I don't have time to read the thread. I did want to point out, however, that the intitial cost of a "trade" system for physical media is higher than the entry cost in a digital world. With physcial media, there are only so many copies to go around. This increases demand for purchases of the retail product. With digital media, in theory, there can be an unlimited number of copies made from a single purchased item.
So there's a limit to the extent to which I'm allowed to share my media? I was unaware of that.
EDIT: To be less rhetorical: There's no enforced limit on sharing in meatspace. Torrents are simply another method of sharing my media. Yes, it's easier to share with more friends, but the 'net has generally expanded everybody's social network, so we all have more "friends" than we used to. There are more users with which to share, so the technology to facilitate sharing must also advance.
But that's exactly my point. People have a problem with it because it is such a quantum leap in sharing technology. It's like going from bows to fully automatic machine guns, a massive increase.
The problem is that the consequences of increased sharing will occur with or without the digital sharing. As Rym pointed out, the secondary market exists, and nobody's going to take that away any time soon. Even if we don't share media directly over the Internet, we'll at least put more people in touch with each other, and enable this secondary market to continue to grow.
No matter what, the business model of the major entertainment industries will change, or they'll die out.
But we're seeing a longer tail in the timing of the demand, and that's likely only going to increase.
The market for new things.
Digitization means that every day, there will be more media immediately available to us than there was the day before. Furthermore, people continue to be born. These combined are going to create, in the next decades, a situation where there will be so much worthwhile media available to any particular person (which, by nature, is new to them), that outside of a few outliers, there will be little incentive for most people to pay a premium for something truly new. The sheer scale of the body of existing work could easily cause this.
Imagine if you had immediate, free access to 99% of all the movies ever made by man. OR, you could pay for access to the remaining 1%. What will that do to the market? Even with current copyright law, this will eventually be the case. Everything will eventually be public domain.
That guy seems to have basically no idea about what the term "competition" even means, to be honest.
Imagine if you had immediate, free access to 99% of all the movies ever made by man. OR, you could pay for access to the remaining 1%. What will that do to the market? Even with current copyright law, this will eventually be the case. Everything will eventually be public domain.
Unless of course the indefinite extension of copyright terms continues.
The problem is that the consequences of increased sharing will occur with or without the digital sharing. As Rym pointed out, the secondary market exists, and nobody's going to take that away any time soon. Even if we don't share media directly over the Internet, we'll at least put more people in touch with each other, and enable this secondary market to continue to grow.
No matter what, the business model of the major entertainment industrieswillchange, or they'll die out.
I agree with you that things are changing. But business just doesn't change as quickly as piracy. Admittedly the industry first reaction of "OMG!! WE NEEDZ TO STOP TH1Z SHITZ!!!" was wrong. Then their DRM was equally fail. Now they're finally catching on with songs for $1 with no DRM. It's taken many years, but I think we can eventually all be pretty happy.
But business just doesn't change as quickly as piracy.
That's a problem. Evolve or die. $1/song with no DRM should've come around during the Napster days; maybe then the industry would have been able to prevent the situation that they find now.
Part of the problem with getting people to just pay for music is that they're used to getting it for free. The resistance of the industry essentially created the environment of widespread free filesharing. By the time they got it through their heads to provide a paid alternative, the culture of filesharing was already an old one. They waited too long, and became the architects of their own demise. The culture of free music has spread to the point that artists now create and distribute legitimately free music, and make money through merchandise and performances.
When there is a legitimate alternative to your outdated business model, your only choice is to change. That's the free market at work.
Right. If we're talking about actual theft of media, that's a different topic. Swiping a CD from a store and sharing or reselling it is very different than downloading a shared CD.
But you're talking about theft. I'm talking about a situation where no one stole anything.
Right. If we're talking about actual theft of media, that's a different topic. Swiping a CD from a store and sharing or reselling it is very different than downloading a shared CD.
But you're talking about theft. I'm talking about a situation where no one stole anything.
Well, sending an advance copy is a choice made by the record company. That's really their fault. The best way to actually do it is to do what Iced Earth did for their most recent album; the advance copy had a recorded message from Jon Schaffer ("This is Jon Schaffer, and you're listening to 'The Crucible of Man') that played over the music roughly every minute and a half in each track. It basically made the entire album undesirable to pirate. The full release did not contain that message. Simple but effective.
If you give it away and tell people not to distribute it, that's a slightly different story, but it's still impossible to enforce. I mean, even before digital distribution, people shared advance copies of music.
What about books? I never sold back my text books in school because of the horrible return. I'm sure the book store keeps what ever the sales price of any used copy. I don't think they would give any money back to the publisher.
What about sharing a text book or loaning a copy to a friend? They didn't pay to use the book yet they still have the benefit.
It's a question of scale really. While it's certainly true that the sharing of media between friends and the resale market can cost publishers sales, we're talking about a limited set of sharing transactions that could occur here. One legitimate sale finding its way to perhaps 2 or 3 non paying consumers, in most cases. In the age of bit-torrent we're suddenly talking about 1 legitimate sale(or not) finding it's way to a potentially unlimited number of non paying consumers. In a world in which such sharing were legally and socially acceptable, I can't imagine how anyone could possibly monetize any kind of art creation. The only possibility that comes to mind is bringing back the old system of art patronage; "Halo 12: brought to you by the catholic church?"
