Orson Scott Card on mp3 File Sharing 544
drjkt writes "Author Orson Scott Card gives his take on mp3 file swapping." Some artists are getting the idea.
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Orson Scott Card on mp3 File Sharing
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8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss
Re:That byline 'speaker-for-the-dumb'... (Score:2, Informative)
(if you dont know, go to amazon an view cards books)
RIAA (Score:0, Informative)
Re:That byline 'speaker-for-the-dumb'... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wait just a sec.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:That byline 'speaker-for-the-dumb'... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wait a second... I didn't think this was true: (Score:5, Informative)
The vast majority of recording artists ... (Score:4, Informative)
The majority of those that make a profit at all do so from performances and direct sales to fans of merchandise. The more people they can get to the concerts, the better off they are. This is why artists make videos and lobby to get them in rotation. This is why they try to influence radio stations to add them to rotations. This is why they give away promotional copies to influential people (DJs, trendsetters, etc.) and to large crowds at events (at record stores, etc.) This is why they lobby (and pay) to have songs included in the soundtracks of video games. They believe that more people hearing their music will mean more people willing to pay to see them perform.
E-Books-- See Baen.com (Score:5, Informative)
The Baen Free Library [baen.com] offers a ton of books from sci-fi/fantasy publisher Baen Books for free in a variety of electronic formats. Baen has also been offering CD-ROMs in some of their hardcovers which contain more books not available on their website. The most recent of David Weber's Honor Harrington series, for example, contains the entire series in electronic format. Best of all, you can copy them and distribute them however you like--you just can't sell them.
Try searching for "honorverse disk" at Google and see what you get. Many people (myself included) put the CDs up on their web server for convenience.
It's hideously effective, incidentally. I've bought about 25 Baen paperbacks in the last two years, and several hardbacks--one of them just for the CD, though I rather enjoyed the book, too, as it turned out.
Re:Wait a second... I didn't think this was true: (Score:3, Informative)
If you want the book analogy, you can't photocopy the book then lend it to your friend (lending is just a temporary case of selling for free), allowing you both to read it simultaneously.
Re:Tech-saavy? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wait a second... I didn't think this was true: (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, if you got together with others and each bought different books and lent them to one another, you would not violate copyright laws. Let's look at precisely why this is so.
17 USC 106 states in short that only the copyright holder may distribute copies of his copyrighted work. This explicitly includes lending.
17 USC 501 tells us that to violate any of the exclusive rights of the copyright holder, such as those in 106 is to infringe.
Fortunately, you're saved by 17 USC 109, which carves out an exception to the broad 106 right to distribute, and permits people who lawfully acquire a copy of a work to resell, or lend it out as they see fit. Because 106 as modified by 109 no longer makes this activity exclusive to the copyright holder, it's not an infringement under 501.
So you can lend books. You can lend any copyrighted matter. At least, as long as it falls under 109!
Unfortunately, two special interest groups had strong enough lobbies to get exempted from 109. The music industry, and the software industry. The exemptions can be found in 109(b)(1)(A). (the general first sale provision itself is 109(a))
There is NO FIRST SALE RIGHT FOR SOUND RECORDINGS OR COMPUTER SOFTWARE insofar as 1) this only pertains to rental, lease or lending -- you can still sell this stuff used if you lawfully acquired it, 2) this only pertains to sound recordings, or computer software that is not embodied in hardware, or that is not intended for use on a limited purpose computer for game playing (i.e. console games), 3) there are some exceptions for libraries with regards to this, but most of us are not a real library.
So you actually would be infringing copyrights to lend a CD to a friend, provided that a court construes "lending" in the statute to be the same kind of lending, which on the face of it, seems to be inescapable.
Fortunately, if it's just between friends, you're unlikely to get _caught_, and if you're not caught, do you really care if it's illegal?
Now, you could further claim that lending it to a friend is a fair use, under 17 USC 107, but that requires an analysis of the SPECIFIC FACTS under the fair use test, a form of which is given in the section. Note that ALL PURPORTED FAIR USES MUST BE ANALYZED, NO EXCEPTIONS. The examples given in 107 aren't broad exceptions, they're examples of the kinds of uses Congress _imagined_ would probably suffice. News reporting has been held unfair before, for example, so don't take anything for granted.
So this is nonprofit (good), with non-factual works (bad), distributing the entire work (bad), with the effect on the market of making a sale less likely to the person who borrowed it since he can just borrow it (and perhaps make an unactionable infringement per 17 USC 1008 IF HE COMPLIES WITH THE STATUTE FULLY AS DEFINED IN 17 USC 1001 which no one ever reads) and not have to pay to enjoy it. OTOH it's rather de minimis since the lending circle is quite small, presumably.
