In that case, you can turn in the third party. This obvious trick isn't a legitimate way of getting around Visa's rules. Call 1-800-VISA-911 next time someone refuses to accept your Visa card because of the purchase amount, or adds an extra fee, or won't complete a transaction unless you show your ID.
They can't force you to look and listen, but if you do, they can force you to pay, or even worse, if you look and listen and they can't force you to pay, they will gather the power and eventually tax all of us some more and keep us down as well. You know, I'd gladly pay a little more tax if it meant regaining the freedoms that have been sacrificed to the copyright demon.
They claim they're different in these cases but when the other party takes power nothing really changes. Uh, except when it does. Like when the Republicans took power and got us stuck in Iraq, made up a whole new list of executive powers, and so on.
Who says that I don't support reform? In the mean time do you expect me to just sit on my hands and do nothing? Nope, although as far as I can tell, that's what you're doing. Whining about how you don't care about the differences between the parties is, essentially, sitting on your hands and doing nothing: it doesn't accomplish anything. If you want to do something, join whichever party is less unacceptable to you, and work to change it from the inside. Or sabotage it so a third party can take its place.
What right do you have to question my sincerity? It seems trollish to me. The same right you have to post this stuff in the first place, which, considering how it runs contrary to fact and is inflammatory to anyone who's been paying attention to politics, is no less trollish.
BTW: Duverger's law isn't a law at all. There are noted examples where his hypothesis hasn't held true. Thus it's not a law. You're right, there are exceptions, but the United States obviously isn't one of them. The fact is, in most cases -- including ours -- plurality voting leads to a stable two-party system. It's not some kooky conspiracy between the parties and the media, it's a natural consequence of the voting strategy that this method encourages.
When are you people going to wake up and see that the two party politicking that is so prominent in the media is just another way to keep you obeying? If you really think that Democrats and Republicans are so different it just proves that you've been fooled. If you really think they're the same, that just proves you're not paying attention. Just look at their positions on such things as abortion, health care, the war in Iraq, executive power, the basic question of whether government can effectively solve problems... they're quite different, and those issues matter.
That "two party politicking" isn't the media or The Man keeping you down; it's an unfortunate fact of our electoral system (see Duverger's law). We have a two party system, get used to it. The way to change it isn't to make up crap about both parties being the same. If you don't like the two party system, then direct that energy into pushing for voting reform, because the only way we're going to escape the two party system is to use proportional representation or another voting method like approval or ranked choice.
If it's not worth paying for than it's not worth owning. Nonsense. When someone says "it's not worth paying for", they mean it's not worth paying the asking price. If I believe something is worth $5, and it's on sale for $20, then I won't pay for it, because that would represent a loss of $15 - but I'll gladly accept it for free, because that represents a gain of $5.
basically, Sarbanes-Oxley says you cannot realize revenue for a sale until you have given the customer the entire product. Sounds like someone needs to correct that law's definition of "the entire product", then.
When I buy a phone, the product is simply what's in the box: a handset, charger, manual, and whatever software it comes with. If they release a firmware update six months later, I can't reasonably turn around and say "A-ha! Clearly this is the entire product, and you screwed me over by not giving me this software six months ago!"... and then do the same thing in another six months when the second update comes out. Logically, the product I paid for only includes the firmware that the phone came with, and anything they decide to give me later is a free bonus.
It should, however, be possible to skip cutscenes. When you start a new game, you shouldn't have to watch the intro again. When you die during a boss battle, you shouldn't have to sit through the taunts and camera panning on your next attempt. Watching the cutscenes once is fine, although both stories in SMG left me thoroughly bored, but having to watch them over and over is unacceptable.
There were times when it felt like the game was more about punishing failure with repetition (ha ha, you died near the end of the level, now you have to start over from the beginning), which conflicts with the idea of making a game that's fun to play -- replaying a level shouldn't feel like punishment.
And as for your "There's no reason why the 360 couldn't act like a normal PC and just directly play media off my desktop hard drive" - what protocol would you like them to support? SMB? Yeah, actually, SMB would be great. Xbox Media Center supports it: just make your default download folder shared and bam, you can instantly play any media file the moment it's downloaded, without even needing to un-RAR it.
