The Culture of CD Burning 820
An anonymous reader points to this "good article from the Boston Globe about the culture of CD burning, and how hard it will be for the RIAA to stop it. Some interesting quotes: 'There's a "sex appeal" to burning CDs, says [Sheryl] Crow, adding that it is a social event for young people, just as listening to 45s was once a social event for their parents.' An interesting one from Hilary Rosen: "I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?' So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people." Seems like at least one musician thinks his A paper is being peddled all over town.
1.1 billion CD's doesn't mean 1.1 billion copies (Score:4, Insightful)
Lets say you buy a 50 pack of CD's....
I might burn 5 music CD's from that.
recordable discs outsold CDs for the first time (Score:4, Insightful)
I can buy 50 recordable cds for $19.99(b4 a 10 rebate
Recordable cds dont even come in 1 packs do they?
For the last time..... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not the pirating...it's the music!
We don't have the bands of the 90's anymore....
We've got a couple big sellers, one hit wonders, trendy bands....nothing 'classic' lately
Go ahead, flamebait, redundant, offtopic
Stop, thief! (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be an accurate comparison if people were copying music and then selling them for profit, rather than giving them away for free.
She should have replied: "Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and show it to all their friends as an example of what they think is good writing?" To which I'd reply: Hell, yes. Anything that gets more people to read my columns, articles or books is a good thing for me as an author.
What about the culture of MP3 Ripping? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm trying to remember the last time I burned a CD for music, I think I only did it when a friend came over and asked if I could copy CD xyz for them. For the most part, I've just about allways ripped to MP3. Pop a disk in, click start, wait about 5 minutes and presto, with ID3 tags provided by CDDB i've just added their music to my collection.
Most of the kids I know with some computer skills (ages 12 and up) do the ripping thing more often than the burning thing. From a price standpoint you never have to use media other than a little hard disk space. With CD's you have to pay out 50cents for a blank every time you want to make one. Don't forget canada either, i'm sure with the new tariff's imposed on recordable media, MP3 ripping will get even more popular over there than ever before.
Nice metaphor, Hilary (Score:5, Insightful)
what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Um... Sure. Try to find somebody who never taped something off of the radio or other medium. Most CD players came with a tape deck so you could tape off the CD to a tape to give it away or play it in your car or something.
Mix Tapes, etc... (Score:2, Insightful)
This brings me back to the buying CD Quality music by the track [slashdot.org]... But their greedy, etc etc...Heck I just throw away the cases and liner notes anyway so it's waste of money for me to have that junk anyway.
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's one thing that's kind of strange. As I was reading her quote, it immediately jumped out at me that her analogy was fundamentally flawed. This took no time at all.
It makes me wonder, has she heard the flaw in this analogy pointed out, and ignored it? Or has she not had a real conversation with someone who is on the other side of the fence? Or is she trying to deliberately give a shoddy analogy in the hopes it gets by people?
mark
Get the Salon article right! (Score:3, Insightful)
Ptui! Read the article at Salon and you'll see that Byrd isn't claiming lots of people are swapping and burning his songs. He's irked at Sony because he hasn't seen a penny of artist royalties on either of his two albums which are still in the catalogue (though he started getting composer royalties after he was contacted to let another artist record one of his songs). He'd rather have the music available freely if the artist is never going to see any payment.
Re:recordable discs outsold CDs for the first time (Score:3, Insightful)
Kierthos
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:5, Insightful)
'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and read it without paying you? Would that bug you?'
Stop, thief! (Score:1, Insightful)
That would be an accurate comparison if people were copying music and then selling them for profit, rather than giving them away for free.
She should have replied: "Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and show it to all their friends as an example of what they think is good writing?" To which I'd reply: Hell, yes. Anything that gets more people to read my columns, articles or books is a good thing for me as an author.
There's a difference (Score:4, Insightful)
How much does she make again? There seems to be a basic disconnect with the simplest elements of intellectual property laws here, and this isn't the first example.
sigh... 90% of debates seem to be teaching the ABCs of logic, argument and the definitions of words.
