But I see from your website that you do not write art music, but rather scores for foreign lowbrow cinema and the like. If you have chosen to forsake public funding and work in a corporate milieu, than filesharing should be the least of your worries about exploitation, as your creative energies are already entirely at the manipulation of corporations.
And that sort of music is actually fairly movie-specific. It's not like you can film another movie and "lift" the score from another to use it - it's completely wrong and generates the wrong mood, etc.
Scores are very source-specific and are designed to fit the theme, mood and action in the movie. Sometimes a movie trailer will use another movie's score (I think the very early Robocop promo trailers used the Terminator score), but that's just a 30 second clip.
At best, a composer will use a score written by someone else for inspiration for a sequel - but that's because the themes are identifiable to that series.
People who are into soundtracks use them as a way to:relive" sequences of the film - a score by a good composer will evoke the same feelings that happened in the movie. In fact, a score is often the primary emotion manipulator in a movie - take it away and the movie will feel lacking. But take away the pictures and the impact of the movie will still be there.
The only worry as a score composer? The current era of Hollywood remakes where they take 15+ year old films and remake them, at which point the new composer will draw inspiration from the old score.
I've worked on quite a few so indeed I know how it works. I've seen how in Hollywood especially the temp tracks are almost gospel, and sometimes the expectation is to pretty much plagiarize it. If the studios could just plaster Gladiator all over their new films for free today, you can be sure they would.
But I don't think even that matters. Trying to define what is best for art is almost as impossible an endeavor as is defining art. Again, most of new stuff is really derivative anyway, so it'd just be one step further into that pit. Many people do prefer originality, so not everything would be the same. But the point is, no one knows the extent of this change.
So I worry about what happens to the people who make a living on creating content, if you radically change the system suddenly. There's an immense amount of conjecture here about an industry most don't really know enough about. It reminds me of when I see people suggesting how bands should make money instead of selling records. You know, sell T-shirts and all that. Not realistic. It's the typical cognitive dissonance from applying an ideology to the extreme.
The fact is, no one really knows what would happen. That's why you should do incremental, not radical changes. Maybe it would be fine for mostly everyone. We don't know. People who aren't intimately familiar with the workings of an industry definitely don't. I think those in the technology world of all people should know how frustrating it is when people (e.g. politicians) that have at best a cursory understanding of an issue try to tell others how it should work.
Just as an example, CRCulver's reply above is completely nonsensical with its art music tangent that applies to a tiny niche of composers, and furthermore offensive with its ad hominem about low brow cinema (take a look at my list; Nanking for example was on the documentary Oscar shortlist, and I've been nominated for the Finnish Film Award for The Home of Dark Butterflies). Yet it's at 5, Insightful, because it fits the ideological narrative that has become popular in tech circles.
Guys, if you want to be of the opinion that copyright has to be abolished even if it hurts a lot of people, that's fine. I'm totally ok with that, if you sincerely think that. But please don't make up stuff to try to support that case.
The Finnish state provides a number of means of support for composers that help insulate them from market forces and filesharing. Even if recordings of your work were massively pirated (or no one bought recordings because they are provided free in our country's excellent public libraries), your bills would still be paid. Thus the arist is supported but music listeners do not need to be hassled about where they get their music from.
But I see from your website that you do not write art music, but rather scores for foreign lowbrow cinema and the like. If you have chosen to forsake public funding and work in a corporate milieu, than filesharing should be the least of your worries about exploitation, as your creative energies are already entirely at the manipulation of corporations.
You must've missed the part where I explicitly said I've been pro file sharing and consumer freedom.
The public funding remark is simply incorrect. Most of the films I have scored have had state funding.
Because you'd be free to use other people's older music to make derivative works.
Considering the completely recycled nature of most of today's music, I really hope it doesn't become even more derivative. However, for wider use interesting mashups, sure. But that seems like a niche benefit compared to the immense harm I see in screwing over people like this. Note though that even the existing legislation is too weak to protect the original artist here, because the big business interests are so powerful.
In benefits society because it's an incentive for you to write even more music, which benefits us all.
The incentive would be for companies to not commission new music, but instead use the free ones from a vastly bigger pool. I'm barely making ends meet as it is, but I do it because I love this work. However if production companies were offered the amazing windfall profit of free contemporary music, I'd have to get another job. That's the cold hard math. The rich composers would just make a little less. But they don't really have to care. I do.
