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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Ya'll hear about the geometer who went to the beach to catch some rays and became a tangent ?
Not actually all that helpful (Score:4, Interesting)
Grateful Dead (Score:5, Interesting)
The Dead always got it - they made far more money touring than by selling records. Letting fans record concerts and swap tapes created a lot of good will and good publicity.
New Buzzword (Score:2, Interesting)
People use "google" as a term for "search online" now, and I fear "MP3" will become the term for "digital music". As we all know, there are other formats, and I don't want to be looked down upon just because I choose OGG.
Hell, there are OGGs on Kazaa, so its not just a piracy thing.
Then again, wouldn't it be great if "MP3" was the term for "pirated music", and OGG was "legal" digitial music (ah, OSS dreams).
Wait a second... I didn't think this was true: (Score:3, Interesting)
"If you got together with a few of your neighbors and each of you bought different CDs and then lent them to each other, that wouldn't even violate copyright."
Is this true? Certainly it can't be if the only distinction of violating the copyright is geographical distance. Can give anyone give any answers?
Orson Scott Card (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:e-books (Score:5, Interesting)
Refreshing attitude. If copyright was reformed to be meaningful in today's environment, where a reasonable profit can be realized in a much shorter time than when copyrights were first introduced due to the capability and speed of worldwide marketing/distribution, eliminating P2P of copywritten works may be a worthwhile trade for the people currently using it for piracy.
Dumb argument, really. (Score:1, Interesting)
He makes a good point (Score:3, Interesting)
Hey, he's talking (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:About time (Score:2, Interesting)
Card = idiot? (Score:1, Interesting)
boohoo steve and sammy! (Score:2, Interesting)
Recording artists have watched their record royalties erode over the past few years ("My Van Halen royalties are history," said vocalist Sammy Hagar), but, in fact, few musicians earn the bulk of their income from record sales.
I find these comments offensive. No more royalties from 20+ years ago. Damnit! I'm not working any more, I should be getting paid still! If sales were sky rocketing after the copyright expired (oh wait, that apparently will never happen again) I could see the argument, but the vast majority of money is made when a CD or whatever first comes out. "What have done for me lately?" comes to mind. If I stop working I don't get paid anymore, if you stop working you don't get paid anymore. That's the way it works.
Meanwhile you have a bunch of half-wits on MTV cribs showing there multi-million dollar mansions. How exactly does this produce any insentive to create something new and interesting? Granted, in most cases its not really a loss. You have people that are basically set for life if they use some minute amount of common sense off of 1 CD release. Of course, they're probably really making money of f being famous. I sure Britney made a crap load more off of promoting pepsi than she ever did from CD sales.
I really didn't mean to blather on this much, my bad. Basically, you aren't making royalties from incredibly old albums (shocker), write some new stuff. You still need income? Here's a thought, write some new stuff. If people don't like it, get a different job. Boo hoo, what about my dependents, they can't live off my name for the rest of their lives. Here's a tip, learn to manage your fucking money! Everyone in the real world has various mechanisms to provide for their families, maybe you should look into them.
BTW, I do agree artists are screwed by the record companies and it's about time they started standing up and taking some responsibilities for their own situation and actions.
jason
Re:Research (Score:3, Interesting)
But didn't (Score:2, Interesting)
We all know what the obivous answer is, just like we all know things like big government squanders our tax dollars and the Patriot Act is used to subvert due process. The problem is that we have to act as a group, put aside our self interest for an indefinite period, to force the change.
If the artist stop releasing new "product" for the RIAA to push and only play live to make a living, if music buyers stop making any purchases until prices drop/product improves/delivery methods change, and if pirates stop downloading for a week (call it a proclaimed week of silence) to let the music industry know that we get it, that might at least get their attention. It's tough to kill a bloated, greedy monster of this size.
Thomas Babington Macaulay explained it in 1841 (Score:5, Interesting)
"I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living."
