100 Years of Copyright Hysteria 280
Nate Anderson pens a fine historical retrospective for Ars Technica: a look at 100 years of Big Content's fearmongering, in their own words. There was John Philip Sousa in 1906 warning that recording technology would destroy the US pastime of gathering around the piano to sing music ("What of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?"). There was the photocopier after World War II. There was the VCR in the 1970s, which a movie lobbyist predicted would result in tidal waves, avalanches, and bleeding and hemorrhaging by the music business. He compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler — in this scenario the US public was a woman home alone. Then home taping of music, digital audio tape, MP3 players, and Napster, each of which was predicted to lay waste to entire industries; and so on up to date with DVRs, HD radio, and HDTV. Anderson concludes with a quote from copyright expert William Patry in his book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: "I cannot think of a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries."
The have fought and lost (Score:5, Insightful)
The RIAA (and later the MPAA,) have fought EVERY single innovation that even looks like it might possibly impinge on their clients' business turf, right up until it becomes overwhelmingly clear that they're actually preventing their client's from making more money than if they kept their head in the sand.
If it was up to the **AAs, we would be copying sheet music for our spinets with sharpened quill pens.
They are a creation dating from before the invention of democracy and all they have ever done is behave like it.
Re:The have fought and lost (Score:5, Insightful)
Sheet music is possibly the most *highly* guarded copyright work that I've ever had to deal with. It's unbelievable, the licensing behind it.
Re:The have fought and lost (Score:5, Interesting)
Good thing we have sheetmusictorrent.
Actually it looks like John Philip Sousa's prediction was correct. We Don't sit-around home pianos in our parlors listening to somebody music, but I don't cry about it anymore than I cry that the horsewhip or candlestick makers no longer exist. Some forms of technology are obsolete and have been replaced by better forms, like direct recordings from far-off places.
Re:The have fought and lost (Score:5, Insightful)
Good thing we have sheetmusictorrent.
Actually it looks like John Philip Sousa's prediction was correct. We Don't sit-around home pianos in our parlors listening to somebody music, but I don't cry about it anymore than I cry that the horsewhip or candlestick makers no longer exist. Some forms of technology are obsolete and have been replaced by better forms, like direct recordings from far-off places.
Actually I do lament that fact that our culture has become one of passive engagement with music, and for the matter sport. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone but by-and-large most people listen to music rather that create music, most people watch sport rather that play sport. But I don't think that the various content industries share this sentiment, quite the opposite in fact as the entire content ownership and distribution system relies on the commoditisation of culture
Re:The have fought and lost (Score:4, Insightful)
Performing is not "creating music". All of the "creation" is
being done by the guy that wrote the original bit of sheet
music. So we are not that much more passive than we already
were. We're just no longer in the practice of making our own
mediocre performances at home based off of works that are
sufficiently dumbed down.
So? (Score:2, Interesting)
> Performing is not "creating music".
Good, so if I would illegally copy music, I only am infringing on the rights of the songwriter, and so only need to pay ASCAP/BMI. Interesting philosophical take on copyright in music, but not connected with the legal reality of our times.
> We're just no longer in the practice of making our own mediocre performances
> at home based off of works that are sufficiently dumbed down.
And for the same reason, I should tell my children not to bother to attempt to do any
Re:The have fought and lost (Score:5, Informative)
Performing is not "creating music". All of the "creation" is
being done by the guy that wrote the original bit of sheet
music. So we are not that much more passive than we already
were. We're just no longer in the practice of making our own
mediocre performances at home based off of works that are
sufficiently dumbed down.
OK. Perhaps I should have said performed rather than create (although don't underestimate the ability of people to improvise when they are encouraged to engage with music from an early age)
However your comments about mediocrity are exactly what I'm getting at, not all of us is Mozart or Beckham but music and sport are both things that everyone should be encouraged to enjoy. By setting up both activities as something that should only be actively pursued by those with elite levels of talent you are pandering to the moneyed interests within our society that aim to steal culture from us and then charge us to passively engage in it.
Note that I am not saying we should not also encourage those with elite levels of talent but I believe that there is a healthy balance from which we've long strayed
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...music and sport are both things that everyone should be encouraged to enjoy. By setting up both activities as something that should only be actively pursued by those with elite levels of talent you are pandering to the moneyed interests within our society that aim to steal culture from us and then charge us to passively engage in it.
Well, seriously, I think it's a little premature to take it this far.
Last I heard, Little League was still going strong and "soccer mom" is a familiar idiom to any American. I don't see lack of talent stopping any teenager from picking up an electric guitar or a drum machine (not least of all the world's most popular bands).
Sure, commercial music publishing companies love the idea of offering up musicians as "rock stars," but even back in the 1800s you had Charles Dickens traveling the country, giving readings of his novels. Few people give him the credit for destroying the American pastime of reading books, though.