Have you seen anyone copying newspapers? (Score:3, Insightful)
My question then is who is stealing here?
Cheers.
To Hillary I ask would ask: (Score:5, Insightful)
'What have you done this week?' She might say she bought a sweater because she liked it. So I'd tell her 'Oh, you bought a sweater? Would it bother you if you had to pay for that sweater again if you wanted to tie it around your waist when it got too warm to wear it? Would it bother you if you couldn't tie that sweater around your waist too? Would that bug you?'
Re:Yowzah! (Score:3, Insightful)
This pisses me off. (Score:5, Insightful)
This makes me so mad. I am not even much of a hacker, but I'd like to be, in the real sense of the word.
I take stuff apart.
I make my computer do what I want it to, even if it wasn't originally intended to do those things.
The hacker ethic is several orders of magnitude more beneficial to society than the RIAA.
Hackers got us on the moon.
Hackers made The Matrix [imdb.com].
Hackers made slashdot.
I, for one, hope the hacker ethic is here to stay, no matter what this prick has to say about it.
Re:Hilary Rosen is confused ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Metaphor, peeps. Not a literal representation of the situation. Just metaphor.
She's saying, "Wouldn't you be pissed if somebody else gained from your hard work without you getting a damn thing?" And she's hoping people will say, "Yes."
Okay, counter-point time... I used the word "gained", and that, in Slashworld, implies profit. But that's not necessarily so. If somebody burns a CD, they've "gained" the benefit of not having a negative impact on their wallets, which surely would have happened had they paid for the music legally.
So the metaphor stands: somebody else using your work for their benefit without consideration for the investment of your time and energy is *similar* to somebody copying a CD without consideration for the machinery, both creative and economic, that went into its creation.
Jesus, people... Stretch your brains a little.
same old stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't believe that anybody thinks that the record industry has the best interests of the artists at heart - if they did they'd incorporate as non-profit corporations and divide the profits among the artists.
The industry is there to make money - why can't they just be honest about it instead of claiming to be the best friend of the recording artist?
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:2, Insightful)
That would be an accurate comparison if people were copying music and then selling them for profit, rather than giving them away for free.
The point of the statement is that people are enjoying the benefit of the 'A' paper without doing the work. They don't have to sell it to enjoy the benefit of it. The listening is the benefit.
She should have replied: "Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and show it to all their friends as an example of what they think is good writing?" To which I'd reply: Hell, yes. Anything that gets more people to read my columns, articles or books is a good thing for me as an author.
Of course, if everyone is reading copies of your columns, articles, and books, you get
You've become a famous, but hungry, author.
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously this comment doesn't apply to me nor does it apply to most others. Who the fuck cares if the paper you wrote got taken by someone else? If they are going to take it and get a good grade on it, there is only one person losing out here, that's the "theif".
Even if the paper I wrote gets published and recieve royalties for it does it bother me that these people used it for themselves?
The False Blank CD Sales Statistic & RIAA Spin (Score:4, Insightful)
From the article:
Last year, recordable discs outsold CDs for the first time.
I've seen this statistic before, and it's misleading as hell. The conclusion made in the article cited and previous articles I've found in the LA Times & NY Times, is that CD copying is exploding, with the recording industry losing out on what could have been a boost in sales. This, however, is a lie, and a wonderful example of using statistics to mislead people.
It's a lie because all the statistic shows is the number of individual blank CD-Rs sold. There is NO USE INFORMATION associated with this number. As is well-known on /., people burn CDs to back-up their work, store pictures and video, copy CDs they already own to reduce wear on their purchased CDs, burn ISOs of downloaded programs, etc, etc, etc. The use is limited only by the imagination of the person with the burner. Yet, RIAA would have us all believe that 90% or more are used to copy CDs. I don't buy it, and they don't have the information to prove it.
