Sure, but you need to bear in mind that if you buy a licence (which would be the option they'd invariably go for, because it's what's on the that's of most value) and physical implementations come gratis or at cost, the price will go up. The prices as they are now rely on increased profit margins from people who are careless enough to break or lose their media, and as people realise they can get cheap copies for themselves and friends, there's going to be increased piracy rates and production costs, which will further drive the price of music up.
But otherwise, if we're prepared to pay the extra for unlimited licenses, it sounds like a great idea. Next time I see media for sale with such a license attached, and it's not horrifically expensive, I'll buy it, just to support them.
Ever heard of the free market? If something isn't worth the price (i.e. you can't afford it), you look somewhere else for a competing product in your price range, and pay for that (which could even be free). That rewards lower prices, and so people who want to make money will tend towards a lower price. If you want free, and the market can provide, it usually will. You can find plenty of creative-commons, public-domain, or just plain free-as-in-beer music. You can't quite find as much as commercial music, because, lets face it, having everyone (or at least the majority) pay for music really helps encourage the artist.
Taking when you can't afford is understandable when talking about necessities. Taking when you can afford (just about everyone can afford a bit of music) rewards nothing but your own greed.
However, what the GP fails to mention is that you shouldn't use this set-up to download illegal copies of certain files, because the more you abuse anonymity, the more people will try (and succeed) to take it away from you (and everyone).
One of the arguments that is used as a "plus" for legal digital downloads of music is that it allows for independent artists to get in on the act, free themselves of the shackles of the mega record companies and just do their own thing, right from making their music in the first place down to distributing it (presumably) via their own web site.
Therefore, what the people that buy digital downloads are saying is that the music they want to buy is not available via the traditional music distribution process (i.e. CDs) because the big record companies do not cater for what they want.
By assumption, therefore, the music in the charts is not representative of the music most people like to listen to which therefore suggests that it is easy-to-manufacture, maximum-profit product.
There are a few holes in your logic:
Firstly, you assume that signed artists have "shackles" placed on them by the music industry, whereas, more often than not, it's the other way around. The music industry chooses to produce the talents with the greatest chance of becoming a commercial success. They don't buy up risky investments, and teach them how to produce the kind of music they want to sell. That would be terribly inefficient plus very controversial. With so many teens singing into their toothbrushes, they're not short on sellable talent.
Secondly, you also assume that people indeed are complaining that the music they want isn't available on CDs, and that their complaints are accurate. It just might be with the people you know, which could be a relatively minor demographic. Plus, if they actually looked and listened through some of the RIAA's catalogue (including back-catalogue), they might actually find something they like.
Thirdly, the contention that the music in the charts is not representative of the tastes of most people does not necessarily imply that the music is created to be easy to manufacture, and the implication that maximum-profit is unrelated to people's tastes is misleading. The music is not "easier to manufacture" (easy meaning cheap). Do you think the pop divas out there accept that they are less talented than indie artists, and therefore accept a lower rate? Of course not. If anything, the process should be more expensive, with the more technological layers separating a singer from the finished product. The RIAA don't care because pop still maximises their profits (that's their purpose). Since it does maximise their profits, and profits come directly from the consumer's pocket, it must be representing the tastes of some people.
But the fact is that digital downloads do not solve the indie artist issue alone. When you've got thousands upon thousands of (possibly very talented) artists distributing their music via a web site, how can they compete with the mega record corps who have millions of marketing budget and are, by virtue of the above, quite capable of shifting vast amounts of music which is not representative of what people want?
The RIAA is actually a large cog of a bigger system of the music industry. The RIAA capitalise on the most lucrative markets (i.e. the markets with the most demand) and the indie artists pick up on the more esoteric tastes. The RIAA can't really afford to cater for the esoteric tastes while the indie artists cater so well for them, and the indie artists can't afford to directly compete with the RIAA on the popular music front in any significant way, nor could they fill the huge demand if the RIAA stopped supplying. The system works, and both parts are necessary. Neither the RIAA nor the indie artists accurately represent the majority of tastes separately. Together, however, just about every base is covered.
The labels themselves claim that the reason mucis prices are so high is because for every winner in the top 100 there are a hundred money losing losers.
Yes, but why are the other 100 money losers? I'll give you a hint: it's not because the RIAA didn't feel like brainwashing the public that day.
I doubt anyone on Slashdot is going to admit that they buy the mass-produced plastic music that is in the charts
I've done it before. I'm not sure if I'd to it again, but I have bought a few in the past. This isn't a sign of music getting worse, it's a sign of music changing relative to my tastes. How do I know? Because music appreciation is subjective. If you disagree, provide me with a hard formula for discerning good music from bad music, provide an empirical proof that your formula is not just erroneous opinion, and demonstrate why people's own judgements are impaired. Otherwise, just accept that the "plastic" genre of music is for some people, just not for you.
We, the 'masses,' now have access to create, distribute, discover, promote, share and listen to any music. Hopefully access to all of this new music will inspire us, make us think and open doors and minds to new experiences we choose, not what a corporation or media outlet decides we should want.
The RIAA has absolutely no business or reason to dictate to us what we like. It's not exactly difficult to buy music that people want. Why would they even bother trying to prescribe tastes, when they can just cater for the most lucrative markets? This just smells of irrational anti-RIAA FUD.
