Trent Reznor says YouTube is “built on the backs of free, stolen content”
factmag.com
factmag.com
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe...
You are not trying to isolate a scientific truth, but engaging a lifetime of biased neural pathways with the goal of maximum enjoyment. When listening to music in the real world, your biases will affect your perception so trying to remove specific ones in the name of science is only muddying your measurement of actual preference.
I want an iPhone, but I can't even sync music libraries with my Linux desktop.
So I'm stuck with Android.
Does iTunes not run well enough in Wine [1]?
I say this all as a frequent user of Steam on Linux and a nonuser of iTunes.
[0] - http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
[1] - https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
The backend would be bittorrent, so it wouldn't require bandwidth. If all of the contributors would be sufficiently anonymous, lawyers and governments wouldn't matter either.
So it would just be an interface connected to a repository of curated torrents. Not trivial but not nearly as hard as you're making it out to be. I think the only reason it doesn't exist is that videogame pirates are largely content with their current system. That or no one capable of implementing it has had this idea.
And, this was like 5 years ago before I joined Steam. It was a convoluted mess.
The end result is many Steam users have vast libraries of games that they have either never even installed let alone played for more than 30 minutes. This was common with many of us that used to practice piracy, but now the excess is captured as some revenue rather than none.
I have to say that I'm actually kind of okay with this, at least for myself. I choose to view it as voting with my dollars to let indies and publishers know the types of game I'd like to see more of.
And, admit it, it's kind of pleasant to let your eye wander over the list of unplayed games and imagine how much fun they'll be when you someday, somehow find the time to play them (even when you know deep down that you probably never will). "Wanting is better than having" and all that. And the bonus is that they're all virtual and don't clutter up the house.
Value is where one finds it. :)
The "aspirational" purchase, which I'm very familiar with.
"Oh man, that's a great sale price, I should totally pick that up." <my "Up Next" category on steam is only 33 long...>
And also taken away from you on a whim. I had this happen for about 3 weeks, without a clear reason and without communication (aside from "we're looking into it"). I will never buy another DRM'd game through Steam or anywhere else.
And specifically for "latest albums," they seem to do a delayed release a lot. I saw this recently with Clapton's I Still Do, but it shows up with many others too. Often they'll release a single track for streaming, and have a link to purchase the whole thing. And even now that they've made the album available for streaming, there's one track missing!
It's a bit frustrating to pay a subscription only to have it show me an advertisement to buy an album they refuse to stream. I'm less familiar with other services but it sounds like they're similar.
One trouble with the Steam analogy is that there's nothing for games like YouTube is for music. I can go from zero to listening to a particular piece of music in barely more time than it takes to type the name of the song. Pirating games takes a lot more work.
Let's not conflate the delivery service used to get the product from the actual product.
You download something on the internet, for free, it could contain anything. The spy agencies of UK and USA had used modified pirated software in order to access computers of enterprise CEOs and engineers that were so stupid to compromise secrets valued on millions in order to save a few bucks.
I think piracy is definitely about price as much as access. I think when Gabe speaks, he speaks for Valve and defends its monetization strategies. Of course he's selling you the idea of access, he wants you to put your stuff on Steam, where he gets a 30% cut. Price still matters.
Most piracy is not a service issue. Most piracy is a greed issue. Yes, there are region locks. Yes, not all content is available to all people. Yes, purchased content may only be usable on certain devices. Yes, we could list edge cases for hours.
But most content is available to most people in a way that has never been easier or faster to access in the history of time. It just costs a little bit of money.
Do you realize how incredibly easy iTunes is? I can purchase and start playing almost any TV show or movie ever made in approximately 5 mouse clicks and 15 seconds. (Yes, if you don't live in the US it may not be available. I covered that already. Thanks.) It's insane how easy it is.
It's impossible to compete with truly free. Netflix can offer a good deal thanks to copyright laws. Were it not for such laws piracy sites would be of such high quality that no paid service could possibly compete.
If you had a credit card with infinite money the paid would be pretty god damned good. Better than piracy. The single biggest advantage piracy has, by far, is it doesn't cost money. That's a pretty damned big advantage.
I think service is a piracy solution. But the problem is greed. Old fashioned, simple greed.
I expect downvotes. But this is my opinion. I hope you don't downvote simply because you disagree.
The issue with TV shows is somewhat different because of their episodic nature and the fact that alot of what they have to offer is available for free over the air, or already paid for by the cable customer, or the Netflix customer. It's harder to justify buying something that you really only want to watch once, will likely be available at some point in the future for free, or where the producer just doesn't care enough about your part of the world to even bother releasing it in a reasonable timeframe.