I can see this turning into and endless rally of comments, but I'll try again:
I am not saying that a proportion of the population doesn't engage in either sport or music but in the case of music it is far from a majority and in the case of sport it is something that children do but adults don't - how much of the adult population do you honestly think participates in regular sporting activities.
Besides which I was defending my original post against jedidiah's complaint which seemed to me to be posing the ar
Re:The have fought and lost (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The have fought and lost (Score:4, Insightful)
If you get a bunch of people together to jam, record everything, then sit around drinking beer and listening to the recording, laughing at the bad parts and gathering up the cool parts so you can polish them into something tight next time, that's just as creative as sitting around writing sheet music alone in a quiet room, if not more so.
Most of my favorite recorded songs have my voice and my harmonica in them. Every time I listen to them, I think of good times and old friends.
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Performing and composing are different, but one's not "less" or "more" than the other.
Aside from the fact that a lot of forms of music are improvisational, which is a form of creating something new, performing itself requires skill and (in most cases) collaboration with others and is expressive, from the choice of music to the tempo, shaping of the phrases, and indeed individual notes.
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Spoken like a person who has never performed music. Every musician worth his salt creates a new and original interpretation of the composer's music. Even the amateurs gathered around the parlor piano were doing something creative within the framework of the composition.
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Performance and creation were always tied together whenever people got together to perform music. Families would invent new verses for songs, making games out of it.
This tradition was alive in the Boy Scouts when I was a kid. Constant exposure to music is the same as constant exposure to a language - you're going to pick it up and begin to express yourself in it whether you're trying to or not. Having strong roots in performance of other people's music can only encourage creating your own. It won't neces
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To quote Col. Potter, "Horse hockey!"
Nowadays, instruments are cheap and ubiquitous. With a midi board and GarageBand, you can come up with almost anything you can imagine.
I, for one, am terrible with transcribing music. Like my father I'm the "play by ear" type - I need to hear it to play it. So when I come up with a tune, I put it all together in GarageBand with the simple midi instruments. Once I feel I've got it to the right basic sound, timing, etc. then I get on real instruments and record it.
As for p
Re:The have fought and lost (Score:5, Insightful)
Good thing we have sheetmusictorrent.
Actually it looks like John Philip Sousa's prediction was correct. We Don't sit-around home pianos in our parlors listening to somebody music
No we do it in Karaoke bars.
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Good thing we have sheetmusictorrent.
Actually it looks like John Philip Sousa's prediction was correct. We Don't sit-around home pianos in our parlors listening to somebody music
No we do it in Karaoke bars.
And Guitar Hero and the like.
Not to mention that, in addition to those that these games inspired to pick up an instrument, it's always been popular (at least over here) to learn guitar or an instrument.. (which more often than not, lies forgotten shortly after said studies are finished or interrupted, until a new generation picks it up).
Re:The have fought and lost (Score:4, Insightful)
A guitar are for picking up chicks in high school and college, it always have been, it always will be. The difference between a professional and an amateur is that the professional keeps picking up high school and college chicks until he gets to old to rock out.
Re:The have fought and lost (Score:5, Funny)
the professional keeps picking up high school and college chicks until he gets to old to rock out.
Wooderson: That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.
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just pray they never get younger...
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It is enjoyable to listen to the music I like the most, but it is totally passive and selfish. Singing in a group, or beside the woman I loved at the piano, is by far the more cherished experience. If I had to choose, I'd choose the latter. It makes memories, while the former does not.
Re:The have fought and lost (Score:4, Insightful)
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He'll go where most of the obsoleted employees go: Into the factories which specialize in unskilled labor.
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Does it really count as a job when you haul it one six-pack at a time, and do it internally?
Re:The have fought and lost (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it interesting that gathering around the piano to sing music was used as an argument against recording technology, yet today they would consider it public performance and demand royalties. (At least that's the direction things seem to be heading.)
Re:The have fought and lost (Score:4, Interesting)
Sheet music is possibly the most *highly* guarded copyright work that I've ever had to deal with. It's unbelievable, the licensing behind it.
Ya, but that may be due to the fact that it's so easily reproducible. You can actually copy it with pencil and paper. I remember that days of "unlicensed" fake books. Sure they were a violation of copyright, you couldn't be considered a "real" musician without a few.
Re:They have fought and lost (Score:2)
The price reflects that. However, my most treasured music is on paper.
Do not forget the systematic abuse of the law. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The have fought and lost (Score:5, Informative)
lets not for get who is actually behind the MPAA - RIAA, these are the companies that need to be targeted and boycotted into changing their ways, purchase only 2nd hand media and do not purchase anything branded sony, why allow the fecktards to dictate Orwellian hardware DRM designed to take away rights not to stop piracy anymore.
Name and shame the companies as all the **AA trade group name is for is to protect the corporate globalists from bad press.
