RIAA’s New Tune
The RIAA has a new strategy for combating the behavior that they insist on absurdly analogizing to having armed gunmen show up on board your ship and threaten to murder you unless you hand over cargo to them. Instead of suing music fans, they’ve worked out some kind of deal whereby Internet Service Providers are supposed to act as their enforcers:
Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider’s customers making music available online for others to take.
Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.
It’s not at all clear to me why ISPs would agree to do this, but apparently they are. In a market where consumers had a wide array of ISP choices, I assume this would just cause people to migrate to an ISP that declined to take this sort of deal on. But at the moment, there are still few enough that it’s plausible both Comcast and Verizon will agree to the deal and then folks like me will have no choice. Meanwhile, as noted by TechDirt one thing missing here is any sign of due process:
But the biggest problem is the fact that this allows private organizations to judge users without any significant defense on their part. The stories of falsely accused file sharers are widespread at this point. IP address-based evidence is notoriously unreliable. Yet, the RIAA will be basing its notifications on such evidence. Sure, plenty of the IP addresses dug up by the RIAA are probably accurate, but we live in an innocent-until-proven-guilty world, and this does away with that completely.
And as ever, the misguided quest to eliminate non-commercial file duplication can only work by attempting to prevent utterly non-infringing behavior. I legally purchased Jens Lekman’s When I Said I Wanted to Be Your Dog some time ago. I had a copy on one of my laptops, and from there transferred copies to my iPhone and the external hard drive I use for backup. I wanted to listen to “Tram Number 7 to Heaven” earlier this week while working on a different computer. Under the circumstances, the easiest way of getting the song to my computer was to download a copy via a peer-to-peer file sharing service. This was, as far as I’m concerned, completely non-infringing — I’m a legitimate owner of the album — but it could have gotten someone ratted out to his ISP under the RIAA’s new plan.
Stuff like this around the margins aside, you can’t help but blame the RIAA. The rise of digital media and the internet has made the specific business record labels are in basically obsolete, but they have a lot of political capital and are using it to try to stay in business.
What I’ve never seen is a serious effort on the part of policymakers to articulate what policy problem it is they’ve been trying to address with internet-era revisions to intellectual property law. The Wall Street Journal’s writeup of the latest RIAA moves is accompanied by a familiar chart of falling album sales. But boosting album sales is not a legitimate public policy objective. Nor is boosting record company profits. Nor, even tough musicians themselves are a much more sympathetic claimant than record company shareholders, is boosting musician incomes. The purpose of intellectual property law is to protect the interests of consumers. I’ve never seen anybody attempt to argue that people aren’t forming new bands or recording new songs anymore. Nor have I seen anybody attempt to argue that it’s more difficult today to find new music to listen to than it was ten or twenty years ago. In fact, the reverse is the case. The very trends toward digitization and file-copying have made music much more widely available than it was in the past. There have been better times to be a record company executive, but there’s been no better time to be a consumer of music in the United States. Under the circumstances, it’s not at all clear what the policy logic is behind the belief that there’s an infringement “problem” that needs to be solved through stepped-up enforcement. The mere fact that infringement occurs is not a reason to believe there’s a problem since as long as the legal price of a song is far above the marginal cost of producing a copy, the socially optimal level of infringement is going to be well above the zero-infringement threshold the RIAA is aiming at.
And that’s even without considering the costs of enforcement and compliance.
So while it’s good to see the RIAA backing off lawsuit-mania, there continues to be no real evidence of a public interest in clamping down on noncommercial file sharing.
124 Responses to “RIAA’s New Tune”
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December 19th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
I believe the case has been made on your blog that the role of government is to protect the rights of the minority against the opinions of the majority.
I guess this only applies to gay marriage, and not intellectual property rights. Of course Lord Yglesias would not be a hypocrite on this issue.
I would also argue with this quote, because it is completely wrong:
December 19th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
In fact, this is another amazingly correct post of Matt’s.
In fact, the purpose of IP law is to protect not consumers, but the human race, by (supposedly) influencing the creation of new ideas and inventions and then allowing them to become public property after a specified period of time (well under 75 years, by the way.)
In fact, none of this has ever been established as true – either that IP law stimulates new inventions over what would have happened anyway, and certainly that ever extending the time period has done anything but slow the creation of new inventions.
There simply is ZERO evidence that IP law has any positive benefits whatsoever. It’s strictly an abstract concept that has negative real results.
December 19th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
I would also argue with this quote, because it is completely wrong:
The purpose of intellectual property law is to protect the interests of consumers.
No, that’s about right. Intellectual property law exists to incentivise the creation of new intellectual works. The opportunity to profit from their creation serves the purpose of providing consumers with new stuff to consume, which is in their interest.
The RIAA and their ilk have perversely distorted this original intention so that they now act as if the primary purpose of intellectual property laws is to give them the opportunity to make a profit, regardless of whether or not this is to the benefit of the consumer. This…does not go down well with a lot of people, including a great deal of the artists who are supposedly “protected” by the RIAA membership’s need to make a profit.
December 19th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
IP law exists for the enjoyment of the discover, not to protect the interest of the consumer.
I am sure that the artists had no opposition to getting paid by the RIAA. If they objected to the terms and conditions of the contracts they signed with their record label they could have negotiated or have gone indy.