I have to say I feel really sad reading stuff like this. I feel a big kinship with the geek culture in general, having grown up loving my VIC-20, C-64, Amiga, tinkering with open OSs, and in general just being strongly anti-DRM and pro open source. My music background is strongly influenced by my demoscene work, freely distributed of course, like a lot of my other music. But I feel completely alienated by the pro big business turn the discourse has taken. I've been a strong advocate for file sharing and consumer freedom in general, but I've started to feel I've perhaps made a mistake. Because it seems the only groups caring about my right to tell a company not to put my music in a shitty TV ad that they profit off immensely are the same ones suing people for file sharing.
It's almost like there's no one who cares about the little guy anymore. It's just big technology interests like Google and Netflix that would love free content and keep all the money to themselves, versus the big media interests that also would love to keep all the money to themselves. I'm clearly in neither camp. I hope my impression is wrong and the silent majority in the open source movement still believes in protecting the little guy even if he happens to only create content for a living.
Seems to me we have reached that point again and copyright is only a perverted shadow of what it was intended as. Dropping it completely for non-commercial use and 8 or 12 years for commercial use would have tremendous benefits society as a whole.
Are you saying that I as a professional composer should let companies use my older music for free in commercial contexts, to benefit society? How could that possibly benefit anyone except the companies that already are completely nickel-and-diming freelancers like myself?
Actually what makes iPhone a very nice device for ssh is the excellent MobileTerminal availabile for it. They make great use of gestures on the screen and I find myself using terminal apps faster on it than I did on, for example, the Nokia E70.
My only complaint is the obvious lack of tactile feedback with the keyboard, but that for me has been outweighed by the positives of what the gesture-based approach with MT offers.
What do WiFi and Bluetooth have to do with running Skype over a cellular network? This sounds like a red herring to allow them to start talking about "crippling" again. How have the carriers "crippled" their WiFi-enabled phones anyway? This one I have not heard of.
One example that I can see is that the Nokia E61's US cousin E62 has WLAN support disabled. I gather it's been disabled by Nokia themselves but it's hardly in their interest to do so unless it's a requirement to be carried by Cingular (which the E62 is).
Take OpenOffice for example. MS Office power users will miss some features, but the vast majority of students and home users can now use it for all their tasks.
I've often pondered the subject of open source in very specialized, relatively niche software like audio. It seems that, for obvious reasons, open source development works the best in areas where there is strong general public interest and as such more people interested in helping develop the software. OpenOffice seems to be a good example of an app, well a suite of apps rather, that has strong momentum and is able to compete at least to some extent with the commercial products, although I'm hardly an expert in office software. And of course Firefox et al.
However for audio the situation is a lot different I think. There are many remarkable open source audio software projects that I don't want to discount in any way, but on the other hand I'm also a working as a composer for a living in film, TV and video games both in Hollywood and in my native Finland, and I can pretty much say that in 99% of the cases the professional composers are sequencing with Logic Pro (OS X), Digital Performer (OS X), Pro Tools (OS X + Windows), Cubase (OS X + Windows) or Sonar (Windows). There's lots of other cool apps like Live etc., but I've yet to meet anyone who would use them only, and I can't really see how that would be efficient unless you're only working with loops etc.
Personally I work with Logic because I find with its vast support for keyboard shortcuts combined with a good macro program such as QuicKeys for automating repetitive tasks, it simply makes me work the fastest, which is absolutely vital in this business.
The one common factor with all these, of course, is that they're proprietary and commercial.
Feature-wise, I think it'd be an uphill battle to compete with the professional audio apps, because the competition in that market is pretty fierce and the developers are adding huge amounts of new stuff with every major revision. However, therein lies a problem also, because the software tends to be pretty buggy these days because of the race for more and more features. It's all getting just a little bit too bloated and unstable, and the companies seem to be less interested in even fully fixing the programs anymore -- just check the Cubase forums for example and the outcry when Steinberg announced they're not going to patch SX3 anymore.
The niche that open source could probably fill in that market would be a really stable program that just "works". Of course if it would also be a really modular design where you would only have a really efficient core MIDI/audio engine with abstract data that would be easily accessable by custom modules so you could for example add notation, Live-type loop handling, a new sequencing interface etc. and update it pretty much separately from the core app, that might help the open source model work better. I have a programming background but certainly don't have time to build anything from the ground up. However if it would be possible to for example create a new MIDI editor GUI in a few weeks, I probably would take the time to do that -- I've certainly developed an ideal design for these types of things in mind along the years, and none of the available programs fully meet that criteria
Like America in WW1 ie defeated Netscape (germany) then rested on the laurels and stopped innovating. (When WW2 started America's army was nowhere near ready) Then when attacked by Japan (firefox) America (ie) immediately began...