If what you said about censorship was true, then American censorship law would make no sense whatsoever. How could the government say that censorship would never, ever happen in this country, if any random company could censor? Um.. what? The government doesn't say that. Try reading the First Amendment again; it specifically says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech (and that prohibition is also applied to the states under the Fourteenth Amendment).
I don't know where you got the idea that there's any "American censorship law" that says censorship will never, ever happen in this country -- there isn't. Sorry, buddy, but you're wrong. Censorship is not the sole domain of the government.
He means our system of elections (the "plurality" or "first past the post" voting method), not the electoral college. When you have individual candidates running against each other, each voter only selects one candidate for each office, and the winner is simply the candidate who gets the most votes, you end up with a stable two-party system.
To allow third parties to succeed, you either need to have proportional representation (seats are divided up among all the parties in proportion to the number of votes they receive, even if they don't "win" any single district), or you need a way people can vote for a third-party candidate but still support a major-party "backup" candidate (such as approval or ranked choice voting).
In all seriousness, what would it take to create a _third_ party in the US [...] Would that even be possible under US law? Sure, the law doesn't prevent other parties from existing. There's already the Green Party, Libertarian Party, Constitution Party, and plenty of smaller ones. They rarely win elections, though, especially at the federal level.
What stops the US from having viable third parties is our election method (plurality voting). If we had proportional representation, where getting 5% of the votes means your party automatically gets 5% of the seats in Congress, or if we used approval voting or ranked choice voting within each district instead of plurality, then third parties might actually have a chance.
Plurality voting the way we run it encourages strategic voting that hurts smaller parties. In other words, even if you truly prefer the third-party candidate, your policy interests are better served by voting for the more acceptable one of the two major-party candidates; the system punishes you for voting for a candidate who's unlikely to win. See Duverger's law.
And the Radiohead example is a weird one -- they benefited from the massive wave of publicity from being the first major band to use that model. And even despite that, the majority of fans chose not to pay a cent. It doesn't matter how many fans chose not to pay a cent. All that matters is the total amount of money that was collected.
If 95% of the fans paid nothing, and the other 5% paid a total of $5 million, that's still five million bucks. Either that amount is enough compensation for the time they put into making the album, or it isn't; the number of people who hear it once it's been released is irrelevant to that question.
Certainly their artists are getting paid, but not nearly as much as artists signed with "traditional" labels. Many artists signed with traditional labels make nothing at all. I don't see how the current setup is any better than one where artists are guaranteed to either make an acceptable income or know in advance that they won't (as opposed to only finding out once they've already invested their time into recording an album).
Do you buy a new car without looking at a model on the lot? I don't think so. A car is a product. Writing a song is a service. I pay for services all the time without knowing exactly how they're going to turn out.
In fact, any entity that pays for any kind of research is doing essentially the same thing. They don't know exactly what they're going to get, but the work is worth paying for because it's likely to produce results.
By your logic, people are so generous that we shouldn't bother enforcing tickets on planes and trains, right? If I don't pay my fare, there's a chance that the plane won't fly. Sure. That's basically the idea behind flying standby. You save money but assume the risk that you won't get to travel on your preferred schedule. It's natural enough to extend that to paying nothing but assuming the risk that you won't get to travel at all.
Of course, people like to know that they'll definitely get to travel, which explains why that option hasn't, er, taken off for air travel.
People are greedy. It's an unfortunate reality at times, but it's reality plain and simple. People will not pay for what they can get for free. It is the classic economics problem with non-rivalrous public goods: how to avoid the free-rider problem. The theoretical free-rider problem's impact on real life may be overstated. Economic experiments have shown that people will contribute more than the bare minimum. For a real life example, see Radiohead's name-your-own-price album release, which brought in millions of dollars total despite the fact that each participant had the option to pay nothing at all.
Wait, so if I want to hear a new record from Fall Out Boy, I have to find other fans, gather together with them, and pay money in advance? How in the world am I supposed to know if the new song is any good or not?
Do you realize how ridiculous this complaint sounds?
