For many of the Apple buyers these days, Apple is not a technology company but a fashion company. They largely won't admit it, but they buy them as fashion accessories.
How many people do you actually know with Apple products? Some of the most down-to-earth people I know own Apple products. They certainly don't buy them for fashion value, which is pretty obvious given how old and used their products are. Come to think of it, with one possible exception, I don't know anyone who actually does flash their apple products like a fashion accessory. Do you?
So does that mean illegal services (such as torrent sites on a blacklist) might be blocked
Yes. Just like they were before.
And how long is it before that changes to "must be blocked" due to being a signatory on an international copyright treaty...
No shorter (if ever) than before the law.
Or does it mean companies can no longer filter websites they find inappropriate? They after all a form of ISP in a way.
Certainly not by any sane legal definition.
Any time you let the government decide what is permissible on your network you will be sorry in the end.
...which has what to do with Net Neutrality?
All this to solve a problem that doesn't even exist. The only time we saw torrent throttling (not even blocking!!) in the U.S. was Comcast, and they got smacked down for it. The market worked, why do we need regulation when there is no problem?
What if an ISP started throttling/blocking something a little less beloved than torrents? How much support would you get if they blocked, say, terrorist propaganda? Every one of the slippery slope arguments applied to government (not that I've heard a convincing one yet) can be applied to companies.
"Network Neutrality" sounds so happy and awesome at first, but it hides a greater problem than you'll ever see from throttling.
I have no more love for Microsoft than the next guy
You have no more love for Microsoft than cmdrsalamander (102098)? The guy posted one comment 10 years ago, and it wasn't even about Microsoft. How could you possibly tell?;-)
And again, I fail to see the problem. If people want recordings so badly, they'll learn to pay for them.
Okaaaay... the problem is that the process of learning this lesson will painful and expensive for artists, music fans, and pirates alike. It will painful not only to those who deserve it, but also people who are sucked in such a blunder by association. This is not fair. Of course, no lasting damage will be done, but I think that punishing the entire population for the stupidity of a small vocal subset is not acceptable. So yes, it is a problem.
The market was ready 5 years ago.
So, how can you still claim that it's market inertia? If it could have adopted the change 5 years ago, then why hasn't it done it yet?
When we throw the old system up in the air, it won't reassemble itself because it's not capable of doing that since 1930s. It will come down in pieces. The new system has to be built from ground up in its place and we can't start building it until at least a part of the old system collapses and gives us some clear ground to build on.
Sorry, but why can't we build a new system parallel to copyright? It's trivially easy to release something without copyright while copyright law is in effect, and copyright law has no bearing on such media. If you have such a system, start building it. Nobody is going to stop you.
The dinosaurs do because they control what gets into mainstream media and what doesn't. Right now, if you're not in mainstream media, you don't exist for vast majority of people.
Please note that the "dinosaurs" are not copyright law, and the problem is entirely distinct. What you want to do is use their dependence on copyright to hurt them, even at the expense of everyone else. If you have dinosaurs camping in your public tubes, consider petitioning for better tubes, rather than for nuking their food supply.
Also, to borrow a page from your book of rhetoric, I don't see the problem. The dinosaurs have their positions on the airwaves because they earned it, and certain people only follow mainstream media because they are satisfied with what the dinosaurs are providing them. If indie artists want the same attention, they have to earn it the same way. They have to make themselves worth listening to, and find some other less dominated medium to advertise themselves. Lots of them already have.
Ah... I don't recall arguing for the complete abolishment of copyright. I most certainly will argue for a drastic reduction in its length, and would also argue that noncommercial infringement should not be punished as harshly as it is (or at all), but I understand that in a commercial sense copyright has its advantages. Our implementation of it is just really really fucked up.
I didn't realise you weren't advocating the abolishment of copyright. I tend to make that mistake from time to time, since people who wish to legalise non-commercial sharing tend to make the same arguments as copyright abolitionists, and come up with the same rebuttals. I suppose that statements like "long after copyright is just a bad footnote in the history books" you made on our other thread, don't help either.
Well, certainly a length reduction wouldn't hurt, and reducing maximum awards for infringement would be good as well (million dollar damages are excessive in anybody's book). As for the distinction between non-commercial and commercial piracy, this is a subject I have argued about here many times before. It simply comes down to the fact that commercial infringement and non-commercial infringement have no practical differences to the artist. Both cause the same reduction in demand for their product, and both incur an opportunity cost from a lost potential sale. In fact, it would be, if anything, preferable for the artist's work to be commercially pirated, since at least the artist can compete with a non-zero price point. If anything, non-commercial should be banned instead (but preferably both).
What makes you think this would happen in the first place?
A better question would be, "What makes me think this could possibly happen in the first place?" since the burden of proof rests with you, and all I have to do is come up with plausible scenarios. I was hoping that I wouldn't have to elaborate on this (simply because it usually takes a long time), but the gauntlet is thrown, and I'll comply.