Re:About time (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Research (Score:5, Interesting)
I would also like to point out a few points:
1 - The fact that I get or not the song from the internet is irrelevant. I am not stealing since I am not depriving someone from stuff he has, nor profits he could make. How can someone steal bits? Even those are just copied into my box!
2 - To prove me that I am doing something wrong you would have to show me how I am hurting somebody. I'm not reselling the music I download, nor even uploading it online... just downloading. A theft to me is what I explained on point 1.
3 - I am actually helping the corps make some better publicity of their songs by actually downloading what I find and buying those CDs I trully like. Otherwise they would be loosing a profit. So to put that in their words, I would be committing a crime if I didn't do so (hehehe).
Just think about it,
Decameron
Re:e-books (Score:1, Interesting)
The same holds for music. A few months ago, my best friend sent me a CD with rips of just about every album Radiohead had ever made. I didn't know much of their music. I thought I didn't like that band. All I knew were the 2 songs that are always played on the radio. (...) I listened to the mp3s, started to really like RH. In june, I bought their new album when it came out. I just bought concert tickets today to go see them. I'll probably buy myself their DVD for Christmas.
The term of copyright has been exploited. (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article:
Sure it was, once you realize that copyright was never meant to grant a copyright holder perpetual income. Copyright was meant to be an incentive to publish, part of a bargain with the public. So a limited term of copyright (which we don't have today thanks to retroactive term extension) that expires well within someone's lifetime (which we also don't have today) were both good things. Mark Twain fought this and we (as a society) are better off for his not having gotten his wish in his lifetime. If the term of copyright was then what it is now, we wouldn't have as many of his works to share (we might not have any, they might all be tightly controlled by his estate like Mitchell or Gershwin's estate handles their works). You don't spur society to publish more work by granting them everlasting power to deem how the work can be disseminated and built upon.
I think it's reasonable to say far more works would have been lost to time because nobody could legally preserve them by copying them (a time-honored means of saving knowledge for future readers). The Public Domain Enhancement Act [eldred.cc] (H.R. 2601 [loc.gov]) attempts to restore a more reasonable effective term of copyright without violating on the Bern treaty. I encourage everyone to contact their congresspeople to co-sponsor this act.
Once you recognize that nobody makes ideas in a vacuum and we all base everything we think and do on the work of others, you get to a point where you begin to question the underlying assumptions of copyright and anyone who pitches copyright as property (a prejudicial term [gnu.org], at the least). I wonder about a far shorter term of copyright and whether society would benefit from not allowing certain expressions to not have copyright power at all (such as non-free software which remains non-free even after it would enter the public domain because the source code for the program is never revealed).
Re:About time (Score:5, Interesting)
I haven't thought this through a whole lot, and I realize that it would have a lot of kinks to work out. (How would anyone get permission to copy a song if they weren't the artist? Obviously the copyright holder would have to be able to sign contracts granting that permission, but that is the same as giving up ownership of the song if the contract is horrible enough. Maybe copyright holders could always retain the option to terminate any contract that gives someone else part of the copyright, or something. Or maybe copyright holders could simply not be able to enter into contracts that would forbid them from entering copying contracts with others.) But I think it's an interesting idea. What does Slashdot think?
Re:Well, that settles it then (Score:5, Interesting)
Point being, I'll grant him some expertise in this area. He's thought about these issues long and hard. I doubt that Mr. Coleman has thought long and hard on any subject of more depth than why Todd got all the punany and he didn't.
Re:Research (Score:3, Interesting)
The net effect is identical.
Subsequently, the moral conclusions and legal consequences should be identical.
Exactly (Score:2, Interesting)
I looked at some of his other articles on the site and he argues:
OK, he's right about that last one.
A few of the articles are interesting, most of them just show how far-right the people who don't consider themselves far-right have gone in the US.