"Wait, so if I want to get a haircut, I have to find a barber and agree in advance to pay him? How in the world am I supposed to know if the haircut is any good or not?"
You're not paying to hear a song that already exists, you're paying the artist to write a new song. Just like you're not paying for some haircut that already exists on a shelf somewhere, you're paying the barber to cut your hair.
How are you supposed to know if it'll be any good? Well, presumably you know who Fall Out Boy is, so you already know it's going to suck.;) If it's an artist you're unfamiliar with, then you can rely on word of mouth, or look at the stuff that artist has previously released, and if the artist is trying to build a name for himself, he can release a portfolio for free to show what he's capable of.
Point is, this is a solved problem - people deal with it just fine in every other industry.
Lastly, why would I bother doing all that if I could just let somebody pay for the music up-front and enjoy the proceeds later? It's the classic free-rider problem.
The choice is yours. You have to ask yourself, how much do you care about having this new song written?
If you care so little about it that you're willing to take the chance that it might not get written at all, then you can feel free to hang on to your money. Maybe enough other people will contribute that it gets written, and you can enjoy it for free. Or maybe they won't, and it'll never get made.
There's nothing wrong with that outcome - it just means the artist's time isn't worth as much as he's asking, because people don't feel strongly enough about his music to open their wallets. He can lower his price, or convince people that he's better than they think he is (i.e. that they'll be missing out on something big if his new song never gets made), or go into another line of work.
On the other hand, if you do care enough about this potential new song that you'd be upset if it were never made, that gives you an incentive to pay. If your favorite band sent you a letter saying "We need some money or else we'll never be able to record another album", wouldn't you respond? I know I would.
If it costs $50,000 (in just fixed costs by the time you count studio time, a producer, re-recording, etc--all before the band's cut) to produce a new track, it'd never be worth my time to invest money if I knew that other people were going to do it anyway.
If you know that other people are going to do it anyway, then you're right, there's no reason for you to pay. And why should there be? The artist gets paid the same either way. He doesn't care who the money comes from.
Finally, imagine the contracting costs. I like listening to a bunch of music in the morning. Even if I felt the moral obligation to pay each musician for their work, I really don't want to be bothered trying to decide which new songs from 50+ artists I should invest in. I simply have better things to do with my time than to evaluate songs that haven't even been written yet.
Well, I'm sure there's plenty of music out there that you've never heard. If paying for new music is too much hassle for you, then stick to the old stuff.
But it wouldn't have to require so much individual involvement. For example, I pay $12.95 a month for satellite radio, and some fraction of that goes to paying royalties for the songs they play. I pay that money because I don't want to deal with finding new music on my own - they hire people with good taste to find new music for me.
Now imagine if instead of paying royalties for songs that have already been made, they spent my mone
Sure, but who is "we"? The government? No. That's one way to do it, of course, but you don't need any government involvement at all to fund such things. "We" could be nothing more than a group of fans organized through the band's web site (or through an independent clearinghouse like Sellaband). If you've never seen a political candidate's web site, you'd be surprised at the motivational value provided by something as simple as a thermometer graph filling up towards a target dollar amount.
Yes, in an ideal world there would be a prize for developing a cool new drug or writing a cool new song. Then the results should be shared freely. But modern technology has yet to invent a way to figure out how big that "prize" should be for each drug and song. The market seems to be a far better predictor. Who said anything about "prizes"? This is about payment for work, pure and simple. The way to figure out how big the payment should be is the same way we figure out how much anyone should be paid for anything: the people who are doing the work come to an agreement with the people who are paying for it. That is the market.
If you, the artist, feel that the time and talent you'd invest in writing a song are worth $10,000, then you can ask for $10,000, and refuse to work until your audience has put up that much money. If they feel your price is too high, then they won't pay, and you can either lower your price or go into another line of work, just like a barber or interior decorator or anyone else who provides a service.
For example, it costs billions of dollars to develop a new drug, but manufacturing drugs is incredibly easy. Everybody complains about the patent system for drugs, but nobody has come up with another system that would give sufficient incentives for a pharmaceutical company to invest billions in lab research and clinical testing of new drugs. Statements like this are typical of copyright apologists who can't see beyond the status quo.