Lastly, there's this nugget:
Even Harvard Law School students are getting into the act. When Hilary Rosen, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America, lectured at Harvard last week, she asked how many of the law students had illegally downloaded music. About one-third of them put their hands up. But when she asked how many had burned CDs for friends, the vast majority raised their hands.
''And some of these people are thinking of going into the entertainment industry,'' Rosen said afterward, shaking her head in disbelief. ''This is what we're up against.''
What Rosen is "up against" is called FAIR USE. The sort of CD copying for a friend is exactly what is protected, even under the current DMCA-clouded copyright landscape, under the home audio & recording act. You ARE permitted to copy & share your music, burn CDs for friends, etc. The law that allows you to make tape copies makes no differentiation between analog & digital media. So Rosen's head-shaking is so much dross & corporate lobbying. I agree on targeting people who sell copies, that's dirty. But sharing with friends & family? Gimme a break - that's free advertising.
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:3, Insightful)
On being nice to your customers (Score:4, Insightful)
That's because hard drive business has a better relationship with its customers. I don't recall Western Digital or Maxtor suing a customer because he tinkered with his drive. You could say that IBM screwed its customers with the DeskStar saga, but you can't blame Big Blue for N'Sync, 98 Degrees, etc. People are willing to spend a pretty penny for storage; they aren't willing to drop $18 for two singles and filler.
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:2, Insightful)
Imagine that there was a "duplication device" that could clone whatever you put into it - a watch, a TV, a car, whatever. Imagine it only cost $.20 per use. This device could literally destroy our society. Think about how many people would be driving Porche Boxters or (insert your favorite car here) versus how many would actually sell. Your friend bought a brand new HDTV? Now you've got one too! How would any manufaturer or store stay in business? Does this seem bad to anyone other than me?
Why doesn't the same logic apply to digital music? Sure CD's are way over priced, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go steal! Sorry to rant but I'm tired of people trying to justify what they know is not right!
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:2, Insightful)
That's rediculous, for two reasons:
a) Time and time again, psychology studies show that people dont want to be freeloaders. So, everyone won't be reading from copies, because psychology tells us enough people will wish to contribute monetarily, regardless of enforcement mechanisms, to keep you eating. And sleeping. Now, you might not own a jaguar, but I hardly think _anyone_ intrinsically deserves a Jaguar, unless they've solved world hunger, or something. Capitalism was meant to be a means of making a living; now, the primary argument against going without seriously restrictive technological means of 'pay for read/use/listen' encforcement is that we wouldn't be able to afford food or water if those mechanisms wern't in place. Thats bullshit. It's only the difference between making a living from your trade, and being stupidly rich.
b) If everyone read copies of my work, as per the other reply to yoru post, I'd have my name on everyone's lips. This is alagous to the guy who invented Tetris
Anyhow, you're saying exactly what companies are saying - if we can't make technologies to get the last X% of our 'lost potential sales through copyright', no creator will be able to afford food, water, a home! What a load of shit!
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, as long as you don't plan on making a career out of it. How do you think you'll ever make a living if only one guy buys your book and then gives it away to the rest of the world for free?
Boston Globe Author Seems Niave (Score:5, Insightful)
How can you draw any conclusions from comparing a product that costs $0.50 per unit to a product that costs $18 per unit? The above sentence shows that people are spending $550 million on blanck CDs and $17.4 BILLION on prerecorded CDs. This is a factor of 32 in favour of prerecorded CDs!
Why do I see everyone saying that piracy is the reason for the drop in record sales? I'm sure most
It's also notable where the people who still buy music are buying it. Chains like Tower and Virgin are down 8 to 9 percent, according to SoundScan, while mass merchants such as Wal-Mart and Target (that is, stores that sell many other products besides CDs) are up 6 percent.
Imagine, CD sales UP in stores that sell them cheaply!
Albhy Galuten, vice president of new media for Universal Records: "I find it incredibly ironic that some people will spend an extra $1,000 on their hard drives just so they can store more music, but they won't pay for the music."