Umm *raises hand* I think we need a mod option for "war analogy that blows my mind".
Every time this topic pops up, this same nonsense keeps coming back. US has much lower population density blah blah. To answer the first poster in the thread: The US has an average population density of ~30 people per square km.
Finland has a population density of 17 people per square km. My house there is literally in the middle of nowhere, and yet I get 8Mbit DSL there. Currently I live in Los Angeles, and the communications infrastructure is a joke compared to RURAL Finland. The maximum speed I can get anywhere, cable or DSL, is 6Mbit.
My previous apartment in LA was "so far" from the DSLAM that I could only get 1.5mbps. This in the second biggest city in the US as you know. Granted one that is all about urban sprawl, but I can guarantee you it's more densely populated than my Finnish home town.
Frankly, I'd replace the apologism with demanding the telcos do something about. With the monopolies they have in their tidily divided areas, they just sit on their asses and do nothing except take the consumers' money as the existing wiring just continues to degrade. Verizon's FIOS is promising, though, but spreading very slowly.
Mashed potatoes school food style.
That's some badass mashed potatoes right there, I wonder if it could be used for construction in seismically active areas.
Certainly agreed. School food is one of the things you don't even really think about when you're going abroad, but when I started studying at USC in LA, I found myself missing Finnish school food.
Which is certainly ironic, seeing as all the students in Finland always seem to be giving the school cafeterias a hard time about the quality of the food. Sure the food's cheaply made and won't quite match the gourmet factor of a real restaurant, but I'd take them any day over a random selection of over-priced fast food where the only really healthy option seems to be to buy a salad.
I don't know for sure about Spain's situation, but typically these kind of taxes are paid to copyright holders according to market research the RIAA-equivalent does in the country. You have to be quite successful to even see a dime of them.
I lived in the US for the past year and I figured going to the second largest city (LA) in the country that's home to so much of the world's top technology companies, the Internet access would be just great too.
Well, where I can get full-rate ADSL and ADSL2 (8M & 24M) here in Finland in the middle of nowhere for pretty decent prices, the most I was offered was 3M in LA. And even then the ISP was too clueless to realize that even that wouldn't work, so they had to downgrade me to 1.5M to get the connection up.
Can someone tell me what's holding the US back so badly? It seems at least the free market has failed the consumer badly, as the reason Finland is in such good shape is because the government acted at the telcos trying to ask for draconian fees for competitors to use their lines.
Slashdot Mirror
And that sort of music is actually fairly movie-specific. It's not like you can film another movie and "lift" the score from another to use it - it's completely wrong and generates the wrong mood, etc.
Scores are very source-specific and are designed to fit the theme, mood and action in the movie. Sometimes a movie trailer will use another movie's score (I think the very early Robocop promo trailers used the Terminator score), but that's just a 30 second clip.
At best, a composer will use a score written by someone else for inspiration for a sequel - but that's because the themes are identifiable to that series.
People who are into soundtracks use them as a way to :relive" sequences of the film - a score by a good composer will evoke the same feelings that happened in the movie. In fact, a score is often the primary emotion manipulator in a movie - take it away and the movie will feel lacking. But take away the pictures and the impact of the movie will still be there.
The only worry as a score composer? The current era of Hollywood remakes where they take 15+ year old films and remake them, at which point the new composer will draw inspiration from the old score.
I've worked on quite a few so indeed I know how it works. I've seen how in Hollywood especially the temp tracks are almost gospel, and sometimes the expectation is to pretty much plagiarize it. If the studios could just plaster Gladiator all over their new films for free today, you can be sure they would.
But I don't think even that matters. Trying to define what is best for art is almost as impossible an endeavor as is defining art. Again, most of new stuff is really derivative anyway, so it'd just be one step further into that pit. Many people do prefer originality, so not everything would be the same. But the point is, no one knows the extent of this change.
So I worry about what happens to the people who make a living on creating content, if you radically change the system suddenly. There's an immense amount of conjecture here about an industry most don't really know enough about. It reminds me of when I see people suggesting how bands should make money instead of selling records. You know, sell T-shirts and all that. Not realistic. It's the typical cognitive dissonance from applying an ideology to the extreme.