His piece describes clearly what the major record labels used to be good for and why they are now good for nothing but getting in the way.
I dunno. I still buy some RIAA music every now and again. I don't get the impression that the shareholders are compelling it to simply get in one guy's way, even if his ego is a little inflated.
That's right! He should make this speech at all the pr0n forums! I've always had a little trouble interpreting the sexual intentions of the women there.
If men understand the sexual intentions of other men, and women don't understand the sexual intentions of other women, then it's clearly the women who don't communicate clearly.
Men are from Mars, women are collected from random points in the cosmos.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't see anything we need to be discussing regarding this point.
I won't.
No, I really see no problem. As far as I can tell, there are scarce resources (people) creating art in multiple media. Some of those media retain the scarcity of their creations (statues, paintings, carvings, installations, books, performances, feel free to add to this), and others can produce or share the products of their work in media that offers no intrinsic limit on the number of copies that can be produced of the work (digital recordings, software, images, movies, etc.) The different media obey different laws. Physical media obeys physical laws, the "Copying" media does not. In both case there are opportunities to be exploited to profit.
I'm not sure I understand your point here. You seem to be breaking down the problem successfully, but there's crucial analysis missing. Why isn't the non-obedience of "copying" media to "physical laws" a problem? Is it your opinion that because we have so many scarce art forms, there is not enough of a problem with the lack of scarcity of art to justify copyright?
If so, I'd like to point out that all the art media you pointed out (and all the art media you didn't) have both a physical component and an intellectual component in varying proportions. The greater the physical component and the higher the overhead cost of copying, the less it needs copyright protection. At the same time, there is less need for taking them out of copyright, because it's just as hard to make a legitimate copy. A statue, for example, often takes significant raw materials to recreate, plus it requires a skilled hand and lots of time to copy, or at least a prohibitively expensive machine. There's very, very little statue piracy in the world because of that fact. But what exactly is copyright doing wrong then? There's no lawsuits, no snooping of private communication, no potential for a public domain of any significant value. Compare this with a DVD which the physical aspect costs less than a dollar, but the intellectual aspect could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. There, copyright is solving a problem, if you accept that artists deserve money for their work. However, at the same time, that's where copyright's most controversial aspects are concentrated. If you get rid of copyright, there'll be very little change in the statue trade, good or bad, but there'll be huge change in the movie trade, which will be very bad.
As far as fairness, I must take a rather large amount of offense with your contrived protection of entitlements to these "artists" you seem to be representing. Personally, I get paid for my time, most people do. I see no, absolutely none (mind you I USED to think otherwise), justification as to why somebody who produces something copyable is entitle to anything more than payment for their time.
I believe they are entitled to fair payment. By fair, I mean an amount of money that is of the same proportion to demand as any other business. If the money drips in bit by bit, or if they're paid upfront for their time, I don't give a shit. So long as they get their fair amount, I'm happy. I would be slightly upset if we were to remove the ability to enforce licenses like the GPL, but I could certainly live with it. The problem is that the drip method is simply the best we have so far. The free market has spoken.
copyright is a contrivance
All law is a contrivance. Some have been around longer than others, and some are easier to enforce than others, but they all are arbitrary rules we set for ourselves. They don't mirror some divine constant of morality, fairness, or justice, they're just to help us survive and survive relatively comfortably. It is indeed human nature to break copyright, but it's also human nature to break all laws. That's why we have them; if no-one wanted to break them, we wouldn't need them. For some of the o
So it's agreed then, you original argument was a straw man.
No, a strawman is designed to shift focus away from the issues at hand. It was a rebuttal to another strawman. It's not designed to convince you that IP must be incorporated into property law. If it was, it would be a strawman, but it's not. It was perfectly relevant and to the point, until you read it out of context.
I see no current, nor future problem marketing art, regardless of the medium. Different media will impose different constraints on how you can market it, no problem.
You really see no problem here? Ever heard of the problem of scarcity of art? Scarcity is a major cornerstone of modern economics, and art simply doesn't have it naturally. Without scarcity the only money comes from weak economic aberrations like charity, which while it may work acceptably for a while, it is not at all reliable and not particularly fair (i.e. representative of effort). It's a problem to which we have a solution: copyright. Ignoring the problem won't make it go away. If you wish to replace copyright, you must replace it, not just throw it away, and hope something will step into its place.
This is another straw man: we have the status quo and the status quo is crap we need another system that can replace the status quo but otherwise be just like the status quo. Firstly, new business models not based on selling copies are emerging. FLOSS is already doing it, a number of musicians are figuring things out. This trend will continue. Saying that there is nothing to compete with it is hyperbole.
No, this is actually the very heart of the problem. Copyright is only here because we have yet to find something better. Now, copyright is actually damn good, in principle. We offer artists copyrights in exchange for creation. Those copyrights, so long as they are honoured by the community, have value, yet, at the same time, don't cost us anything. Their entire value is derived from the potential of the artist's work. Now, we don't actually force artists to accept copyrights; they can choose to give them up completely. Therefore (and this is the real beauty) any artist who would have created under a copyright-less system will still create, plus many more who need/want the money involved. Copyright, as a system, is actually highly competitive, and can easily be tested side-by-side with any other system.