I'm not saying price isn't a factor, or the desire to get tons of "free" stuff isn't a factor, but distribution is still a PITA for TV worldwide, and TV/Movie companies also have the same level of "greed" in terms of wanting to herd consumers towards DVD/Blueray that Record companies have with regards to CD sales and wanting to return to the huge paydays of the 90s.
"they're not stealing it because they're going to make money off of it; they're stealing it because they love the band"
Meanwhile, YouTube is a business, it displays ads for stolen content and everyone has easy access to it.
Perhaps one could say they are "trying" to pay content providers, but are just not doing as good a job as iTunes.
Apple has far better control over iTunes, than Google has over Youtube. Youtube is just a different animal.
Last thing I read from him was a rant about social media :/
Years ago he was making his Nine Inch Nails tracks available for users to download and remix. He uploaded an entire concert (HD, multiple angles, terabytes of video if I remember) to bit torrent so users could download it and produce their own concert film. So he's been taking advantage of the power of the internet for a while and fans have benefited from that. I think his problem is when you take away control from the artist.
In fact, they even provide tools to help you fix videos that have audio copyright claims against them...
It's at least 7 years old[1] and the system itself (if not the name) is almost 9 years old[2]. That's not recent relative to just about anything.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/01/youtubes-january-fair-...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/youtubes-copyright-fil...
While many clips were affected by this, you can still (and could always) find almost anything, uploaded pirated, on the first try -- from songs and shows to whole movies. The main exception is for 1-2 very vigilant artists (e.g. can't easily find non-officially uploaded Dylan tracks that are not bootlegs).
Youtube is full of copyright violations of smaller production companies without this kind of infrastructure. Kid's show are pretty bad. I can put anything on for my son via youtube, when its pretty obvious those are not official channels and those very same episodes are $5 rentals on any other service.
Whatever your views on his statements are, this comparison is fallacious. He's called YouTube disingenuous for building a business on the back of stolen content. OiNK can neither be accused of disingenuity, nor of building a business.
prostitution, gambling, drugs, books, music, video
Prostitution and drugs are hardly victim-less.
Which I guess/believe was the point OP was making.
Unless they take very aggressive action to force Google to do otherwise, that is.
"And the electronics industry's attitude toward the labels is summed up by an Apple slogan: Rip. Mix. Burn. Which, a music executive once told me, translates into "Fuck you, record labels."
The slogan wasn't Download Mix Burn. Apple has always been strong on the IP end of things.
Rip meant taking physical audio CD's you, or anyone you knew, owned. One kid buys a CD, and the next day it's in every kid in the school's iTunes library. I think iTunes even had an ability to just grab and copy MP3s from anybody's library that was broadcasting on the network, circa 2006-07.
The British record industry in the Eighties had a "home taping is killing music" campaign, the could've updated it to "home burning is killing music."
It's not like the record companies were completely blameless. They didn't care about their customers, they only cared about the artists they signed because they were legally obligated to, and no one who cares about music is mourning their downfall.
[1] The difference, of course, is that many of the free resources were given away by license. However, at the end of the day, very little compensation has gone to many people who have built critical, foundational parts of the infrastructure that has fueled billions of dollars in revenue for companies world wide. On some level, hearing a musician who has been compensated, significantly, for their work complain about inequities kind of makes me laugh.
Hell, I don't even find the concept of physical property to be straightforward. Almost every single physical object we have in our lives today is built off the work and ideas of countless millions and billions of people before us. So the objects in our lives that we "own" and have "earned", in reality, were earned and produced by large swaths of humanity over thousands of years.
Now, how do we reconcile this with the fact that I'm still standing here, holding the object in my hand, and "no, I definitely would not like to give it to you, thank you very much". That seems incredibly tricky. And then of course there is the fact the concept of property ownership does incentive huge amounts of innovation and productivity. So we don't want to ruin that. I'll have to continue thinking about this another day...
Yes but they only started doing that after they became the go-to site for videos. If they didn't allow copyrighted materials from the beginning it never would have become the behemoth it is and more than likely would've died before it had a big enough audience to entice copyright owners to strike deals with it.
From his site: as a thank you to our fans for your continued support, we are giving away the new nine inch nails album one hundred percent free, exclusively via nin.com.
the music is available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE. your link will include all options - all free. all downloads include a PDF with artwork and credits.
After making loads of money in the 90s from the very music industry he despises now. It's easy to give stuff for free when you are already rich.
When does your next record drop?
I thought it was "another current corporate executive talking down a major competitor's successful product."
With views and adsense revenue being heavily front loaded against the upload time of the video I have no method of recovery of those lost dollars.