The Recording Industry Likes to Make Me Look Like an Asshole
blog.earbits.com
blog.earbits.com
Well consider me fucked.
What the author doesn't realize is that he's fighting against an organic phenomenon. Even if SOPA passes, piracy will continue to thrive. There are thousands of eager engineers begging for the chance to prove that they can produce an elegant hack around this poorly considered attempt to control the internet. There is also a culture that has now adjusted its formula for content value, and those people will demand piracy, just as they demand jailbroken phones and modded xboxes, and someone will rise to meet their demands. A new file sharing solution will emerge, and the media companies will have to spend another decade trying to lobby for a way to whack the next mole.
In the meantime, those of us who understand that you can't prevent a bit from being copied have learned how to create content that people feel good paying for. Of course, people don't have the right to download content without paying for it, but you can't stop the spread of 1s and 0s without giving the media companies an authority that goes beyond what is reasonable.
The customer's desire to give you money is the product. This is inherent in the nature of near zero cost replication.
Loius CK gets it, Reznor gets it, Yorke gets it, kickstarter gets it. OP doesn't, the RIAA doesn't.
OBVIOUSLY NOT. If you don't appreciate the music, or even the artists work, then don't download it. If you don't want it, dont steal and insist that your "just getting it for the right price." I can't even begin to explain how entitled it sounds o hear people saying that they wil pay for the things that they "really should be paying for because they want to be." This is a justification for piracy and is in no way a solution to the curent issues. You buy a product, you donate to charities which you like. Charities ask you to contribute, firms tell you what you need to to pay for their product. Louis CK is in no way an indication that people will pay for things they 'really appreciate,' lots of people really wanted the experiment to work. But what of Kanye's album? I see hundreds saying "Oh this guy is a jerk, I'm just gonna take his album." Is that how natural markets work?
Don't like it? Good, that's your NATURAL INCLINATION to go for lowest price possible which will in no way just 'go away' when you really appreciate your products, nor should it.
And this is not zero cost replication. There are people that put a ton of time and effort into piracy to make it work. We'll know when we've reached a solution that works when the enormous online filesharing infrastructure necessary for the current levels of piracy dissolves, and people simply start to pay for the products like they would any other.
If coca-cola sold their recipe rather than selling cans of soda, then I would agree with your paragraph one.
Remember that coca-cola does not pay royalties to many of the inventors of the ideas the bottler uses to bottle soda. Newton's heirs do not own the world.
As for paragraph two, all I can say is that yes: human markets do work that way. My advice to you is to remember that a rational man adjusts to the world, rather than becoming angry that it isn't the way he wants it to be.
As for paragraph three, you're wrong -- we all donate to charities we like, we all give gifts, we all help each other; we read books by great thinkers and are thankful for their gift. When you really like an artist, learning that they need money to recoup their cost of production is much the same as learning what a friend wants for their birthday: you give it as a token of your affection.
edit: you just added paragraph four. Please reread what you wrote. You're not even pretending to understand the subjects you're commenting on any more :(
People need to adjust to idea that services need to be paid for. Plain and simple, if they aren't paid for, in full, they stop being provided. And if say this magical benevolent system is implemented, are you to guarantee that good will can ensure that the money is actually paid? I can't, and based on the justifications for theft I've seen on this forum, I seriously doubt anyone here will actually pay for the all music they take, especially under the anonymity and "I'm special so it doesn't matter when I do this immoral thing" of the internet.
I agree, but that doesn't justify copyright or any other draconian law. We should do away with them and people will need to decide if they want to pay and ensure their survival or not.
immoral
Oh, I love this. You can't even comprehend the notion that people may actually not find copyright infringement to be immoral, can you? Tip: many don't.
Example: Morally (in my moral code, obviously), I don't have the right to e.g. throw racial insults at people, legally, I do (Free Speech and all).
So I believe legally, one should have the right to download anything without censorship like copyright. Whether it's moral is not relevant.
Do you think that artists will continue to produce when you rid them of their right to sell their product in the way they choose?
Uh, that's not what it does. It doesn't take away the right to sell it, just the exclusive right, and I believe lots of people would still buy it and it would still be profitable, so yes, I think they would continue to produce.
But, whether they would or not is irrelevant to my viewpoint that copyright should be abolished.
"If you don't agree with me it's because you're corrupt". Frankly, that's just a disgusting personal attack. And if I do, it's just because I'm a member of society and I believe society as a whole benefits a lot from copyright being abolished.
Do you think it's possible that you don't value copywrite law nearly as much as an artist would because their music would be effectively free and you wouldn't pay for music or movies anymore?
Hmm, you should checkout http://www.thepiratebay.org. Music and movies are already effectively free for anyone who doesn't want to pay, and for nerds like me who know how to install and run complex software it'll always be. The elimination of copyright (not copywrite) law doesn't benefit me in that way, no.
And quite obviously, I mean for you to answer "I'm going to pay for everything because I want to!" so I can understand that there isn't something I'm missing in all this, just a lot of people who want an easier and cheeper way to get music and movies.
If I pay, it's already because I want to. Do you really think copyright law stops a person with the average knowledge that HN users have from getting free stuff?
Yes, I pay for stuff I can get for free.
To refuse to reconsider whether it is theft or not is therefore asinine.
That said, I'd like to ask what more than a cynical and baseless speculation you use to support the argument against a patronage model for creative content? You're looking at charity in the wrong way -- a number of individuals who enjoy the benefits of some action are free to provide as much of their own incentive to support those institutions.
Your argument against a patronage (donation based, or public subsidy) model is akin to complaining that a homeless shelter should expect all of the homeless they take care of to pay their share in the service they provide. That is not the point and is clearly not the effective strategy. Enough people who have the cultural motivation and desire can donate to those shelters, or a number of other non-profit institutions who provide different solutions.
There simply is no evidence for you to base the allegation that it is "in no way a solution" because we already see patronage as an effective model for a number of systems that capitalism has failed to address. Once we stop pretending creative content can be owned, we can actually begin progressing as a culture.
The days for copyright are numbered, and the selfish and entitled are not the pirates but the artists who demand that their content be worth something to everybody.
You have no basis for asserting that culture "services" stop being provided when they are not individually exchanged for cash for every use and reuse. In fact, the vast majority of human history stands as testament to the opposite: works are commissioned by patrons, or financed by performance, or even simply as acts of self-expression.
