As a teenager, I thought I had a right to enjoy their work without paying for it. But this attitude surprises me from adults. Why don’t bands deserve to be paid for their product?
This is the same community that really hates ebook lending, and it's very much the same set of consumer-limiting control over intellectual property that curtails piracy but also makes things really inconvenient for the legitimate customer. I'm surprised but also not that people aren't able to think about this as more than a (false) dichotomy.
Properly implemented DRM is fine! Spotify has been a huge success, for example. Watching Netflix fully brings the convenience of streaming to legal content consumption. The only inconvenience here is that you can no longer pirate anything.
And, to use a facile and touchy example, Donald Trump didn't revolt at the capital.
But fine:
> what is a very real dichotomy
Help me out here - why are the only two choices: 1. rampant piracy 2. automated systems that allow corporations to trivially take down content, legitimate or not, with generally no recourse unless you get e.g. Google's attention on twitter?
Why are people so convinced there's no middle ground here, and that everybody with an opinion that #2 is perhaps a little problematic must be totally pro-piracy?
> Properly implemented DRM is fine!
Perhaps the argument is that we don't yet live in the land of properly implemented IP controls. I didn't realize we'd reached utopia; I'll go back to buying ebooks and reusing them across whatever devices I please.
Spotify and Netflix are great examples of exactly proof that a convenient form of consumption will get paying customers, and I was certainly more willing to buy MP3s when they stopped coming with DRM attached to them. The fact these work does not somehow render the point that, well, the original article, occurs, as a result of these things, and that it's ironic that it happens to Metallica, who would probably prior to this have been pleased that an automated system takes down anything approximating Enter Sandman.
That's a ridiculous wholly non-analogous example. Trump clearly incited the riot, there were recordings as proof, and resultant court cases. I assume (and hope) that this is also your understanding of what actually happened with Trump.
In this case, it doesn't even come close. For example, Metallica wasn't even signed on the record label that did the rootkit. Metallica had literally no involvement any hacking of their fans' operating systems.
You're stating a different dichotomy now. The original one you proposed was whether it is possible to be against online piracy without attacking consumers' data.
I'm happy to entertain your other more reasonable arguments that you have later written as follow-ups, but your original post directly accusing Metallica of rootkits is just flat-out untrue.
I'm just making the point that Metallica not rootkitting anybody is in no way an argument that they are neither in favor of that drastic a measure nor that they did not encourage or provide justification for the recording industry to do the same.
> You originally stated that Metallica rootkitted people.
No, I made a leap from "lobbying for and publicly whining about piracy" to "efforts to curb that include rootkits and other less horrible inconveniences". I'm sorry if that leap felt too extreme, next time I'll make the pit stops along the lines of "things don't work offline" and "things disappear without you knowing" and "things using otherwise standard formats aren't readable on your non-blessed device".
Whether Metallica directly rootkitted anything (which was never stated, it was just juxtaposed as an example of how this POV can hurt consumers in the end) doesn't really matter. Let's pretend that nobody ever rootkitted anybody.
How is this dichotomy different? My original, according to you:
> The original one you proposed was whether it is possible to be against online piracy without attacking consumers' data.
My recent restating:
> Help me out here - why are the only two choices: 1. rampant piracy 2. automated systems that allow corporations to trivially take down content, legitimate or not, with generally no recourse unless you get e.g. Google's attention on twitter?
Hm. Option 1 is online piracy, 2 is attacking consumers' data. Sounds pretty similar? Or do I need to be really literal and exact and use the same words?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compact_discs_sold_wit...
Of course, that's also available today, but that's not really relevant to the problem being discussed, which is: it's possible to want to pay artists, while also finding overzealous enforcement of the DMCA problematic.
Amazon actually will delete music from your hard drive.
5. Reservation of Rights
Except for the rights explicitly granted to you in the Terms of Use, all right, title and interest in the Service, the Software and the Digital Content are reserved and retained by us, our Digital Content providers, and our licensors. You do not acquire any ownership rights in the Software or Digital Content as a result of downloading Software or Digital Content.
And yeah I do disagree with the license of hard copy distribution. I don’t think just because I buy a book I can do whatever I want, even burning it.
I really think the supposed harm to consumers is vastly exaggerated in HN; on the other hand, the harm to artists and creators is serious, especially to those without the privilege of patronage.
You may copy, store, and burn iTunes Plus Products as reasonably necessary for personal, noncommercial use.
All of the agreements cited are pretty clear that you can copy and store the bytes for your own use.
I agree with the thrust that "purchasing" music is certainly weirder with these overreaching legal agreements (and I think it's more fraught when it comes to video or video games), but I disagree with the perspective that:
A) That this is a lease of the music
B) That that condition is justified because you didn't create an exclusive commission.
It seemed to me that, legality aside (and forgive me if I'm misunderstanding), you were asserting that customers have no business expecting indefinite access to an MP3 they paid for, and I... disagree, but if the recording industry wants that to be the case, they're welcome to yet another scenario where pirates have a better customer experience than paying customers.