I think it would be fair, but it's actually a borderline case given how the test works.
That's why the example using CDs is not very good.
On the whole, it pays to look through the copyright statute (17 USC) rather than listen to what a lot of the
Re:Grateful Dead (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The vast majority of recording artists ... (Score:3, Informative)
Read what Steve Albini [negativland.com] has to say about it. Sure the record company he speaks of sucks, but does the artist make any money touring? Read what Coco the Electric Monkey Wizard [tygerstudios.com] and The Brannock Device [tygerstudios.com] of Man or Astroman? have to say about the Finances of playing live.
Plus these guys are actually in the top 10% of the bands out there, the average band is something that you see opening for these guys.
Re:e-books (Score:1, Informative)
At least in Suburbia, USA (where our city passes every library initiative on the ballot every time), it's also true for : comic books, large softcover collections (far side/etc), newspapers, LPs, CDs, VHS, DVDs, AND software and PC games (evidentally they don't give a shit about EULAs). Granted there's no AutoCAD, or MS Windows/Office, but they have a decent selection. About the only thing they don't have is video games (they do have video game guide books sometimes however!)
Funnily enough I remember going into my local library, the day after Harry Potter came out on DVD. Every video store was completely rented out (when they had walls full of copies). 2 copies were just sitting in the DVD section, ready to be checked out at the library.
Re:The vast majority of recording artists ... (Score:3, Informative)
movie copyrights (Score:2, Informative)
I've been getting more and more pissed everytime I go to a movie and see this damn intro about the carpenter who is loosing work because of pirates. As long as movies keep getting made, he has got a job. If someone pirates something, that just takes out of the the actors and studios monster profits, right? This guy gets his paycheck and then is off the job once the movie is made. It's insulting.
I'm sitting here staring at my collection of LEGAL dvd, vhs, cd, and tape media wondering just how much money I've spent in my life on these morons? I'm just a student, so it's a big percentage of my income that goes to the entertainment industry. I wish I could know that creative people got most of my money.
I personally quit filesharing recently... I used it to find new music that was worth my money. Now I'm less likely to buy a new CD if I haven't downloaded a least a couple good songs first.
-k
Or maybe, JUST FREAKING MAYBE (Score:3, Informative)
Call me a crazy dreamer, but I believe that's a play on one of his most popular titles, Speaker For the Dead. When
Re:About time (Score:3, Informative)
This is a common see-saw power cycle in the history of copyright law and the publication of artistic works.
The point isn't that I need somebody to market for me. The point is, the more marketers working for me, the more I can influence my ability to become popular and profitable. So the answer is to ensure that the markers are not so powerful as to garauntee their own jobs by rigging the utopian goal of a meritocracy in the music business.
Re:Unimpressed (Score:3, Informative)
You are missing his point, since its clear you have never dealt with book publishers in the last 20 years. Section 101 of the 1976 Copyright Act defines WfH, and the european equivalent was made to match the US, despite no mention of Work-for-Hire in the Berne Convention. WfH was left out of Berne, because all authors thought it a bad idea, and addressed under the section on Moral Rights. Berne did not go far enough and specifically state that WfH should be outlawed in national copyright laws, because the US had already had it for almost 70 years.
Most large publishers require authors to sign an agreement declaring their work was really done as a Hired Work, and forfeit all associated rights. Don't want to sign their contract? Then go find a different publisher. There are a few good publishing houses which will allow you to keep the copyright, Nolo Press is a good one for authors rights, but all the big ones claim all works as their own.
I've written a couple of books, the last has not (yet) been published because I spent several years of my time putting all my creativity and ideas into it and I refuse to give up my rights to greedy publishers. The earlier works were all just technical books, and I didn't much care for holding the rights because the publishers waved a big check and guaranteed to keep my name as author. But after that one big check, no more income. If one of the books had become a best seller (not unlikely), then the publisher would have made a fortune, and I would have only my initial payment. If you look at the copyright page in O'Reilly books, the copyright is always assigned to the publisher, not the authors.
Look at Ender's Game, and the copyright is to Card, because he signed away his rights on a bunch of earlier stuff to earn enough of a name to find a publisher willing to let him keep his rights. The same holds with the Harry Potter books, the first one JK Rowling had to sign over all the rights to the publisher, but subsequent books she kept the copyrights, so she sees no futher income from the first book past her one payment, but has become the highest earning woman in Britain from the later books. Her first publisher is making a fortune off her first book and doesn't ever give her any of it.
That is the way the law has been twisted by greedy businesses, and its not going to get better until our MEPs and CongressCritters act in the interests of the individual again. Rants by Card and other respected artists, even if slightly mis-informed, can only help to educate the only people who can change the law back towards the public good.
the AC