What you really seem to have a problem with, though, is your inability to separate mechanisms from goals. The goal of copyright is to incentivize production. The mechanism is government-enforced monopolies over intangible things which, for legal purposes, are treated as property.
The main problem is that the mechanism is breaking down because citizens are becoming more powerful. They have access to technology that permits copying and distribution. This makes cultural IP less property-like, and more language-like.
The correct response to this is not to make the mechanism more powerful, especially not a response that actively increases the (necessary) tyranny of government over citizenry. The correct response is to create a different mechanism for incentivizing creative work, one that is robust in the face of increasing citizen sovereignty.
I mentioned in another comment here a tax redistributed based on popularity, as measured by fingerprinting playback. That's just one idea.
But when you say that I, or people like me, support theft or stealing, or suggest that artists shouldn't get paid, you're simply wrong; worse, you're deeply misguided in what you're attacking. You are defending the mechanism. You should try standing up for the goal, with the rest of us.
You are looking at things with the assumption that copyright is a natural system, and any deviation from that system requires a justification. Hence your taking as an axiom that allowing others to copy a work is a service provided by the artist for payment.
I feel that a more rational basis is assuming a system of no laws as a 'default' state. Any deviations from this state require a justification of how they would benefit society as a whole.
To give an exaggerated example, let us consider whether murder should be outlawed. In a 'default state', there would be no prohibition on murder, and anyone could murder anyone else for whatever reason they like. It is clear that murder may benefit the person doing the murdering in some cases; is there a sufficient cost to society as a whole? Naturally there is - the fear of being murdered forces everyone to take security precautions into their own hands (inefficient), and causes needless pain and suffering. So murder should be outlawed.
Now, let's look at theft of material goods. Note that theft of physical goods and copyright infringement (or unauthorized copying) are two entirely different things, and must be treated as such - in particular, theft deprives the original owner of enjoyment of the object in question. So, why is theft of material goods a bad thing? Well, in a capitalistic society, material goods are provided as compensation for doing something of benefit for society (ie, payment). Allowing theft subverts this system; those doing the work don't get paid, and instead thieves get the benefit. The nash equilibrium of such a state is for everyone to engage in at least some level of thievery, which competes for their time - thus reducing the amount of useful work performed. Thus, societal efficiency drops, for no benefit on average. As such, it should be outlawed.
What about copyright? As a first-order effect, it's clear it benefits the artists (although this becomes unclear when you consider the additional advertisement provided by free availability of the works in question). However, what about everyone else? On average, does society as a whole benefit from this deviation from the 'default state' of no copyright law? It's clear there's harm to individuals other than the artist - they must pay, or they are prevented from doing things they would otherwise be able to (ie, replicating the work). So there must be a corresponding benefit to others; the benefit gained by the artist cannot alone offset the harm to society as a whole.
The original conception of copyright aimed to increase the prevalence of artistic works, by providing artists with royalties. This was the benefit to society that made the original equation balance. However, with the Internet, there is no shortage of artistic works being provided completely for free by the author, with no copyright royalties coming to the author. This lessens the benefit to society provided by copyright law.
We must also consider the additional costs of copyright law added in the modern era. 'Mash-ups' are artistic works in their own right; however, copyright is used to force them to be removed from public view. This was a scenario that would have been unheard of back when copyright law was first envisioned, and is a further cost on society as a whole.
But, you might ask, isn't the provision of material goods (ie, royalties), the basis for encouraging work for societal benefit, as in the theft example? I would argue that there are a few important differences:
* It has been demonstrated that there is no shortage of people willing to do artistic work for free. This is not the case for all jobs - eg, there are very few people willing to work in a sewer for free.
* It is still possible for artists to be rewarded for their works even without a system of royalties. Donations, commissioned works, advertisements, hard-to-replicate physical goods (special CD cases, etc), and live performances are good examples of this.
* People sometimes choose to pay for something even when they can have it for free. This is irrational behavior, but it's how human psychology works - just look at the humble indie bundles (http://www.humblebundle.com/) as an example. You could buy the bundle for $0.01, or you could even just snag a copy off bittorrent or something (there's no DRM!), but yet the average payment for bundle #4 is $5.33 - and the current total income is at $1,578,109.48. Even though copyright is not being enforced here, money is still being made.
* Most importantly, unauthorized replication does not actually deprive anyone of enjoyment of the work in question. As such, the very act of copying creates some level of cultural value, by exposing the artistic work in question to more people. Theft of material goods creates no value, as any additional enjoyment in the new owner is offset by the deprivation of the old owner of enjoyment of the object in question.
In short, copyright was a good trade-off between individual rights and societal benefit back when it was first conceived. However, things have changed, and it can be argued that copyright no longer provides such a benefit. Once it loses its reason for being, it should be repealed, or modified to bring a net benefit to society. I certainly cannot support anything that would attempt to simply extend copyright at this point.
You on the other hand, are whining about the unfairness of it all. On a forum for technical people.
You are either ignorant of the technology portion of things, or are trolling. Either way, please leave until you have fixed the problem.
Taking a coca-cola can leaves the grocery store with one less can. Until we have Makers, that analogy will always be broken. And when we have Makers, people will probably copy coca-cola cans too.
From my post: Of course, people don't have the right to download content without paying for it.
There is no doubt that people deserve compensation for their work, but if the full value of your effort can be represented as a string of 1s and 0s, then you must accept the reality that computers, the most ubiquitous machines on the planet, are all designed with the fundamental purpose of shifting around 1s and 0s. You simply cannot fight the reality that data is cheap and easy to share without setting back progress.
That's because there is no technical solution, this is a people problem, not a tech problem. I've thought about it a lot myself. Software gets pirated too, after all, so if there was some technical way to block it, it would've happened already. Microsoft controls a significant fraction of the world's OSes and they can't even manage it, and not for lack of trying or lack of funding.
But that does not mean that artists are screwed, only that they'll have to adapt. Computers won't replace authors any time soon[1]. And adapting is possible, though it relies less on copyright and more on business acumen. Look at the webcomic authors: they give away their work for free, but the smart ones can still make good money. If you want lessons on how, start watching how Howard Taylor does business. He gets his fans to ship his books for him and they like it.