I understand that many people have philosophical objections to the entire notion of intellectual property, and I will admit that I unable to conceive of a solid philosophical argument to justify intellectual property laws. In this case, however, I believe we should be governed by pragmatism over principle. The same arguments can and are applied to patent law, and I seriously doubt many of you object to the existence of such forms of IP protection. Most people recognize the importance of patent law in fueling technological and economic progress, as patent law protects and rewards innovation. On the chance that you don't recognize this importance: who's going to invest millions in R&D if the competition can just steal the results of my research and sell it for half the price?
As someone who enjoys high quality, professionally produced media content, I am more than happy to help subsidize its creation. I agree that there will always be musicians making music, if for no other reason than the love of the art. But who's going to be producing 20 million dollar video games or 200 million dollar films, if no one is willing to pay for them?
It's a question of scale really. ... But who's going to be producing 20 million dollar video games or 200 million dollar films, if no one is willing to pay for them?
This is really what it comes down to. Piracy and secondary markets are much bigger problems for games and movies because those are inherently something different from other forms of art altogether. They are products as opposed to acts. Musicians, actors, and artists to some degree, they are really just performing acts. These acts can get recorded, but they can also be reproduced in a form that cannot be stolen, which is the live act. Products, like games, movies, books, pictures, etc., they cannot be reproduced in a separate form, they can only be controlled.
Then following that is the question of scale. A book is generally written by one person (excluding the editors and publishers). A picture is generally taken by one person or a small crew. A game or movie can also be made by a small number of people, but for the most part they aren't. And when you're talking about those, there's usually a huge difference between a game made by a team of five and a game made by a team of 200. I do worry that if piracy and reselling gets bad enough and there aren't enough first-sales, the only games and movies we get will be of the indie variety. Nothing necessarily wrong with those, but it would be killing off a very significant part of the craft.
These combined are going to create, in the next decades, a situation where there will be so much worthwhile media available to any particular person (which, by nature, is newto them), that outside of a few outliers, there will be little incentive for most people to pay a premium for something truly new. The sheer scale of the body of existing work could easily cause this.
I think the fundamental point in contention here is that something has to be changed in response to this. I don't think it does. Like Pete said, "Evolve or die." Not all extinctions are a tragedy; some of them just make sense. This is simply the evolution of a market. We don't need to eliminate the right of first-sale to address this "problem," because it isn't a problem. When demand for something decreases, people stop producing. That is natural. When the market is glutted, sales slow down or stop. If the amount of goods in circulation is enough to meet the cumulative needs of the population, then no more needs to be produced. This is a situation where demand for additional copies, items, performances, etc. has diminished.*
How is your future scenario different from the options now, other than exact numbers? We already have an overwhelming amount of material available for free (public libraries, internet, some museums) or very low cost (Netflix, subscription services, other museums). Yet we continue to produce movies, TV, books, art, music, and many other things. When people are no longer willing to pay for something, it stops being produced. If people stop being willing to pay for "truly new" things, which I very much doubt will happen because we are consumer whores, then truly new things will stop being produced. We might have trouble recognizing what is truly new versus what is a crappy knockoff, but that is a different issue. However, if we have come to the point that no one wants the new things anymore, then the lack of production can hardly be seen as a travesty.
I have 4300 songs on my hard drive, and yet I am always eager to find good, new music. Despite the incredible bounty of music on, say, the Podsafe Music Network that I can get for free, I still pay for some of my music. Sometimes I pay for it because it's the easiest way to get it immediately. Sometimes I pay for it because I want to support the artist. There is more than one single motivation for paying for things; availability of alternatives cuts down on one reason to pay for something (necessity), but not the others. *Just for clarification, how copyright issues are different: The differentiation that copyright supporters make between this situation and piracy/entitlement is that people still demand the material, but they feel entitled to get it for free. If they were turning to legally free alternatives or secondary market products instead of illegally consuming the pay media, then there would be no problem. Instead, they are either pirating the media they want or they are berating artists who ask for donations/contributions/etc. for not providing their work for free. You can always chose to consume the free media and ignore the pay media...so why isn't your scenario happening in totality? Because people want the new stuff, regardless of the wealth of material already available to them.
I'm hitting the button now before I revise this post into something even longer.
How is your future scenario different from the options now, other than exact numbers? We already have an overwhelming amount of material available for free (public libraries, internet, some museums) or very low cost (Netflix, subscription services, other museums). Yet we continue to produce movies, TV, books, art, music, and many other things. When people are no longer willing to pay for something, it stops being produced. If people stop being willing to pay for "truly new" things, which I very much doubt will happen because we are consumer whores, then truly new things will stop being produced. We might have trouble recognizing what is truly new versus what is a crappy knockoff, but that is a different issue. However, if we have come to the point that no one wants the new things anymore, then the lack of production can hardly be seen as a travesty.