Not only that, but the free market can actually be used to determine how copyrights are used. Artists can (and do) tap into the market for free(ish) media, and they can compete with all-rights-reserved media. Consumers can decide whether they want the locked down media or the free media, taking into account price, quality, convenience, etc. There's no need as of yet to codify this into law. It's already happening as you point out. Most FOSS licenses (only exception being BSD-style licenses that don't require crediting of the original author) require copyright, but they don't retain all rights. FOSS has proven that even if it can't quite get to the pinnacle of certain software markets, they can still make damn good software, for free. Copyrights can still exist, but the market could potentially determine that reserving software rights is no longer profitable. Similarly with music. Only when we find a way to market all forms and all potential forms of art, while committing them instantly to the public domain, can we replace copyright. It's not the current copyright holder's responsibility to adapt if you want free, illegal, access to their works, it's your responsibility to come up with a better system.
It is nobody's fault, but technology has been produced and adopted that undermines old business practices: boo hoo. We have absolutely no obligation to support business models that fail to adapt to new realities.
It's the pirates' fault for using the technology illegally, and you have an obligation to obey the law. If you don't like the
Property is not quite as tangible as you think. As I mentioned earlier on this thread, physical property is actually an abstract concept where things are attributed to you, regardless of physical situations. If someone takes your physical property, it actually remains your own physical property, which is contrary to the physical situation, where the other person has possession of it. Possession is tangible, property is not.
What about money? Is money tangible? Do you dispute our ownership of our bank balance? Do you think cash should be worth the ink and paper/plastic it's printed on? Property is not tangible, and therefore, no significant distinction lies between IP and physical property in that category.
They will never be the same, viewed the same, or treated the same, no matter how many times you try to confuse the issue by using the word "property" to describe these concepts.
Property is an abstract concept that we came up with a long time ago. It wasn't handed down from on high (unless you're religious), it was invented from nothing. We are the owners and sole keepers of the concept of property, and thus we can change it and expand it to suit our needs. I have shown that the concept of property and the concept of IP fit the same economic model. In fact, that is actually the point of IP: to fit the economic model of property. Now, you can say that IP shouldn't be property for some reason pertaining to its benefits/costs, but you can't really claim that it doesn't work with property. It does, and we could let it in, and until people provide compelling reasons why it shouldn't be let in, we will continue to think of it as property.
You're never "promised" profitability - it's always a risk.
Pardon me, I simplified confusingly. What I meant to say is that the artist is promised a correlation between popularity and profitability, should he price it well. There is always a risk that no-one will want the product. There shouldn't be risk of people taking it and not paying for it.
But where do you draw the line, then?
Where judges, juries, and common sense dictate. You are well on the other side currently.
And how do you enforce these laws? Death of the author plus 70 years?
That's another debate entirely. I have some ideas and some theories, but unless you insist, I'm not going to exacerbate this debate any further.
How long do we hold up progress so that corporations can reap profits?
It's not and never was about corporations reaping products. That's the very definition of a strawman.
The laws defining entitlement to physical property is the theoretical concept, physical possession or indisputable control over physical objects is indistinguishable from "ownership" without laws, a society that recognizes them, and enforcement. The necessity of "ownership" of physical objects begins with that our bodies are physical in nature and at least in need of physical support (food, shelter, clothing). Beyond basic physical needs we are in the realm of accumulating wealth. I would say that your claim that we would adjust the laws that govern physical property to be in-line with the rules that could conceivably be applied to non-physical goods is, at best, a straw-man, and at worst deliberately disingenuous.
You're quite astute, but not quite astute enough. I wasn't actually saying in that paragraph that we should adjust those laws because physical property is just as theoretical. I was saying that the theoretical nature of IP should not be a reason in itself to discount it, because physical property is equivalent in that criterion. I don't presume that that would be enough to make a vacuous argument in favour of IP.
Your argument is one of re-imposing the model of "scarce goods", which is not a good long-term strategy, as it is antithetical to the expansion of the ability of the human brain.
One would hope that with the expansion of the human brain would come other solutions to the marketability problem of art. Right now, all we have is one working system, a couple of highly experimental, barely tested systems, and a large group of people saying the system in place now is crap without any working system to compete with it. I'm not blindly devoted to traditional copyright models, I've just yet to see a system that works any better.
The alternative is draconian.
That's the future, this is now. We can drop copyright law just as easily later, when it becomes a hindrance, as we can now.
Imagine I had a photographic memory could I not recite, word for word the book I read, then sold? I could rewrite a copy of the book, in fact. Then what?
Then you could conceivably be sued for copyright infringement (but I doubt it'd fly). If you just had a word-perfect version in your memory, then good for you. No publisher would be so stupid as to try to sue someone for their thoughts.
You are also making the claim that life under a copyright-based regime is in some way more "moral" then what those file copiers are doing. I could not disagree more, I would say that obsessive control over the way in which ideas are spread and shared is fundamentally amoral.
Ya, so is possessiveness. You should be spreading your wealth as much as you can amongst the poor. Unfortunately, coding that into law means that there is no incentive to work for your possessions, since they'll be gone anyway. It's nice to give, but not nice to be forced to.