There is no basis for the idea that if it were legal to download music for free, nobody would buy music.
There is basis to believe this. It's one of the fundamental assumptions of the free market that consumers are rational, that is, if they are given a choice between buying one of two identical products, and one is priced more cheaply, they will uniformly choose to buy the cheaper product.
Of course, consumers are not always rational. Some have consciences which tell them, on some level, that they owe something to the artist, so they'll make a purchase which gains them literally nothing over the pirated version. Also, we have the law, which is deterrent enough for some people. If we removed the law (or weakened it enough so that people could share as much as they liked), then all that would stand between us and paying for nothing is our consciences. If we did pay for nothing, then there is no fathomable way that the artist will get anything from us, and they would be unable to sell recordings.
Thus, all I need to do is convince you that our consciences are not reliable enough to bet our culture on. All that I need to do to convince myself of this is just observe people on/. when any negative piece of entertainment-related news comes to the front page. A classic example is Infinity Ward's decision to cut out dedicated server support from Modern Warfare 2. There was a slew of people who were saying that they were so angry, they would pirate the game. It wasn't going to help the problem at all, just that it was all Infinity Ward's fault for making them do it.
Notice how flimsy the reason can be in order to justify turning to piracy. They are drunk on their own power, and their moral centre can easily be overwhelmed as soon as they find out that the companies are exercising their own powers in a way that they (the pirates) don't like. What happens when they star
I see your point, but you must understand the fundamental problems with enforcing copyright on the Internet.
I see a challenge, not a fundamental problem. On the other hand, I do see a fundamental problem in convincing people to voluntarily pay for something that they can get for free. Computers are incredibly adept at copying bits, it's true. We can't stop computers from copying bits, but only the narrow-minded would suggest that this is the only method to enforce copyright on the internet. There's DRM, which uses cryptography to make it computationally infeasible to make use of the copied bits. It's distasteful, but it's not like pirates have left us with much of a choice. We can also detect copying and identify copied works, especially when done on public networks. We can also try and change people's hearts and minds. I'm pretty sure there's plenty of potential there, since almost everyone I talk to doesn't quite understand exactly how piracy losses work.
Even assuming that copyright is ethically sound in today's world, it's not technically possible to meaningfully enforce. You can advocate copyright all you like, but to do so you ought to come up with a very clever way to make it work online without compromising more important rights, such as free speech, privacy, due process and fair use.
I started doing exactly that not long ago. Mind you, we actually have a semi-decent method of enforcing now, i.e. allow copyright holders to sue any infringers they suspect, and let any victims of inappropriate investigation techniques countersue. The problem is that a large portion of the population don't find that a deterrent, but plenty of artists are surviving, so it's not all bad.
Let's say that copyright is reformed and drastically weakened, taking a bunch of rights away from artists. Let's say no functioning business model can be found. If it ends up that professional musicians cannot make decent money in such an environment, then, as much as I dislike saying this, they need to go out of business. We have to keep in mind that no individual or company is entitled to a working business model and payment through it. Times change, and as people like to say, businesses must adapt or die.
So what you're saying is, in order to maintain continuity with the rest of the free market, we should just do without art and entertainment? Why? What possible benefit is there in doing that? What could possibly be so evil about selling art that, not only you would be prepared to forgo art completely, you would demand that everyone else forgo art as well?
It is not as though such a change would be the end of creativity, as the media companies like to claim.
You know, I haven't seen anyone genuinely support this strawman. Do you have a quote of anybody claiming this?
What people do claim, myself included, that it is entirely plausible that our culture will regress all the way back to the times before copyright. That is, when the only works of any significance are results of commission and hoarded by rich people, and entertainment for the common man comes from a handful of wandering bards. It's all dandy for the uber-rich, but for us, it sucks. I honestly have no idea why people want to model our culture on that.
I also think that such a change might be good in that those artists and bands that only care about money- and by definition, produce inferior music- will leave the music scene, making way for musicians that are more passionate about their music and do it because they love it.
There are so many things wrong with this statement, I scarcely know where to begin. So far, I can count a false dichotomy (they like music, or they need money), an incorrect use of the phrase "by definition" (unless you genuinely believe that "bad musi
This is not hard. I run Ubuntu on both my computers. I get my music from Jamendo [jamendo.com], a website that hosts CC-licensed music. I play Nexuiz [wikimedia.org], a free FPS roughly based off Quake (and I'm not a big gamer). The biggest exception would be movies, as it's harder to find copylefted films, but many of those that I download are old enough that they shouldn't qualify for copyright anymore.
I too have taken the same approach (also using Jamendo via Ubuntu), but it was hard. I did much searching through their album list, and out of all the ones that I could find with any seeders, I only found one album that I thought was worth the space on my hard disk it occupied. Even then, it wasn't nearly the calibre of most of the other albums I own. I did genuinely want to find a hidden gem; something to tell me that free music could rival, or even best commercial music, but I couldn't find it. Such hidden gems may well have existed, but the fact that I couldn't distinguish them from the dreck, or that I couldn't download them, speaks volumes as to flaws in (the current implementation of) the system.
