I hope one day you come to think about what you are really saying. It's too hard to protect the interests of artists, fuck 'em.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.