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Pedantic quote from the article:

"Tell me (and Barassi) why this sort of thing happens. If your answer includes words like 'licensing,' 'rights' or any other explanation of the convoluted system that the labels themselves set up to prevent people from purchasing their music, your answer, while 'technically correct,' is completely wrong."

In other words, who cares?

The artists (as a general body) do not care even the slightest if I live in a foreign country.

The customers don't care what country the artist was in when they created their work.

That leaves the middlemen - who are increasingly irrelevant precisely because they are providing no value to either side.

Trust me, the instant I think "the middlemen" add no value to either side, I'll drop them like a hot potato.

The trouble is, they do add value, from my perspective. But they also add headaches. There is a cost/benefit trade-off here, for artists to evaluate. (Which is why I felt the need to respond to this idiotic article, my gut reaction to which was actually along the lines of "oh no, not this tired old shit again". For values of "tired old shit" that equate to Techcrunch, not BRAT, who at least knows what he's talking about, unlike the TC journalist who's using him to make a point while disingenuously refusing to engage with the real nature of the problem.)

Could you give some examples of the value added by middlemen? And the headaches?

He wrote at length about it here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...

What middlemen in any transaction usually provide is a pre-existing customer base and fulfillment. In the past you could arrange to purchase your novels, magazines, newspapers, whatever, directly from the creators, with each setting up a long distance financial arrangement ... or you could go into the local bookstore and buy it there.

In some cases, such as film or broadcast, the middleman is providing the venue. Not every creator can afford their own broadcast tower and transmitter and few people own their own 35mm projector.

Of course, now times are changing, and many people do own the modern digital equivalent of all those things, and many authors do have their own distribution and marketing channels.

Middlemen still provide a pre-existing financial arrangement. As a consumer I don't really want to set up a credit card account with every fly-by-night operation on the internet that I might want to purchase from. So places like Apple and Amazon and Paypal still have a place.

And in the international marketplace, especially in media sales, local licensors often provide the value of localization. Subtitles, dubbing, translation, etc.

It's only been 10 - 15 years since significant numbers of people have been able to purchase stuff online, and there are still issues with bandwidth for some media. The world is changing and adapting to the new normal.

Congratulations, you are living through an important period of history. Expect some bumps, inconvenience and inefficiencies while humanity readjusts to a couple of thousand years of dealing with physical media.

Thanks - it wasn't clear who the middlemen were : The uncooperative website, someone distributing to the website, the music publisher, the artist's agents, etc...

You just described middlemen in general and didn't explain how these music publishing middlemen still add value.

Sorry, but what value do publishers provide for _digital_ products? I mean for paperback copies I can understand the value (they will have printers closer to their market for reduced costs, better local promotion etc), but for ebook versions what do they provide you?

It's listed in a comment right above yours, but was posted after your comment. Here are his reasons: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-m...

Haven't read them all but just skimmed, but I still don't see why he can't just sell his DRMed PDFs of books he writes through some third-party.

A good publisher can provide editing, formatting, graphics, advertising, and localization.

They can also add their stamp of approval to it (I know that this means nothing to a lot of buyers, but it does mean something to some. I have heard a couple of readers of mass fiction rave about trust Del Rey books to be worth reading because they trust Del Rey), and an established publisher can more easily get it into print if/when it is worth doing.

Of course an author can do all of those themselves or hire others to handle those steps for them. But it is certainly value-added to have all of that done for you.

I think the key point you're missing is that ebooks still need much of the same work done that physical books do.

Charles, I'm the author of the idiotic article and I thought I'd wade in and explain my comment about not wanting to hear another rundown on why the system is the way it is.

Over at Techdirt, a site I've been reading for a half-decade and contributing to for nearly a year, IP issues compose probably 80-90% of the posts. The reason I inserted that particular paragraph was to head off discussion centered around rehashing multi-national licensing nightmares and instead get some sort of explanation as to why this isn't being fixed faster.

Obviously, there is a multitude of systems already in place and extricating ourselves from this won't be easy and won't happen quickly. But rather than working to streamline these processes, representatives of content industries are spending a great deal of their time (and lobbying power) trying to do the impossible: stamp out piracy.

Most people don't need an excuse to pirate content, but situations like this push people who otherwise would have purchased something into finding an alternate route or doing without, neither of which will make the labels (or studios or whatever) happy.