Blech, an edit: What I have seen that applied to is subscription-based music, where the license agreement around whether that song is available for subscription changes. Is there an example of this happening to a "purchased "song or album? I've never seen an effort by a publisher to reclaim hard-drive-bound songs that have been paid for (and I imagine spicy legal cases about expecting refunds).
Edit again: I realize I'm sort of meandering. My point is only that it's not unreasonable to expect that, I agree that licensing agreements for digital purchases of all kinds have surprising details about what you actually "own".
Jk, I don’t care. Thanks for arguing in good faith, that’s not something that ever happens in this forum, I do appreciate that.
E: Like i said, I do think that unless you explicitly buy the rights to a song, you don’t own it, you’re leasing it. Probably the only reason (judging by music lawyers behavior) to have the ability to a sort of ownership to physical media is because they had no way of stopping you from doing anything you want with your copy. Of course, that’s a different story today, I’m sure given a time machine, that would not have been a precedent.
So that’s why I don’t like the argument from prior precedents, since it would not repeat given current tech.
I am also sympathetic to the "creators'" perspective. How can you make a profit if people take whatever you made without compensation? I think part of my cynicism here is that the recording industry has long exaggerated and argued in poor faith about what the harm of a download is - conflating downloads with lost sales at a 1:1 rate, which... isn't quite right. And their approach for securing things can be problematic, I remember having a hell of a time with iTunes back with their DRM solution, hating that I couldn't just play the song I had paid for. If only I'd pirated from the start...
I think there's some axes along which things could be improved - the convenience axis - can I even buy (access to) the song without jumping through hoops? Can I pay to skip ads on whatever platform I'm using? How many different accounts do I need to get access to the music I'd like?
Edit: Agreed, I think if they can get away with having control at all times with the music you have available, they will... and it's hard for me to decide whether there will be backlash or just general acceptance in the same vein as the rest of the walled garden trends we've seen over the years.
If I purchase a Gucci handbag, I can do whatever I want with it even though it contains Gucci's trademark IP. It would be surreal for Gucci to be allowed to control what I wear it with, for example, or later take it off me. Nonetheless, owning the handbag does not give me ownership of their IP and it wouldn't make it legal for me to sell counterfeit copies of it.
The presentation suggests that Metallica goes unpaid for their product. I suspect there are many fat bank deposits that indicate otherwise.
What I feel is more important is that the assertion obfuscates the primary motivation in play. Wealthy and powerful copyright interests want to control what customers get to do with the product they purchase. This government-granted privilege isn't one that's enjoyed by the vast bulk of producers.
Worse, copyright gatekeepers have twisted the constitutional purpose of copyright - from encouraging the progress of science and the useful arts - into a pampered entitlement of never-ending profit.
No, this is not a story of the evil capitalist overlord oppressing the little guy. Save the hero narrative. Even the broke bands (which is most of them) want people to pay them for their work. The good news is there are actually a lot of them who don’t, and that’s their personal decision. You’re allowed to take it for free if they set their price at zero, but you’re not allowed to set their price at zero for them.
Broke bands aren't who are paying legislators for ever-racheting copyright laws - each of which comes at the public's expense and further betrays the bargain between copyright holders and the public.
and - Corruption fueled copyright laws tend to favor powerful, wealthy gatekeepers (by design). For everyone else there are far better methodologies to making a living. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120210/02273417726/how-b...
What if the situation were different, and there where billions of people searching for infinite wells when all of the water became polluted and you were the lucky one to find it. Do you deserve everything now? How else were you supposed to have been incentivized to search for infinite wells if not for the possibility that everything would be yours upon finding it.
Alright, what if it weren't water? What if it were something that, instead of keeping you alive, just made life worth living? I reckon you probably couldn't get everything for it, but surely you could get a lot.
Does that seem like a bad system to you? I tell you what. I have a lot of money, I'll pay you to go searching for the infinite well of happiness (you can't survive on credit forever), and in exchange, it becomes mine when you find it, and then I can sell it for everything.
The premise that monopoly rights on distribution are necessary to incentivize the searching is pretty severely undermined by the fact that those monopoly rights are aggregated by companies which incentivize the searching via other means.
You’re misusing the word monopoly. Everyone has a monopoly on their own labor. But they don’t have a monopoly on music, and neither does Metallica. You’re not entitled to a man’s song and dance under any circumstances that don’t involve him entering into a mutually agreeable transaction with you. If this makes life not worth living, hopefully you can find someone else willing to accept your offer of giving them nothing in exchange for it. If you can’t, well, tough shit I guess. You still don’t deserve it for free. It’s not Lars’ problem if you will die without his music.
The question of copyright has ALWAYS been one of incentive, and I think my argument to that point is pretty clear.
Further, I am not misusing the word monopoly. Copyright is precisely monopoly distribution rights.