Of course, it is perfectly natural then to worry about how folks who traditionally made a living off of selling copies of things will make a living. Firstly, they will adapt. New, really smart folks will find ways to make money off of copies of things, so don't lose too much sleep over that.
If there is all that untapped potential, why haven't they come forward and tried their new ideas? What if the reason for that is that we actually don't currently have the potential to come up with replacements for copyright? What then? Do we just let art die?
The important point is that the future not only won't but has absolutely no obligation to maintain the status quo for "tradition" reasons.
At the same time, it not only won't but has absolutely no obligation to be forced to settle for something significantly worse than status quo.
If we cannot figure out how to realize the value of unfettered copying and wind up with the do
No, no, and NO! IP (Imaginary Property) is *nothing* like tangible property. It's not property at all, any more than (as Thomas Jefferson analogized) a the flame on your candle is property. Share your flame with me, and we are both enriched and neither of us are deprived.
So I guess you're ignoring my well-laid out explanation of why IP isn't particularly distinct from, and could feasibly be analogous to, physical property, and providing us with your own self-serving analogy. Funnily enough, it only doesn't suit my purpose because the value of the flame is so small (due to the infinitesimal effort required to make it, unlike art). If you do make that nigh value-less flame available to the public, you lose whatever profitability you may have been promised when you made it. So yes, you are deprived of value, just like regular stealing. It works better if you take a multimillion dollar movie instead of a flame, because multimillion dollar movies don't pay for themselves.
If I have a good memory, I can keep your IP in my head - will you have the courts compel brain surgery against infringers to recover the stolen property?
No. Next question please. Seriously though, IP's value is like a leaky sieve. You can't prevent it from being copied informally like that, and it simply isn't worth it (for copyright holders or their customers) to enforce that high on the hyperbola.
If you make 1 million copies of your $0.99 song, do we tax your IP at a high rate, because you are now worth almost a million dollars?
I can see you didn't understand me the first time. The more copies you make, the less value your IP has. Copyright-holders basically exchange small chunks of their IP for cash. Every time they distribute a copy, they lose some control over distribution (another copy in the wild), and potential demand for the IP goes down with one less customer. On the flip side, they are compensated for that loss of value with money. That is, assuming people don't pirate the IP.
On the other hand, what about real, tangible property? Can we treat it similar to IP?
Yes, potentially. We could maintain IP of a builder on a property, as per your example. They could claim copyright on the design or the building, and retain some rights over duplication. Typically, that wouldn't happen though, because the market would basically demand that the builder sell their IP rights along with the finished product.
As long as people have independent thought, that is impossible, because when sharing an idea becomes morally repugnant, we will no longer be human.
An idea is not covered by any form of IP. Patents can prevent you from marketing a product using certain ideas (certainly not from conveying or expressing that idea), which someone else has worked hard to come up with and refine (in theory). Art is far more specific.
I wouldn't steal a car, but if I could give a car to someone that didn't have one simply by pulling it out of my ass at no cost to me, that seems like a really "moral" thing to do.
That's the problem, isn't it? It's no cost to you, but it has cost to the people who's livelihoods come from designing cars. Your analogy makes slightly more sense (from an economics perspective) if you replace "pulling it out of my ass" with "breaking into a factory and taking it".
Telling me it's wrong because [Big Corporation] should get something because *I* made a copy of a car just doesn't *feel* right.
And telling me that artists should work for free, regardless of their needs, feels wrong to me.
You think? You reckon companies which don't receive revenues from this deal are not going to try and sue you/your ISP?
Isn't that the point of collective licensing?
There never were any moral repercussions, supply a product at a competitive price, and people will pay for it. If you don't someone will copy your work and will supply it for a competitive price.
However, taking whatever you want from shop windows (as in the analogy of the GP), does have both legal and moral repercussions.
You play devil's advocate, for your opinion is neither moral nor would be beneficial to people. Therefore, you are advocating a larger devil than I. Of course, what I'm saying I have not justified in any detail, but I resent being called a devil's advocate when my views are all reasoned and reasonable, with the good of everyone (not just copyright holders) in mind.
The problem is: information is not a "good" or a "product". It is not a "thing". So, it cannot be analysed in the same manner as physical objects. Lessig's picnic table example is perfect for this. If I take your picnic table from your back yard, I am stealing. If I see you have a picnic table, like the idea, and go and buy one for my yard, what have I "stolen" then? I certainly got the idea from you, but I also have not taken anything from you.
It could be considered property if we so wish. If you take a picnic you take the value of a picnic table and add it to your own by taking it from the owner. You could feasibly take a leg of the picnic table, and take a portion of that picnic table's worth. When you copy an artwork (not an idea - ideas theoretically shouldn't be worth anything without significant research behind them), you don't steal from the owner of the original copy, you steal from the copyright holder. You slightly loosen the control that copyright guarantees by making that copy. That control is the only thing giving that copyright value, and by loosening it, you deprive the copyright holder of value, like you did with the picnic table. You also illegally gain value yourself, just like with the picnic table. It's actually quite compatible with traditional theft.
It is only valuable if artists truly have an alternative. Before the internet, there really was none. It is entirely possible that this sort of blanket taxing on ISPs will return artists to the former situation -- just as with net radio where SoundExchange requires royalties to be collected for all songs regardless of whether the artist is a member or not.