As for the movies situation, that's kind of a black-eye for your position. You're still relying on movies that, even if they shouldn't be under copyright at this stage, were at one point under copyright. That means that you're still relying on the fruits of copyright to support your entertainment, which means that suggesting the abolishment of copyright would almost certainly harm you (and people like you, doing the same thing) in the long term as well (although not as much as the rest of us).
Nothing is stopping you from doing so. Nothing is stopping your favorite bands from selling recordings.
Well, I can't possibly if they stop selling recordings, and they can't possibly continue to sell recordings if nobody is buying them (this is a very real concern, and you need to prove that this wouldn't happen in order for us to change to your new system). If it was the case that nobody wanted their recordings, then I could live with being marginalised, but if it's just the case that people want recordings and they want them for free, then I have to stand up against such short-sighted stupidity.
I have to ask, if you're already reaping the benefits of a free culture, why are you pursuing this? What benefits could you possibly receive under a different system? I mean, you wouldn't have the faint legal threat when you download your old movies, but if the influx of new movies (all but) stops, then surely that would be a bad trade-off, right?
So the latter problem then. No significant incentive to release recordings, so the system is woefully inferior. There are already plenty of live performances, and I see no evidence to suggest that destroying incentives to record will increase that number.
The world does not owe anyone success in business - whether in traditional trades or in the luxury-goods trade that music belongs to. And noone should be able to have laws made to artificially keep what in effect is a guild (at best) or a protection racket in business.
That's great, except that copyright doesn't guarantee success in the art business. All it does guarantee is that demand will reflect success. If their services are in demand, then they will be successful. Most businesses get that for free, but artistry doesn't. It is absolutely essential for the free market to run, because otherwise we simply don't get what we demand, and the free market ends up useless.
If music recordings went away tomorrow the world would continue since they are luxury goods. Stop thinking of artists as God's effing gift to mankind. They are just dilettantes preferring to do what they like instead of providing something others actually need.
True, but if that's the case, then what's the worry about destroying copyright? Surely, if they're luxury goods, and we don't need them, we can just not buy them, and we'd have the same effect as if we destroyed copyright!
I do think it's a little sad, however, that in response to finding something you don't see a practical use for, your first instinct is to destroy it. Perhaps we don't need artists, but some people, myself included, find life much more tolerable when there's entertainment about. If you want to pack nothing but pure necessities into your life, more power to you, just stay the fuck away from mine.
I fail to see the problem. This is how free market works. You get what you're willing to pay for.
The problem is that, unlike most cases where the free market is applied, "what we want" is considerably different to "what we are willing to pay for". What we want (in general) is recordings, but we aren't willing to pay for them. "You get what you're willing to pay for" was the point; we are not willing to pay for recordings, so we don't get them.
That's nothing more than market inertia.
OK then, perhaps we should wait until the market is ready to adopt such a change. You know, so that we can prove once and for all that it is just market inertia, and not that the idea is clearly infeasible. It just seems more sensible than throwing the system up in the air, and hoping it will reassemble itself as something nice. I think we might be waiting a long time though.
Entertainment industry won't adopt new marketing models because those models can't support dinosaurs this big.
I'm sorry, but how does "supporting dinosaurs" prevent indie artists from trying new business models?
Most of the entertainment industry will fall sooner or later with a loud Earth-shaking thud and alternative models will take over because they give the author much more money than the industry.
So the fairy tale goes. In the real world, when we destroy something valuable, we need proof that it will reassemble into something more valuable. It didn't when I was nine, and it was my mother's favourite vase.
Copyright is meaningless when digital files can be instantly replicated and shared.
No, no, no! Copyright is currently at its most meaningful! It was designed for exactly this kind of possibility, when copying and distributing artworks becomes cheap and trivial. We didn't need copyright when such things were expensive and difficult, because often the benefits were dubious. It was when the printing press became mainstream, and there was potential for other, even faster copying machines, that we needed copyright to counter the increasing ease and temptation of copying. Now, in the internet age, copyright is more relevant than ever!
If recording artists manage to make livings selling copies despite this, great. Everyone wins. If they fail, they have no one to blame but themselves.
If they manage to make a living selling copies despite this, yes they have made a living, but they're also subsidising their own lost sales. They then pass this cost to their customers through higher prices. You say "everybody wins", but a more correct version would be "pirates win, customers and artists don't lose (yet)". If more customers start pirating, or pirates start losing the moral drive to buy music that they like, then the system falls flat on its face.