Where does this guy buy hard drives? Seems to me that a 40G HD is $150 Canadian. That's enough to store about 10000 songs, or about 1000 albums. That would cost $18000 dollars to buy those albums new, though, so even if you were paying $1000 for your hard drive, I could still see why you were doing it.
I haven't gotten to the Salon article yet... maybe it will cheer me up.
Oh geez... (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe that's because for the price of a CD I can get 50 "recordable discs". Even if I spent the same amount of money on each I'd still have 50x more blank ones.
Re:Sheryl Crow (Score:4, Insightful)
She's jumping on a bandwagon which includes the RIAA. How is that a rebel? It's like saying a citizen in the Colonies that decided to help the English is a rebel. She isn't a rebel in any way, shape, or form -- she's siding with the record industry.
Re:1.1 billion CD's doesn't mean 1.1 BLN copies. (Score:4, Insightful)
Next they're going to start bitching about how many gigs of hard drive space are being sold. Hillary's starting to become the new blink tag of the internet. People are just getting far too tired of her played out, immature antics. BTW, the biggest music "thieves"...people who work in the music industry. Mostly the interns they hire from local colleges.
That, my friend, would be Free Hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
It would not destroy anything. The manufacturers would not be able to stay in business, just like any other obsolete company in a market economy - good riddance. The net gain to society would obviously be enormous. See it as Free Hardware (as in Free Hardware Foundation), people would be getting stuff for free and there would always be some people prepared to make new inventions for the others. Companies wanting to get profit out of that industry would have to rely on giving support and "business solutions". Sound familiar?
Outdated model. (Score:4, Insightful)
Musicians should get paid - before they start playing. Not everytime someone new hears it.
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:2, Insightful)
The focus seems to be moving to those individuals who are making a profit. Keeping up the RIAA's momentum in pushing their agenda. Or it could have just been the slant of that article.
Either way, I make mixes all the time and listen to them at work. These "pending" copy protection schemes keep me from making my mixes. Thankfully it has been limited to crappy music.
Oh, and Elvis Costello is an idiot.
Re:To Hillary I ask would ask: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right, of course, but it doesn't matter. It should be the undesireable behavior that is illegal, not the technology that happens to enable it along with hundreds of other legitimate behaviors.
In fact, if you manage to get them to give a straight answer, they'll probably even tell you this kind of behavior is fine.
That has never and will never be the position of the RIAA. As far as they're concerned you purchase a licence to the recording on that particular medium. You might get them to admit that making a backup copy is ligit, but if you want the recording in a different format they think you should have to pay again. It is unfortunate for them that current law doesn't allow for that position, so they've resorted to lobbying for new laws that will indirectly give them that power.
Duplication Device (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine that there was a "duplication device" that could clone whatever you put into it - a watch, a TV, a car, whatever. Imagine it only cost $.20 per use. This device could literally destroy our society. Think about how many people would be driving Porche Boxters or (insert your favorite car here) versus how many would actually sell. Your friend bought a brand new HDTV? Now you've got one too! How would any manufaturer or store stay in business? Does this seem bad to anyone other than me?
Interestingly enough, there was a science-fiction short story published in Analog more decades ago than I care to admit exactly along those lines. I don't remember the title, but in the story, some alien race dumped a matter duplicater and the plans for it on the human race, with the apparent intent of causing human society to self-destruct. Instead, the humans worked out the obvious solution: since anything could now be duplicated, the only thing that has value is unique originals, and the way to make a living is to design and create unique originals of things.
I think of this story a lot whenever the debates over digital copying and copyright infringement comes up. The Internet + computers are that matter duplicator, as far as anything digital (music, software, books, data) is concerned. The only question is, how do you get people to pay you the necessarily hefty fee for the unique original when they can wait for someone else to buy the original and get a copy for free? It used to be that the guys in charge of the "matter duplicators" (printing presses, film duplicators, record presses) charged a fee for each duplicate to cover the cost of buying the "unique original" (the manuscript, artist's studio tape, composer's score, etc.), but when everyone owns a "matter duplicator" (computer), who buys the original?