The core thing that Rym is missing is that of media as an aspect of culture, not a product to be consumed. As the Internet has grown, the rate at which people are producing content has grown enormously. One might argue that this is just the result of technology, but then, don't Rym and Scott themselves keep going on about how quickly technology grows? If we're on the cusp of Ghost in the Shell as they suggest we are, then content is just going to become easier and easier to produce. In fact, here's a quick math/logic counter to Rym, though I agree that the assumptions are arguable: 1) The growth of technology is exponential 2) Our ability to produce and distribute media is proportional to our level of technology Hence our ability to produce and distribute media is proportional to the amount of media currently available - we can keep pace with the past. (I resisted the temptation to use a differential equation )
I think that the trend is indeed that the presence of more media only accelerates the production of media. Sure, the nature of the media must change, but it will continue to be produced, and by greater and greater fractions of the populace. When we hit the GitS horizon, everyone will be able to produce art trivially. It won't magically make them able to produce good art - most of it will still suck; in fact, as a proportion, more of it will suck than now - yet more and more great art will be produced by those with the ability to do so. Of course, past the GitS horizon, monetization of art will be completely ridiculous, but Rym's claim that the new will drown in a sea of the old is plainly false.
*Just for clarification, how copyright issues are different: The differentiation that copyright supporters make between this situation and piracy/entitlement is that people still demand the material, but they entitled to get it for free. If they were turning to legally free alternatives or secondary market products instead of illegally consuming the pay media, then there would be no problem. Instead, they are either pirating the media they want or they are berating artists who ask for donations/contributions/etc. for not providing their work for free.
The more I hear about it, the more I think this "culture of entitlement" idea is disjoint from reality. Sure, there's always a few people who think that way, but I've never seen any real evidence that such people are anything but a vocal minority. Plenty of people torrent various media, but I seriously doubt they're snickering to themselves about how they circumvented the artist's evil attempt to make money while they do it. There are plenty of people who are willing to support the artist when offered a reasonable way to do so, but when the only options are unreasonable, take the perfectly valid standpoint that their not consuming the media because they don't want to pay the price wouldn't do anyone any good.
The more I hear about it, the more I think this "culture of entitlement" idea is disjoint from reality. Sure, there's always a few people who think that way, but I've never seen any real evidence that such people are anything but a vocal minority. Plenty of people torrent various media, but I seriously doubt they're snickering to themselves about how they circumvented the artist's evil attempt to make money while they do it. There are plenty of people who are willing to support the artist when offered a reasonable way to do so, but when the only options are unreasonable, take the perfectly valid standpoint that their not consuming the media because they don't want to pay the price wouldn't do anyone any good.
The reason people pirate things is not because of a sense of entitlement. It's because the artists are acting like squeegee men.
For those of you who do not know, a squeegee man is a guy who will just walk up to your car on the street and clean your windshield without you asking him to. He will then ask you for money afterwards. If you make a piece of artwork, for example an album, and try to sell it afterwards, you are acting just like a squeegee man.
Some people might give you money, some people might not. That's up to them. But those who do not pay are not stealing. You did the work of creating the music without anybody asking you to. You also did not have any agreement regarding money before doing the work. Therefore, if there is any sense of entitlement, it is on the part of the artist. They feel that they made some art, so now they are entitled to be financially compensated.
Don't think this is something that is unique to artists. It is common to all professions. Pick any job in the world, and there are ways to do work before and after making a financial agreement. I can make software, and then try to sell it after it's made. I can also go and tell companies that I will make software they want, but only if they pay me first. A mechanic can fix your car for free, then ask for money after, or he can only fix your car after you agree to pay him.
Both models are fine, and have places in this world. The thing is, if you follow the model where you do the work first, and try to get the money second, you have to accept the fact that a lot of people will eat the fruits of your labor without giving you any money. The squeegee man accepts the fact that smart city folk aren't going to give him anything. Yet, some artist makes some music and then says you are stealing because you listened to it without paying. The pro-copyright artists are the ones with entitlement problems, not the pirates.
For those of you who do not know, a squeegee man is a guy who will just walk up to your car on the street and clean your windshield without you asking him to. He will then ask you for money afterwards. If you make a piece of artwork, for example an album, and try to sell it afterwards, you are acting just like a squeegee man.
That's apples and oranges! The spueegee man is demanding payment for something he already did. An artist is asking for compensation for the album they've made. If you don't want to pay, you don't get the album. There's no entitlement on either side of that transaction.
Scott, people are not giving away software and then demanding money. People who provide media for free and then ask for donations are not the same as people who ask for money up front before giving you the product. Making a product and then selling it is a well-established practice. The producers only feel that you should give them money if you choose to use their product; it's not the same as feeling entitled to sales. If no one uses your product, then you get no money. I don't think that people have to accept that many people will reap the benefits of their labor without paying for it because this is a capitalistic economy founded on the opposite of that principle. This is a poor analogy.
Scott, people are not giving away software and then demanding money.
Shareware.
You think that proves her wrong on a technical issue. I think it proves her right. Shareware is made on the idea of a free sample. You show people how good a part of your product is and then they can pay for the rest of they want the whole thing.
Just for you I read ever single word in that article (rather than just skim it). This is my reaction...
Wow, that there is some crazy, hippy bullshit! I can't believe that that is the cornerstone of your argument!
It is assumed that a) Artists are inherently entitled to monetary compensation for their Art, and b) copyright is a mechanism for this compensation.
I challenge both assumptions.
To start out she only ever challenged the first assumption and then just started ranting that copyright is crazy monopolist bullshit.
And of the issue of why art shouldn't be compensated..