You can give the pirates the middle finger all you want. But, laws or no laws, I don't see how people are going to stay in business unless they adapt. I can understand it being painful: I see factory workers getting replaced by machines, after all. But the lesson is the same: evolve or die.
[1] Uncreative fill-in-the-blanks style writing, like that program that does sports reporting, excepted.
That's just not correct. The technical "solution" of Napster and later torrenting enabled this on a mass scale, did it not? Surely that's a "technical" matter and not only a people matter? If you make it technology easy enough that a 14yo with little tech skills can download the latest pop album for free and with virtually no risk of any consequences, then you've technically provided a way for someone to take the easy way out. People are like water - they'll almost always take the easiest route to get what they want. If it's easier to torrent/download and there are no repercussions (of whatever type), then they'll choose that more often than not.
Take away the tech that made it easy (or technically add in repercussions like a virus/trojan) and they'll stop.
You can't take away the enabling, either, any more than you can turn back the hands of time. Information is information. If I can transmit a message to you, then I can do so whether or not it's copyrighted. I can just encrypt it to block out any middlemen who would otherwise censor it. I can route it through third parties. I can use steganography to hide it. It's not fair, but it is. Like much of life, it's evolve or die.
Even if we ramp the controls and enforcement to police state levels, one look at China's Great Firewall shows that it leaks like a sieve. What you say has been tried already. For my entire life. It has yet to succeed. I don't believe it ever will.
Just admit it. You have no idea what you are talking about.
There is no "the tech". There is no head to cut off. If one group of people stop distributing the knowledge to share files, the another will take its place.
Consider, when musicians and performance artists play on the street, they determine based on the donations they get whether or not their efforts are worth their time, and adjust their future investments accordingly - they don't use law enforcement to force every viewer/listener to pay, claiming entitlement to compensation. On the internet, the sound reaches further, and the street is larger - as are opportunities for donations, and the cost of using law enforcement to extort payment.
Perhaps a better solution hasn't been offered because, for things that travel and are reproduced more like sound waves than physical objects, this model of business/enforcement just isn't scalable, at least without infringing on people's rights.
Copyright is not about money, not directly. Copyright is about power. In the case of the content industries, honking great amounts of government backed power to grant or withhold access to what is basically the shared culture of the planet. Enough to, eg: strong arm a company that would prefer not to be evil into accepting at-whim takedown - that's what power does. And that's what by-design amoral money-grubbing organizations do when you hand them that much power, they turn into thugs, because their only way to make money is to hold things hostage. Even those around them who would be moral are pulled into the amoral system, because of that power.
Regardless of whether you agree that artists and labels should be paid, copyright is a bad way to implement it.
Thus, defending copyright but saying "you make me look bad" - no, this is inevitable. If you shook the dice again and re-implemented copyright with different starting people, personalities and companies, this would happen again. it's what copyright does.
I am in the same business as you and I will say this old quote. "Do not cut your nose to spite your face".
So to fix lets say $50 billion worth of losses, you support destroying the Internet?
Do you realize that the way the DCMA is abused this moment, SOPA can and will be abused?
Based on your accusation of Grooveshark, let us take the reverse. do you realize with SOPA anyone can take down earbits every single day for any song and you have to prove you have the legal right to stream those songs?
Be careful what you wish for.
The music industry isn't a thousand part as important as a usefull internet. Frankly copyright has become far too difficult to enforce without killing the internet so we should drop the enforcement, accept the decline in output from the movie/music industry (and I am ok with it going all the way to zero) and move on.
Unlike a lot of others here I don't have anything against mainstream music, but I do no that there is no such thing as a free lunch and that the price of copyright, compared to the additional value created by it, is too high.
Remember there is no natural right to copyright, it was allowed by the founders as a way to promote useful art and science - and there is no requirement that we keep it.
If people create useful original content, others can reward them so as to promote future development. Donating to your favorite artist or an emerging talent should be the nature of our cultural progress, rather than the selfish strive for exuberant compensation. If money is actually necessary to produce better than what you'd call "mediocre" content, we can establish public systems to direct money for those purposes.
I highly doubt money is so necessary anyway, considering audio and video equipment and editing software are easier and easier to attain. There are kids creating music and uploading it to Soundcloud every single day, giving it away, and forming networks to distribute this content with their friends. Some of them can produce some really amazing music with _very_ cheap equipment. I could produce objectively more sophisticated music in thirty minutes with a kaossilator I've had sitting in my garage for five years, than probably any song in the top-100 charts right now -- sans auto tuned vocals.
I know that's "mainstream" hit piece, but it's true. You can't honestly tell me when you think "progress in culture" you imagine that most of our cultural funding should go toward "artists" who do not actually produce their own content, but rather sell their public image. Somebody with barely any experience in music production can produce a pop song similar to most of the popular content out there. It's all being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, who is then conditioned to expect even dumber content in the future.
How easy is it for actually creative music to be accepted by a wider audience? Not easy, when the distribution channels are owned by the people representing the distributors and producers of the content. Then the Cable companies also are owned by those organizations too, and it becomes a sick and twisted mess.
Further proof is shown in television. BBC and NOVA and NPR and other organizations have far more accurate and superior scientific and culturally educational programming and journalism, but they're publicly funded. Whereas the History channel probably hasn't played a single history program for years, and runs "Modern Marvels" reruns every hour on the weekend until the next primetime spot for "Ice Road Truckers" opens up. The Science and discovery channels almost never produce unique or interesting content.
These organizations and their strangleholds on our legislative process keep the status quo of copyright intact, even despite grave consequences to our personal liberties, knowing full well that their financial benefit has a more immediate and self-perpetuating impact on society. It's disgraceful.
Why can't a more universal public funding system be embraced, considering we have the technology to do it? If we care about personal liberties and advances in communication, we should take innovative steps in that direction.
Conflating the recording industry with art and culture (or even music) in general is like conflating Amtrak with the concept of 'transportation' in general. Losing the recording industry won't deny us music any more than the loss of Amtrak will deny us transportation.
There are even better (as in, economically more efficient) ways of financing culture production with technology. For example, consider a situation where playback devices were (perhaps intermittently) connected to the internet, were able to track audio fingerprints of music they played back, and had a tax on their sale. The proceeds of that tax could be redirected in proportion to the popularity of particular works. You wouldn't have to worry about sharing or lending. Everyone could consume as much as they wanted to, and there would still be the benefits of competition.