Re:Hilary Rosen is confused ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Uh, it's also similar to someone reading a library book and thus avoiding paying the author. Or borrowing a book from a friend. Or humming a song for my own amusement.
People share ideas. That's part of the human experience. Sharing by making digital copies is no different than telling jokes, lending books, singing songs, and all the other methods of sharing we've had for centuries.
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:3, Insightful)
Pretty soon, it may be illegal to make our own artwork, since we might "steal" from the "real" artists. There is no shortage of local bands or talent to fill their void.
Re:Have you seen anyone copying newspapers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Music CDs, on the other hand, aren't sponsored, and they're advertised one HELL of a lot more aggressively than most newspapers -- probably has to do with the audience being more subject to faddish obsessions. You don't see people wantonly swithcing newspaper subscriptions that often.
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Would it bother you if some other legislature--say, the N.Y. state assembly, or the U.K. House of Commons--could prevent you from passing that law, because they wrote one like it last year, and now they own the statuatory language, the legal mechanisms, and underlying ideas?
Not all CD burning has music. (Score:3, Insightful)
Lets see. 100+ CDs I've burned in the last year to distribute reports and large files that were too big for email. 3 CDs I've burned in the last year to make mix-tapes for my freinds.
Sorry to burst that bubble, but from where I sit, a lot of the CD burning that goes on is for legitimate, business applications.
But if you listened to them, the CD burners we have at the office are tools of evil. And.. I'm supposed to pay additional taxes to cover the losses to the recording industry?
"Hey boss... the price of CD-Rs just went up." 'Why?' "Well, aparently our business has to pay Madonna and N'Sync because of some high school kids".
Lunacy. Pure Lunacy.
Elvis Costello (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, the difference is that there's only one chair. If it's stolen it's gone, and the carpenter can't sell it anymore. But of course data can't be stole in that manner. Not to mention the breaking and entering part which also doesn't exist with CD burning.
His analogy would only be accurate if someone broke into the studio and stole a unique master tape.
Reaping What They Sowed (Score:4, Insightful)
I was an active music consumer when CDs first came out in the USA. At the time, they were priced several dollars more than LPs (actually, the price, in some cases, was nearly double). The price increase, we were told by the labels, was due to low sales volume compared to LPs and lack of CD production facilities in the USA (the first CD production facility in the USA came online around 85 or 86, I believe) and that CDs would get cheaper once these factors abated.
Like idiots, we believed the labels and waited for the prices to come down. They didn't. They didn't come down when CDs overtook LP sales. They didn't come down when CDs overtook cassette sales. In fact, they kept going up. The labels liked the fat profits they were making with no effort when CD production costs plummetted and their prices remained the same.
Here we are 18 years later and the record labels are getting exactly what they deserve. They got fat and stupid off of their CD profits and were too slow to respond effectively once digital music became a force to be reckoned with. Did they make individual songs available for purchase and download so people wouldn't have to fork over $20 for a CD that contained one or two songs they liked? No. Did they make cheaper MP3 versions of albums available for people who didn't care about the quality, expense, and packaging of a full-priced CD? No.
The labels didn't respond to the market and so the market is running all over them. It's sad that the artists are the ones being screwed, though. The labels sowed the seeds of discontent and now the reaper has come to call.
Re:Remove the middle man (Score:3, Insightful)
It will never be a viable business. Music is free now. You can't sell it.
What you CAN do is look at the expense of distributing your music online as a promotional expense. People get to know you. Eventually your music gets on P2P and you don't have to pay for THAT bandwidth.
The whole trick is getting people to hear your stuff so they want to go to your show. That's where money will be made by musicians in the future, NOT by selling the sound waves themselves.
Might take a few more years for musicians and the recording industry to grasp that, but mark my words, that's where we're going.