It's true that the current business model for researching, manufacturing, and selling drugs wouldn't work without patents, just like it's true that the current business model for recording, marketing, and selling copies of music wouldn't work without copyright. But the whole point of eliminating restrictive patent or copyright laws is to promote a better business model, one that involves less speculation on the part of producers and less restriction on the freedoms of everyone else.
If manufacturing drugs is "incredibly easy", then the pills should be cheaply manufactured by whoever can do it most efficiently, driving the cost of each pill down to little more than the cost of synthesizing and packaging the drug. There's no need for the company that manufactures it to be the same as the company that researched it in the first place, and there's no need for that research to be paid for by increasing the cost of each pill. The research is valuable on its own, no matter how many pills are made, and making more pills doesn't reach back into the past and increase the cost of the research.
What we should be doing is paying directly for the research (or, in the case of music, the writing and recording). That's the hard part. Once it's done, and the researchers (or artists) have been paid, then the information they produced should be freely available to everyone else, so that it can be used and distributed as efficiently as possible.
Do you know at all if steam offers refunds for its online purchases? According to their support wiki and section 4 of the subscriber agreement, they do not offer refunds. I'm not sure how that fits into UK law.
I think he's talking about retailers. If you send 20 copies of your game to a store, and only 5 of them sell, the store will ship back the other 15 to make room for new products, presumably at the publisher's expense. With Steam, if no one buys the game, they don't have to deal with leftover inventory.
If, however, you mean to say you don't need the artist to make a copy for you, then that's false. You still need the artist to make the original for you.
So it's not false at all, then, is it?
Making the original != making copies. Making the original involves writing melodies and lyrics, playing instruments, singing, adjusting levels in a mixer, etc. I can't do that; I'm not a musician. Making copies, on the other hand, involves sending files over the internet or writing bits to a CD. I can do that myself, because I own a computer. I will gladly pay someone for making the original, but asking me to pay for copies is asking for charity.
So it's your contention that the artist should ask for a lump sum payment up front for the original work? Who exactly do you expect to pay for that?
Essentially the same people who pay for it now: music fans. If your favorite band came to you and said "we need money or we'll never be able to make another album again", wouldn't you open your wallet? I sure would.
Tell you what. If you create some art, feel free to sell it like that. Other artists who feel that the other method is better will sell it their way.
The problem is, allowing them to "sell it their way" means I have to give up some of my speech rights in order to support their nonsensical business model.
Why can't we just tell them to find a model that works without taking away anyone else's rights?
I mean, suppose I start a business of helping old ladies across the street in exchange for money, and then when I realize many old ladies can walk across the street by themselves and I'm not making as much money as I could, I ask you to vote for a law that would make it illegal for old ladies to cross the street unassisted. Wouldn't that be crazy? Wouldn't you tell me to find another business model that didn't rely on restricting everyone else to make them dependent on me?
Since you can't reasonably expect a copyrighted work to be created without copyright, your art will be sold exactly as if there were no copyright at all.
Art has been created for centuries, long before there was anything like copyright, and even today, people continue to create works that they release for free public consumption. It's a mistake to assume that this stuff would stop being created without copyright. Some producers who are primarily motivated by control or profit might stop, but on the other hand, other people would be able to produce more if copyright didn't prevent them from making derivative works.
Many artists just want to be paid as much as they can for creating their work. Creating unlimited copies discourages people from paying the artist.
Restricting speech and technological innovation in order to allow artists to make a few more bucks is unconscionable. We all want to be paid "as much as we can", but in real life, we have to settle for being paid as much as we can convince others to pay us. If you can't convince people to pay you as much as you'd like for writing music, then you have to think about whether writing music is the right career for you.
If everyone copies artists' works instead of paying for them, then sooner or later, the pool of available artists will dry up, and there will be nothing new to copy.
If such a scenario ever came to pass, the artists would find it very easy to sell their talent in a world where no one had heard anything new for years. "I'll write you a song right now for $500!" they'd say, and a public starved for anything new at all would throw cash at them. Eventually people would want to hear songs that took a little longer than 5 minutes to write, and the artists would be able to collect larger sums for larger projects.