But instead, we have anti-free-market approaches that institute monopolies. And companies have massive vested interests in perpetuating those government-granted monopolies. The purpose of copyright is to incentivize the creation of works of art. Extending the copyright term for existing works has no such justification; but that's exactly what corporations were able to convince Congress to do with the Sonny-Bono act.
Books aren't scarce anymore. You could not, in several life times, read all the books on project Gutenberg. Yet not a single one of those is protected by copyright today.
So tell us - how to you propose to "fix" the DMCA? Because if you won't give us any specifics except saying that the DMCA is flawed, and you won't come out against SOPA, then guess what - the recording industry is just showing the rest of us who you really are.
Techies everywhere hate spam. They've used every trick in the book on the spammers. There's also anti-spam legislation. But how much spam do we still have? Tons of it. And any filter you make won't even work as well as the spam filters do, because the people actually want to pirate stuff, while they don't want spam.
So this is one of those solutions where we end up worse off than when we started, being forced to buy or create useless filters that get in the way and still don't solve the problem they were supposed to, perhaps with legal penalties for failing to do the impossible.
In this context, whether or nor the music record industry lives or die have zero impact on my music collection other than when it's about dying time, or rather they think it's dying time, they must poison the landscape and everything else.
The record industry is not dying. They are actually thriving. Nor are they particularly significant. However, they want to destroy the internet in the ways it work. I resent that.
You want me to find a copyright enforcement law that is better than SOPA and DMCA? I'll do you one better. I want you to find an artist compensation mechanism that cuts out the fat middle-man (the labels).
And I really never thought I'd read anyone saying that the DMCA wasn't strong enough to protect the rights of copyright holders. Amazing.
I actually have to agree with him that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is broken because it serves neither party well, as the current Megaload vs. Universal case shows: Megaload makes a lot of money with ads on their download site, but at the same time calls itself a "safe harbour". And on the other side we Universal abusing the DMCA to oppress free speech.
My point is that we could go and try to make a law that fixes both these problems. Or we could just accept that if we put the infrastructure in place to stop all copyright infringement, the same infrastructure will be very effective in stopping freedom of speech. And only after we accepted this, will we be able to start thinking about a better way to fairly(!) compensate artists for their work.
But it is not worth destroying the internet to try to fix it. I would rather go bankrupt than live in the world this bill is pushing us towards.
A free and open internet is on track to do more to progress humanity than any other invention in history. Trying to derail it because musicians are finding it hard to sell CDs is selfish at best and borderline psychopathic at worst.
On some level I would agree with that. If the rights of party A can be protected only by draconian laws that trample the rights of parties B, C, and D, then we shouldn't pass those laws even if it really is unfair to A. And in the real world that formulation is overly generous to the record labels, who do have means to enforce their rights, just not as conveniently as they'd like because they have to deal with annoyances like evidence and due process.
Nobody was protecting the interests of artists before the Internet. Nobody. 0.1% got Ozzy-level rich, 0.9% did OK, the rest of the artists were not even allowed to sell their out-of-print back catalog.
READ THIS
Record labels used to be a way of getting access to top equipment, producers, marketing and studios. This is all cheap nowadays, so why keep the old middlemen?
It's too hard to protect the interests of buggy-whip makers. Let's outlaw automobiles. It's too hard to protect the interests of barges. Let's outlaw trains. It's too hard to protect the interests of ocean liners. Lets outlaw air travel.
No one is entitled to a living. No one should have to rely on the government to protect their business model. If your business model doesn't work in an Internet-enabled world, too fucking bad. We didn't bail out the buggy whip makers for having a business model that couldn't survive in an automobile enabled world. We didn't bail out the barge and steamboat industry when trains came along. Why should we bail out the recording industry because they can't hack it in an Internet-enabled world?
Because that's what this is. A bailout. This a bailout that dwarfs the bank bailout in terms of the harm it can do to our economy and our liberty. And it's not even a bailout for artists. It's a bailout for a parasitic monster that, as far as I can tell only serves to funnel money from consumers to lobbyists.
EDIT: By your logic, even the recording industry itself shouldn't exist. The recording industry killed off the "home-performance" industry and drastically cut sheet music sales by making and distributing recordings of performances. So who's looking out for their interests?
Your argument is ridiculous because we're talking about a product that everybody still wants. It's not a buggy whip. It's music. If you don't want it enough to pay for it, then you just don't need to have a copy. Is that really such a hard concept for you to grasp?
Is it a product that everybody wants? Or is it a product that everybody says they want? If music were truly as appreciated as you say it is, then more people would be paying for it, no?
And guess what? More people are paying for music. iTunes is selling millions of tracks each year. Amazon is doing the same. Do you really think that artists would go out of business if they got the whole share of their iTunes proceeds, rather than having to split it with the recording industry?
As another comment below me says so eloquently, "Louis CK gets it. Trent Reznor gets it. Radiohead gets it. The recording industry doesn't get it and neither do you."
Your argument of people doing it right is irrelevant. They choose to sell it one way, and other artists choose another. You as a consumer can have an opinion as to which way is most effective, but you cannot decide how they distribute.
You could outlaw (or make difficult to use, restrict its features) the walk-through-walls technology. Or you could just stop clinging to your old idea of what a bank or a vault is.
Consider a few centuries in the future, when everybody has brain / computer interfaces, and access to perfect recollection through playback of previous sensory input. Do you think recorded music will still be a traded product then, when any friend or family member can casually transfer to you an exact reproduction of their own experience?
But your fans? They are. Focus on making them happy. You can't do that by being negative all the time. I know this issue is a sore spot and it makes you feel hurt. That's why I'd focus on the fans. You know, people who are happy to hear your music. You're absolutely right that making music is not obsolete, so focus on getting that music to your fans and providing the things they want. It's just good business.
See Louis CK? See that success? Go copy it.
I thought the debate was about legality, or, if not that, at least about moral right to download music. And what earbitcom is saying is - if you think the digital music costs too much or has too much DRM, you don't have to download it.
And, by the way, what Louis CK did that is so revolutionary? He did a show and sold the recording online. For money. What is so revolutionary in that?
Because that's how you get people to give you money. It should be common sense, but I see people failing badly.