Fair enough. I didn't say I supported this arrangement. I don't, unless there is some kind of choice in the equation. For example, you can opt in to the fee if you wish to copy music, or else face the usual multi-thousand dollar lawsuits.
This sort of monopoly is unfair to both artists and "consumers" as it denies both the opportunity to exercise their Free Choice.
Currently though, it's not a monopoly.
This does not mean that internet style distribution should not be used.
Of course not. It just means it shouldn't be used exclusively, which it isn't. The RIAA use it as much as is natural with the market the way it is.
Correction: The artist is entitled initially to any money generated by the work they create.
You're wrong. There is no money in anonymous P2P file-sharing, but it significantly degrades the value of the copyright. It'd be a HUGE hole in copyright if there had to be money involved. It'd be like pardoning corruption if there was no exchange of cash, which would mean the RIAA would be able to set politicians up with hookers to pass any law they want, legally.
If they artist wants to "keep" his work, he can keep his work a secret. If he is going to give it to the public, it will no longer be exclusively his -- it will be a part of our culture.
Well, I personally am not comfortable about leaning on artists to keep their work private. I would rather experience it.
However, this "outdated business model" is the cause of copyright violating other more important rights like Free Speech.
Oh, what bullshit. That, and your sig. Give me one example where copyright has limited your ability to express yourself legally. We have fair use for exactly that. No copyright holder is so starved for
So now the sense of my rhetoric and reasoning is now conditional on the identity of my employers*?
* Which is not anyone with a vested interest in copyright, and they certainly don't pay to spread my opinions (just to head off those trigger-happy witch-hunters who accuse anyone with a contrary opinion of being an RIAA-shill).
Point being that we're not talking about trading kilogrammes of potatoes. The discussion is about 'owning' ideas and intellectual property and the transmission thereof. It's being argued widely, in case you didn't notice, that information and ideas (eg: recordings of music/melodies, as opposed to the actual personal and live performance of music) should not be defined in the same way as material objects because they are so easy to replicate at no appreciable cost.
Fair enough. It's really a matter of opinion and you are entitled to your own. However, I'd like to explain why my opinion is different.
Basically, physical property is already a theoretical concept independent from tangible objects. You may own that kilogram of potatoes, but there is nothing physical in your ownership. If someone steals your potatoes, they don't instantly own them; you still do (you just no longer have possession of them). Just because it's easy to take property doesn't mean that we should align ownership with possession. That would destroy the point of property and negate the vast positives of defining property. It would also be cheaper in terms of enforcement and chances for civil system abuses (ala RIAA lawsuits) to ignore property, but we have decided that those costs are vastly outweighed by the benefits. If as many people were to commit physical theft as people currently commit copyright infringement, I would bet my bottom dollar there would be moves to abolish physical property to be in synch with the fickle nature of possession.
IP is relatively new, and difficult to enforce. Therefore it is not currently as entrenched in our morality, and a community of infringers has been allowed to form in the absence of adequate enforcement. IP could reflect society if society started to support IP law, like we did with the concept of property, and like physical property, we could benefit from it's addition to property law. The current abnormally high rate of abuse once it's refined and enforced properly, like physical property is. To quote the old propaganda "You wouldn't steal a car..."
Yes, the RIAA is a target but so is the concept of copyright which, it is argued, is being abused to make unfair profit and hound ordinary people into paying protection money. This why the two are linked, not due the stupidity of anyone.
So it's not copyright they're complaining about, it's the RIAA, or more specifically, the exploitations by the RIAA of certain holes in the legal system that allows them to demand "protection money". And instead of campaigning to plug those holes, or even call for the RIAA's head on a pike, they've decided to go for copyright, a system that is actually beneficial.
It looks like you don't have much of a clue either and, as always, more fingers on your hand are pointing at you than at those you accuse.
I don't get it. How's that?
The RIAA behaves like a spoilt child, a bully and, whilst it operates within legal boundaries, it doesn't operate within moral or ethical boundaries. It is exploitative and this is what people are angry about.
Agreed. I get pretty pissed about it myself. I just get kinda annoyed when people think that it's an excuse to break copyright law, or they equate the RIAA with copyright law, and thereby conclude that we should take them both down simultaneously.
There are no alternatives, really, to the RIAA (as you basically admit in points d and e), so it is a monopoly. Again an unacceptable situation.
No, there are plenty of alternatives to the RIAA. Artists can choose a number of options for distribution including, but not limited to, doing it themselves. We have a number of options for legally obtaining music, including indie labels and CC-licensed music. The only thing we don't have an option of doing is obtaining music the RIAA owns from distribution channels they haven't approved. It's not so much a monopoly as it is a forced bundling of distribution channel and product. You can boycott the product and the distribution channel, or accept them both. There's still plenty of diversity and competition in the market.
People aren't totally stupid to swallow your talk about business deals and whatever. In essence, ordinary people are angry and have had enough of scheisters and swindlers and usurers and corporate plunderers. Fuck that shit and in your face!
Sorry, but are you suggesting that because I use complicated concepts like basic economics, I am a scheister, a swindler, or a usurer? Would you prefer if I avoided using such aloof and intellectual terms as "trading" or "ownership"? I'll keep that in mind for next time. Hell, I already know that the RIAA keeps that in mind when they spew non-stop crap about piracy funding terrorism. I guess they realise that the masses can't actually comprehend the real justifications for copyright, and they need to coddle them with alarmist FUD. Next time, perhaps I'll just follow suit. Whatever breaches the stupidity, you know?