Of course, it's unlikely that we'd ever reach that point, because profit is not the only motivation to create, and selling copies is not the only way to make a profit. If copyright were aboli
There still is value in Linux, even if it has no scarcity. Nevertheless, it does mean that you can't make a solid business out of selling straight linux copies. It almost falls into the realms of charity since there's no money involved. Sure... and I contend there's nothing wrong with that. Selling copies is a stupid business model in a world where anyone can make all the copies they need for free. I pay people to do things that I can't do on my own, or don't want to do. If you ask me to pay you for something that I can easily do myself, you're basically asking for charity.
Art, however, is not always like that. Some people just want to be financially reimbursed for their art creation. Indeed, and that's fine too. I absolutely agree that creating art is a valuable talent and people deserve to be paid for it. Those people, however, need to grow the balls to request payment for what they actually do, instead of playing coy by asking to get reimbursed for making copies.
That is: you want to get paid for creating a song? Fine, tell me (or a few thousand other people like me) what your idea is like and how much it's going to cost us. Collect the money, record the song, and then the transaction is over. Once you've been paid for making that song, it's no longer any of your business where we listen to it, how many copies we make, or who we share those copies with.
Fair enough. Perhaps we should talk about copyright infringement in terms of stealing value rather than stealing IP? Either way it works for me, because it exposes copyright infringement as stealing. But again, the value isn't "stolen", because the work doesn't become any less valuable as more people obtain copies of it. It's as true of music, books, and movies as it is of software - just like Linux doesn't lose value as more people install it, The Matrix doesn't lose value as more people watch, buy, or download it.
If there was a desirable song worth some non-trivial amount of money, and a pirated version for free, is there any added value? No. The demand is split between the two products. You really don't need both of the products, since they are both essentially the same. They are the same, and thinking about one song as two "products" is a mistake. It's the same song either way.
If anyone could create significant value out of thin air, then what's the point in working? Well, exactly. People can't create songs out of thin air. But once a song has been recorded, they can create copies out of thin air -- so what's the point in buying copies? Or selling them? The only hard part is recording the song in the first place, so charge for that instead.
Yes, but it's devalued. You have it for free, I worked hard to create it. So what? That doesn't mean it's "devalued". The copy of the book, movie, software program, etc. in your possession doesn't become any less useful just because someone else has a copy of it. It's not like there's some total amount of "value" in every intellectual work that's spread out evenly among all the copies - Linux doesn't become worth less and less as more people install it.
You can also steal from my bank account. I still have my bank account, it's just been devalued. Yes, you still have the account, but you don't have the money that was in it. That's why people talk about stealing money, not stealing bank accounts.
No, the value is shared. Look it up. In economics, you simply can't create value. It has to come from some resource. The IP's value comes from the hard work that someone put into creating it. Nope, you're way off. The value comes from how useful or desirable it is to the people who want it. A song that was made in a week that people actually want to listen to is more "valuable" than a song that took a year to make but still sounds like crap.
It proves its an iPhone to the webservice. Kind of a useless security measure if that's what they're trying to do with it. It doesn't prove you're using an iPhone to access the service, or that you even own an iPhone. It only proves that you know an iPhone's serial number.
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In that case, you can turn in the third party. This obvious trick isn't a legitimate way of getting around Visa's rules. Call 1-800-VISA-911 next time someone refuses to accept your Visa card because of the purchase amount, or adds an extra fee, or won't complete a transaction unless you show your ID.
That "two party politicking" isn't the media or The Man keeping you down; it's an unfortunate fact of our electoral system (see Duverger's law). We have a two party system, get used to it. The way to change it isn't to make up crap about both parties being the same. If you don't like the two party system, then direct that energy into pushing for voting reform, because the only way we're going to escape the two party system is to use proportional representation or another voting method like approval or ranked choice.
When I buy a phone, the product is simply what's in the box: a handset, charger, manual, and whatever software it comes with. If they release a firmware update six months later, I can't reasonably turn around and say "A-ha! Clearly this is the entire product, and you screwed me over by not giving me this software six months ago!"