Louis CK is a good example because he showed that caring more about fans than pirates is good business sense. Pirates are going to pirate, so he said screw them, I'll do right by my fans. See, you get $0 whether they pirate or don't pirate. But with fans? You get a sale if they buy and no sale if they don't. So the pirates are all zeroes anyway, while the fans are the difference between sale and no sale, and that is what makes or breaks your business.
> I thought the debate was about legality, or, if not that, at least about moral right to download music.
As far as business goes, that debate is irrelevant. And unless you enjoy the whole starving artist thing, business is kind of important. Pirates haven't gone anywhere, so screwing your fans in the name of fighting piracy is cutting off your nose to spite your face. But you don't have to listen to me. You can tell your fans that it's your way or the highway if you want to. Just don't complain when they take the highway instead and go off to buy from someone who treats them well, like Louis CK.
And it should be his right to do so, and this right should be protected.
If you write software, you can put it under GPL code and demand that everyone, who sells and re-uses your code, also release it under GPL. And that's OK, you wrote the code, you are the author, you can do whatever you want to do with it, you can set your own rules (within the law).
But you wouldn't like some corporation (say, Microsoft) to take your GPL code and re-sell it as closed-source without you seeing a dime of that money. But that's exactly what is going on at large with music and other culture today. Sites like MegaUpload, that is now seen on here like almost a harbringer of free speech, is making giant amounts of money on other people's work.
Now I like that Louis CK is selling his comedy online without DRM. But conceptually it's not that much different from bands selling their music on iTunes, only that Louis is well known from TV.
I agree with second part - that's why BSA is pushing SOPA, too. Yes, I agree that BSA itself does things that are verging from borderline legal to illegal (see earbit's article, just substitute BSA and RIAA).
I agree that this right should be protected (selling my work), but you do have this right today and nobody is going to take it away anytime soon. It just so happens that information can be distributed instantly to anywhere in the world nowadays, so the business model of selling copies is failing. There is no conceivable way of changing that other than breaking the internet.
If you paid U$1000 for a karate lesson, is teaching your friend a bit of karate stealing?
Depends on your agreement with the karate teacher.
If you agree that you won't teach other people this technique, then technically, yes. To a friend it doesn't really matter, but on bigger scale, it does. It's called intellectual property.
While we're at it, there should also be no poverty, everyone should have a place to live, and be safe from violence, etc. But this is the real world and people need to figure out how to deal with that, unfairness included.
There simply aren't any working solutions. Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. To computers, everything is a number. You tell the computer that no one is allowed to say "5" any more and they'll say 2+3. Or 6-1. Or 10/2. You block those and they'll find infinitely many other ways of saying it. It's binary. All or nothing. Half a solution is nothing. Zero. No good. One copy is enough for everyone.
The game is completely, utterly unfair. You have to control every computer. Once there's one unrestricted copy, it's game over. That's why people are not eager to accept "solutions" that merely screw a lot of things up, but do not, will not, and cannot fix the problem, any more than all the effort put into anti-spam has stopped spammers, in spite of 99.99% of the techies in the world hating them with undying passion and working night and day to stop them.
When's the last time you got no spam at all? The piracy thing is harder because people actually want to pirate and nobody wants spam. So why would anyone accept something like SOPA, which will drag tons of innocent sites into the crossfire while accomplishing nothing? I responded initially to someone blaming the techies for not coming up with solutions. The reason for that is because there are no technical solutions.
The only real solution to piracy that anyone has managed is not to play that game. Forget the copyright game, you're just going to spend your life swearing at pirates and wasting your energy on things that do not make money. Instead, play a different game where you build up a fanbase that supports you. It has worked. I have shown actual, living, breathing examples of people who have become successful playing that game instead. If copyright were abolished tomorrow, it wouldn't even matter. The fans support them, not some knock-off or pirate.
I can't for the life of me understand why someone would instead keep at the old game. Don't they want to be successful?
Spammers want spam. And there's more money in being a spammer than there is in being a pirate.
People still want music. They never wanted the music industry.
The argument here is whether in general, people still have to pay for music.
SOPA isn't the right answer. It tramples on too many fundamental rights for it to be. But to simply say that the music industry should die because the Internet makes piracy easy, that's a bold statement. Within a decade, books will be scanned and turned into eBooks at an incredible rate. It's already happening, but the technology is too slow to make digitizing every book right away possible. But when it does get there, will writers still be encouraged to write? Their books could be so easily pirated. Sure, some might still write. But those who write books on obscure subjects might not find the motivation to write anymore books when their book turns up on a torrent site instantly. And what about when 3D printers and 3D scanners get to a state of mass-consumption? Who will buy furniture anymore when they could scan and build it themselves from pirated blueprints?
There's no easy answer. But to just say "too fucking bad" is wrong.
I think an argument could be made that the music industry has such a piracy problem (I concede this here, in spite of the music industry constantly reporting greater profit) because it is providing an inferior product, or service.
(I am linking to the discussion.) There was a very interesting GamaSutra article posted here about a month ago, on how Valve sees piracy as a "non-issue": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3155052
The summary from 10,000 feet is that the way to beat the pirates is to give those that buy the product a better service than the pirates do. Making music as difficult to acquire (oy, the fuss they put up about previews and digital distribution!) and use (format shifting, moving your music along with you) is not a a very customer-friendly mod of operation.
I buy my music, but, with BitTorrent, you can listen to the entire song before you buy it. I don't know how much music I passed over because I didn't want to waste money on something that I may or may not like.
So the deal is: do you want to de facto (but not de jure) allow the unrestricted copying of copyrighted works, or do you want to effectively reduce the internet to a walled garden of a few big companies? No more startups, no more wikipedia, no more youtube, no more wordpress, no more twitter?
And it isn't just that -- no more youtube means no more police brutality videos, no more twitter means no more real-time updates from ordinary people, no more wordpress means that if you want to launch a movement or voice your concern you better pray that the MSM will pick it up.
The techs are upset because the new ways people are proposing won't just fail, they'll create all sorts of new problems in addition to failing.
Nobody hates the artists. Why would they? Artists give us great entertainment! Without the artists, we'd have nothing to enjoy. There are solutions, though. The solutions don't require new laws, they require new ways of doing business. Maybe that's not fair, but I can't help you there. No one can help you there. It's like we're trying to convince one of King Canute's advisers that a more strongly-worded rebuke will not, in fact, turn back the tide that's swallowing up their property and they're stubbornly holding their breath, waiting for a proclamation that works. The way forward is more like using the waves to provide power. Use piracy as marketing. Money comes from other things: signed products, live appearances, merchandising.