If they can't make money while people decide to illegally take whatever digital recordings they want for free, I suppose it's their fault for not finding the correct business model, right? OK, take your mind out of the self-entitled consumer position that school education indoctrinates you into, and bring your head into the space of pure reason. What justification do you have that such a business model exists? Or if it does, that we'll end up better off for it? I mean, it's not like artists or publishers like their own business model. It requires them to trust that their own fanbase won't rip them off, and we all know how that turned out! They would much prefer to find some way of making steady income that fairly compensates them for their work. If they heard of such a business model, I'm sure they'd be very excited, and want to give it a go (yes, Big Music publishers included). But, so far, obviously, no one has come up with such a business model. Either the business model requires far too much from the artist (e.g. "give me everything for free", or "make quality, free, full-length recordings as advertisements"), or too much from the consumer (e.g. "OK, fuck it, I'm just going to tour from now on").
Sorry, you can't possible say that with a straight face.
No, that's true. I had a little smirk on my face when I realised that someone was inevitably going to fall into that trap.
It is, in fact, true. Most consumers, whether they pay or steal, prefer to consume works from the copyright business model. And, most artists prefer to release under copyright because, as I said above, of the lack of sensible alternatives.
And while I'm here, I've been meaning to pull you up about your sig.
It's easier to think there's a Slashdot groupthink conspiracy against you than admit your beliefs are not realistic.
If you use the word conspiracy, you don't understand how groupthink allegedly works. There's no organisation, just intellectual isolation of a group of people. Certain views, held at one time by a majority, echo among/.ers. The viewpoint is promoted as fact, and dissent is modded down, further increasing the effect. That is groupthink, and it happens. The same thing happens with biased news networks (except that with them, there sometimes is a conspiracy *cough* Fox News */cough*).
Have you ever noticed how the opinions of/.ers seem so out of phase with the rest of society? It's because we segregate ourselves, and read primarily opinions that we agree with. Most people see this, and conclude that other people are just stupid, but I guess it's easier to think that than admit that you're mind is part of a greater groupthink.
Well, let's see here. Is that a false dichotomy I smell?
No. It's really not. The manual labourers comment was far from my point, which was that artists holding side jobs have much less time to function as an artist. I didn't say it was impossible to be an artist while holding down a steady job, just that you don't get nearly the same time to devote to your art as a full time artists.
If we forced artists to work at other jobs, and not pay them for their artistry, we force them to get jobs with pay enough to support them (since their art won't help them), typically with long hours. How are they supposed to find any significant time to complete their works? What if they also have families to feed and otherwise look after? We can't just smooth over all of this, and hope that it all works itself out. We need some proof that any problems caused by getting rid of copyright are outweighed by the benefits.
Recordings have been nothing but a form of advertisements for virtually all but the megastars for the entire history of recorded music, and session musicians often get paid by the session, and don't have residual royalties.
Then why am I finding it so hard to think of a band, local, national, or international who gives away their recordings at cost price to support their tours?
Also, this doesn't mean that nobody will get paid for making recorded music, just that there will not be a continuous source of income from previous work.
How does that work?
As for burden of proof, I say it should be laid upon the party proposing a government backed monopoly, not the party proposing the ability to freely spread information.
The burden of proof did lie with us, a few hundred years ago when copyright was proposed. Now that we've accepted it, and our culture has grown and blossomed so much, the burden of proof now rests with anyone who wants to change it. It's up to that person to prove, beyond anybody's reasonable doubt, that the change will not just be a disaster. Just because you're wanting to "freely spread information", doesn't mean that you're proposing what is best for us.
Better solution, get rid of copyright entirely. Society is producing content at to fast a clip for it to be necessary any more. You produce a work and by the end of the week someone has already produced a derivative work. All this copyright stuff does is slow down progress.
To see why this is too good to be true, try actually restricting yourself freely distributed media, and derivative works thereon. The rapid influx of new works belies the creative stagnation behind them. By the time you've watched the 5th downfall parody, you just want it to end.
If you are worried about how content creators get paid then you haven't thought about it long enough.
And if you're not, then from experience, the chances are you've thought about it just enough to come to a conclusion you want to come up with, but not enough to find the deep flaws behind it.
Content as a service, that is the new model.
If recordings are involved in that service, then the system has the same flaws (you can get an unlimited free service from a P2P network). If recordings are not involved in that service, then the system is already woefully inferior to the system currently in place. Merchandising suffers from that very problem, because it means you reward artists less as musicians, but more as a brand to suck financially dry. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer buying recordings of music made by my favourite bands to buying T-shirts and mugs with their faces on them.
The idea of verifying that the media under free licences is actually free is not such a bad idea. It does, as the summary says, cut into one of the strengths of copyleft licences, but on the other hand, it also strengthens the trust in such a licence. I think (IANAL) that at least part of the burden lies with the consumer to confirm that the work they're licensing is actually licensed that way, so the obvious benefit of this system is that we can look at the license, and say with a greater degree of confidence that we won't be sued down the line for redistributing.
Now, I'm just waiting for such a verification requirement for DMCA takedowns.
Most people get paid for the work they do, not the work that they did. If a construction worker wants some more money, he has to build another house. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that if a performing artist wants more money, he should have to execute another performance.