Art is a gift. An artist creates Art (not to be confused with skilled labor) on their own initiative. An artist "labors" in service of their vision, their Muse, the Art itself. The Muse alone is the Artist's employer. It's debatable whether the Artist can negotiate with their Muse before performing the labor — I certainly try to — but like most labor, terms are dictated by necessity. Just as economic necessity forces many workers into hard labor for low wages on their employer's terms, so does suffering force many Artists into labor on the Muse's terms. But unlike corporations and human employers, the Muse turns out to always have the artist's best interests at heart. I'd much rather serve the Muse than an employer; but the Muse doesn't negotiate a moneyed wage. Monetary compensation is not part of the deal.
Just wow. As I said before, hippy bullshit.
And if artists deserve to be compensated, then how much do they deserve? Isn't art priceless? How do you determine how much it's worth?
alright, maybe I see the point she getting at. Let's see where this goes...
We could let the market decide. That could work... IF WE GET RID OF MONOPOLIES. The Free Market only works without monopolies. Information monopolies like copyright destroy that system. I'm all for allowing the Free Market to function, but it can only function without copyright.
Ok...WAIT! WHAT?!? That just made no fucking sense at all. 2 + 2 = a bushel of potatoes. I'm all for letting the market decide, and it has decided a song is worth about $1, but why the fuck is copyright evil?
Indeed, Madonna is not compensated as an artist; she is reaping profits from her information monopoly — that is, the copyright that restricts her Art. So if Madonna is your model, you aren't rooting for artists; you are rooting for monopolists. If your mechanism for "compensating" artists requires them to become monopolists and to grow and position their monopolies as monopolists do, then you are championing monopolies, not Art.
No, Madonna is marketing herself and her art effectively and reaping the benefits of that.
Seriously, this paper is bullshit and I want compensation for the 15 minutes I wasted reading it.
You can't deny the man knows crazy, hippy bullshit when he sees it.
Seriously, she just completely ignores capitalism. This is just not the way that our society functions. Her argument boils down to, "you can't charge for art, it's...art" and "copyrights don't let art spread, it wants to spread, you can't chain it down, let it be free, and don't worry about money."
Making a product and then selling it is a well-established practice. The producers only feel that you should give them money if you choose to use their product; it's not the same as feeling entitled to sales. If no one uses your product, then you get no money. I don't think that people have to accept that many people will reap the benefits of their labor without paying for it because this is a capitalistic economy founded on the opposite of that principle. This is a poor analogy.
Right now we have these pesky laws of physics. We can't get free energy. Our entire way of life is based upon this reality.
Imagine if tomorrow, someone invented a free energy machine. Obviously, this isn't actually going to happen. But pretend it did. Obviously, this person would be morally obligated to connect their free energy machine to the grid, and provide free energy to the world for free. Anything less would be criminal. If some power company decided to still charge you for electricity, an unlimited resource, that would also be criminal. People wouldn't stand for it. If it's free, and you try to charge for it, fuck you!
Up until now, we've had a pesky law like this governing information. Our inferior technology required that information was expensive and limited. Storage and transmission of information were limited resources, just like energy. Thus, we built our society based on those assumptions. We sold music the way we sold cars.
The thing is, now everyone has a free energy machine in their house. Almost anybody can store and transfer vast amounts of information at an insignificant cost. Trying to sell already-recorded music today is like trying to sell electricity when there is a free energy machine. It's heinous. Does this completely ruin things and hurt a lot of people? Yes it does. A free energy machine would put thousands upon thousands of utilities workers out of a job. It would do just as much, if not more damage. But you know what? It's tough shit.
It used to be true that you could make art and ask for money afterwards without being the squeegee man. This is no longer true. It was not a decision we made as a society. It's just reality that we can not change. Like it or not, we have to live with, and accept that once you make something, if you want to share it with anyone, you are necessarily sharing it with everyone. You have no choice in the matter, for good or ill. Thus, if you make a book, and then ask for money afterwards, you are the squeegee man. When you wrote the book, you cleaned every windshield in the entire world. Some people might give you money, but some won't. And just because they read the book without paying you, it doesn't make them bad.
If you want to make money from art you have a few choices. One is that you can ask for money before making the art. Two is that you can work in a physical medium, like sculpture or painting. Three is that you can rely on people that are willing to pay the squeegee man. Four is that you can deliver your art in ways that are still limited, like having your movie shown in a fancy theater experience.
You might not like it. I may not like it. We might want the world to work differently. It might hurt a lot of people. It might have dire and horrible consequences for our society. It could be the worst thing ever. But none of that matters. There's nothing we can do about it. The laws of the universe have changed. Accept it and deal with it. Fighting it is just making everything worse.
But I love Nina's comic and animation, even though she is, verily, kind of a hippy liberal lady. I think she is great.
Also, Autodesk ruling = Big news for Emi. Now maybe I can get old versions of Maya more easily? It drives me nuts, because we are running 8.5 and if we wanted to buy another copy, we would have to get Maya 2009, which is incompatible with 8.5, which means we would probably have to upgrade everything.
Seriously, she just completely ignores capitalism. This is just not the way that our society functions. Her argument boils down to, "you can't charge for art, it's...art" and "copyrights don't let art spread, it wants to spread, you can't chain it down, let it be free, and don't worry about money."
You sir, are the one completely ignoring capitalism. You know, Laissez-faire capitalism. Lazzeis-faire as in leave it alone. As in the government should not interfere with the market(s).
You know what copyright is? It's a gigantic government interference in the market. The government is using a law to force a monopoly where one does not naturally exist. If the invisible hand of capitalism were allowed complete freedom, with no government intervention, piracy would be completely legal, and nobody would pay for anything they could get for free, unless they were feeling charitable.
