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Comment by leereeves | Hacker News Reader

The music labels who decide the terms of sale didn't create the music. They're rent seeking corporations who seek to increase their profits in any way possible and bribe politicians to create artificial barriers through which they can create toll gates.

And their control is expanding. Older works that should (by historical precedent) be part of the commons remain copyrighted because of endless extensions. Practices that were once legal and common become illegal (like copying tapes vs copying CDs) or technically difficult (like recording music off the radio vs recording music off the Internet).

Fighting back and "lowering the price everyone is willing to pay" doesn't sound like a bad thing to me.

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> The music labels who decide the terms of sale didn't create the music. They're rent seeking corporations who seek to increase their profits in any way possible and bribe politicians to create artificial barriers through which they can create toll gates.

This is a self-serving rationalization that is not universally true. There are plenty of labels that are artist-owned, or are very friendly to artists. These tend to be small or mid-sized labels, and have been the most hurt by piracy. Ani Difranco has spoken about the impact of piracy on her Righteous Babe Records. Fat Mike of Fat Wreck Chords has spoken about the impact of piracy on independent and growing bands.

Meanwhile the biggest labels (the ones you're complaining about) have done just fine under piracy because they've never hesitated to sign acts desperate for the big time to crappy 360 deals that give the label a cut of every single revenue stream.

Looking at "the music industry" as a whole obscures the truth, which is that the shape of the music industry has changed--the middle has been hollowed out.

What we have now is a system in which it's easier than ever to get discovered, but if you want to actually make money, you're more dependent than ever on a huge company to permit that to happen--whether it's a big label, commercial sync deals, Ticketmaster, YouTube, etc.

I don't pirate music or movies so it's not "a self-serving rationalization".

It's an argument that copyright law serves the interests of a few at the expense of the many.

And I think you've missed the point about smaller bands and labels. They struggle whether they sign with a big label or go independent because only superstars and big corporations make big money from music. Many fans know this and are generous to support their favorite smaller bands.

The legitimate way to lower prices in a market is to create a competing product and sell it for less money, not interfere with a creator's rights to sell their product on their terms. The music industry isn't "brib[ing] politicians" to "create artificial barriers" to people creating competing content. Indeed, it's easier than ever to compete with the record labels. Sites like YouTube offer vast opportunities for creating and distributing indie content. The only reason the record labels make any money at all is that they make content people want more than the indie content they could get elsewhere for cheaper.

Copyright is itself an artificial barrier, as is copy protection and laws like the DMCA that make copy protection a legal as well as technical barrier.

I respect your right to your opinion that poor people should be prevented from hearing or seeing something entertaining because a corporation wants more money (it's rarely the creator who makes these decisions), but that's not the only legitimate opinion.

Copyright isn't a law handed down by God; it's a fairly new legal creation on the scale of human history and its constant expansion is a major factor behind increasing inequality in the world.

The market is NOT a new invention. Copyright exists to regulate the market.

The notion that ideas are products to be sold on the market instead of free thoughts to be shared is a new invention.

In fact, most of the world still doesn't believe it, which is why the US has to fight so hard to expand copyright and patent protection in other nations.

> Copyright is itself an artificial barrier, as is copy protection and laws like the DMCA that make copy protection a legal as well as technical barrier.

Yes, copyright is an artificial barrier, but a barrier to what? It's not a barrier to fair competition. It's a barrier to circumventing a creators right to bargain about the price of her creation.

Copyright itself isn't "handed down by God," but the idea that people should own the fruits of their own labor is an old one. That's all copyright is.

The origin of copyright was providing monopoly rights to the Stationers Guild in Britain to control printing of works under the Licensing of the Press Act 1662. So a right vested in the printers who wanted to be able to sell for much higher prices than the duplication itself justified, not the authors.

Of course this would also allow them to pay more to authors, because they would be able to amortise it over more copies, but the guild had a monopoly on printing, so it was not in any of their interests to substantially increase the proportion paid to authors - the main benefit of this monopoly was to themselves.

When parliament refused to renew it after protests because of the censorship it authorised, the Stationers Guild kept trying to push for it to be reintroduced, and first then started pushing the "authors rights" angle, leading to the Statue of Anne (Copyright Act 1710), which was the first "modern" copyright act in that it vested rights in authors.

But the idea of restricting the ability to copy to favour the creators of a work was something the printers first started pushing for their own interest because their abuse of the copyrights previously granted to them directly made it unpalatable to re-authorise those rights.

And extending the copyright on works whose creators are long dead doesn't do anything for the creators.

If copyright law wasn't serving the interests of Disney, Sony, and other big corporations, they'd be pressuring politicians to change it, rather than expand it to other countries.

>The legitimate way

What determines legitimate? There is, of course, the law. But the law has numerous limits and abilities to be exploited. To some extent, the law of the past was violated by the RIAA and others, and so nothing they do could be considered legitimate. And on a very different line of reasoning, the law can be considered only a tax and thus it is legitimate to pay the tax once enforced.

>The music industry isn't "brib[ing] politicians" to "create artificial barriers" to people creating competing content.

They don't lobby for laws that do things such as lead to YouTube creating copyright systems they can then exploit to take out competitors? Using government to capture the EM spectrum so that indies cannot compete on it? No, they aren't being simplistic tropes that bribe the government to outlaw all competition directly, but I would suggest to not use that as one's only measurement.

Plenty of selling music today is written, performed and completely produced by the musician.

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