There's a lot of numbers thrown around equating each torrent to a lost sale. Actual lost sales due to speed bumps and hurdles in the distribution are rarely discussed by the industry and when they are, they result in horrendous "solutions" like Ultraviolet or the "drive your DVD to the retailer in order to rip a copy to the cloud."

So, if I'm ignoring the "why" behind the situation (which I don't believe I am), it's because the point of the article was "Don't cry about piracy if you can't give me an option to buy."

We know the system is a tangled mess. We know there are many more middlemen than there needs to be. We (and every time I use "we," I'm speaking broadly from my experience as a writer/reader of Techdirt) don't believe ALL middlemen are useless. Many of them DO add value, but when you've got several middlemen guarding turf in several different locales, all hoping to carve a slice of a digital good, it leads to this. And knowing every detail of "how" and "why" a particular band can't sell a particular album via the internet to you simply because of where you live doesn't change the fact that it's frustrating for fans who want to support artists and, I would imagine, greatly frustrating for the artists themselves, who need all the paying fans they can get.

So, we can engage the real nature of the problem, but unless someone towards the top starts slicing away at the undergrowth surrounding worldwide distribution, not much will change.

There are some great comments here. I found yours to be very informative as well as the contributions from commieneko and Gfischer. Both raise very good points about this situation. In short, the systems in place can't adjust as quickly as the market does. (Or in some cases, won't.) But back to the point of my post: you (this would be the royal version, not you personally, Charles) really shouldn't be hollering about piracy when you're unable (and in some cases, unwilling) to let would-be paying customers give you their money.

(P.S. I don't really consider myself a journalist. I'm sure many, many people would agree with me.)

' … it's because the point of the article was "Don't cry about piracy if you can't give me an option to buy."'

Keep in mind there's no obligation on their part to sell it to _anybody_. Taking matters into your own hands and choosing to download something you want-but-can't-buy happens to be different to physical goods, in that you're not depriving the original owner of the use of the file, but assuming you've got the "right" to have a copy is a particularly advanced sense of entitlement.

It's probably easier to have come to this realisation from Australia, quite a lot of "the internet" doesn't believe you exist if you don't have a US credit card billing address, so it's not just music and ebook downloads that I've had to make the choice of "Pirate? Use VPN & fraudulently-obtained-pre-paid-credit-card*? Bother a friend who does have US internet-commerce-existance? Or do without thing I was about to buy?".

Maybe I should pot a graph of my major label music purchases by year, and do a blog post explaining the recent steep decline?

I don't think this is a case of entitlement. There are plenty of people who do without rather than pirate. There are plenty who pirate after trying to make a legitimate purchase. As you say, no one is under any obligation to sell their music, books, etc. to anybody. But if you're going to make it available to purchase, actually make it available to purchase.

Setting it up so that only certain people can purchase your goods does nothing for the two parties most interested in each other: the customer and the artist.

You should plot a graph of your purchases and their subsequent decline. Every decline these days is written off to piracy while situations like yours and BRAT's (and thousands of others) are ignored or dismissed as outliers.

Over at Techdirt, a site I've been reading for a half-decade and contributing to for nearly a year, IP issues compose probably 80-90% of the posts. The reason I inserted that particular paragraph was to head off discussion centered around rehashing multi-national licensing nightmares and instead get some sort of explanation as to why this isn't being fixed faster.

Obviously, there is a multitude of systems already in place and extricating ourselves from this won't be easy and won't happen quickly. But rather than working to streamline these processes, representatives of content industries are spending a great deal of their time (and lobbying power) trying to do the impossible: stamp out piracy.

Agreed the piracy issue is a red herring; it's an emergent side-effect of the unavailability of cheap, convenient legal purchase options. But it's also one that is popular with the folks who fill boardroom seats at the top, who tend to be old and anxious about hot new technologies that they don't understand.

And that in turn is an emergent side-effect of the wave of media conglomeration that happened in the 1980s, as large publishers went on acquisition and merger sprees and ended up as part of huge groups within a handful of large cross-media multinationals.

What they urgently need is some sort of cross-licensing agreement, but I'm unsure where it's going to come from ...

(Reply cut short due to urgent business IRL. May be more to say later.)

"What they urgently need is some sort of cross-licensing agreement, but I'm unsure where it's going to come from ..."