You know, in capitalism people are supposed to vote with their dollars. When comparing two things of equal quality, you are supposed to buy the one that is lower in price, right? So when perfect copies of art are available for free, it would be anti-capitalist to pay for them anyway.
People like to throw the word capitalism around a lot lately without really knowing fuck shit about what capitalism is. The term has come to be synonymous with "whatever economic policy is best for rich people and big businesses," or "whatever current US economic policy is." News flash, that's not what capitalism is.
Capitalism, in its purest form, means government can not, and should not, make any laws that regulate commerce at all. Capitalism in the Adam Smith form means that the government should only step in as a referee of sorts to make sure there is fair play in the markets. For example, the government might be allowed to break a bad monopoly, like breaking up Ma Bell. The government would also have the task of eliminating coercion and deception from the markets.
Copyright is a protectionist doctrine. It is as much the exact opposite of capitalism as are large tariffs.
Imagine if tomorrow, someone invented a free energy machine. Obviously, this isn't actually going to happen. But pretend it did. Obviously, this person would be morally obligated to connect their free energy machine to the grid, and provide free energy to the world for free. Anything less would be criminal. If some power company decided to still charge you for electricity, an unlimited resource, that would also be criminal. People wouldn't stand for it. If it's free, and you try to charge for it, fuck you!
Are you assuming this "free energy machine" cost nothing to research, develop, and build? They would be at least entitled to recover what they put into it, including materials and labor. The power might be an unlimited source, but what about the upkeep of the infrastructure that carries it to your house? The utility companies would still be required for that purpose. You would still have to pay for the delivery medium. You might pay a lower power bill because you don't have to pay for the actual power, but you would still have to pay for the things involved in getting you the power in the first place!
Music generally takes time, work, and resources to produce. Even if they can be distributed for free, they still cost something to produce. There's a reason that digital copies of albums usually cost less than buying a CD! They aren't charging you for the physical medium anymore, because that cost has been eliminated. Do you think the majority of the price of a CD is the cost of reproduction? NO! "Music that has already been recorded" is not suddenly a cost-free product. That's the same as saying that a DVD player that has already been manufactured and is sitting on the shelf should be free because all the work to make it is already done! WTF, man? Are you really that delusional? Sure, the distribution costs are nearly null with digital media, but the up-front production costs haven't gone away. So lower the price by the costs you eliminated, and charge a reduced price. Eliminating some costs doesn't mean you suddenly have to charge nothing!
The problem with your philosophy is that you have fundamentally different values than most people who produce things and a fundamental misunderstanding of how the production and distribution world works. Most artists would not say that all of their art is a gift, particularly career artists. They put time, materials, and labor into creating it and distributing it, just like the guy who invents the free energy machine. Just because one hippie artist who wrote an article on the internet thinks art is a gift doesn't mean it IS DEFINITIVELY SO. Your philosophy seems to be that these people are not worthy of being compensated for their work. If so, I say fuck YOU. Sure, they may choose to give it away for free, and that is all well and good. Copyright exists to protect those who do not choose to give their work away for free.
Sure, if music took no effort, no time, and no materials to produce and was absolutely free to make in every sense of the word, then it should be given away for free. That is not the case, and the fact that you assert that it is demonstrates a lack of ability to effectively analyze system dynamics. If you can't see all the parts of the machine that come together to produce a result, then you probably shouldn't try to make recommendations about how to make that machine work better.
Just because it requires resources to make something does not entitle you to receive resources in exchange for it. If you make something, and nobody pays for it, it's just the tough shit rule. It doesn't mean we should make laws that say you should be paid even though nobody wants to pay you.
If you don't want to run the risk of not being paid, then agree to payment before you do something.
Just because it requires resources to make something does not entitle you to receive resources in exchange for it. If you make something, and nobody pays for it, it's just the tough shit rule. It doesn't mean we should make laws that say you should be paid even though nobody wants to pay you.
It also doesn't mean you have to give it away for free!
This is the fundamental disagreement we're having here. You say that simply because something exists, everyone should have unfettered access to it.
Copyright allows art and ideas to be commodities and as such bought and sold in a capitalist system.
Just because it requires resources to make something does not entitle you to receive resources in exchange for it. If you make something, and nobody pays for it, it's just the tough shit rule. It doesn't mean we should make laws that say you should be paid even though nobody wants to pay you.
If you don't want to run the risk of not being paid, then agree to payment before you do something.
This is true, but your power analogy is flawed. There is no cost to produce the energy, but there is a cost to distribute it. There IS a cost to produce music, but there is almost no cost to distribute it.
The business model needs to change from a product-based one to a service-based one. You contend that the artists are like the squegee man, which is not true. The squegee man is providing a service, whereas record labels still treat music as a product.
If a record company started charging a subscription-based access fee for unlimited and unencumbered access to ALL of the content produced by ALL of their artists, that could be a viable business model. I'm thinking of a pay music downloading service with correctly tagged files, fast service, guaranteed uptime, etc. Make it torrent based to really reduce that cost of distribution and push it off to the consumer; you'd probably need to pay people to keep some things seeded all the time, but that's a pretty small cost.
That would fundamentally change the nature of the "job" of a musical artist, but that's pretty much what needs to happen. Essentially, a record company could adopt the MMO business model and be viable in the future. Treat artists as salaried employees who generate content for your subscribers.