RIAA, CRIA, SOUNDEXCHANGE, BPI, IFPI, Ect:
# Sony BMG Music Entertainment
# Warner Music Group
# Universal Music Group
# EMI
MPAA, MPA, FACT, AFACT, Ect:
# Sony Pictures
# Warner Bros. (Time Warner)
# Universal Studios (NBC Universal)
# The Walt Disney Company
# 20th Century Fox (News Corporation)
# Paramount Pictures Viacom--(DreamWorks owners since February 2006)
============
If Sony payola (google it) wasn't bad enough to destroy indie competition you have this:
Is it justified to steal from thieves? READ ON.
RIAA Claims Ownership of All Artist Royalties For Internet Radio
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/04/29/0335224.shtml [slashdot.org]
"With the furor over the impending rate hike for Internet radio stations, wouldn't a good solution be for streaming internet stations to simply not play RIAA-affiliated labels' music and focus on independent artists? Sounds good, except that the RIAA's affiliate organization SoundExchange claims it has the right to collect royalties for any artist, no matter if they have signed with an RIAA label or not. 'SoundExchange (the RIAA) considers any digital performance of a song as falling under their compulsory license. If any artist records a song, SoundExchange has the right to collect royalties for its performance on Internet radio. Artists can offer to download their music for free, but they cannot offer their songs to Internet radio for free
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/4/24/14132 [dailykos.com]
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Re:The have fought and lost (Score:5, Insightful)
The RIAA (and later the MPAA,) have fought EVERY single innovation that even looks like it might possibly impinge on their clients' business turf, right up until it becomes overwhelmingly clear that they're actually preventing their client's from making more money than if they kept their head in the sand.
If it was up to the **AAs, we would be copying sheet music for our spinets with sharpened quill pens.
They are a creation dating from before the invention of democracy and all they have ever done is behave like it.
It's easy to persuade people into harming themselves, just play on their ignorance and pride, tell them that it "harms the economy" [slashdot.org] and they'll run miles for you.
About harming the economy. Whose economy? Mine or yours? (not you crovira, I'm referring to RIAA, MPAA etc.) Because from my perspective it seems to be a good deal. And if you're telling me that music or movies or even culture will stop to exist, I have a feeling you're just full of fucking shit and I'm willing to bet you any sum you want on the opposite. Now nobody in the industry would ever dare to make that bet since they know that they are just -- that's right -- full of shit.
Re:The have fought and lost (Score:4, Insightful)
Hate to break it to you, but I think this sort of thing is way more common than just being limited to these industries. Big business and/or unions have fought innovation that they see as being counter to their interests all the time. Case in point, the Postal Codes in Canada [wikipedia.org] - OMG all the mail sorters will be out of work!
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If it was up to the **AAs, we would be copying sheet music for our spinets with sharpened quill pens.
No... We wouldn't...
Quill pens would be deemed illegal as a circumvention device under the DMCA.
Copyrights are going to be forgotten (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's what Thomas Jefferson (found of the democratic party) and James Madison (author of the Constitution) said about it:
"Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.
"Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
Madison -
"But grants of this sort can be justified in very peculiar cases only, if at all; the danger being very great that the good resulting from the operation of the monopoly, will be overbalanced by the evil effect of the precedent; and it being not impossible that the monopoly itself, in its original operation, may produce more evil than good." Sounds like Mr. Madison was talking about RIAA.
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I already provided citations yesterday. As my profs were fond of saying, "It's not my fault you weren't here." Just google Harvard and "5000 downloads one lost sale" for study number one.
Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten (Score:5, Insightful)
And their Copyright Act of 1790 said the following:
- for the encouragement of learning
- limited term of 14 years with 14 year extension if the *original* author was still alive
- libraries, colleges, and private individuals were not subject to the copyright (i.e. fair use)
- was only for expensive works like books, not incidentals like maps or charts
This is the kind of copyright law we should have today, not the perpetual copyright that lasts ~100 years (five generations). When the original laborer who created the work dies, then the copyright should die as well. As Jefferson said "the Earth is for the living not the dead," and laws exist to serve the current generation not previous generations.
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The copyright term should be fixed. Otherwise, considering the moral quality of most music and film producers, belligerent artists who fail to cooperate might find themselves knocked off and the big companies could then publish their works under the public domain.
Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten (Score:5, Interesting)
Good point. The original "14 years" was derived by looking at actuarial tables, and determining how long the average artist lives after his creation. In 1790 the average was 13 years, 8 months..... today it would probably be longer..... still it was tied to the original creator's lifespan, not perpetual.
So that means Mickey Mouse, which was created in 1928, should now be public domain.
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- was only for expensive works like books, not incidentals like maps or charts
The production of a quality map or chart has a higher cost than the production of a work of fiction. Either copyright should apply equally to all works, or it should apply to none, for basing it on the cost of creation of the work is impossible to do fairly. Otherwise, I agree wholeheartedly with what you have said. Copyright as we know it today is a leech sucking creativity out of entertainment, and replacing it with profit.