There are creative ways to solve these problems. You can even get your fans to help, like that guy I pointed to who holds parties with his fans while they help him ship his books. Anyone who is not doing this kind of thing, but instead holding their breath, waiting for techies, lawmakers or even King Canute to solve them is going to suffocate. It's not fair, but that's life for you. If it could be changed, it already would have.
You may think that's ridiculous, but things of that sort already exist. For example, there's a way to use DNS as a tunnel for other data. Yes, doing that is crazy.
If I'm incredibly pessimistic about this, it's because I've watched the long history of failure as many smart people attempted, then utterly failed, at doing this. One side must be perfect. The other needs just one opening. Games like that are so massively unfair that the only winning move is not to play. And you don't have to play: I've already pointed out how some artists have adapted and are doing good business. People want to support them. That's the way forward.
Maybe I'm wrong and someone will invent some magic technology that stops piracy. But anyone who is holding their breath waiting for it is very likely to suffocate. There are people looking for the way forward. It's just not a technical solution.
Copyright: An incentive to produce culture.
The Internet: A bit distribution platform.
Technology: Gave you the ability to sell physical records, then took it away. That was a quick century.
It's not that simple to "solve" piracy with technology. Technology inherently makes it easy to copy and share things. The changes will have to come from the businesses that accept that they have a failed business model. They must accept that have no realistic way to continue.
"I have a really interesting piece of information. In fact, I create this information, and it takes a lot of work. For whatever reason, you want the information. I'm happy to share it with you, for a price far lower than the cost of creation, but only if you promise not to tell anyone else." Copyright is a short-circuit process whereby anyone who has ever received the information in whatever way (including hearing/seeing it in public) is legally treated as though they agreed to the above terms.
I think that some kind of "I'll give you info X if you promise not to redistribute it" structure is not a priori a bad idea. Obviously, it is unclear that those promises would be upheld in practice ... but at that point I believe it becomes a market question of whether people are willing to live up to their promises and not a question of bad policy.
Copyright, as an approximation to such a structure, is fundamentally problematic because it attempts to make the above exchange work without:
a) having to trust people (the law is used to scare them into behaving)
b) the receivers of the information having felt like they made a valuable promise in return for the valuable information (the receivers are told they are getting something that is "owned" as opposed to merely "not public knowledge")
Time and again, people have proven that if there is a SIMPLE EASY alternative, then we will use it. Take a look at Steam, Spotify, Amazon etc. All of these people provide a service that is easy to use, and despite there being a simple way to pirate the content provided on most of those services (and btw, this here is the big secret), MOST PEOPLE DON'T.
Most of the time, if there is a valuable product out there, then consumers have no problem paying for it. Yes, there will still be piracy for a variety of reasons just as there will always be physical theft, e.g. too high a cost, people are too poor etc..., most people support artists and content creators and are willing to pay for their use of those products.
Game manufacturers are starting to catch on, so are software producers with the emergence of app stores (the restrictions on those platforms are another matter entirely and I won't judge them here), but despite the fact that the music industry is older than either of those industries, it is aiming to shut down the only platform in modern society that can push their profits incredibly high if they do it right.
Yes, to do this right (and I am not saying Spotify or ITunes have this down), they would have to invest, A lot, but given how much they are investing in lobbying for SOPA, it is a joke to think they couldn't devote a tiny bit of their über profits to developing a platform that actually works.
P.S. earbitscom - Here is an alternative. One that your site goes some way towards providing.
SOPA is not the right way to do it but denying the reality makes the anti-SOPA side's message not being heard by those across the aisle.
I have no idea, but is it reasonable to make the claim that the DMCA is flawed? By that I mean, is it excessively annoying / ineffective to actually use the DMCA for its intended purpose?
(I'm not referring to DMCA abuses... just whether it's fundamentally broken or not.)
I haven't really given it much thought. I always assumed that the DMCA was a reasonable middle ground. But is it?
But then it gets worse, because you have sites like Grooveshark, which plenty of people do know about, do police, and do contact to have their content taken down, only to have that content reappear every other day. As of right now both The Eagles and King Crimson have publicly shared their lengthy email histories with Grooveshark, asking repeatedly to have their content removed. Grooveshark removes it, and then 24-48 hours later most of it is back on the site. Technically this is covered by the DMCA and it is the artist and their label's job to go to Grooveshark every day, find the content, pull the links, notify the company, and keep doing this over and over. The problem is, between the upload and the takedown, the content is there long enough for people who might otherwise use a legal service or purchase the material to access it as much as they want.
If you believe the purpose of the DMCA is to give rights holders a certain amount of power to self-enforce and are willing to concede that it won't all be stopped, it works pretty well.
If your opinion is somewhere in between, adjust as needed.
I think if earbits wanted to clean up his essay a bit he should come out and state clearly and explicitly what his goal for his desired legal regime is. I suspect he's sneaking in an implicit requirement that it be perfect on us, and if you accept that you'll never be satisfied. There is no set of tools that the government can hand the industry to eliminate piracy. Even SOPA isn't draconian enough. On the other hand, once you accept that a certain amount of lossage is inevitable and that we expect rightsholders to only really have to chase down violations on the largest sites and have the tools to catch the vast bulk, the argument that the DMCA is some sort of grossly flawed bill becomes much, much harder to just float by without justification. There's a huge gap in the logic there, which I think is what some people are choking on without quite consciously realizing it.
I suspect that actually filling in that gap will inevitably erode the perceived power of the argument, though. He complains technical people aren't working out how to solve a problem that he can't actually give his true requirements for without losing his audience.
There is a volume problem with the DMCA, as earbit notes, but I tend to think that that is solvable with software.
But when a site sits on a fat pipe in the Ukraine, serving up every movie made in the last 10 years for free, there is currently nothing in the DMCA or other U.S. law that can do anything about it.
I believe that there is a market equilibrium, and that as songs are made cheeper to reflect their new value to consumers, more will buy rather than steal, but it seems like labels are insisting that they should dictate market price without alternative rather than adjust price to demand. I don't mean that they should just lower prices until we get what we want, but I think the direction the music industry is headed is more enforcement of monopoly than prevention of theft.