Artists should be paid for live music. In the modern technological landscape, digital copies are no longer the product, but rather the advertisement.
Why? Why should artists make money the same way as a builder? Why should artists only be paid for live music? Why on god's green earth would we actually want musical recordings to degenerate into a form of advertising? I can just picture it: the same 30 second clips recorded from an old performance, and horrible camcorder recordings from people sneaking cameras in the audience. Your idea just seems horrible for both artists, legitimate customers, and pirates alike.
The assertion that performing artists need to perform to get more money is idiotic. Most performing artists are also recording artists (some artists are exclusively the latter), and much of their job is making and selling their recordings. There is significant value in the copies of these recordings, and it seems considerably more reasonable that, in order for consumers to come into possession of copies of these recordings, there needs to be some sort of mutual agreement between the artist and the consumer. "Mutual", as in not just the consumer demanding that the artist work a certain way, and provide certain things for free.
And besides, even if that wasn't true, there is nothing that says an artist has to be an artist. If artists can't make a living being artists, then they can go get a job that pays, just like the rest of us.
Well, there's 90-100% of their music-generating hours down the toilet. Is there some shortage of manual labourers that I'm not aware of?
I see no evidence that this will result in a complete absence of new music
That is irrelevant, because the burden of proof lies with you. I can certainly see more than ample evidence that it will result a severe collapse in music production (if not a complete absence), so perhaps you're not looking hard enough.
and if it does then the forces of widespread demand will create new opportunities to profit on music.
Right, because the free market will magically swoop in and save the day. Has it occurred to you that, if people are completely unwilling to pay for music recordings, that they simply won't get music recordings, no matter what free market tricks you use? I mean, you can try embedding the cost into something else that people can't have for free, like a concert ticket, but then that just means that recording becomes a side show at best, and a neglected afterthought at worst. If people don't want to pay for something, unless they can find people willing to do it for free, then they aren't going to get it.
So your justification of your outdated business model is crap.
Hmm. Last time I checked, the "outdated" business model that you're referring to is currently more favoured by both artists and consumers than, say, your suggestion for a business model. I wonder which one is the less feasible?
Music publishing is an anachronism, and you need to stop taking our freedom away, move into the modern era, and get yourself a real job.
Seriously, why do you hate recording artists? If you hate paying for recordings, there are other legal ways of not paying for recordings, other than trying to change the law and force them out of their job. You could, you know, just not buy them. It's pretty easy.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. Yet another case where emotional knee-jerk > evidence-based judgement.
Some sheeple need iPhones to be cool. Just like other sheeple need to deride iPhone users to be cool.
Clever. :-)
How many people do you actually know with Apple products? Some of the most down-to-earth people I know own Apple products. They certainly don't buy them for fashion value, which is pretty obvious given how old and used their products are. Come to think of it, with one possible exception, I don't know anyone who actually does flash their apple products like a fashion accessory. Do you?
You misunderstand me. The law makes it no more or less possible for illegal services to be blocked.
Yes. Just like they were before.
No shorter (if ever) than before the law.
Certainly not by any sane legal definition.
...which has what to do with Net Neutrality?
What if an ISP started throttling/blocking something a little less beloved than torrents? How much support would you get if they blocked, say, terrorist propaganda? Every one of the slippery slope arguments applied to government (not that I've heard a convincing one yet) can be applied to companies.
Again, no more than without Net Neutrality.
You have no more love for Microsoft than cmdrsalamander (102098)? The guy posted one comment 10 years ago, and it wasn't even about Microsoft. How could you possibly tell? ;-)
Okaaaay... the problem is that the process of learning this lesson will painful and expensive for artists, music fans, and pirates alike. It will painful not only to those who deserve it, but also people who are sucked in such a blunder by association. This is not fair. Of course, no lasting damage will be done, but I think that punishing the entire population for the stupidity of a small vocal subset is not acceptable. So yes, it is a problem.
So, how can you still claim that it's market inertia? If it could have adopted the change 5 years ago, then why hasn't it done it yet?
Sorry, but why can't we build a new system parallel to copyright? It's trivially easy to release something without copyright while copyright law is in effect, and copyright law has no bearing on such media. If you have such a system, start building it. Nobody is going to stop you.
Please note that the "dinosaurs" are not copyright law, and the problem is entirely distinct. What you want to do is use their dependence on copyright to hurt them, even at the expense of everyone else. If you have dinosaurs camping in your public tubes, consider petitioning for better tubes, rather than for nuking their food supply.
Also, to borrow a page from your book of rhetoric, I don't see the problem. The dinosaurs have their positions on the airwaves because they earned it, and certain people only follow mainstream media because they are satisfied with what the dinosaurs are providing them. If indie artists want the same attention, they have to earn it the same way. They have to make themselves worth listening to, and find some other less dominated medium to advertise themselves. Lots of them already have.