It should, however, be possible to skip cutscenes. When you start a new game, you shouldn't have to watch the intro again. When you die during a boss battle, you shouldn't have to sit through the taunts and camera panning on your next attempt. Watching the cutscenes once is fine, although both stories in SMG left me thoroughly bored, but having to watch them over and over is unacceptable.
There were times when it felt like the game was more about punishing failure with repetition (ha ha, you died near the end of the level, now you have to start over from the beginning), which conflicts with the idea of making a game that's fun to play -- replaying a level shouldn't feel like punishment.
I don't know where you got the idea that there's any "American censorship law" that says censorship will never, ever happen in this country -- there isn't. Sorry, buddy, but you're wrong. Censorship is not the sole domain of the government.
Who wants to pay 10-25 cents for MMS just to decode an advertisement?
He means our system of elections (the "plurality" or "first past the post" voting method), not the electoral college. When you have individual candidates running against each other, each voter only selects one candidate for each office, and the winner is simply the candidate who gets the most votes, you end up with a stable two-party system.
To allow third parties to succeed, you either need to have proportional representation (seats are divided up among all the parties in proportion to the number of votes they receive, even if they don't "win" any single district), or you need a way people can vote for a third-party candidate but still support a major-party "backup" candidate (such as approval or ranked choice voting).
What stops the US from having viable third parties is our election method (plurality voting). If we had proportional representation, where getting 5% of the votes means your party automatically gets 5% of the seats in Congress, or if we used approval voting or ranked choice voting within each district instead of plurality, then third parties might actually have a chance.
Plurality voting the way we run it encourages strategic voting that hurts smaller parties. In other words, even if you truly prefer the third-party candidate, your policy interests are better served by voting for the more acceptable one of the two major-party candidates; the system punishes you for voting for a candidate who's unlikely to win. See Duverger's law.
If 95% of the fans paid nothing, and the other 5% paid a total of $5 million, that's still five million bucks. Either that amount is enough compensation for the time they put into making the album, or it isn't; the number of people who hear it once it's been released is irrelevant to that question. Certainly their artists are getting paid, but not nearly as much as artists signed with "traditional" labels. Many artists signed with traditional labels make nothing at all. I don't see how the current setup is any better than one where artists are guaranteed to either make an acceptable income or know in advance that they won't (as opposed to only finding out once they've already invested their time into recording an album).
In fact, any entity that pays for any kind of research is doing essentially the same thing. They don't know exactly what they're going to get, but the work is worth paying for because it's likely to produce results. By your logic, people are so generous that we shouldn't bother enforcing tickets on planes and trains, right? If I don't pay my fare, there's a chance that the plane won't fly. Sure. That's basically the idea behind flying standby. You save money but assume the risk that you won't get to travel on your preferred schedule. It's natural enough to extend that to paying nothing but assuming the risk that you won't get to travel at all.
Of course, people like to know that they'll definitely get to travel, which explains why that option hasn't, er, taken off for air travel. People are greedy. It's an unfortunate reality at times, but it's reality plain and simple. People will not pay for what they can get for free. It is the classic economics problem with non-rivalrous public goods: how to avoid the free-rider problem. The theoretical free-rider problem's impact on real life may be overstated. Economic experiments have shown that people will contribute more than the bare minimum. For a real life example, see Radiohead's name-your-own-price album release, which brought in millions of dollars total despite the fact that each participant had the option to pay nothing at all.
Wait, so if I want to hear a new record from Fall Out Boy, I have to find other fans, gather together with them, and pay money in advance? How in the world am I supposed to know if the new song is any good or not?
Do you realize how ridiculous this complaint sounds?
;) If it's an artist you're unfamiliar with, then you can rely on word of mouth, or look at the stuff that artist has previously released, and if the artist is trying to build a name for himself, he can release a portfolio for free to show what he's capable of.
"Wait, so if I want to get a haircut, I have to find a barber and agree in advance to pay him? How in the world am I supposed to know if the haircut is any good or not?"
You're not paying to hear a song that already exists, you're paying the artist to write a new song. Just like you're not paying for some haircut that already exists on a shelf somewhere, you're paying the barber to cut your hair.