If there were a way for artists to effectively bypass the system, or for value to consumers to have sway in the market price, this may not be an issue, but it is. In reality, the system means more theft, so artists see less revenue, and I'd imagine that artists would go for an alternative as readily as many consumers. And further, if there were some way to do away with it, there'd likely be far less of a culture of theft, or say, less communally supported resources for it, so artists might conceivably be able make money if they attempted to go sans-label.
Obviously these are just more reasons why the system is broken, but the difference is the availability of a market solution. And if there isn't in fact, a treatment for the disease rather than the symptom, I really only see SOPA as reasonable if it were immediately followed by anti-trust legislation against some big name labels.
While this statement may be true about "the particular albums this particular author likes" it is untrue in general. A good song will get popular through various means. An artist does not need his life to be controlled by a middle man so that the audience can be advertised to. There are many ways in which the word spreads in the 21st century. The hard thing for an artist is to acquire the minimum artistic ability which probably means years of toil to reach a level when some one cares to listen to you. Making a song is a relatively inexpensive task. And once u have a reputation, you have mechanisms like kickstarter to fund your project. More alternatives will evolve as the recording industry dies.
That generation seems so backwards and hubrisitic: the crazy idea that one could just take and take and take without giving something back, without respect for the balance of the system. “My actions don’t count because mother nature will always figure a way to make it all work out okay.” Could there be a more juvenile train of thought?
That’s the fundamental problem when it comes to content; that’s the fundamental problem when it comes to ‘business models’ - not the RIAA or MPAA or even TPB - but the hordes of people who have too little respect for the people who create the content that is voraciously consumed. Hordes that take advantage of a system and predictably cry out when anything threatens their spot at the teet.
The earth, of course, doesn’t ask for money - just for respect - respect shown when each individual asks “Am I hurting you?” and when each individual wonders “Is there a better way I could be doing this?”
A lot of folks fancy themselves the smartest person in the room, but there is a lesson in respect for others that needs to be learned before true success can be realized. Put away the false dichotomy of how things used to be and how you want them to be; there is a real way they can be, and a balanced way they should be.
I remain optimistic. But then, it's sometimes tempered; Upton Sinclair said it well:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
As far as artists being compensated for their work, I really have enjoyed some of Jaron Lanier's talks where he argues that if the net had retained a design intended to keep "provenance" then every person would get paid for the bit's (no pun intended) they've input, and ideally this is the direction that would have been more equitable. As to the feasibility or how "realistic" his views can extend beyond "talks" , I have no idea. I do think within the current framework piracy is simply the norm and all the politics around are just a barrage of job opportunities to try and "solve" unsolvable problems. The point of the piracy "war" isn't to end it, it's to extend it out as long as possible. :)
And that is where I stopped reading, unfortunately. Have a little faith in yourself, why don't ya?
If this is the crux of your argument (and I fully believe it is), then your entire premise is flawed. There are big players making major inroads into this problem already. You might have heard of some of them, like iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, Amazon MP3, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Google Market, Steam, and Origin.
You should read what Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve Software, the owner of Steam (which is often credited with singlehandedly saving PC gaming as an industry) has to say about piracy: http://www.gamefront.com/gabe-newell-piracy-is-a-non-issue/
The solution isn't DRM, or dispatching special ops to assassinate teenagers who pirate Ke$ha music, or giving corporations an internet killswitch. The solution isn't even to eliminate piracy. You can't, and you'll never be able to. Beyond that, you don't even need to eliminate piracy. What you want to eliminate is lost sales. There's a lot of conflating piracy and lost sales, especially by the content producers, and it's utter bull.
If Newell is correct (and I have every reason to believe that he is), then the way you capture sales lost to piracy is you establish distribution that is easier and more accessible than piracy, and people will use it. The "they wouldn't buy it anyway" argument is old and tired, but there's a nugget of truth in it - there are two general classes of content pirates; those who would buy the item, but for whom piracy is more convenient, and those who wouldn't buy the item, and take it because they feel entitled to it. There's a third, smaller class, who would buy items, but lack the finances to do it, but it's arguable that that's not a lost sale, and in all three cases, you're still achieving greater distribution, which does make at least some contribution to your product's success, however nebulous. That's not to make an excuse for piracy, but I firmly believe it to be a reality of any form of content distribution.
The consumers have proven over and over again that we'll legitimately buy things if there are easy, convenient ways to get them legitimately. You generally lose sales to piracy when it becomes easier to pirate content, not when it becomes cheaper. I would argue that the majority of piracy is about convenience moreso than it is about money. The solution isn't to make it less convenient to be legitimate (hi, DRM), but more convenient, and all of a sudden, you find yourself recapturing those lost sales.
Well written - thanks for sharing. (And I'm 40 if that matters)
I wish to register myself as a counterexample in the strongest possible terms.
In fact, I believe un-funding the "recording industry" would result in an immediate and measurable net increase in the quality to junk ratio.
This is why any student of history is against SOPA. We believe that it does not protect the rights espoused in the Constitution. We believe that it may be abused in the future.
Some people, such as yourself, seem to believe that this would never happen. You seem to think that because there is a need (in your view) for copyright holders to remove "owned" content, that we need a law like this. And further you seem to believe that its ok to have such a broad law, even though it may be open to such abuse.
UMG is just demonstrating why the founding fathers were right and why you are naive and short-sighted.
Here's the thing: if UMG wasn't actively doing it, you'd still be naive and short-sighted. You'd still be an "asshole", in your words, and the founding fathers would still be right.
There's one thing that the OP is indisputably correct about: Content creators (should) own the content they create. When Isee someone do something like putting "owned" in quotes, it just immediately strikes me as someone who justifies piracy to themselves by saying that no one owns content.
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
"limited times". Apparently the US Constitution disputes your assertion. Bunch of pirates, those founding fathers.
More on the "ownership" myth. Just one of many sites picked from google. http://c4sif.org/2011/07/the-mythology-of-intellectual-prope...
In other words MPAA and RIAA do not have an automatic right to their business models because as technology changes so than to how much we the public grant in rights to companies in form of copyrights, etc.
Remember this dumb fuck MPAA and RIAA when DCMA was passed it got redefined by negotiation and court cases. When SOPA gets redefined we do not have to be nice about it..fair warning..