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>>>The production of a quality map or chart has a higher cost than the production of a work of fiction
Yes TODAY it's more expensive, but that wasn't the case in 1790 when this law was passed. Running off a map lithograph on your printing press was trivial compared to the labor required to typeface an entire book, letter-by-letter. Copyright was later extended to maps/charts/sheetmusic in the 1890s.
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Ideally a copyright would be exactly the bare minimum that was required to get the author to create his work
Why is it that one question is always forgotten when talking about copyright incentives. And that would be, "Do we need to have that specific work created in the first place?". Do we need xxxxx number of songs produced yearly, or could we make do with less, in favor of spending more resources elsewhere instead.
Always remember that the real cost of copyright is the reduced spread of information. Sure, we may get more information produced, but the total spread of that information goes down. Is the information
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I agree with short copyright but making it based on the life of the author is a bad idea. First of all, and this is the most obvious drawback, it encourages murder. Secondly, it's not well suited to handle works made by multiple people (a subset of this being a corporation).
wow what a great quote (Score:3, Insightful)
that's pretty much the conceptualization of cyberspace, versus "meatspace", the real world, where if you own a car, and someone takes it, you've been deprived of a car: genuine stealing, as opposed to "stealing" digital content, which isn't stealing at all
we talk about how you can effortlessly copy a file and move it anywhere in any quantity at no difference in cost, and you would think this instantaneous sharing of digital content is some newfangled philosophical challenge brought about by the latest techn
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you would think this instantaneous sharing of digital content is some newfangled philosophical challenge brought about by the latest technological innovation..... and here's this guy from [almost 250] years ago... pretty much nailing the issue on the head. Man those founding fathers were smart
QFT (quoted for truth). The internet is just a new method of spreading ideas. Before the internet, it was radiowaves, and before radiowaves it was books, and before books it was stone tablets. The technology has changed but not the underlying foundational principle. Ideas are infinitely reproducible and can be spread to many, without depriving the original owner of his creation.
i guess al gore has to step aside: thomas jefferson conceptualized the internet! ;-P
+1 Funny.
Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten (Score:5, Interesting)
As Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, "To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt."
I think copyright, and IP law in general has a legitimate and defensible purpose. That said, IP policy is essentially made without any regard to facts (you could argue that about a lot of policy, but in IP it's particularly bad). The fact that one can violate copyright law so easily, without intending it, and the fact that so much stuff of so little value is copyrighted, as well as really old stuff, breeds contempt of copyright law altogether.
The legitimacy of copyright law might be salvaged by cutting down the length of terms drastically, or otherwise changing the policy so that it is actually sensible. Barring that, though, as long as some written works from 1924 are still copyrighted, can you really blame people for thinking the whole thing is ridiculous?
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For software, I can see legit reasons to want to keep source under wraps for the duration of the copyright. So how about a compromise? If you want copyright protection, a full copy of the source code must be provided to the Library of Congress to be released after the copyright period expires. Combined with a reasonable copyright term, say, 10 years, this sort of thing should work fine. I still have install media that works for 10 year old OSes and computers that can run them. I agree about music/movies tho
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You are probably right, but as long as the laws remain on the books some of these people are going to get the occasional very nasty surprise when they find out, the hard way, that copyright really does exist and really does affect them. Five years ago I naïvely thought that there would be a huge backlash against the RIAA lawsuits, and that would force a revision of the laws involved. It never happened, and now I am not convinced that it will ever happen.
Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten (Score:5, Insightful)
Heh. When you manage to write three consecutive sentences without the use of the word 'fuck' we'll talk about you being allowed to call other people's posts 'drivel' again, okay?
Of course he's a troll but let's get over the same old arguments again, shall we?
Isn't it true that today, you don't need to be tech-savvy to get media for free? Is it not true that even if you had to be tech-savvy, EVERYONE knows someone who is?
If it therefore were true that, with media illegally being available for free, everyone would stop paying for it, then there couldn't possibly be any music recording studio or movie company left. Today.
The fact remains that only socially inept assholes don't pay for entertainment they enjoy (or people who don't have the money anyway). Those people always have the drive to smooch off of someone else. The technology has never mattered and will never matter. Those people don't pay, no matter the DRM. They are not lost sales due to P2P, they are lost sales, PERIOD.
There will always be people creating entertainment without getting rich in mind. Those are, arguably, the good entertainers. So I say kill copyright. Perhaps then the only thing remaining will be stuff that isn't the same old shit over and over again. After all, without any direct monetary incentive, those media conglomerate bastards just might not see the point in producing shit anymore. One can always hope, eh?
Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten (Score:5, Funny)
One of the underlying questions is: with the millions of hours of music we already made, what benefit does it bring us to have even more music?