The biggest problem here is that it won't solve anything. People want more access to art, but they don't want to pay for it. The RIAA wants to be paid fairly for all the unauthorised accesses to the art they produce. The two are incompatible. Either we'll have a super-inflated internet connection price (and be screwed over), the RIAA will be screwed over (as they are being now by pirates), or both parties will be screwed over simultaneously to a lesser extent (which is essentially what is happening now with piracy, lawsuits, restrictions, etc).
That is exactly what I'm talking about. Thank you for giving me such a nicely-wrapped example of my grievances. The absence of a lawsuit we know is because of corruption. Why? Because the US government is corrupt. How do we know the US government is corrupt? Because of X example of corruption. How do we know that that piece of heresay was a result of corruption? Because the US government is corrupt. And so on, and so on, one shoddy piece of crap piled on-top of another masquerading as a foundation for an argument. It's self-justifying bullshit designed to absolve people of their responsibility to keep their own democratic government representing their own views.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but you need to bear in mind that if you buy a licence (which would be the option they'd invariably go for, because it's what's on the that's of most value) and physical implementations come gratis or at cost, the price will go up. The prices as they are now rely on increased profit margins from people who are careless enough to break or lose their media, and as people realise they can get cheap copies for themselves and friends, there's going to be increased piracy rates and production costs, which will further drive the price of music up.
But otherwise, if we're prepared to pay the extra for unlimited licenses, it sounds like a great idea. Next time I see media for sale with such a license attached, and it's not horrifically expensive, I'll buy it, just to support them.
Boy, I wouldn't want to be the policeman to find you in a front-on collision.
Would it kill you guys to view a page with ads?
Taking when you can't afford is understandable when talking about necessities. Taking when you can afford (just about everyone can afford a bit of music) rewards nothing but your own greed.
Quick! Before they evaluate their position rationally! Get them to sue! Get them to sue!
However, what the GP fails to mention is that you shouldn't use this set-up to download illegal copies of certain files, because the more you abuse anonymity, the more people will try (and succeed) to take it away from you (and everyone).
Firstly, you assume that signed artists have "shackles" placed on them by the music industry, whereas, more often than not, it's the other way around. The music industry chooses to produce the talents with the greatest chance of becoming a commercial success. They don't buy up risky investments, and teach them how to produce the kind of music they want to sell. That would be terribly inefficient plus very controversial. With so many teens singing into their toothbrushes, they're not short on sellable talent.
Secondly, you also assume that people indeed are complaining that the music they want isn't available on CDs, and that their complaints are accurate. It just might be with the people you know, which could be a relatively minor demographic. Plus, if they actually looked and listened through some of the RIAA's catalogue (including back-catalogue), they might actually find something they like.
Thirdly, the contention that the music in the charts is not representative of the tastes of most people does not necessarily imply that the music is created to be easy to manufacture, and the implication that maximum-profit is unrelated to people's tastes is misleading. The music is not "easier to manufacture" (easy meaning cheap). Do you think the pop divas out there accept that they are less talented than indie artists, and therefore accept a lower rate? Of course not. If anything, the process should be more expensive, with the more technological layers separating a singer from the finished product. The RIAA don't care because pop still maximises their profits (that's their purpose). Since it does maximise their profits, and profits come directly from the consumer's pocket, it must be representing the tastes of some people.The RIAA is actually a large cog of a bigger system of the music industry. The RIAA capitalise on the most lucrative markets (i.e. the markets with the most demand) and the indie artists pick up on the more esoteric tastes. The RIAA can't really afford to cater for the esoteric tastes while the indie artists cater so well for them, and the indie artists can't afford to directly compete with the RIAA on the popular music front in any significant way, nor could they fill the huge demand if the RIAA stopped supplying. The system works, and both parts are necessary. Neither the RIAA nor the indie artists accurately represent the majority of tastes separately. Together, however, just about every base is covered.
That's right! He should make this speech at all the pr0n forums! I've always had a little trouble interpreting the sexual intentions of the women there.
I won't.
I'm not sure I understand your point here. You seem to be breaking down the problem successfully, but there's crucial analysis missing. Why isn't the non-obedience of "copying" media to "physical laws" a problem? Is it your opinion that because we have so many scarce art forms, there is not enough of a problem with the lack of scarcity of art to justify copyright?
If so, I'd like to point out that all the art media you pointed out (and all the art media you didn't) have both a physical component and an intellectual component in varying proportions. The greater the physical component and the higher the overhead cost of copying, the less it needs copyright protection. At the same time, there is less need for taking them out of copyright, because it's just as hard to make a legitimate copy. A statue, for example, often takes significant raw materials to recreate, plus it requires a skilled hand and lots of time to copy, or at least a prohibitively expensive machine. There's very, very little statue piracy in the world because of that fact. But what exactly is copyright doing wrong then? There's no lawsuits, no snooping of private communication, no potential for a public domain of any significant value. Compare this with a DVD which the physical aspect costs less than a dollar, but the intellectual aspect could cost hundreds of millions of dollars. There, copyright is solving a problem, if you accept that artists deserve money for their work. However, at the same time, that's where copyright's most controversial aspects are concentrated. If you get rid of copyright, there'll be very little change in the statue trade, good or bad, but there'll be huge change in the movie trade, which will be very bad.