Yeah, that's the issue. Here's my pipe dream. Someone at one big studio/label/publishing house stands up and says "This is ridiculous" and begins a Sherman's March to Sea on the existing system and streamlines it using common sense and ass-kicking.

That's my dream. I wish they would, while they still have the money and power to make it happen. Of course, that still doesn't address the problem that the industry heads and the artists have very different ideas about what's equitable. So, that's another issue. The industry doesn't have a great track record on treating its artists fairly so in all likelihood any slash-and-burn revamp would likely heavily skew in favor of those at the top of the heap, much as it does today.

A very slim possibility exists that this revamp, though heavily skewed, would still end up being a net gain for most, if not all of the artists working within that system.

What gets me is that they have still have massive amounts of power and money and they're using it all to play a largely defensive battle. Being the last to market, so to speak, isn't going to help them take control of the future. I understand that you can't suddenly yank an ocean liner into a tight 90-degree turn, but you also can't avoid icebergs (to continue this awful metaphor) by waiting until it's tearing chunks out of the hull before making your move.

The artists (as a general body) do not care even the slightest if I live in a foreign country.

cstross argued the opposite, and explained why.

He did, and quite eloquently. Yet, all of his reasons for caring are tied up essentially with failings of the middleman.

Based on his answer, if he could deal with a truly global middleman that could distribute throughout the world and paid him fairly for that privilege (rather than only caring about their own current region), he would probably cease to care.

And that is an excellent response. But if, instead, one's response is to stick their fingers in their ears and sing "LALALALA" as the original essay did, then you can't have such discussions.

You're way off track. The whole point is that there is a huge problem preventing potential customers from giving content owners money, even as the content owners bitch and moan about us not giving them money.

It is emphatically not the customer's job to solve the problem.

If you want money, make it easy for people to give you money, otherwise, you're just a crazy guy rambling about the vast world-wide conspiracy to screw you.

But if you want to have a discussion about ways to make it easy for people to give you money, then you have to discuss what the current reasons are for why things are the way they are.

I assume that here on HN, we're interested in finding the roots causes of things. Not throwing up our hands and saying "I know it's broken, but I'm not interested in talking about how to fix it."

You (for a wide "you") aren't talking about how to fix it. Instead you're justifying why it would stay broken.

And then it's immoral when they try to enforce this.

I (specifically myself) am interested in why things are the way they are, so I can understand what needs to be done to improve it. I am not a part of the establishment enforcing this.

The statement that I responded to was directly contradicted by a published author (cstross). That's what I was pointing out, that if we want to get further towards understanding the situation, perhaps we should listen to a person with experience in it.

Surely, of all places, HN is a great place to discuss broken existing business models?

Nobody is going to know how to "disrupt" a problem they don't understand.

If you had to choose an audience in front of which to explain the problem of the existing publishing industry and their outdated approach to selling digital versions of their product to people begging to be able to pay for them, can you think of anywhere else that's more likely to have enough people capable of going "I cold fix that!"?

It shows up in the tools. I had to enable every. single. little. country. in the iTunes publisher tool separately. It took about 3 minutes per country, times something like 25 countries. There was no "this is global" checkbox.

(As an aside, the smoothest publishing tool is pubit owned by Barnes & Noble. Go figure.)

There is a world of difference between splitting rights between countries and actively fighting people trying to buy your goods from some other country.

E.g. the kindle store is mostly US only, but you can use any international credit card to buy them. I think this kind of attitude is good enough for now, until a true global shift.

As well as getting more money, they can get advance money. This is important for movies. They can raise a chunk of the production budget by pre-selling distribution rights to Europe and Asia &c. In order to have something concrete to sell, they need strict DVD region coding and country restrictions on the internet.

Distribution rights for your country are worth investing in because you know you can make money if the movie is popular. A percentage of net profits is not worth investing in, because you have no control over what they are netted of.

Global distributors alone won't solve this -- the funding mechanisms need to change too.

Do they typically sell the foreign distribution rights, or an option on those rights. It is an important distinction with respect to business model.

If it is an option, then the foreign distributors can wait to see how the film does domestically before deciding whether to go all-in, which also works against doing a simultaneous global release.

But they have to understand that, by trying to get more money by inflicting pain on their customers by herding them into per-region pens, they thereby gave up all their moral rights to bitch about piracy, ever? In any non-home country, anyway?