I didn't realise you weren't advocating the abolishment of copyright. I tend to make that mistake from time to time, since people who wish to legalise non-commercial sharing tend to make the same arguments as copyright abolitionists, and come up with the same rebuttals. I suppose that statements like "long after copyright is just a bad footnote in the history books" you made on our other thread, don't help either.
Well, certainly a length reduction wouldn't hurt, and reducing maximum awards for infringement would be good as well (million dollar damages are excessive in anybody's book). As for the distinction between non-commercial and commercial piracy, this is a subject I have argued about here many times before. It simply comes down to the fact that commercial infringement and non-commercial infringement have no practical differences to the artist. Both cause the same reduction in demand for their product, and both incur an opportunity cost from a lost potential sale. In fact, it would be, if anything, preferable for the artist's work to be commercially pirated, since at least the artist can compete with a non-zero price point. If anything, non-commercial should be banned instead (but preferably both).
A better question would be, "What makes me think this could possibly happen in the first place?" since the burden of proof rests with you, and all I have to do is come up with plausible scenarios. I was hoping that I wouldn't have to elaborate on this (simply because it usually takes a long time), but the gauntlet is thrown, and I'll comply.
There is basis to believe this. It's one of the fundamental assumptions of the free market that consumers are rational, that is, if they are given a choice between buying one of two identical products, and one is priced more cheaply, they will uniformly choose to buy the cheaper product.
Of course, consumers are not always rational. Some have consciences which tell them, on some level, that they owe something to the artist, so they'll make a purchase which gains them literally nothing over the pirated version. Also, we have the law, which is deterrent enough for some people. If we removed the law (or weakened it enough so that people could share as much as they liked), then all that would stand between us and paying for nothing is our consciences. If we did pay for nothing, then there is no fathomable way that the artist will get anything from us, and they would be unable to sell recordings.
Thus, all I need to do is convince you that our consciences are not reliable enough to bet our culture on. All that I need to do to convince myself of this is just observe people on /. when any negative piece of entertainment-related news comes to the front page. A classic example is Infinity Ward's decision to cut out dedicated server support from Modern Warfare 2. There was a slew of people who were saying that they were so angry, they would pirate the game. It wasn't going to help the problem at all, just that it was all Infinity Ward's fault for making them do it.
Notice how flimsy the reason can be in order to justify turning to piracy. They are drunk on their own power, and their moral centre can easily be overwhelmed as soon as they find out that the companies are exercising their own powers in a way that they (the pirates) don't like. What happens when they star
I see a challenge, not a fundamental problem. On the other hand, I do see a fundamental problem in convincing people to voluntarily pay for something that they can get for free. Computers are incredibly adept at copying bits, it's true. We can't stop computers from copying bits, but only the narrow-minded would suggest that this is the only method to enforce copyright on the internet. There's DRM, which uses cryptography to make it computationally infeasible to make use of the copied bits. It's distasteful, but it's not like pirates have left us with much of a choice. We can also detect copying and identify copied works, especially when done on public networks. We can also try and change people's hearts and minds. I'm pretty sure there's plenty of potential there, since almost everyone I talk to doesn't quite understand exactly how piracy losses work.
I started doing exactly that not long ago. Mind you, we actually have a semi-decent method of enforcing now, i.e. allow copyright holders to sue any infringers they suspect, and let any victims of inappropriate investigation techniques countersue. The problem is that a large portion of the population don't find that a deterrent, but plenty of artists are surviving, so it's not all bad.
So what you're saying is, in order to maintain continuity with the rest of the free market, we should just do without art and entertainment? Why? What possible benefit is there in doing that? What could possibly be so evil about selling art that, not only you would be prepared to forgo art completely, you would demand that everyone else forgo art as well?
You know, I haven't seen anyone genuinely support this strawman. Do you have a quote of anybody claiming this?
What people do claim, myself included, that it is entirely plausible that our culture will regress all the way back to the times before copyright. That is, when the only works of any significance are results of commission and hoarded by rich people, and entertainment for the common man comes from a handful of wandering bards. It's all dandy for the uber-rich, but for us, it sucks. I honestly have no idea why people want to model our culture on that.
There are so many things wrong with this statement, I scarcely know where to begin. So far, I can count a false dichotomy (they like music, or they need money), an incorrect use of the phrase "by definition" (unless you genuinely believe that "bad musi
That's creepy.
Come on man, that's like 4 lines right there!
I too have taken the same approach (also using Jamendo via Ubuntu), but it was hard. I did much searching through their album list, and out of all the ones that I could find with any seeders, I only found one album that I thought was worth the space on my hard disk it occupied. Even then, it wasn't nearly the calibre of most of the other albums I own. I did genuinely want to find a hidden gem; something to tell me that free music could rival, or even best commercial music, but I couldn't find it. Such hidden gems may well have existed, but the fact that I couldn't distinguish them from the dreck, or that I couldn't download them, speaks volumes as to flaws in (the current implementation of) the system.