It also doesn't mean you have to give it away for free!
This is the fundamental disagreement we're having here. You say that simply because something exists, everyone should have unfettered access to it.
Copyright allows art and ideas to be commodities and as such bought and sold in a capitalist system.
PS: Capitalism != Laissez-faire
Clearly, you are having a problem reading.
I'm not saying that you have to give it away for free. I'm not saying that just because something exists, people should have unfettered access.
I'm saying that we have no choice. People have unfettered access. There is nothing we can do about it. Just like there is nothing we can do about the laws of physics. Reality has changed. This is not a decision we get to make. Information, and anything that can be represented digitally, is infinitely and freely copyable. That's the reality of the world we live in. Does that mean bad things? Yes, it means a lot of bad things for certain people. Does everyone have to like it? No, it's understandable why many will not like it. But there's nothing we can do about it. It's already done. Deal with it.
This is the same argument we have been making concerning privacy. Privacy is dead. Is it going to cause a lot of pain and suffering to lose privacy? Yes it is. But you know what, privacy is gone. Technology has killed privacy, and now it's mutilating its corpse.
With copyright, we didn't accept the new reality, and we're paying for it big time. If we don't accept the new reality of no privacy as well, we've got some hard times ahead.
Comments
No matter what, the business model of the major entertainment industries will change, or they'll die out.
Imagine if you had immediate, free access to 99% of all the movies ever made by man. OR, you could pay for access to the remaining 1%. What will that do to the market? Even with current copyright law, this will eventually be the case. Everything will eventually be public domain.
Part of the problem with getting people to just pay for music is that they're used to getting it for free. The resistance of the industry essentially created the environment of widespread free filesharing. By the time they got it through their heads to provide a paid alternative, the culture of filesharing was already an old one. They waited too long, and became the architects of their own demise. The culture of free music has spread to the point that artists now create and distribute legitimately free music, and make money through merchandise and performances.
When there is a legitimate alternative to your outdated business model, your only choice is to change. That's the free market at work.
If you give it away and tell people not to distribute it, that's a slightly different story, but it's still impossible to enforce. I mean, even before digital distribution, people shared advance copies of music.
What about sharing a text book or loaning a copy to a friend? They didn't pay to use the book yet they still have the benefit.
I understand that many people have philosophical objections to the entire notion of intellectual property, and I will admit that I unable to conceive of a solid philosophical argument to justify intellectual property laws. In this case, however, I believe we should be governed by pragmatism over principle. The same arguments can and are applied to patent law, and I seriously doubt many of you object to the existence of such forms of IP protection. Most people recognize the importance of patent law in fueling technological and economic progress, as patent law protects and rewards innovation. On the chance that you don't recognize this importance: who's going to invest millions in R&D if the competition can just steal the results of my research and sell it for half the price?
As someone who enjoys high quality, professionally produced media content, I am more than happy to help subsidize its creation. I agree that there will always be musicians making music, if for no other reason than the love of the art. But who's going to be producing 20 million dollar video games or 200 million dollar films, if no one is willing to pay for them?
Then following that is the question of scale. A book is generally written by one person (excluding the editors and publishers). A picture is generally taken by one person or a small crew. A game or movie can also be made by a small number of people, but for the most part they aren't. And when you're talking about those, there's usually a huge difference between a game made by a team of five and a game made by a team of 200. I do worry that if piracy and reselling gets bad enough and there aren't enough first-sales, the only games and movies we get will be of the indie variety. Nothing necessarily wrong with those, but it would be killing off a very significant part of the craft.
How is your future scenario different from the options now, other than exact numbers? We already have an overwhelming amount of material available for free (public libraries, internet, some museums) or very low cost (Netflix, subscription services, other museums). Yet we continue to produce movies, TV, books, art, music, and many other things. When people are no longer willing to pay for something, it stops being produced. If people stop being willing to pay for "truly new" things, which I very much doubt will happen because we are consumer whores, then truly new things will stop being produced. We might have trouble recognizing what is truly new versus what is a crappy knockoff, but that is a different issue. However, if we have come to the point that no one wants the new things anymore, then the lack of production can hardly be seen as a travesty.
I have 4300 songs on my hard drive, and yet I am always eager to find good, new music. Despite the incredible bounty of music on, say, the Podsafe Music Network that I can get for free, I still pay for some of my music. Sometimes I pay for it because it's the easiest way to get it immediately. Sometimes I pay for it because I want to support the artist. There is more than one single motivation for paying for things; availability of alternatives cuts down on one reason to pay for something (necessity), but not the others.
*Just for clarification, how copyright issues are different:
The differentiation that copyright supporters make between this situation and piracy/entitlement is that people still demand the material, but they feel entitled to get it for free. If they were turning to legally free alternatives or secondary market products instead of illegally consuming the pay media, then there would be no problem. Instead, they are either pirating the media they want or they are berating artists who ask for donations/contributions/etc. for not providing their work for free. You can always chose to consume the free media and ignore the pay media...so why isn't your scenario happening in totality? Because people want the new stuff, regardless of the wealth of material already available to them.
I'm hitting the button now before I revise this post into something even longer.
1) The growth of technology is exponential
2) Our ability to produce and distribute media is proportional to our level of technology
Hence our ability to produce and distribute media is proportional to the amount of media currently available - we can keep pace with the past.
