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Comment by iamdave | Hacker News Reader

for the tl;dr crowd- The author writes about an incident in which he discovered a teenager was trading his sheet music, without his permission and approaches her about it, said teenager actually makes several very good points, which get ignored by the author on various occasions in their conversation in lieu of a "lecture" on copyright.

Further tl;dr - the comment section by and large are all pats on the back to the writer. Few worthy of reading, but not many.

While I certainly see the perspective of the author here, wanting to preserve the integrity of his work, invariably he faces the same crisis the mainstream music industry faces: refusal to accept the change in mentality about content distribution and consumption, and an ardent unwillingness to entertain the idea that maybe in order to attract new audiences you have to tickle their senses and find out what they want, and how to give it to them. "Build it and they will come", thing.

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You let the kid off too easily.

He is already selling artists sheet music that they absolutely need for their profession via instant download for the cost of a coffee and the teenager in question still believes it is her right to misappropriate a copy instead because she doesn't want to pay.

The author isn't trying to preserve his work's integrity, whatever that is, he is trying to preserve his income.

He is a song writer. He genre is not a big recording industry item, mechanical royalties will be minimal. There are no concert tee shirts ,to assuage anyone's guilt here.

If I want a coffee, I take my cash to the corner store and buy it. It is easy. Doing any commerce on the internet is nowhere near as easy as that.

You are clearly someone who has never not had a credit card. These things are almost impossible without one, and certainly not as easy as getting a coffee. And news flash, lots of student and poor people DO NOT HAVE A CREDIT CARD!

And even if you do, you go to some dodgy website that you have never heard of before and just enter in your credit card details? Well, I don't.

> If I want a coffee, I take my cash to the corner store and buy it. It is easy. Doing any commerce on the internet is nowhere near as easy as that.

If you have the right form of currency, it's EASIER. You don't have to go to the corner store.

> You are clearly someone who has never not had a credit card

Are you kidding me? I didn't have a credit card until I was 20. How did I get by, how did I survive? Any checking account nowadays has the option of a debit card, which works just as well. Any bank account at all can be accessed by Paypal, and bank accounts are not nearly as exclusive- I opened my own savings account when I was 12. Friends, parents, friends' parents... Someone you know has a credit card, and you can pay them back.

Besides, just because you don't posses the means to pay for something doesn't mean you can take it. If I go into a corner store with only Yen in my pocket, I can't very well pay for a magazine even though I have the money. Does that justify me to steal it? Not a chance.

P.S. it's actually easier to get a cc if you are a student...

There is a Walgreens about every 10,000 feet where I live. Each one of them has prepaid credit cards in the impulse buy racks[1] by the checkout. Anyone can convert their physical dollars into credit card dollars.

Would you like the remains of your shattered argument in a bag or may I dispose of them for you?[2]

[1] And pregnancy tests. Who impulse buys a pregnancy test?

[2] Ok, that was uncalled for, but its hot and I'm not feeling civil right now, and you started it with the all caps.

Congratulations. As someone who does not live in the US, I have never seen these before, and I am pretty sure they are new as in the last few years.

They do sound like a solution to my problem, and I will investigate if they have them here in Australia.

Yes, but the author is couching his rhetoric in claims to "fairness" and moral righteousness. I think his stories are most revealing of his position:

I am an author, I tend to believe that I should be able to get paid for doing that work (and it is work, Eleanor, it's really hard work)...You think you're entitled to deny all of those people their rightful share of the work they do. I don't understand why you think that.

That's the core of his argument. He thinks that since he has been making a living this way for a long time, and it has worked out all right for everyone, his way is the right way and anything else is of dubious morals, because why would you want to deprive a good man of good work?

The discussion seems to be about whether the girl has a "right" to download or share his sheet music. In my opinion, she can do it, and that's that; should he have a "right" to stop her? He has not convinced me that there's any reason he should have that right.

> In my opinion, she can do it, and that's that; should he have a "right" to stop her?

I certainly can brutally kill puppies. Do you have the right to stop me if I own them?

Stop trying to twist the argument. There's a helluva lot of things you can do, but whether somebody else has the right to intervene and stop you is irrelevant.

And most of those things that you can do, you should be able to do. The exceptions are what need to be justified.

I don't see a lot of justification for claiming that piracy is wrong or bad. It's directly helping someone and not directly hurting anyone, and I haven't even seen someone claim credibly that it's hurting artists' pocketbooks. Certainly this girl's actions were a totally victimless crime.

I certainly don't see evidence that piracy is resulting in a lower quality of art, and it's obviously great in the short-term for consumers (especially ones like teenagers who have a hard time buying music and movies and books.)

> He has not convinced me that there's any reason he should have that right.

OK, suppose your girlfriend agrees to have you take some rather private photos of her under the condition that you will never make these available to someone else. (Or the other way 'round if you're a girl) One day you break up and you're sharing these photos. Does she has the right to stop you distributing them?