As for the movies situation, that's kind of a black-eye for your position. You're still relying on movies that, even if they shouldn't be under copyright at this stage, were at one point under copyright. That means that you're still relying on the fruits of copyright to support your entertainment, which means that suggesting the abolishment of copyright would almost certainly harm you (and people like you, doing the same thing) in the long term as well (although not as much as the rest of us).
Well, I can't possibly if they stop selling recordings, and they can't possibly continue to sell recordings if nobody is buying them (this is a very real concern, and you need to prove that this wouldn't happen in order for us to change to your new system). If it was the case that nobody wanted their recordings, then I could live with being marginalised, but if it's just the case that people want recordings and they want them for free, then I have to stand up against such short-sighted stupidity.
I have to ask, if you're already reaping the benefits of a free culture, why are you pursuing this? What benefits could you possibly receive under a different system? I mean, you wouldn't have the faint legal threat when you download your old movies, but if the influx of new movies (all but) stops, then surely that would be a bad trade-off, right?
So the latter problem then. No significant incentive to release recordings, so the system is woefully inferior. There are already plenty of live performances, and I see no evidence to suggest that destroying incentives to record will increase that number.
That's great, except that copyright doesn't guarantee success in the art business. All it does guarantee is that demand will reflect success. If their services are in demand, then they will be successful. Most businesses get that for free, but artistry doesn't. It is absolutely essential for the free market to run, because otherwise we simply don't get what we demand, and the free market ends up useless.
True, but if that's the case, then what's the worry about destroying copyright? Surely, if they're luxury goods, and we don't need them, we can just not buy them, and we'd have the same effect as if we destroyed copyright!
I do think it's a little sad, however, that in response to finding something you don't see a practical use for, your first instinct is to destroy it. Perhaps we don't need artists, but some people, myself included, find life much more tolerable when there's entertainment about. If you want to pack nothing but pure necessities into your life, more power to you, just stay the fuck away from mine.
The problem is that, unlike most cases where the free market is applied, "what we want" is considerably different to "what we are willing to pay for". What we want (in general) is recordings, but we aren't willing to pay for them. "You get what you're willing to pay for" was the point; we are not willing to pay for recordings, so we don't get them.
OK then, perhaps we should wait until the market is ready to adopt such a change. You know, so that we can prove once and for all that it is just market inertia, and not that the idea is clearly infeasible. It just seems more sensible than throwing the system up in the air, and hoping it will reassemble itself as something nice. I think we might be waiting a long time though.
I'm sorry, but how does "supporting dinosaurs" prevent indie artists from trying new business models?
So the fairy tale goes. In the real world, when we destroy something valuable, we need proof that it will reassemble into something more valuable. It didn't when I was nine, and it was my mother's favourite vase.
No, no, no! Copyright is currently at its most meaningful! It was designed for exactly this kind of possibility, when copying and distributing artworks becomes cheap and trivial. We didn't need copyright when such things were expensive and difficult, because often the benefits were dubious. It was when the printing press became mainstream, and there was potential for other, even faster copying machines, that we needed copyright to counter the increasing ease and temptation of copying. Now, in the internet age, copyright is more relevant than ever!
If they manage to make a living selling copies despite this, yes they have made a living, but they're also subsidising their own lost sales. They then pass this cost to their customers through higher prices. You say "everybody wins", but a more correct version would be "pirates win, customers and artists don't lose (yet)". If more customers start pirating, or pirates start losing the moral drive to buy music that they like, then the system falls flat on its face.
If they can't make money while people decide to illegally take whatever digital recordings they want for free, I suppose it's their fault for not finding the correct business model, right? OK, take your mind out of the self-entitled consumer position that school education indoctrinates you into, and bring your head into the space of pure reason. What justification do you have that such a business model exists? Or if it does, that we'll end up better off for it? I mean, it's not like artists or publishers like their own business model. It requires them to trust that their own fanbase won't rip them off, and we all know how that turned out! They would much prefer to find some way of making steady income that fairly compensates them for their work. If they heard of such a business model, I'm sure they'd be very excited, and want to give it a go (yes, Big Music publishers included). But, so far, obviously, no one has come up with such a business model. Either the business model requires far too much from the artist (e.g. "give me everything for free", or "make quality, free, full-length recordings as advertisements"), or too much from the consumer (e.g. "OK, fuck it, I'm just going to tour from now on").
No, that's true. I had a little smirk on my face when I realised that someone was inevitably going to fall into that trap.
It is, in fact, true. Most consumers, whether they pay or steal, prefer to consume works from the copyright business model. And, most artists prefer to release under copyright because, as I said above, of the lack of sensible alternatives.
And while I'm here, I've been meaning to pull you up about your sig.
If you use the word conspiracy, you don't understand how groupthink allegedly works. There's no organisation, just intellectual isolation of a group of people. Certain views, held at one time by a majority, echo among /.ers. The viewpoint is promoted as fact, and dissent is modded down, further increasing the effect. That is groupthink, and it happens. The same thing happens with biased news networks (except that with them, there sometimes is a conspiracy *cough* Fox News */cough*).