How are you supposed to know if it'll be any good? Well, presumably you know who Fall Out Boy is, so you already know it's going to suck.
Point is, this is a solved problem - people deal with it just fine in every other industry.
Lastly, why would I bother doing all that if I could just let somebody pay for the music up-front and enjoy the proceeds later? It's the classic free-rider problem.
The choice is yours. You have to ask yourself, how much do you care about having this new song written?
If you care so little about it that you're willing to take the chance that it might not get written at all, then you can feel free to hang on to your money. Maybe enough other people will contribute that it gets written, and you can enjoy it for free. Or maybe they won't, and it'll never get made.
There's nothing wrong with that outcome - it just means the artist's time isn't worth as much as he's asking, because people don't feel strongly enough about his music to open their wallets. He can lower his price, or convince people that he's better than they think he is (i.e. that they'll be missing out on something big if his new song never gets made), or go into another line of work.
On the other hand, if you do care enough about this potential new song that you'd be upset if it were never made, that gives you an incentive to pay. If your favorite band sent you a letter saying "We need some money or else we'll never be able to record another album", wouldn't you respond? I know I would.
If it costs $50,000 (in just fixed costs by the time you count studio time, a producer, re-recording, etc--all before the band's cut) to produce a new track, it'd never be worth my time to invest money if I knew that other people were going to do it anyway.
If you know that other people are going to do it anyway, then you're right, there's no reason for you to pay. And why should there be? The artist gets paid the same either way. He doesn't care who the money comes from.
Finally, imagine the contracting costs. I like listening to a bunch of music in the morning. Even if I felt the moral obligation to pay each musician for their work, I really don't want to be bothered trying to decide which new songs from 50+ artists I should invest in. I simply have better things to do with my time than to evaluate songs that haven't even been written yet.
Well, I'm sure there's plenty of music out there that you've never heard. If paying for new music is too much hassle for you, then stick to the old stuff.
But it wouldn't have to require so much individual involvement. For example, I pay $12.95 a month for satellite radio, and some fraction of that goes to paying royalties for the songs they play. I pay that money because I don't want to deal with finding new music on my own - they hire people with good taste to find new music for me.
Now imagine if instead of paying royalties for songs that have already been made, they spent my mone
If you, the artist, feel that the time and talent you'd invest in writing a song are worth $10,000, then you can ask for $10,000, and refuse to work until your audience has put up that much money. If they feel your price is too high, then they won't pay, and you can either lower your price or go into another line of work, just like a barber or interior decorator or anyone else who provides a service.
It's true that the current business model for researching, manufacturing, and selling drugs wouldn't work without patents, just like it's true that the current business model for recording, marketing, and selling copies of music wouldn't work without copyright. But the whole point of eliminating restrictive patent or copyright laws is to promote a better business model, one that involves less speculation on the part of producers and less restriction on the freedoms of everyone else.
If manufacturing drugs is "incredibly easy", then the pills should be cheaply manufactured by whoever can do it most efficiently, driving the cost of each pill down to little more than the cost of synthesizing and packaging the drug. There's no need for the company that manufactures it to be the same as the company that researched it in the first place, and there's no need for that research to be paid for by increasing the cost of each pill. The research is valuable on its own, no matter how many pills are made, and making more pills doesn't reach back into the past and increase the cost of the research.
What we should be doing is paying directly for the research (or, in the case of music, the writing and recording). That's the hard part. Once it's done, and the researchers (or artists) have been paid, then the information they produced should be freely available to everyone else, so that it can be used and distributed as efficiently as possible.
I think he's talking about retailers. If you send 20 copies of your game to a store, and only 5 of them sell, the store will ship back the other 15 to make room for new products, presumably at the publisher's expense. With Steam, if no one buys the game, they don't have to deal with leftover inventory.
If, however, you mean to say you don't need the artist to make a copy for you, then that's false. You still need the artist to make the original for you.
So it's not false at all, then, is it?
Making the original != making copies. Making the original involves writing melodies and lyrics, playing instruments, singing, adjusting levels in a mixer, etc. I can't do that; I'm not a musician. Making copies, on the other hand, involves sending files over the internet or writing bits to a CD. I can do that myself, because I own a computer. I will gladly pay someone for making the original, but asking me to pay for copies is asking for charity.