(I resisted the temptation to use a differential equation
I think that the trend is indeed that the presence of more media only accelerates the production of media. Sure, the nature of the media must change, but it will continue to be produced, and by greater and greater fractions of the populace. When we hit the GitS horizon, everyone will be able to produce art trivially. It won't magically make them able to produce good art - most of it will still suck; in fact, as a proportion, more of it will suck than now - yet more and more great art will be produced by those with the ability to do so. Of course, past the GitS horizon, monetization of art will be completely ridiculous, but Rym's claim that the new will drown in a sea of the old is plainly false. The more I hear about it, the more I think this "culture of entitlement" idea is disjoint from reality. Sure, there's always a few people who think that way, but I've never seen any real evidence that such people are anything but a vocal minority. Plenty of people torrent various media, but I seriously doubt they're snickering to themselves about how they circumvented the artist's evil attempt to make money while they do it. There are plenty of people who are willing to support the artist when offered a reasonable way to do so, but when the only options are unreasonable, take the perfectly valid standpoint that their not consuming the media because they don't want to pay the price wouldn't do anyone any good.
http://questioncopyright.org/compensation.
The reason people pirate things is not because of a sense of entitlement. It's because the artists are acting like squeegee men.
For those of you who do not know, a squeegee man is a guy who will just walk up to your car on the street and clean your windshield without you asking him to. He will then ask you for money afterwards. If you make a piece of artwork, for example an album, and try to sell it afterwards, you are acting just like a squeegee man.
Some people might give you money, some people might not. That's up to them. But those who do not pay are not stealing. You did the work of creating the music without anybody asking you to. You also did not have any agreement regarding money before doing the work. Therefore, if there is any sense of entitlement, it is on the part of the artist. They feel that they made some art, so now they are entitled to be financially compensated.
Don't think this is something that is unique to artists. It is common to all professions. Pick any job in the world, and there are ways to do work before and after making a financial agreement. I can make software, and then try to sell it after it's made. I can also go and tell companies that I will make software they want, but only if they pay me first. A mechanic can fix your car for free, then ask for money after, or he can only fix your car after you agree to pay him.
Both models are fine, and have places in this world. The thing is, if you follow the model where you do the work first, and try to get the money second, you have to accept the fact that a lot of people will eat the fruits of your labor without giving you any money. The squeegee man accepts the fact that smart city folk aren't going to give him anything. Yet, some artist makes some music and then says you are stealing because you listened to it without paying. The pro-copyright artists are the ones with entitlement problems, not the pirates.
Wow, that there is some crazy, hippy bullshit! I can't believe that that is the cornerstone of your argument! To start out she only ever challenged the first assumption and then just started ranting that copyright is crazy monopolist bullshit.
And of the issue of why art shouldn't be compensated.. Just wow. As I said before, hippy bullshit. alright, maybe I see the point she getting at. Let's see where this goes... Ok...WAIT! WHAT?!? That just made no fucking sense at all. 2 + 2 = a bushel of potatoes. I'm all for letting the market decide, and it has decided a song is worth about $1, but why the fuck is copyright evil? No, Madonna is marketing herself and her art effectively and reaping the benefits of that.
Seriously, this paper is bullshit and I want compensation for the 15 minutes I wasted reading it.
Seriously, she just completely ignores capitalism. This is just not the way that our society functions. Her argument boils down to, "you can't charge for art, it's...art" and "copyrights don't let art spread, it wants to spread, you can't chain it down, let it be free, and don't worry about money."
Hippy...artist...bullshit.
Imagine if tomorrow, someone invented a free energy machine. Obviously, this isn't actually going to happen. But pretend it did. Obviously, this person would be morally obligated to connect their free energy machine to the grid, and provide free energy to the world for free. Anything less would be criminal. If some power company decided to still charge you for electricity, an unlimited resource, that would also be criminal. People wouldn't stand for it. If it's free, and you try to charge for it, fuck you!
Up until now, we've had a pesky law like this governing information. Our inferior technology required that information was expensive and limited. Storage and transmission of information were limited resources, just like energy. Thus, we built our society based on those assumptions. We sold music the way we sold cars.
The thing is, now everyone has a free energy machine in their house. Almost anybody can store and transfer vast amounts of information at an insignificant cost. Trying to sell already-recorded music today is like trying to sell electricity when there is a free energy machine. It's heinous. Does this completely ruin things and hurt a lot of people? Yes it does. A free energy machine would put thousands upon thousands of utilities workers out of a job. It would do just as much, if not more damage. But you know what? It's tough shit.
It used to be true that you could make art and ask for money afterwards without being the squeegee man. This is no longer true. It was not a decision we made as a society. It's just reality that we can not change. Like it or not, we have to live with, and accept that once you make something, if you want to share it with anyone, you are necessarily sharing it with everyone. You have no choice in the matter, for good or ill. Thus, if you make a book, and then ask for money afterwards, you are the squeegee man. When you wrote the book, you cleaned every windshield in the entire world. Some people might give you money, but some won't. And just because they read the book without paying you, it doesn't make them bad.
If you want to make money from art you have a few choices. One is that you can ask for money before making the art. Two is that you can work in a physical medium, like sculpture or painting. Three is that you can rely on people that are willing to pay the squeegee man. Four is that you can deliver your art in ways that are still limited, like having your movie shown in a fancy theater experience.