Have you ever noticed how the opinions of /.ers seem so out of phase with the rest of society? It's because we segregate ourselves, and read primarily opinions that we agree with. Most people see this, and conclude that other people are just stupid, but I guess it's easier to think that than admit that you're mind is part of a greater groupthink.
No. It's really not. The manual labourers comment was far from my point, which was that artists holding side jobs have much less time to function as an artist. I didn't say it was impossible to be an artist while holding down a steady job, just that you don't get nearly the same time to devote to your art as a full time artists.
If we forced artists to work at other jobs, and not pay them for their artistry, we force them to get jobs with pay enough to support them (since their art won't help them), typically with long hours. How are they supposed to find any significant time to complete their works? What if they also have families to feed and otherwise look after? We can't just smooth over all of this, and hope that it all works itself out. We need some proof that any problems caused by getting rid of copyright are outweighed by the benefits.
Then why am I finding it so hard to think of a band, local, national, or international who gives away their recordings at cost price to support their tours?
How does that work?
The burden of proof did lie with us, a few hundred years ago when copyright was proposed. Now that we've accepted it, and our culture has grown and blossomed so much, the burden of proof now rests with anyone who wants to change it. It's up to that person to prove, beyond anybody's reasonable doubt, that the change will not just be a disaster. Just because you're wanting to "freely spread information", doesn't mean that you're proposing what is best for us.
To see why this is too good to be true, try actually restricting yourself freely distributed media, and derivative works thereon. The rapid influx of new works belies the creative stagnation behind them. By the time you've watched the 5th downfall parody, you just want it to end.
And if you're not, then from experience, the chances are you've thought about it just enough to come to a conclusion you want to come up with, but not enough to find the deep flaws behind it.
If recordings are involved in that service, then the system has the same flaws (you can get an unlimited free service from a P2P network). If recordings are not involved in that service, then the system is already woefully inferior to the system currently in place. Merchandising suffers from that very problem, because it means you reward artists less as musicians, but more as a brand to suck financially dry. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer buying recordings of music made by my favourite bands to buying T-shirts and mugs with their faces on them.
The idea of verifying that the media under free licences is actually free is not such a bad idea. It does, as the summary says, cut into one of the strengths of copyleft licences, but on the other hand, it also strengthens the trust in such a licence. I think (IANAL) that at least part of the burden lies with the consumer to confirm that the work they're licensing is actually licensed that way, so the obvious benefit of this system is that we can look at the license, and say with a greater degree of confidence that we won't be sued down the line for redistributing.
Now, I'm just waiting for such a verification requirement for DMCA takedowns.
Why? Why should artists make money the same way as a builder? Why should artists only be paid for live music? Why on god's green earth would we actually want musical recordings to degenerate into a form of advertising? I can just picture it: the same 30 second clips recorded from an old performance, and horrible camcorder recordings from people sneaking cameras in the audience. Your idea just seems horrible for both artists, legitimate customers, and pirates alike.
The assertion that performing artists need to perform to get more money is idiotic. Most performing artists are also recording artists (some artists are exclusively the latter), and much of their job is making and selling their recordings. There is significant value in the copies of these recordings, and it seems considerably more reasonable that, in order for consumers to come into possession of copies of these recordings, there needs to be some sort of mutual agreement between the artist and the consumer. "Mutual", as in not just the consumer demanding that the artist work a certain way, and provide certain things for free.
Well, there's 90-100% of their music-generating hours down the toilet. Is there some shortage of manual labourers that I'm not aware of?
That is irrelevant, because the burden of proof lies with you. I can certainly see more than ample evidence that it will result a severe collapse in music production (if not a complete absence), so perhaps you're not looking hard enough.
Right, because the free market will magically swoop in and save the day. Has it occurred to you that, if people are completely unwilling to pay for music recordings, that they simply won't get music recordings, no matter what free market tricks you use? I mean, you can try embedding the cost into something else that people can't have for free, like a concert ticket, but then that just means that recording becomes a side show at best, and a neglected afterthought at worst. If people don't want to pay for something, unless they can find people willing to do it for free, then they aren't going to get it.
Hmm. Last time I checked, the "outdated" business model that you're referring to is currently more favoured by both artists and consumers than, say, your suggestion for a business model. I wonder which one is the less feasible?
Seriously, why do you hate recording artists? If you hate paying for recordings, there are other legal ways of not paying for recordings, other than trying to change the law and force them out of their job. You could, you know, just not buy them. It's pretty easy.
I, for one, am offended! As a slashdotter, I have the ability to unfairly target many companies and individuals, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that!
The reasons that you gave, plus the rest of your comment, tell me pretty conclusively that you don't.
I've never met anyone who's been wrong on the internet. I doubt such people would exist.
(Try resting now!)