The fact is, no one really knows what would happen. That's why you should do incremental, not radical changes. Maybe it would be fine for mostly everyone. We don't know. People who aren't intimately familiar with the workings of an industry definitely don't. I think those in the technology world of all people should know how frustrating it is when people (e.g. politicians) that have at best a cursory understanding of an issue try to tell others how it should work.
Just as an example, CRCulver's reply above is completely nonsensical with its art music tangent that applies to a tiny niche of composers, and furthermore offensive with its ad hominem about low brow cinema (take a look at my list; Nanking for example was on the documentary Oscar shortlist, and I've been nominated for the Finnish Film Award for The Home of Dark Butterflies). Yet it's at 5, Insightful, because it fits the ideological narrative that has become popular in tech circles.
Guys, if you want to be of the opinion that copyright has to be abolished even if it hurts a lot of people, that's fine. I'm totally ok with that, if you sincerely think that. But please don't make up stuff to try to support that case.
I would rather everyone try
The Finnish state provides a number of means of support for composers that help insulate them from market forces and filesharing. Even if recordings of your work were massively pirated (or no one bought recordings because they are provided free in our country's excellent public libraries), your bills would still be paid. Thus the arist is supported but music listeners do not need to be hassled about where they get their music from.
But I see from your website that you do not write art music, but rather scores for foreign lowbrow cinema and the like. If you have chosen to forsake public funding and work in a corporate milieu, than filesharing should be the least of your worries about exploitation, as your creative energies are already entirely at the manipulation of corporations.
You must've missed the part where I explicitly said I've been pro file sharing and consumer freedom.
The public funding remark is simply incorrect. Most of the films I have scored have had state funding.
Because you'd be free to use other people's older music to make derivative works.
Considering the completely recycled nature of most of today's music, I really hope it doesn't become even more derivative. However, for wider use interesting mashups, sure. But that seems like a niche benefit compared to the immense harm I see in screwing over people like this. Note though that even the existing legislation is too weak to protect the original artist here, because the big business interests are so powerful.
In benefits society because it's an incentive for you to write even more music, which benefits us all.
The incentive would be for companies to not commission new music, but instead use the free ones from a vastly bigger pool. I'm barely making ends meet as it is, but I do it because I love this work. However if production companies were offered the amazing windfall profit of free contemporary music, I'd have to get another job. That's the cold hard math. The rich composers would just make a little less. But they don't really have to care. I do.
I have to say I feel really sad reading stuff like this. I feel a big kinship with the geek culture in general, having grown up loving my VIC-20, C-64, Amiga, tinkering with open OSs, and in general just being strongly anti-DRM and pro open source. My music background is strongly influenced by my demoscene work, freely distributed of course, like a lot of my other music. But I feel completely alienated by the pro big business turn the discourse has taken. I've been a strong advocate for file sharing and consumer freedom in general, but I've started to feel I've perhaps made a mistake. Because it seems the only groups caring about my right to tell a company not to put my music in a shitty TV ad that they profit off immensely are the same ones suing people for file sharing.
It's almost like there's no one who cares about the little guy anymore. It's just big technology interests like Google and Netflix that would love free content and keep all the money to themselves, versus the big media interests that also would love to keep all the money to themselves. I'm clearly in neither camp. I hope my impression is wrong and the silent majority in the open source movement still believes in protecting the little guy even if he happens to only create content for a living.
Seems to me we have reached that point again and copyright is only a perverted shadow of what it was intended as. Dropping it completely for non-commercial use and 8 or 12 years for commercial use would have tremendous benefits society as a whole.
Are you saying that I as a professional composer should let companies use my older music for free in commercial contexts, to benefit society? How could that possibly benefit anyone except the companies that already are completely nickel-and-diming freelancers like myself?
Actually what makes iPhone a very nice device for ssh is the excellent MobileTerminal availabile for it. They make great use of gestures on the screen and I find myself using terminal apps faster on it than I did on, for example, the Nokia E70. My only complaint is the obvious lack of tactile feedback with the keyboard, but that for me has been outweighed by the positives of what the gesture-based approach with MT offers.
I've often pondered the subject of open source in very specialized, relatively niche software like audio. It seems that, for obvious reasons, open source development works the best in areas where there is strong general public interest and as such more people interested in helping develop the software. OpenOffice seems to be a good example of an app, well a suite of apps rather, that has strong momentum and is able to compete at least to some extent with the commercial products, although I'm hardly an expert in office software. And of course Firefox et al.