You might not like it. I may not like it. We might want the world to work differently. It might hurt a lot of people. It might have dire and horrible consequences for our society. It could be the worst thing ever. But none of that matters. There's nothing we can do about it. The laws of the universe have changed. Accept it and deal with it. Fighting it is just making everything worse.
Also, Autodesk ruling = Big news for Emi. Now maybe I can get old versions of Maya more easily? It drives me nuts, because we are running 8.5 and if we wanted to buy another copy, we would have to get Maya 2009, which is incompatible with 8.5, which means we would probably have to upgrade everything.
You know what copyright is? It's a gigantic government interference in the market. The government is using a law to force a monopoly where one does not naturally exist. If the invisible hand of capitalism were allowed complete freedom, with no government intervention, piracy would be completely legal, and nobody would pay for anything they could get for free, unless they were feeling charitable.
You know, in capitalism people are supposed to vote with their dollars. When comparing two things of equal quality, you are supposed to buy the one that is lower in price, right? So when perfect copies of art are available for free, it would be anti-capitalist to pay for them anyway.
People like to throw the word capitalism around a lot lately without really knowing fuck shit about what capitalism is. The term has come to be synonymous with "whatever economic policy is best for rich people and big businesses," or "whatever current US economic policy is." News flash, that's not what capitalism is.
Capitalism, in its purest form, means government can not, and should not, make any laws that regulate commerce at all. Capitalism in the Adam Smith form means that the government should only step in as a referee of sorts to make sure there is fair play in the markets. For example, the government might be allowed to break a bad monopoly, like breaking up Ma Bell. The government would also have the task of eliminating coercion and deception from the markets.
Copyright is a protectionist doctrine. It is as much the exact opposite of capitalism as are large tariffs.
Music generally takes time, work, and resources to produce. Even if they can be distributed for free, they still cost something to produce. There's a reason that digital copies of albums usually cost less than buying a CD! They aren't charging you for the physical medium anymore, because that cost has been eliminated. Do you think the majority of the price of a CD is the cost of reproduction? NO! "Music that has already been recorded" is not suddenly a cost-free product. That's the same as saying that a DVD player that has already been manufactured and is sitting on the shelf should be free because all the work to make it is already done! WTF, man? Are you really that delusional? Sure, the distribution costs are nearly null with digital media, but the up-front production costs haven't gone away. So lower the price by the costs you eliminated, and charge a reduced price. Eliminating some costs doesn't mean you suddenly have to charge nothing!
The problem with your philosophy is that you have fundamentally different values than most people who produce things and a fundamental misunderstanding of how the production and distribution world works. Most artists would not say that all of their art is a gift, particularly career artists. They put time, materials, and labor into creating it and distributing it, just like the guy who invents the free energy machine. Just because one hippie artist who wrote an article on the internet thinks art is a gift doesn't mean it IS DEFINITIVELY SO. Your philosophy seems to be that these people are not worthy of being compensated for their work. If so, I say fuck YOU. Sure, they may choose to give it away for free, and that is all well and good. Copyright exists to protect those who do not choose to give their work away for free.
Sure, if music took no effort, no time, and no materials to produce and was absolutely free to make in every sense of the word, then it should be given away for free. That is not the case, and the fact that you assert that it is demonstrates a lack of ability to effectively analyze system dynamics. If you can't see all the parts of the machine that come together to produce a result, then you probably shouldn't try to make recommendations about how to make that machine work better.
If you don't want to run the risk of not being paid, then agree to payment before you do something.
This is the fundamental disagreement we're having here. You say that simply because something exists, everyone should have unfettered access to it.
Copyright allows art and ideas to be commodities and as such bought and sold in a capitalist system.
PS: Capitalism != Laissez-faire
The business model needs to change from a product-based one to a service-based one. You contend that the artists are like the squegee man, which is not true. The squegee man is providing a service, whereas record labels still treat music as a product.
If a record company started charging a subscription-based access fee for unlimited and unencumbered access to ALL of the content produced by ALL of their artists, that could be a viable business model. I'm thinking of a pay music downloading service with correctly tagged files, fast service, guaranteed uptime, etc. Make it torrent based to really reduce that cost of distribution and push it off to the consumer; you'd probably need to pay people to keep some things seeded all the time, but that's a pretty small cost.
That would fundamentally change the nature of the "job" of a musical artist, but that's pretty much what needs to happen. Essentially, a record company could adopt the MMO business model and be viable in the future. Treat artists as salaried employees who generate content for your subscribers.
I'm not saying that you have to give it away for free. I'm not saying that just because something exists, people should have unfettered access.
I'm saying that we have no choice. People have unfettered access. There is nothing we can do about it. Just like there is nothing we can do about the laws of physics. Reality has changed. This is not a decision we get to make. Information, and anything that can be represented digitally, is infinitely and freely copyable. That's the reality of the world we live in. Does that mean bad things? Yes, it means a lot of bad things for certain people. Does everyone have to like it? No, it's understandable why many will not like it. But there's nothing we can do about it. It's already done. Deal with it.
This is the same argument we have been making concerning privacy. Privacy is dead. Is it going to cause a lot of pain and suffering to lose privacy? Yes it is. But you know what, privacy is gone. Technology has killed privacy, and now it's mutilating its corpse.
With copyright, we didn't accept the new reality, and we're paying for it big time. If we don't accept the new reality of no privacy as well, we've got some hard times ahead.