OK, I'm exaggerating. There are some articles that show the common sense he seems to think permeates the whole site. Most of it reads to me like the the comments of the little old midwestern ladies who said "what harm can it do to tell people about Jesus" to justify the religious literature given out in Afghanistan. There are sane reasons to disagree, you don't hear them on American TV (but you do on the BBC and the CBC), and it's not because the American press is a liberal fiefdom.
Re:Grateful Dead (Score:3, Interesting)
Discipline Global Mobile (Score:3, Interesting)
The motto of Discipline Records is:
"The phonographic copyright in these performances is operated by Discipline Records on behalf of the artists, with whom it resides. Discipline accepts no reason for artists to give away such copyright interests in their work by virtue of a "common practice" which is out of tune with the time, was always questionable and is now indefensible."
Re:About time (Score:3, Interesting)
I think this is a non-sequitor when talking about file sharing. IIRC, Metallica is one of the few bands to have control over their own copyrights, but nobody respected that when they started complaining about file sharing. As for the length of copyrights, if it were still 75 years or even 50 years (or life+50 or even life+25), it still wouldn't matter for the vast majority of file sharing. How many of the people downloading movies are downloading stuff from before 1950? How many of the songs people download are from before 1950?
As for corporations being able to own copyright, who else should own copyright on a movie that the corp put 50 million into and had one person write the script, two more make changes, a director to film it and another person to do the final editing?
Re:e-books (Score:3, Interesting)
Shit, I just bought all the Ender books. Are you telling me I could have avoided paying money and just got copies of them? Damn.
Oh wait, I can't stand reading e-books. Never mind.
Whoa! Give the studios their due. (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a computer based home studio set up. It wasn't cheap. It was obsolete in months (actually, it was probably obsolete before I put it together!)
But most importantly, it doesn't compare to the Pro quality stuff I've heard!
Much of the equipment is expensive BECAUSE it's not standardized and in fact could not be standardized.
Much of the equipment can and has been built "on a chip" very cheaply, yet still does not retain the quality that the PRO gear has.
The difference is barely noticable until you stack all of these things on top of each other.
Track after track after track of minutely lower quality gear shows up in the final mix.
I've looked into Open source software for studio gear, and would LOVE it if it would happen. Unfortunately it's nowhere near even the lower end home studio gear that I have.
Why is the quality of even the low end gear lower?
Manufacturers of the lower cost gear tend to cut corners on vital components (the AD/DA converters not being made of gold, for instance)that are not noticeable to the human ear on (lets say)16 tracks, but become very noticeable on (lets say)32-64 tracks, not to mention the master.
The prices of alot of this equipment has come down significantly in the last 10-15 years, and I wouldn't doubt that producers are taking a cut,
But I assure you that it's far from open source on commodity hardware.
If I'm wrong, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me, it would make my year.
Hell for that matter, I'll experiment with anything you find and try it out just on the hope!
Re:boohoo steve and sammy! (Score:3, Interesting)
I find these comments offensive. No more royalties from 20+ years ago. Damnit! I'm not working any more, I should be getting paid still!
Orson Scott Card is old enough to remember when you could get a retirement outside of working for the government. If government workers are entitled to getting money after they've stopped working, why should authors' or artists' entitlement be any less?
Re:Wait a second... I didn't think this was true: (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, there are sufficient rules of statutory interpretation that the problem isn't really as bad as you make it sound. Most statutes are pretty clear, particularly when coupled with their definitional portions (which laypeople often neglect to read) or the rule that when in doubt, the plain dictionary sort of meaning is usually what's intended.
Or the fact that laws are interpreted by precendents from earlier court decisions and thus a "standard" interpretation is repeated over and over as "fact".
It is a fact. At least assuming that the precedent is binding.
If a law gets passed and then gets clarification in the court system no one goes back and re-writes the law for easier reading.
Well... bear in mind that if Congress messed with this, there'd very likely be a substantive change to the law while they were at it. Better to let that sleeping dog lie.