If you're a 80's music fan, then you already have everything you need ;-)
Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten (Score:5, Interesting)
There is still "80s" sounding music being created now. In fact, I am listening to my Modern 80s playlist on iTunes now. There are a lot of bands out there today that are doing a very good job of writing songs that would have been right at home in 1983. Music is constantly changing and reinventing itself (although you would never know it from listing to most of the RIAA pablum), so there is alway new and interesting music to discover, even if you are primarily interested in nostalgia, like the music of the 80s.
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I would also be interested. So many awesome bands seem to perpetually languish in obscurity.
Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten (Score:4, Funny)
"What's with these new bands? Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974, it's a scientific fact!"
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They made music in the '80s? I thought the music died when that plane crash took Buddy Holly, et. al.
Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten (Score:5, Insightful)
"Without copyright how... do you think movies, music, games and software are going to remain viable endeavours?"
The answer is: the same way they did before and are doing now. "Piracy" is at its highest, if statistics are to be believed, but so are profits of all the above - in fact the proportions are greatly in favour of vastly *more* money being made now even with higher piracy. Movies, music, games, software = multi-billion dollar industries. One of the top-40 hits in the UK at the moment is by someone who sang along to YouTube vids. *With* copyright enforcement, she would be nothing now (and probably owe several thousand pounds of licensing fees), and we'd be at least one artist down. She's not the first and won't be the last. Most musicians give away or sell their music every day without a problem. It's only the "big" ones that do so for enormous profit and are *actually* represented by these organisations.
I have a friend who is in a relationship with a professional rapper. They don't make much money but they make enough. And all their music is just sitting on Myspace. It's got a Paypal button to let you buy a CD, but their stuff is original, good and given away on YouTube, MySpace and other sites. I don't think they've suffered under the current rates of piracy - I think they'd be nowhere without the exposure that giving their music away brings them.
It works both ways and it is, basically, an artform, not a business. It's like saying "without blue paint, how can artists thrive?!"... they did, for thousands of years, and still do and still would if all the blue paint disappeared. We didn't need blue-paint rationing, or companies telling us that blue paint is the express domain of artists, etc. Copyright is merely a tool to commercialise an artform. There are many ways of doing that, including just giving the damn things away to build a reputation to later release a real piece of art for huge profit.
And, unfortunately, copyright works both ways. If I want fair-use snippets, if I want to license them, if I want to do other things, there's no reason to stop me or make it prohibitively expensive - it's poor business. Ever tried to do this "officially"? Try and ask permission from a record company to use a song on a YouTube vid, or in a school play - see what assurances and what pricing structure they want to give you (I have, in the past, been quoted "per viewer" figures!). It's nothing to do with business, it's about controlling the media so that they can *tell* you what to buy next week (i.e. their next "up-and-coming" artist).
Copyright is already seriously lessened. Children are taught by otherwise-educated teachers to just "paste in something from Google images" which is a potential breach of so many copyrights in an hour's lesson that it's unbelievable. School plays are run off someone's iPod where they've downloaded relevant music and video. Kids share videos, music, ringtones, applications, etc. indiscriminately. It's already a lost cause unless you want to start criminalising everyone from toddlers to grannies. Give it a few decades and it will swing one way or another - you won't be able to make a piece of music without "enforcing" everything to do with it, or you won't be able to sell a piece of music at all. Both are absolutely terrible circumstances, but because of naive business practices, the artform is dying.
I should feel sorry for the smaller artists, for whom copyright is designed to help thrive, but in actual fact they are doing quite well enough on their own and will probably be the winners in the end. I think they've got the tech that replaces the need for the legislation now, so I wish them well. Music, especially, is part of life now. There were several decades of being able to commercialise that and almost every country in the world decided it was better to penalise that instead. Hence, the position now is that people really don't care any more. I don't know anyone who bought *every* song on their iPod.
I've bought t
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Don't need movies - it's all mindless drivel. Totally mindless. Hollywood pumps out the sludge by the score, but they can't make more than one movie per year that's actually worth watching. I'm not sure that they can even make that one.
We could do with less music, but music will not die. There will always be little bands playing in bars, weddings, you name it. If people really want music, they'll pay for someone to perform. Meanwhile, millions of people play music just because they love music. We DO_
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The way things are going, it looks like you're right. They're going to be completely forgotten, right about the time people start completely forgetting their moral obligation to pay the artist. That's right about the time that culture will (almost) completely be wiped out.
So true, look at how there was no culture at all before copyright.
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Oh, you mean where there was no such thing as recordings, artists couldn't play beyond their very immediate area, and only the obscenely wealthy could actually influence art? Oh yeah, that was a cultural renaissance.
Of course, it was a cultural renaissance, just like a single flower poking out of a huge pile of dung is renaissance compared to what came before.