However for audio the situation is a lot different I think. There are many remarkable open source audio software projects that I don't want to discount in any way, but on the other hand I'm also a working as a composer for a living in film, TV and video games both in Hollywood and in my native Finland, and I can pretty much say that in 99% of the cases the professional composers are sequencing with Logic Pro (OS X), Digital Performer (OS X), Pro Tools (OS X + Windows), Cubase (OS X + Windows) or Sonar (Windows). There's lots of other cool apps like Live etc., but I've yet to meet anyone who would use them only, and I can't really see how that would be efficient unless you're only working with loops etc.
Personally I work with Logic because I find with its vast support for keyboard shortcuts combined with a good macro program such as QuicKeys for automating repetitive tasks, it simply makes me work the fastest, which is absolutely vital in this business.
The one common factor with all these, of course, is that they're proprietary and commercial.
Feature-wise, I think it'd be an uphill battle to compete with the professional audio apps, because the competition in that market is pretty fierce and the developers are adding huge amounts of new stuff with every major revision. However, therein lies a problem also, because the software tends to be pretty buggy these days because of the race for more and more features. It's all getting just a little bit too bloated and unstable, and the companies seem to be less interested in even fully fixing the programs anymore -- just check the Cubase forums for example and the outcry when Steinberg announced they're not going to patch SX3 anymore.
The niche that open source could probably fill in that market would be a really stable program that just "works". Of course if it would also be a really modular design where you would only have a really efficient core MIDI/audio engine with abstract data that would be easily accessable by custom modules so you could for example add notation, Live-type loop handling, a new sequencing interface etc. and update it pretty much separately from the core app, that might help the open source model work better. I have a programming background but certainly don't have time to build anything from the ground up. However if it would be possible to for example create a new MIDI editor GUI in a few weeks, I probably would take the time to do that -- I've certainly developed an ideal design for these types of things in mind along the years, and none of the available programs fully meet that criteria
The cost-effective way to get a black Mac laptop.
Every time this topic pops up, this same nonsense keeps coming back. US has much lower population density blah blah. To answer the first poster in the thread: The US has an average population density of ~30 people per square km.
Finland has a population density of 17 people per square km. My house there is literally in the middle of nowhere, and yet I get 8Mbit DSL there. Currently I live in Los Angeles, and the communications infrastructure is a joke compared to RURAL Finland. The maximum speed I can get anywhere, cable or DSL, is 6Mbit.
My previous apartment in LA was "so far" from the DSLAM that I could only get 1.5mbps. This in the second biggest city in the US as you know. Granted one that is all about urban sprawl, but I can guarantee you it's more densely populated than my Finnish home town.
Frankly, I'd replace the apologism with demanding the telcos do something about. With the monopolies they have in their tidily divided areas, they just sit on their asses and do nothing except take the consumers' money as the existing wiring just continues to degrade. Verizon's FIOS is promising, though, but spreading very slowly.
You just created an infinite loop between the Slashdot front page and theirs. RUN!
Mashed potatoes school food style. That's some badass mashed potatoes right there, I wonder if it could be used for construction in seismically active areas.
Certainly agreed. School food is one of the things you don't even really think about when you're going abroad, but when I started studying at USC in LA, I found myself missing Finnish school food.
Which is certainly ironic, seeing as all the students in Finland always seem to be giving the school cafeterias a hard time about the quality of the food. Sure the food's cheaply made and won't quite match the gourmet factor of a real restaurant, but I'd take them any day over a random selection of over-priced fast food where the only really healthy option seems to be to buy a salad.
I don't know for sure about Spain's situation, but typically these kind of taxes are paid to copyright holders according to market research the RIAA-equivalent does in the country. You have to be quite successful to even see a dime of them.
I lived in the US for the past year and I figured going to the second largest city (LA) in the country that's home to so much of the world's top technology companies, the Internet access would be just great too.
Well, where I can get full-rate ADSL and ADSL2 (8M & 24M) here in Finland in the middle of nowhere for pretty decent prices, the most I was offered was 3M in LA. And even then the ISP was too clueless to realize that even that wouldn't work, so they had to downgrade me to 1.5M to get the connection up.
Can someone tell me what's holding the US back so badly? It seems at least the free market has failed the consumer badly, as the reason Finland is in such good shape is because the government acted at the telcos trying to ask for draconian fees for competitors to use their lines.