"Piss on the leftover food" mentality (Score:5, Insightful)
"I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'"
Well, disregarding the fact that taking the paper and getting an A devalues As and punishes the person who is doing the cheating (neither of which is pertinent to this discussion), my answer is "No, that wouldn't bother me at all. I would be glad to have helped someone."
If I get an apple and Johnny gets an apple too, that's a good thing, not a bad thing. For me to get an apple then burn the tree so Johnny can't get one is not helpful, it's not wise, and it's not right. It's also not terribly important right now while the apples are pop-music, but when we're talking about medical software that could save someone's life, or, in the not so distant future, code for a nanofactory that makes food or housing, it becomes very important.
The day is not so far away when these laws, which we make to satisfy piss-ant small-minded corporate drones who imagine that they have a right to profit by punishing others, will affect how many children in the world die of hunger and exposure, or how many people live in squalor and die of malaria.
That we should treat their arguments as anything other than the temper tantrums one would expect of a two year old is inexpressibly infuriating. Have we really learned nothing from millenia of two-bit dictators suppressing the masses for no reason other than it makes them feel important?
fraud vs. IP (Score:5, Insightful)
Similar reasoning can be applied to CD burning. If I burn a CD for a friend, and scrawl the title on it with a Sharpie and slip it in a paper sleeve, that's one thing. It's another thing if I make a master, and start running them off at a pressing facility, with perfect copies of the CD art and liner notes as well, and pass these off (for sale, in the market) as legit. Now, I'm not going to say here that one is moral and one isn't (although you can guess what I think), I'm just saying that on a certain moral level, these acts are
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, wrong answer. You still have an economy, because you still have scarcity. There will be 2 (arguably 3) primary scarce resources in this future you envision...
1) Your time (as long as your life is finite, your time has value)
2) Land. Physical space is a limited resource. How do you pay for the land you want to put your duplicated house on? Where will you live?
3) I will assume our magical device still needs raw materials as input. You have to at least shovel in a load of dirt for it to use to make that copy of the HDTV set. See point 2 about how that is a scarce resource. And yes, with this discussion of "raw material" I can easily see people being forced to pay for air, because you can shove it through a compressor and use it as raw material for that device. (I'm a scuba diver, I'm used to paying for air...)
There will still be an economy, based on you providing the results of the use of your time. In other words, you'll still pay for stuff.
You're missing the point. (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, this isn't a legal argument, it's an appeal to emotion: "This thing which involves copying information produced by the artist upsets the artist. Would you like it if someone did a thing which involved copy produced by you which upsets you?" There is a consistent theme: that copying information without the producer's consent is wrong.
They (the distributors) know perfectly well that they can't make copying impossible, so they are doing everything possible to make it inconvenient and make people not want to do it.
People know they should pay the artist, that it's the right thing to do. The distributors' strategy then is to make them equate "paying the artist" with "buying the CD." It's their only choice, really; if they even admitted there are other ways of paying the artist that don't require the distributors at all, such as a busking model, they'd be cutting their own throats.
If your argument against them consists of pointing out the logical flaws in their argument, you'll just end up looking like a nitpicker to anyone who doesn't already agree with you completely. If you really want to help promote the move away from obsolete, expensive distribution systems, it would be better to point out other ways to support the artists.
Inaccurate metaphor (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's look at this metaphor more closely:
Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too?
On the music side, this is equivalent to taking another artists' music and passing it off as your own. However, this is not what's happening. The "problem" is that people are copying artists' music for free so they can play it at their convenience. The "A paper" equivalent to this would be:
Would it bother you if somebody could just photocopy your paper and read it whenever they want without having to pay you for making the copy?
I don't think many people would have a problem with this. In fact, most people would probably be honoured that their work is so respected. I am not saying that these artists do not deserve to be paid for their work, but this metaphor is poor.