It completely escapes me why people assume that then and now are at all equivalent, or even why then was, in any respect, comparable to what we have n
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IP holders are a culture unlike any the world has seen before. Fortunately, we have antibiotics. That culture can be destroyed.
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Since neither RIAA nor the lawyers seemed obliged to control themselves, then we need laws to do it for them.
- The law should exempt libraries, colleges, and individuals from copies made for personal use.
- The law should fine the RIAA $100,000 and the lawyers $1,000 each for cases brought before a judge, and then later dropped when the case is not going their way. Consider it a "court usage fee" to compensate the government for time/dollars wasted.
- And finally the law should forbid the use of extortionate
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>>>they need the permission by snail mail. YIkes!
Well that's really fair to the original artist. He gets about 1 penny per song sold, but must spend 40 cents mailing-out permission forms to let people use his songs in college or high school.
I suppose one solution is to tell the students, "If you insist upon a piece-of-paper then you're going to pay for it. 40 cents for postage plus 40 cents for paypal fees. Make it an even 1 dollar. -OR- Just take this email as your permission. Your choice."
Sousa was right. (Score:5, Insightful)
Recording technology and radio obliterated small-scale performances and local music. They still exist, obviously, but have nowhere near the cultural prominence or respect that they once did.
Re:Sousa was right. (Score:5, Insightful)
Recording technology and radio obliterated small-scale performances and local music. They still exist, obviously, but have nowhere near the cultural prominence or respect that they once did.
Yeah, after reading the Sousa piece it was shockingly levelheaded and highly rational. He even admits he's an alarmist and that he has a biased view because of his personal stake in this. The last paragraph included in the Ars image is downright prophetic:
It cannot be denied that the owners and inventors have shown wonderful aggressiveness and ingenuity in developing and exploiting these remarkable devices. Their mechanism has been steadily and marvelously improved, and they have come into very extensive use. And it must be admitted that where families lack time or inclination to acquire musical technic, and to hear public performances, the best of these machines supply a certain amount of satisfaction and pleasure.
He almost sounds like a cautious promoter or early adopter himself! Unsurprisingly the Ars article only gives us the first sheet of a lengthy opinion that can be found here [phonozoic.net]. Good reading to realize that these debated issues today are nothing new.
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You don't get out much, do you?
Where I live there is live music available somewhere in the town every single day of the week. In fact, I went to a music festival Sunday that was going on all weekend long. I believe it was called Rocktoberfest [charlestoncitypaper.com] and had 98 local bands?
What you're seeing is natural competition for people's time that every source of entertainment from naval gazing to youtube, to video games, to movie theaters.
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I do get out (and play out) just fine, thank you. :) There's music being played and heard, certainly. Just the same, when was the last time you were walking down the street and saw a family sitting on their front porch playing and singing together?
Re:Sousa was right. (Score:5, Funny)
We keep our ASCAP and BMI site-license agreements posted on the refrigerator. It's only annoying when the auditors show up to sample set lists and expect to stay for dinner. Awkward.
and he was right (Score:4, Insightful)
There was John Philip Sousa in 1906 warning that recording technology would destroy the US pastime of gathering around the piano to sing music
you got to admit it, the guy predicted that correctly!
The others referenced in the summary, not so good. The music industry didn't implode after cassette tapes appeared, there's no reason to think the movie industry will implode now bittorrent's appeared either.
Re:and he was right (Score:4, Funny)
No he wasn't (Score:2)
Consider the number of pianos then and now.
Then add in the number of guitars, bass buitars, synth's, horns, every kind of drum; we have more musicians alive now than have lived before, PERIOD.
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I call bullshit. OK, the world population has literally quadrupled since then, so that might make you right in spite of yourself. But 100 years ago, lots of people who didn't even own a piano still learned how to play one. Plus there were all the people who played fiddle or harmonica or acoustic guitar, or played in the kind of band that Sousa wrote music for (a large enough market that sheet music was big business). Also, someone who playe
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Might or might not be true...
However, music is no less a part of our lives since the recording industry started up. It might be more so even if the recording industry made music a more specialized profession.
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Consider the number of pianos then and now.
Then add in the number of guitars, bass buitars, synth's, horns, every kind of drum; we have more musicians alive now than have lived before, PERIOD.
I think you are making a mistake in this analysis. There are probably more musicians alive now then ever before. There are also more men, women, Chinese men, English women, etc. But unlike commonality of men (still about 1 to 1 w.r.t. women), the commonality of musicians playing live in small venues has decreased. And you know that the practice of gathering around the piano (or its modern equivalent, the "buitar") to sing with family or friends has receded. Do you do it at your house? If you do, I bet
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In particular, small gatherings among friends t
I can think of one! (Score:4, Insightful)
"I cannot think of a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries."
DRM!
Oh, wait...