I believe they are entitled to fair payment. By fair, I mean an amount of money that is of the same proportion to demand as any other business. If the money drips in bit by bit, or if they're paid upfront for their time, I don't give a shit. So long as they get their fair amount, I'm happy. I would be slightly upset if we were to remove the ability to enforce licenses like the GPL, but I could certainly live with it. The problem is that the drip method is simply the best we have so far. The free market has spoken.
All law is a contrivance. Some have been around longer than others, and some are easier to enforce than others, but they all are arbitrary rules we set for ourselves. They don't mirror some divine constant of morality, fairness, or justice, they're just to help us survive and survive relatively comfortably. It is indeed human nature to break copyright, but it's also human nature to break all laws. That's why we have them; if no-one wanted to break them, we wouldn't need them. For some of the o
No, a strawman is designed to shift focus away from the issues at hand. It was a rebuttal to another strawman. It's not designed to convince you that IP must be incorporated into property law. If it was, it would be a strawman, but it's not. It was perfectly relevant and to the point, until you read it out of context.
You really see no problem here? Ever heard of the problem of scarcity of art? Scarcity is a major cornerstone of modern economics, and art simply doesn't have it naturally. Without scarcity the only money comes from weak economic aberrations like charity, which while it may work acceptably for a while, it is not at all reliable and not particularly fair (i.e. representative of effort). It's a problem to which we have a solution: copyright. Ignoring the problem won't make it go away. If you wish to replace copyright, you must replace it, not just throw it away, and hope something will step into its place.
No, this is actually the very heart of the problem. Copyright is only here because we have yet to find something better. Now, copyright is actually damn good, in principle. We offer artists copyrights in exchange for creation. Those copyrights, so long as they are honoured by the community, have value, yet, at the same time, don't cost us anything. Their entire value is derived from the potential of the artist's work. Now, we don't actually force artists to accept copyrights; they can choose to give them up completely. Therefore (and this is the real beauty) any artist who would have created under a copyright-less system will still create, plus many more who need/want the money involved. Copyright, as a system, is actually highly competitive, and can easily be tested side-by-side with any other system.
Not only that, but the free market can actually be used to determine how copyrights are used. Artists can (and do) tap into the market for free(ish) media, and they can compete with all-rights-reserved media. Consumers can decide whether they want the locked down media or the free media, taking into account price, quality, convenience, etc. There's no need as of yet to codify this into law. It's already happening as you point out. Most FOSS licenses (only exception being BSD-style licenses that don't require crediting of the original author) require copyright, but they don't retain all rights. FOSS has proven that even if it can't quite get to the pinnacle of certain software markets, they can still make damn good software, for free. Copyrights can still exist, but the market could potentially determine that reserving software rights is no longer profitable. Similarly with music. Only when we find a way to market all forms and all potential forms of art, while committing them instantly to the public domain, can we replace copyright. It's not the current copyright holder's responsibility to adapt if you want free, illegal, access to their works, it's your responsibility to come up with a better system.
It's the pirates' fault for using the technology illegally, and you have an obligation to obey the law. If you don't like the
What about money? Is money tangible? Do you dispute our ownership of our bank balance? Do you think cash should be worth the ink and paper/plastic it's printed on? Property is not tangible, and therefore, no significant distinction lies between IP and physical property in that category.Property is an abstract concept that we came up with a long time ago. It wasn't handed down from on high (unless you're religious), it was invented from nothing. We are the owners and sole keepers of the concept of property, and thus we can change it and expand it to suit our needs. I have shown that the concept of property and the concept of IP fit the same economic model. In fact, that is actually the point of IP: to fit the economic model of property. Now, you can say that IP shouldn't be property for some reason pertaining to its benefits/costs, but you can't really claim that it doesn't work with property. It does, and we could let it in, and until people provide compelling reasons why it shouldn't be let in, we will continue to think of it as property.Pardon me, I simplified confusingly. What I meant to say is that the artist is promised a correlation between popularity and profitability, should he price it well. There is always a risk that no-one will want the product. There shouldn't be risk of people taking it and not paying for it.Where judges, juries, and common sense dictate. You are well on the other side currently.That's another debate entirely. I have some ideas and some theories, but unless you insist, I'm not going to exacerbate this debate any further.It's not and never was about corporations reaping products. That's the very definition of a strawman.
You're quite astute, but not quite astute enough. I wasn't actually saying in that paragraph that we should adjust those laws because physical property is just as theoretical. I was saying that the theoretical nature of IP should not be a reason in itself to discount it, because physical property is equivalent in that criterion. I don't presume that that would be enough to make a vacuous argument in favour of IP.
One would hope that with the expansion of the human brain would come other solutions to the marketability problem of art. Right now, all we have is one working system, a couple of highly experimental, barely tested systems, and a large group of people saying the system in place now is crap without any working system to compete with it. I'm not blindly devoted to traditional copyright models, I've just yet to see a system that works any better.
That's the future, this is now. We can drop copyright law just as easily later, when it becomes a hindrance, as we can now.