So it's your contention that the artist should ask for a lump sum payment up front for the original work? Who exactly do you expect to pay for that?
Essentially the same people who pay for it now: music fans. If your favorite band came to you and said "we need money or we'll never be able to make another album again", wouldn't you open your wallet? I sure would.
Tell you what. If you create some art, feel free to sell it like that. Other artists who feel that the other method is better will sell it their way.
The problem is, allowing them to "sell it their way" means I have to give up some of my speech rights in order to support their nonsensical business model.
Why can't we just tell them to find a model that works without taking away anyone else's rights?
I mean, suppose I start a business of helping old ladies across the street in exchange for money, and then when I realize many old ladies can walk across the street by themselves and I'm not making as much money as I could, I ask you to vote for a law that would make it illegal for old ladies to cross the street unassisted. Wouldn't that be crazy? Wouldn't you tell me to find another business model that didn't rely on restricting everyone else to make them dependent on me?
Since you can't reasonably expect a copyrighted work to be created without copyright, your art will be sold exactly as if there were no copyright at all.
Art has been created for centuries, long before there was anything like copyright, and even today, people continue to create works that they release for free public consumption. It's a mistake to assume that this stuff would stop being created without copyright. Some producers who are primarily motivated by control or profit might stop, but on the other hand, other people would be able to produce more if copyright didn't prevent them from making derivative works.
Many artists just want to be paid as much as they can for creating their work. Creating unlimited copies discourages people from paying the artist.
Restricting speech and technological innovation in order to allow artists to make a few more bucks is unconscionable. We all want to be paid "as much as we can", but in real life, we have to settle for being paid as much as we can convince others to pay us. If you can't convince people to pay you as much as you'd like for writing music, then you have to think about whether writing music is the right career for you.
If everyone copies artists' works instead of paying for them, then sooner or later, the pool of available artists will dry up, and there will be nothing new to copy.
If such a scenario ever came to pass, the artists would find it very easy to sell their talent in a world where no one had heard anything new for years. "I'll write you a song right now for $500!" they'd say, and a public starved for anything new at all would throw cash at them. Eventually people would want to hear songs that took a little longer than 5 minutes to write, and the artists would be able to collect larger sums for larger projects.
Of course, it's unlikely that we'd ever reach that point, because profit is not the only motivation to create, and selling copies is not the only way to make a profit. If copyright were aboli
Subscription to Stereophile magazine: $10.
Additional hard drive to store your lossless music collection: $200.
Portable audio player that supports FLAC: $300.
High-end headphones and speakers necessary to hear the difference between MP3/AAC and FLAC: $1000.
Gold shielded power, speaker, and headphone cables to avoid picking up noise that masks the differences between MP3/AAC and FLAC: $2000.
Watching all that equipment turn into one big zombie spambot as soon as you press "play": priceless.
That is: you want to get paid for creating a song? Fine, tell me (or a few thousand other people like me) what your idea is like and how much it's going to cost us. Collect the money, record the song, and then the transaction is over. Once you've been paid for making that song, it's no longer any of your business where we listen to it, how many copies we make, or who we share those copies with. Fair enough. Perhaps we should talk about copyright infringement in terms of stealing value rather than stealing IP? Either way it works for me, because it exposes copyright infringement as stealing. But again, the value isn't "stolen", because the work doesn't become any less valuable as more people obtain copies of it. It's as true of music, books, and movies as it is of software - just like Linux doesn't lose value as more people install it, The Matrix doesn't lose value as more people watch, buy, or download it. If there was a desirable song worth some non-trivial amount of money, and a pirated version for free, is there any added value? No. The demand is split between the two products. You really don't need both of the products, since they are both essentially the same. They are the same, and thinking about one song as two "products" is a mistake. It's the same song either way. If anyone could create significant value out of thin air, then what's the point in working? Well, exactly. People can't create songs out of thin air. But once a song has been recorded, they can create copies out of thin air -- so what's the point in buying copies? Or selling them? The only hard part is recording the song in the first place, so charge for that instead.