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I can't think of any significant innovations, but I can think of benefits. Copyright industries have helped thousands of artists support themselves exclusively on their art, and distributed their works worldwide. They've nurtured the concept of a "star", and helped millions of others aspire to become an artist themselves. Not that it was ever uncool before (as far as I know), but now, with the number of hopefuls and wannabes, we're simply spoiled for choice.
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By offering them voluntary contracts and trades respectively to help distribute between the two groups. How terribly evil of them.
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"I cannot think of a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries."
DRM!
Oh, wait...
I guess it did provide some jobs to develop, e.g., HDCP. I'd be hanging my head in shame if it were me, though. ("My children were starving, their clothes threadbare") And its various ancestors, like error tracks, serial port dongles, little slide-rule-like spinny code-wheel things. I guess the spinny-wheel was pretty cool compared to the rest of the examples.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Systematic copyright indoctrination (Score:4, Interesting)
I just placed an order for the "Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars" book. I am looking forward to reading it.
I think that we've discussed it before, but there has also been 100 years of systematic indoctrination about copyright in our schools. In grad school I listened to an outside speaker come in and say that the institution of copyright was created to make sure that companies make money. She believed that, too, as that is what "common knowledge" now says copyright is.
The hysteria is very, very deep. Now when you try to explain the Constitutional reasoning behind copyright you only get blank stares and laughs.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, common knowledge is not always correct, particularly when there's some uncommon prerequisite knowledge involved (e.g. slightly more advanced economics). Sometimes, you simply have to swallow information you don't understand. For example, I don't let the fact that I don't really know how a internal combustion engine works stop me from driving to uni.
Sousa had a point (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you heard the "quality" of "singers" we've (over-)produced in the last 10 years??? Pick an episode, any episode, of Saturday Night Live from the last 10 years. NO ONE sounds live the way they sound on recording. I know what you're thinking: Beyonce. Fine. You're right. Pick another one. Can you?
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Bob Dylan sounds just as crappy live as recorded!
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I don't know about SNL, but Chris Cornell sounds pretty similar live and on recording. David Draimen from Disturbed does, too. I've seen live footage of The Black Eyed Peas, and they seem to do pretty well.
What's being ignored (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of those things did significantly change entertainment. Even things like VHS tapes had a major impact on revenues. The studios managed to adapt but the independents took a hit. Now that things started to get better cheap equipment flooded the market with cheap crappy films so they took their hardest hit yet. All of those innovations put together haven't impacted the industries like the internet. With near unlimited bandwidth and an army of people able to crack most any security measures the dam has quite literally broke. People complain about how expensive things are but if you factor in inflation album prices are flat whiles sales numbers drop. Music was overpriced for years but inflation did finally catch up. Movie ticket prices were around $3 in the 70s but you could also buy a nice car for $5,000. A Corvette may have set you back 7K or 8K. The point is some things have gone up far more than entertainment. A bounced check would have run you a $1 back in the 70s where as now it's $35 to $45. A hospital room was around $150, just for the room, now it's $1,500 or more. In many ways entertainment is a bargain. Greed isn't the factor everyone claims it's changing attitudes of consumers. They want more stuff and their incomes have been flat for a decade or more. If you take an iPod you want everyone accepts that as stealing but if you download a movie or song you want hey it's just 1s and 0s. No harm no foul. It's this perception that has changed. Unfortunately content takes money to produce just like iPods so it will affect what's out there. You can have government funding but that means higher taxes and the government decides what you see and listen to. There's the free market but that's what most are rebelling against. Take away the money and you are left with what fans make in their garages. I keep hearing fans can do it better but virtually everything I've seen is poorly written, silly acting and poor production values. Digital effects have improved some of them but a lot of those are pros doing it in their spare time and often with access to studio equipment. If it takes 50K or 100K in equipment how many films will get made when people are doing them in their spare time with a normal day job? As people want more and more expensive toys with their incomes stagnant they will keep cutting corners to buy the toys and the easiest corner they see to cut is downloading rather than buying content. Unfortunately that new iPod may not be as bright and shiny if there's no content to load on it.
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Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Theft: Removing something that wasn't in your posession, in order to have the advantages for yourself and accepting that you are depriving somebody else from their advantages.
Embezzlement: Removing something that was in your posession but not yours, in order to have the advantages for yourself and accepting that you are depriving somebody else from their advantages.
Copying (music, video, software etc.): Making a copy of something, in order to have the advantages yourself, without depriving anybody else from
Money for nothing and your chicks for free (Score:4, Interesting)
I know this comment (http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1402013&cid=29730503) was an angry troll, but he voices the fear of the copyright industry perfectly just the same.
Copyright is a secondary aspect of art. It is the performance and the original art that people want to see. I can get a copy of a Van Gough at WalMart for $9.99, but the original is priceless. I can download Jethro Tull's entire music collection off the internet for free and I would still pay more than $100 a ticket to go to a concert lasting between 1 and 2 hours. Some movies I will want to see at the theater, others on DVD, others on TV and still others not at all.