Then you could conceivably be sued for copyright infringement (but I doubt it'd fly). If you just had a word-perfect version in your memory, then good for you. No publisher would be so stupid as to try to sue someone for their thoughts.
Ya, so is possessiveness. You should be spreading your wealth as much as you can amongst the poor. Unfortunately, coding that into law means that there is no incentive to work for your possessions, since they'll be gone anyway. It's nice to give, but not nice to be forced to.
If there is all that untapped potential, why haven't they come forward and tried their new ideas? What if the reason for that is that we actually don't currently have the potential to come up with replacements for copyright? What then? Do we just let art die?
At the same time, it not only won't but has absolutely no obligation to be forced to settle for something significantly worse than status quo.
You play devil's advocate, for your opinion is neither moral nor would be beneficial to people. Therefore, you are advocating a larger devil than I. Of course, what I'm saying I have not justified in any detail, but I resent being called a devil's advocate when my views are all reasoned and reasonable, with the good of everyone (not just copyright holders) in mind.
It could be considered property if we so wish. If you take a picnic you take the value of a picnic table and add it to your own by taking it from the owner. You could feasibly take a leg of the picnic table, and take a portion of that picnic table's worth. When you copy an artwork (not an idea - ideas theoretically shouldn't be worth anything without significant research behind them), you don't steal from the owner of the original copy, you steal from the copyright holder. You slightly loosen the control that copyright guarantees by making that copy. That control is the only thing giving that copyright value, and by loosening it, you deprive the copyright holder of value, like you did with the picnic table. You also illegally gain value yourself, just like with the picnic table. It's actually quite compatible with traditional theft.
Fair enough. I didn't say I supported this arrangement. I don't, unless there is some kind of choice in the equation. For example, you can opt in to the fee if you wish to copy music, or else face the usual multi-thousand dollar lawsuits.
Currently though, it's not a monopoly.
Of course not. It just means it shouldn't be used exclusively, which it isn't. The RIAA use it as much as is natural with the market the way it is.
You're wrong. There is no money in anonymous P2P file-sharing, but it significantly degrades the value of the copyright. It'd be a HUGE hole in copyright if there had to be money involved. It'd be like pardoning corruption if there was no exchange of cash, which would mean the RIAA would be able to set politicians up with hookers to pass any law they want, legally.
Well, I personally am not comfortable about leaning on artists to keep their work private. I would rather experience it.
Oh, what bullshit. That, and your sig. Give me one example where copyright has limited your ability to express yourself legally. We have fair use for exactly that. No copyright holder is so starved for
* Which is not anyone with a vested interest in copyright, and they certainly don't pay to spread my opinions (just to head off those trigger-happy witch-hunters who accuse anyone with a contrary opinion of being an RIAA-shill).Fair enough. It's really a matter of opinion and you are entitled to your own. However, I'd like to explain why my opinion is different.
Basically, physical property is already a theoretical concept independent from tangible objects. You may own that kilogram of potatoes, but there is nothing physical in your ownership. If someone steals your potatoes, they don't instantly own them; you still do (you just no longer have possession of them). Just because it's easy to take property doesn't mean that we should align ownership with possession. That would destroy the point of property and negate the vast positives of defining property. It would also be cheaper in terms of enforcement and chances for civil system abuses (ala RIAA lawsuits) to ignore property, but we have decided that those costs are vastly outweighed by the benefits. If as many people were to commit physical theft as people currently commit copyright infringement, I would bet my bottom dollar there would be moves to abolish physical property to be in synch with the fickle nature of possession.
IP is relatively new, and difficult to enforce. Therefore it is not currently as entrenched in our morality, and a community of infringers has been allowed to form in the absence of adequate enforcement. IP could reflect society if society started to support IP law, like we did with the concept of property, and like physical property, we could benefit from it's addition to property law. The current abnormally high rate of abuse once it's refined and enforced properly, like physical property is. To quote the old propaganda "You wouldn't steal a car..."So it's not copyright they're complaining about, it's the RIAA, or more specifically, the exploitations by the RIAA of certain holes in the legal system that allows them to demand "protection money". And instead of campaigning to plug those holes, or even call for the RIAA's head on a pike, they've decided to go for copyright, a system that is actually beneficial.
The biggest problem here is that it won't solve anything. People want more access to art, but they don't want to pay for it. The RIAA wants to be paid fairly for all the unauthorised accesses to the art they produce. The two are incompatible. Either we'll have a super-inflated internet connection price (and be screwed over), the RIAA will be screwed over (as they are being now by pirates), or both parties will be screwed over simultaneously to a lesser extent (which is essentially what is happening now with piracy, lawsuits, restrictions, etc).
That is exactly what I'm talking about. Thank you for giving me such a nicely-wrapped example of my grievances. The absence of a lawsuit we know is because of corruption. Why? Because the US government is corrupt. How do we know the US government is corrupt? Because of X example of corruption. How do we know that that piece of heresay was a result of corruption? Because the US government is corrupt. And so on, and so on, one shoddy piece of crap piled on-top of another masquerading as a foundation for an argument. It's self-justifying bullshit designed to absolve people of their responsibility to keep their own democratic government representing their own views.
On the other hand, you have the opportunity to grab whatever you want and not face any legal/moral repercussions.