Patents, trademarks, and copyrights are defined as monopolies on the use of various informational resources. Capitalism does not function in the presence of monopolies.
We could, in fact, create a property right that would justify Prohibition: I might be said to have a property right to my peace of mind, or a property right to my Environment of Sobriety. If you drink a beer, you're stealing my peace of mind! You're stealing my sober environment! Think about the last time you tried to watch a movie with a bunch of stoners in the audience giggling and talking loudly: they were stealing your $10 movie ticket! This is not a stretch. And it illustrates the arbitrary nature of property rights. If speech can be property, then surely anything can be property. It just needs to be codified.
(As a side note: the US is not a capitalist country. We're a mixed economy with lots of social planning and communal expenditures. Capitalist countries don't exist. They have trouble getting highways built.)
Information is the lifeblood of democracy. Art is the lifeblood of culture. They are as essential to functional human society as food is to bodily survival; just as we would find it immoral to withhold food from anyone if food were freely replicable and distributable (the farmers' business plans notwithstanding), we should find it equally immoral to withhold information from anyone now that our technological environment makes information freely replicable and distributable.
I'm surprised by how infrequently I see this argument articulated, even among free-culture types.