The point I'm trying to get at is this -- people who will pay, will pay and it doesn't matter how much or how little protection there is. Should there be some? Yeah -- because there are people out there who will try to make a business out of copying things for sale and that's not fair either. (I speak of REAL pirates... the bootleggers who sell copies as though they were real) But these copyright industrialists have taken things too far. Their industry is based on the creative works of others and have indeed resulted in the suppression and ruination of creative works.
And people will ALWAYS want to create music and perform the arts whether there is much if any money in it at all. It is a natural drive in we humans. These practices weren't initially driven as a for-profit activity. They did it as a form of self expression and as a means of entertaining those around them. It is the greedy copyright industrialists who are trying to bottle up the hearts and souls of the creative and expressive to make money. What's worse is that the greed is a disease that people quite often catch for themselves turning creatives into greedy creatives.
I liken the difference to people who become doctors and nurses. Some do it because they feel they have a need to help people. Some do it because a lot of people in the medical industry live in really big houses and own a lot of things. Unfortunately, it's a lot more difficult to tell the difference between the real doctors and nurses and the ones who are just in it for the money, but I dare you to make an argument for going to a doctor who is in it for the money instead of the one who is in it for the good of humanity.
The only business that is ever threatened by improved technologies are those that need to be left behind. This article puts it out nicely and shows how long this game has been going on. DAT was an excellent technology and really would have been nice but the copyright industrialists pretty much ruined it. HDMI is a nice interface for media playback devices, but it too is a bit buggered in the name of the "money for nothing" industrialists. The average joe on the streets may never fully appreciate the damage and harm caused by the copyright industrialists, but stories like these are important when trying to show it to them and showing how incredibly bad the copyright industrialists are.
The copyright industrialists don't even KNOW they are bad. The greedy don't even know they are greedy. They simply want what they want and will do a great deal to get it. The difference is that they are willing to harm others to get what they want while the average joe is willing to work for his pay. I think when you boil it down to the question of whether or not someone is willing to harm others for profit, that is probably the best way to determine if someone is "bad" or not. (There are tow truck drivers who will respond in an emergency to assist. There are tow truck drivers who are set up to tow the vehicles and hold vehicles for usurious ransom. The difference is pretty clear.)
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It just goes that way. (Score:2)
This really isn't something that only exists in communications. If there were a huge market for hygienic corn cobs, you'd have heard that toilet paper caused rectal tumors or that improper squatting stunted the growth of children. This is just the way of business. When someone gets close to your bread and butter you squeal.
Quality keeps declining (Score:2)
Do we have anything as good as Beethoven symphonies yet?
What about even approximating Wagner, or Bruckner?
As we become able to produce more and more quantity, it seems quality declines.
Something to ponder.
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Can you even name a few contemporary orchestral composers? If not, I suggest that you have no ability to speak toward their relative "quality."
Player Pianos (Score:2)
Re:Copyright is not about innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
DVD invented as a data storage medium by a consortium of computer companies including Sony, and extended to store movies the consortium was founded by Computer companies and the movie companies joined it later ....
Blu-Ray were invented mostly by Sony, as a data storage medium - the Movie companies (including Sony's movie division) only got involved when the standards for movie formats for these discs were being decided ....
So Sony has divisions which deal in Movies and Music, and divisions which don't ... and they work together when they need to ... but it does not mean the Copyright industries innovate ...
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By definition, a "copyright industry" would be an industry that produces copyrighted works. Such industries would not necessarily be creating "innovation in either the creation or distribution of works" and to suggest so is disingenuous.
You base your whole argument on a deliberate misinterpretation of his words. We both know that he's talking about the various legal departments and bureaucratic machines that exist solely to manage the copyrights of artists and performers, not the wider music and film industry as a whole, or particular companies that it is comprised of. I'm not championing his point, though I do happen to agree with it. I'm merely pointing out that if your best response is to pedantically point out that companies spearheadi
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When the highest price you are willing to pay is ZERO, the "quality" doesn't matter.
So the "problem of perfect copies" is really a big fat red herring.
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Never. But was it actually common in 1906? I doubt it. Pianos aren't inexpensive, and have never been inexpensive.
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When was the last time you gathered around the family piano to sing?
Never, thank God, and you would thank God too if you had ever heard me sing.
I was in choir in high school, because I had to be in *something* for that period. They didn't let me actually sing. I stood at the back and mouthed the words. I thank Edison for sound recording every time I'm foolish enough to raise my voice in what, by default, must be called song because it's not authentic enough for a donkey's bray.
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I would not lend Michael Bay $1 to make a movie, let alone give him $20M
Really? I would, for the same reason the film industry is booming - a two- to three-year turnaround and you triple your money, plus masses of royalties for as long as people want to watch massive blockbusters.