According to your logic, she has not. After all, you're just sharing among friends. And it's not as if she's loosing income of something like that.

Following the authors logic, your girlfriend has the right to stop you distributing them. For you made a promise before she agreed -- you basically entered a contract.

His point is that he offered copies of his work under certain conditions (called copyright). In other words, he expected everybody who agreed to the contract not to copy and redistribute his work. He expects them to hold their promise, their site of the contract.

Nobody's is forced or required to enter the contract and make this promise. You're free to make your own music and share it. Or used someone's music who doesn't expect you to make a similar promise.

However, violating your promise (ie. changing the conditions of the contract) is clearly immoral.

Or would you want to be the victim of somebody who changes the contract conditions after the deal was made? Or would you want to be lied to, or have your friends break their promises?

If the answer is 'No', then copying stuff without a license is clearly immoral.

The author isn't trying to preserve his work's integrity, whatever that is, he is trying to preserve his income.

She may be rationalizing her actions, but from my ethical perspective as a libertarian, she's actually in the right. She didn't stole anything, nor did she agree to a explicit contract with the author. The author don't actually have the right to any profits, only profits that he endeavorer and successfully earn in the market.

But that doesn't matter much to me, anyway. As long as people like him don't lay their hand on the results of my intellectual labor, I don't care about what happens to the pirates and the copyright mafia.

I will be very happy to eat the lunch of other game developers at the end of this silly cultural war.

WTF?

The author’s sales of sheet music to everyone who buys it include an explicit contract (called the laws of whatever country the sale is done in). The girl seems to have gotten a copy from some party to that contract, explicitly against its terms, and is now re-trading the item in question (the sheet music file), on her own. Except the law, as written, quite clearly applies just as much to her as it does to the person who violated his contract with the author in providing her the sheet music.

The nature of the stuff being traded makes it somewhat different than physical goods, but in principle this is no different any other illegal redistribution of goods, for example reprinting cheap copies of some copyrighted book and selling them on the street at barely above cost.

When you talk about your “ethical perspective as a libertarian”, what you apparently mean is that you don’t believe in the concept of copyright (or other “intellectual property”, or perhaps even that society’s laws should be binding on citizens). This is not the usual libertarian “ethical perspective”, and you should be careful about implying that libertarians necessarily feel the same way you do.

> successfully earn in the market

There is only a market for sheet music insofar as that sheet music can’t be trivially gotten for free from a third party. Basically, your comment says something like “we should eliminate the market for sheet music, and the author should do something else.” Well okay, that might be what happens anyway, but that’s not “the market” deciding. For markets to exist requires a set of social structures which regulate its form and function. When those structures break down, as in this case, the market is destroyed.

(These social constraints need not be written down or enforced by an official police force, etc. They just need to be commonly agreed upon and have some social weight. I need to know you won’t take my money and run without giving me the promised chicken, or spend all your time copying the book I sold you and selling it behind my back while I’m trying to write the next one.)

Copyright law applies to her. Contract law binds only to the person the contract was actually made with; he could be sued for violating the contract by giving the music to someone else - the recipients cannot.

Rational libertarians do not believe in copyright law - all of the defenses of variations on copyright that I have seen from "libertarians" are from people who make a living from writing, and are too lazy or stupid to find some other way to make money. That is one reason I quit buying or reading Reason, the magazine for market-worshiping libertinist sub-competents.

>and are too lazy or stupid to find some other way to make money.

Nice to know that you have the insight of what's a legitimate way to make money and what isn't.

BTW, bicycles are often pretty easy to steal. Are bike makers "too lazy or stupid" to find another way of making money? Or should we just find a better way of protecting our bikes?

I would like to add that copyright contracts are possible in a libertarian world. DRM would be alright and violate nothings in libertarian ethics.

However, most libertarians, with their understanding of economics, would laugh at such schemes. We wouldn't think that these kind of business models would be successful.

You are living under a rock. My ethical perspective is not uncommon amongst libertarians. However, it was new and it took for a while for libertarians to accept the arguments.(At least a decade) Right now, some of the major organizations in libertarianism are already using creative common attribution license.

the author doesn't have the right to any profits [from the sale of his work]?!

"people like him"

ok, I can't take this Bizarro World discussion anymore.

I think you're dodging the question here. If you can show us credible numbers to indicate that stopping this girl from getting her hands on his music has significantly improved his income, that would be interesting. But I don't think you can, so bringing up his income is a red herring. He's fighting this girl on moral grounds.

(Ironically, he brings up fair use as an excuse for his copying of media, but won't recognize that copying sheet music for a high school project probably falls under the same umbrella.)

Well, it did subtract the amount he makes off one sheet music sale.