But there are 'hyperlinks' of a sort to help with this issue. There are annotated statute books that list cases that have impacted a law, typically with a brief explanation of how. And there are Shepard's books which track the entire history of laws or cases, prior to the particular point in time you're looking up, and afterwards, so that you can check to see what happened.
But 1) to a large extent, only lawyers really care about this (though they care a great deal) so most people aren't familiar with it, and 2) the government doesn't maintain these resources itself, so there's limited public access to them.
Personally, I think it would be a good idea for the government to supplant West and Lexis, but it would entail an awful lot of work, cost a fortune to start up and maintain, and they're apparently not interested.
Re:About time (Score:3, Interesting)
Music isn't the only industry where someone tries to get a work for hire to get the copyright. Photography is very much driven by the photographers tring to own the copyright forcing you to buy all prints from them if you use their services. Instead of hiring a photographer for your wedding or event who will attmpt to control distribution, change the terms and take bids for a work for hire. You keep the negatives and copyright. Most photographers won't provide a bid. Stick to your guns and only hire photographers on your terms even if it costs more. Finaly it's legal to e-mail wedding photos to distant relatives in something not super compressed. It's kind of on the other foot wanting to retain copyright, but in some cases work for hire should be just that.
An example of a valid work for hire where the performer gets no copyright is a radio station hiring performers to do a station jingle. The station should pay the performers and the station should get the copyright and not have to pay a royalty each time the station has a station break.
Walt Disney learned this the hard way. His first cartoon mouse was Mortimer Mouse. After Walt changed jobs, he found the studio owned Mort. Walt wisely said never again! Walt Disney had to open his own studio in order to keep his creations from being owned by someone else. Bands should have learned from Walt Disney and ditched RIAA style studios/promoters.
I do think more bands should be self produced and find a distribitor/promoter that will promote the band for a fixed fee and/or a portion of the royalties while the band retains the royalty. If the promoter does a poor job, the band should have the right to fire the promoter and hire someone else. The RIAA model is obsolete.
Re:About time (Score:3, Interesting)
Russia has other cool things about copyrights. For example, all films older than 30 years are already in the public domain. Want a 100% legal 300Gb HDD filled with "The Best of Hollywood (1900-1970)" for the price of HDD + 1$/movie? Drop me a note.
Favorite Artist Quote (from the second article) (Score:3, Interesting)
Bracketed text mine.
Re:File-sharing Made Me Spend More Money On Music (Score:3, Interesting)
As OSC said, my largest number of CD purchases were when the "changeover" occurred and I replaced quite a few albums/cassettes with their CD equivalents. After that, my CD purchases declined.
I don't think I've bought any CD's in the last year or two where I hadn't listened to a few tracks in MP3 format already. This isn't just new songs -- I've got "old" MP3's that led me to seek out the CD's they were on.
In one case (The Old 97's), I was at a client site in their server room and they were playing a few tracks that I really liked. I asked for a copy of those tracks and listened to them a while longer. I had never heard of the band before. Eventually, I bought all of their CD's.
Yes, I still have a few MP3's to which I don't have a purchased backup, but they are of songs that I *would not purchase* whether I had the MP3 or not. No lost sales there.
Other than that, OSC's (and other
I have never been a "file sharer" (in the Napster/Kazaa sense) and I don't intend to be. I've said dozens of times (and I still agree) that if I could buy a high-quality track that I could play on any hardware I have (three computers, a PocketPC, a MP3 player, several CD/DVD players) for ~$0.99 (without a subscription commitment), then that is the way I would buy *ALL* of my music. If I could buy a track for the price of a soft drink (without copy protection) *I'm* not going to upload it to Kazaa or Usenet -- I spent my $0.99 on it, you can go buy your own.
Hmm, writers and programmers... (Score:1, Interesting)
I've always thought about, but accepted it as many of you probably have. Why do we?