Because someone doesn't agree with you doesn't necessarily invalidate their opinions. If anything, in perhaps a better time, it would open the invitation for frank, but ideally _civil_ discussion.
"the most thoughtful, poignant essays I've recently read on the subject."
You might want to read more...
I _did_ read more.
I play guitar, and I know and play with a lot of small / amateur musicians who literally pay their rent with their artistry.
I find it amazing that in the dawn of all the technology we have at our hands, people would honestly advocate that all of an artist's digitally distributed goods should be 'free', whether they intend it that way or not, relegating the artists to only being able to make money by performing in public shows, and I guess hoping against hope that the pirating public doesn't decide that that is too proprietary a way for them to distribute their music.
Hell, the way it's going, I can see people making an argument for holding artists down while we surgically remove their talent from them so that we can stick it up on the Pirate Bay. :-\
No more than simply not buying and not listening does, and I doubt you consider that "stealing".
I find it amazing that in the dawn of all the technology we have at our hands, people would honestly advocate that all of an artist's digitally distributed goods should be 'free', whether they intend it that way or not, relegating the artists to only being able to make money by performing in public shows, and I guess hoping against hope that the pirating public doesn't decide that that is too proprietary a way for them to distribute their music.
I find it amazing that some people can't comprehend that one can find the notion of copyright wrong, regardless of its benefits.
I also note that buyer have shown multiple times that they're willing to pay way more than they need, even if they can get it legally for $0.01, so that assumption that it would relegate the artists to just public shows remains to be proven.
If you don't believe in copyright as a natural right, and as a result, simply do not purchase music that you find objectionable on whatever grounds, then I support you 100%.
Regardless of whether or not copying the material deprives them of a tangible good, it didn't cost them nothing to produce the work. Instruments are expensive, recording time is expensive, distribution is expensive, etc.
More to the point, I believe that even if you don't consider the artist the owner of the work, then I believe you should respect that they are the owners of its distribution.
The first paragraph of the essay says anyone who disagrees that copyright is a natural right "can go fuck themselves".
People who disagree with copyright as an institution would do so conclusively because they do not believe in the ownership of intellectual thought. They believe that there are better, more progressive institutions for cultural progress. They do not agree that somebody owns the content they produce.
The article stubbornly ignores that assessment and then tells people to fuck themselves if they can't subscribe to failed logic.
I understand that there are dissenting arguments from the propagation of natural copyright, and while I agree that our patent system is horribly, horribly broken, I do not believe that artists should not be able to set a price, of their choosing, for the release of the works they produce.
Classic.
Simply amazing. I never suspected that even the people who made that advertisement took it seriously.
If nobody gets paid for producing art, then our artists can't afford to make it their jobs, which means they won't have enough time to make better art.
What is simply amazing to me is that anybody would rather steal the work than just not have it. If it doesn't have any value, then why do you need it?
Yes, I'm implying that there is tangibility to a digital good. Perhaps the car analogy wasn't great, but if you're the guy selling your mother's famous chocolate chip cookie recipe, and I steal... errr, COPY the recipe down and put you out of business, I'd imagine you wouldn't think too fondly of me.
Please excuse me if I can put myself in the shoes of those being stolen... pirated... copied... victimlessnessed upon, and that I feel more for their needs to get compensated more than the arrogant needs of those who feel justified in stealing something they didn't create while trivializing the efforts of those who created it in the same breath.
I simply don't know how to correct this sort of willful ignorance.
It costs money to make music. It costs money to make films. It costs money to make art.
The way one is able to make those as a living is to sell the finished products and/or distribute them. If you consume the good and do not recompense, then you are depriving the artist of their means of making a living, which takes away their ability to make more art.
This whole conversation is amazing actually. It really does feel like I've been teleported back into the late 90s when normal people still actually believe this kind of crap. It's like HNs has somehow turned into early slashdot.
If you aren't willing to pay for it, then simply don't consume it. If they aren't willing to give it to you for free, then it isn't yours to take, any more than it is okay for me to steal... I mean 'copy' naked pictures of your girlfriend off your phone and distribute them to the world.
After all, it deprives you of nothing, right?
read:
"You make the classic mistake of assuming that somebody who is willing to consume media for free would also be willing to consume it for a price, and that therefore anybody who gets it for free is a lost sale. This simply is not the case."
The entertainment factor here is wearing off. I'm out.
I'm not willing to pay for an iPhone, so I don't buy one. Just because I'd be willing to have one for free doesn't justify me the right to steal it. If you aren't willing to pay for something that costs money, your alternative is to not have it.
The arrogance of the people who aren't willing to pay for the music come out of their speakers is appalling to me. That said, you justify it to yourself all you like.
Should you ever find yourself on the wrong end of the law because of it, I hope the parties arresting you feel the same way, for your sake.
Now imagine somebody built so many of these matter duplicators that we could literally carry them in our pockets and duplicate whatever we want. Should we start putting cameras in everybody's home to make sure they're not duplicating stuff they should be paying for?
This is exactly what we're talking about. We have digital consumer technology that can replicate and distribute almost any media, and the reason these problems have only just started propping up in the last couple decades is because before that, all media was physical. It was on newspaper, or film roll, or vinyl record, or cassette, or in books.
Why should we be paying a company when we aren't losing them anything? Why do they call us thieves when we have not harmed them in any way? Are we supposed to ignore these new technologies because they don't support their business model? Fuck them, I'll use my matter duplicator however I want.
The only way I'll consider giving my money to Coca-Cola when I can just use a matter duplicator, is if they're producing new and tasty beverages that they could not develop without my money. This is exactly my reasoning for being a pirate.
Disagree all you like. Theft of intellectual property is against the law.
I think your moral justifications are simply that; justifications. Stealing isn't right, and if you don't want to support an artist, don't buy their work. That is, in my opinion, both the legal and moral way to be on the right side of artists.
I really don't think it's the recording industry that's making you look like an asshole.
I don't think you can use the excuse that we don't have a way to support your business model, to turn around and support fascism.
"You get people like Universal, who yanks down a Youtube video that they have no copyright claim to, simply because they don’t like it and they can. This is suppression of free speech and a violation of the most important right in our country."
Only the government can suppress free speech. If you're talking to someone and I come in and shout over you so nobody can hear you, I'm not limiting your freedom of speech, I'm just being an obnoxious asshole.