It absolutely did not. The girl made it clear that she doesn't have a credit card and can't/won't convince her parents to pay, so there's no way he would have gotten a sale out of her.

so he should subpoena the website for logs of every person she traded his music to and ask them all if they all have the same convenient lack of ability to pay $3.99 online? get real. one person shares with 10, those 10 with 100, and whoops, now he's lost over $400 in potential sales because she wanted to be nice and share. no i can not prove he would have had these sales, nor do i need to. you also seem to ignore his other suggestion: check out the song book at the library.

Your logic falls apart at the end. Checking out books from a library must be equally wrong. Hundreds of people can do it, and then he's out over a thousand dollars in potential sales.

the books are returned, thus as long as the people do not make copies of the books all they can hope to do is memorize the sheet music. if they forget they have to go get it again. if it's already lent out, they have to buy it.

Well, your first suggestion is as equally impossible to carry out as the actual law.

I think you have to prove that the sales are lost, if you're making the case that someone is being harmed by piracy. Based on my experience with a ton of friends stealing media left and right, piracy seems somewhat orthogonal to sales. Folks seem to mostly steal things that are either very hard to get otherwise (old, out-of-print, not yet released) or that they would never be willing to pay for. A lot of pirates end up amassing a tremendous amount of media, more than they could ever afford if they were to buy it all. Often they spend a lot of money buying what they can afford.

To complete this rehashed discussion with a repetitive anecdote, I can say with total certainty that I have spent literally thousands of dollars more on music than I would have ever spent if I did not steal any. Like the girl in the article, I was a teenager with no capacity to pay for music for years as I discovered and stole from all the artists from whom I have been buying since.

I think you're confusing some issues here. In the case of copyright infringement it is clear that sales were lost. The question is just how many and that is what can't be proven. It's true that numbers the media industry claims are ridiculous when compared against their projected growth before file-sharing took up widespread use but that doesn't mean their loss was $0 either.

There's an even more subtle point here that teenagers don't have an easy way to purchase things in the online economy without their parent's permission. Part of the reason she's trading is because she can get it no other way. If I'm an aspiring artist, I'll be damned if some four dollar barrier stands between me achieving my dreams and not at all.

It's pretty clear that she had already tried to convince her parents about this, but failed. Teens can use cash to buy whatever they want, but not online.

I'd figured this would be an uncharitable summary, but after reading the article, it's pretty much spot on. He keeps reiterating that he needs to make money, she keeps giving good explanations for why her actions don't impede that goal, and he keeps ignoring everything she says in favor of repeating his thesis.

The question that you are dancing around is: do we care enough about creative works to support their creation, or do we really care so little about the food for our soul that we look forward to consuming only the side-project crumbs that people make in their evenings and on weekends for fun?

Some artists have a "live" performance that people enjoy paying for that un-copyable experience. But do we really want our authors to make their entire living from tips at book-signings?

Copyright hasn't caught up to the reality of unlimited instant effortless copying, but artists still need to eat, and paying them for what they do is probably going to remain the simplest way to make sure they eat at all.

The problem is that the content distributors still have not yet grasped the idea that 'scarcity' is moot in an age where information can easily be produced, reproduced, and disseminated at the speed of thought. Actually, they have grasped it, they just have not extracted a method of controlling it outside of the realms of pay walls, destroying UX by forced advertisement campaigns, and the walled-garden that is the iTunes Music Store.

"Do we care enough about creative works to support their creation?"

I have ticket stubs from twelve Dave Matthews Band concerts that say yes, in my case.

If people don't feel like paying for musicians and the like, than it's a signal to the market to stop supporting musicians and force them to work other jobs that people are willing to pay for.

If that what it meant to be, than it will be. Copyright will merely submerge the will of individuals into the underground illegal music scene and not solve any problems for musicians at all.

They can keep busting pirate networks all they want, it won't change a thing in the long run. Musicians will die off and soon we will be left with a frozen archive of musics, though a very large library.

It doesn't matter that much to me anyway. I'll never be able to get all the favorite songs in the world. I'll never be able to remember enough in my lifetime. I am pretty content with this scenarios.

I don't think what artists fear will come true. Instead, many of them will probably find ways to make a living.

For me, it's the same cognitively. There are still tons of artists and songs to discover, too much for a lifetime, and too much for the limited memory capacity of my brain.

And I suspect that in a world with no more musicians and a frozen archive of music, you would see a strong market demand for new music, so people would become musicians to meet that demand. Eventually it will reach a new equilibrium, with fewer musicians than we have today making less money than they make today. Their income would come from their new music, their back catalogues would be worth much less than they are today.

A different music scene, but not necessarily a worse one.

Whoa there. Some of the most awesome things I've ever come across have been "side-project crumbs". I'll take art made for fun over art made for money any day.

Some people have so much fun (and ability) making art, they can make a living off of it. There's a huge overlap between art made for fun and art made for money, and taking away artists' means to make a living takes away a significant amount of art.

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