Re:Outdated model. (Score:3, Insightful)
musicians create their music, and they create one or several renditions of it that they record. they sell these renditions because people want to buy them (it's called a market).
musicians are allowed to choose whether they desire to sell or give away their music, just like programmers are allowed to decide whether to sell or give away their software.
if the musician didn't want to sell his/her music, then he/she would be a local bar act somewhere or even more likely a music teacher collecting $7.50 per lesson.
music on mp3 becomes soft like software... in other words it is intangible. It is just as intangible as the different expertise of a Doctor vs. a Nurse. Just because I can't touch it and feel its weight in my hand doesn't mean that I won't pay the few extra bucks for a doctor if I happen to get sick.
You pay for services every day. Music, whether you define it as a noun or a verb, a product or a service, still has value to people and will therefore be bought and sold in a society that permits such things.
Re:Does she understand open source/GPL at all? (Score:4, Insightful)
Go to the URL right next to my 'user 580 info' there and you will find music you can download and KEEP, for free. Go to the artwork section and you'll find the COVERS for burning free CDs of the different albums. And all those 'buy now' buttons and crap are for ACTUAL RED BOOK COMPLIANT NEVER-BEEN-COMPRESSED HIGH-RESOLUTION-MASTER CDS. Real CDs done right.
And on every CD is written: please copy this CD for your friends.
The CDs have bonus tracks, every time- and why not? But I totally encourage people to rip the CDs in any format you'd like to see around- 256K mp3? Ogg Vorbis? WMA, which I despise? Go nuts, you are free to do so! And then share the fsckers on Gnutella or whatever else pleases you. I mean it.
There are some artists (while he lived, John Lennon was very much one of them) for whom living right is more important than kaching! Mind you, if I wanted to get economically raped, I'd solicit a major label contract instead of keeping rights to my own work ;) but you HAVE to be able to imagine where all this is heading.
In a world where digital information is completely fluid, trying to fix a representation of the information is absolutely pointless. It's fucking crazy is what it is, excuse the strong language. It is the equivalent of wanting to charge for individual electrons in the electricity that powers your house. It's wanting to charge for water molecules in a rainstorm in the middle of the ocean. (damn good analogy actually, as most of the water is undrinkable, the value of really good water is high, yet it's falling from the sky all around you anyhow)
When ultimate broadband, ultimate storage, ultimate compression and encoding and playback happen, what will we have then? You will log onto the internet and someone will put up a file on a website or whatever. "Recorded Music (235T)" Oh, it's the archive of the complete history of recorded music! 235 terabytes. Gee, that's only a five minute download, *click* and so you have the history of recorded music on your Holo-Uber-Optical-Drive.
Now what?
The kind of incredible, unbelievable liquidity of information we're headed for (quick question: over your current modem or broadband, how long does it take you to download more written text literature than you could ever possibly read in your life?) changes the whole concept of the entertainment industry. It is no longer a one-to-many situation. Information storage and processing is expanding so fast that the new problem is not distribution, but overchoice.
At Ampcast, I have an album that is 'noise' music. It's the raging shrieks and staticy roars of a processed shortwave radio picking up things like satellites and atmospheric disturbances. Some people really like this kind of stuff, but most sane people would hate it. Some people really hate Britney Spears but most sane people would acknowledge the cynical competence of her production and tap their foot along to the artifical pop tripe. Yet, in data form, both sorts of music take up about the same number of bytes. And not only that, but an increasingly manageable number of bytes- no sort of problem to keep around. The future will mean you will have every imaginable music and film at your fingertips- and the question will not be 'how can I get this', but 'what do I actually like?'
In the past it was difficult enough to deliver music, that you had to go with what would appeal to a broad cross-section of people. This problem is DEAD... so on the one hand the future contains an ever-widening bunch of genres and musical/artistic styles (try understanding modern electronic dance music forms! Incredible forking and proliferation of distinct stylized forms...) and on the other hand it becomes virtually impossible to sort out what actually interests you from the 20 million other musics and arts that don't do anything for you...
If the entertainment industry had any clue at all they'd be trying to get a handle on this. What they're actually doing, for instance by cracking down on webcasting that tries to intelligently predict listener tastes, is destroy it. But they CANNOT destroy the need for it- because with information as liquid as it's gonna be, the amount of overchoice produces a compelling need for this new approach.
We will end up with a succession of entirely synthetic (possibly CGI!) worldwide superstars- whose appeal is so relentlessly broad that it has no depth or staying power at all- and everything else will be CHAOS... and choice. And just a hint of that meritocracy that the entertainment industry's been outgrowing.
Music by this longwinded geek [ampcast.com]
Even less commercial music [ampcast.com]
Who told him he could sing? [ampcast.com]
Chris Johnson
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Think of something where everyone has access to a technology that allows them to circumvent the system that makes what they want possible
2) You can either conclude that everyone who pays for that thing is:
a) too stupid to save money
b) able to understand that that thing would not be around were it not for people who paid for it.
Companies wish to convince us that the only time pepople pay for something when a free alternative is available is because they are dumb. However, this is not true. There tons of ways to scam the system, easily, undetected, and without possibility of getting caught. And yet, while some do (as always, a neccessary evil unless we wish to reseign to a future of microchip implants and tracking devices to catch that last, very clever cheater), many don't. I've really yet to meet someone who tries to get everything for free - it is a type of human companies wish to convince us that everyone is, so they can justify the restrictive technologies they wish to force on their consumer base in order to make everything quanitifiable. Would your dad have stolen the recordings of all his favorite artists? Would most Volvo enthousiasts seek out free Volvo's if they could, even if they knew that Volvo could not fund future developments and Volvo's if they did? It would be like evolution producing a species that cut off its own genetalia as its first action upon birth
At the base of all this is the assumption companies make - your behaviour is dependant 100% on the economics
I'll will try and drag up some specific studies, but to me its so clear
Re:Social Events (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes people make bad career choices. That's a fact of life too. If you've chosen to sell canned content, you certainly picked a bad time to do it.
We cannot in good conscience use the freedom and potential of the Internet as license to shoplift every bit of value produced by people on the AGREEMENT that they will receive value in kind for their work.
What agreement? If you produce something that can be copied infinitely many times, you should make sure that you are paid before you ever release that thing.
All work has value.
No, it doesn't. Something only has value if someone wants that thing.
The sooner we get past this debate, the sooner we can have all the cool promised products.
Huh? What am I not getting now that you think I will get by blindly continuing to follow the current system?
Why not cheat? (Score:1, Insightful)
90% of the education I have to take is a complete waste and/or sham anyways. We spend more time doing accounting than programming in my computer courses, and what programming we do do is in RPG, COBOL, or VB. So why not cheat?
At least I get papers from the people I help cheat when I need them. Makes the marks easy to get, and I refuse to work doing COBOL or RPG anyways (I'd rather be a sanitation engineer) so its no loss.
If it weren't for anti-creative people like Hilary Rosen we wouldn't be in such a mess in our education system anyways.
Re:Social Events (Score:2, Insightful)
Even under your hypothetical world in which everything is universally warezed (which would mean an artist would only be able to sell one copy of any recording) they would still be able to make a living by performing live.
What is not possible in such a future is to make $50M by selling vast quantities of $.35 plastic disks for $18.99.
Record companies, book publishers, newspapers, motion picture companies, and other content providers are going to have to adjust to a new reality, in which two inexorable forces are going to drive down the market value of their content.
1. anyone can be their own producer/publisher because the pc revolution and the internet make it possible for any aspiring hack to produce and publish high quality content worldwide for very very low cost.
2. it is virtually impossible to prevent people from making and distributing copies of the work produced by major companies on the internet.
It is a new reality; and it cannot be changed. They must adjust their business models to this new reality or they will slowly whither and die.
So far their reactions have been to attempt everything possible to prevent copying, but it is going to be increasingly difficult to compete with the content created by people not affiliated with the major media companies.
The market value of content will continue to decrease, whether they manage to suppress copying and sharing mechanisms or not.