December 19th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
What lots of people don’t seem to understand is the diffrence between Downloading music from P2P networks and uploading it.
When you download from someone, you’re not violating copyright. When you upload it, you are. The RIAA has gone to great lengths to blur the two concepts because in actuality they don’t want people uploading or downloading. But copyright only covers uploading.
Of course, there are some P2P networks that upload as you download, such as bittorent.
December 19th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Life, Liberty, and unlimited downloads of Abba.
December 19th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Yes, it’s a pretty darn good post – and this time Matt doesn’t hedge the truth with bullshit nods to elite opinion (like he does in his Russia posts).
Matt also got in a pretty good typo, “tough musicians”.
December 19th, 2008 at 7:27 pm
I believe the case has been made on your blog that the role of government is to protect the rights of the minority against the opinions of the majority.
Hah, that’s absurd. The government should protect appropriate rights for minorities, not any right they want. The government should not protect the rights of the minority of people who drive drunk to do so at the expensive of the majority who do not, for example.
December 19th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
then allowing them to become public property after a specified period of time (well under 75 years, by the way.)
Unless the owner of the copyright is a major multinational corporation, like – say – Disney. In which case it purchases influence and has its copyright indefinitely extended.
***
Touching on the point in the post, some major ISPs in Canada (like Rogers Cable) are now detecting peer-to-peer traffic among its customers and slowing their service. Except, as Matthew points out, there are a number of non-infringing ways in which people can use peer-to-peer. For instance, our national public broadcaster (the CBC) – in service of its function as a national public broadcaster – has begun to make available its programs online in bit torrent form. So you could be legally downloading a program, with the imprimatur of legitimacy of Canada’s national broadcasting network, no less, and find your internet service impeded by Rogers.
Helluva system.
December 19th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
As always, Congress does NOT protect the interests of the consumer.
Congress protects the interests of whoever last paid Congress off.
December 19th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
For a thousand years, English Common Law was that if you purchased something, it belonged to you. If you wanted to share it with your friends, that was your right as well.
Now a few hundred gray-haired, demonstrably corrupt whoring assholes in Congress want to change that. Because they were paid to do so.
You can argue the interpretations of the Law — just don’t pretend that there’s any moral case here.
We are a nation of 300 MILLION People — why do we allow ourselves to ruled/microcontrolled by a mere 300 or so of some of the most contemptible shitheads on this planet?
December 19th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Cutting off your service based on the RIAA’s ISP numbers is especially egregious given the ubiquity of wireless routers. If my neighbor doesn’t bother to encrypt his wireless connection, I could sponge off of it and download music all day long, and one day he’ll get his internet cut off through no fault of his own.
December 19th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Guess what? Comcast has been doing this, at least with regards to HBO (thus not the RIAA), for a couple of years.
December 19th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
So Matt, shall we all go to the store tomorrow and steal your book?
Shall we tell the bookseller you said it’s alright because they are part of an evil corporate machine, just like your publisher who, I presume, sends you checks once in a while?
And can we then scan your book, distribute free pdf and Kindle versions, mail it over to some lawless country were printers make bootlegs of it?
And will you tell the people at your publisher to sod off because as opposed to writers like yourself they’re a very disagreeable and parasitic bunch, that it’s not in the public interest to protect your or their rights and that despite piracy there are still plenty of writers around, so who cares?
December 19th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
According to the chart, album sales dropped after the dot-com bubble burst and they’re dropping again now. What do these two time periods have in common?
December 19th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Also, the lower album sales are largely the result of inventory changes.
Basically, the record companies have better metrics of album sales now, and send out fewer CDs and get fewer returns: What those numbers show is the fewer CDs being sent out.
December 19th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
And will you tell the people at your publisher to sod off because as opposed to writers like yourself they’re a very disagreeable and parasitic bunch, that it’s not in the public interest to protect your or their rights and that despite piracy there are still plenty of writers around, so who cares?
Yeah! If someone made Matt’s writing freely available on the internet, I bet he wouldn’t be so smug.
December 19th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
The mere fact that infringement occurs is not a reason to believe there’s a problem since as long as the legal price of a song is far above the marginal cost of producing a copy, the socially optimal level of infringement is going to be well above the zero-infringement threshold the RIAA is aiming at.
That’s an interesting way of putting it. There are (relatively) high fixed costs to producing music and essentially zero marginal costs. Presumably, there needs to be some way for the fixed costs to be recouped with profit from consumers; but once this is accomplished, it is socially optimal for the music to be freed. The problem is establishing a mechanism by which profit can be realized with the least restriction on access. I’ve never heard someone argue that the best way to accomplish this is to simply let a certain amount of infringement happen, but that seems to be what Matt is saying here.
It might work! Make file sharing of copyrighted work illegal, but completely decriminalized. Prudes, rich people, etc. will buy the songs, thus allowing profit, while young people and such who don’t have much money and don’t care much for laws will infringe, maximizing access. Consider it a tax on lawfulness.
(Kind of how the system works now, actually, minus the RIAA mob tactics)
December 19th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
It’s not at all clear to me why ISPs would agree to do this, but apparently they are. In a market where consumers had a wide array of ISP choices, I assume this would just cause people to migrate to an ISP that declined to take this sort of deal on. But at the moment, there are still few enough that it’s plausible both Comcast and Verizon will agree to the deal and then folks like me will have no choice
I think the ISPs are agreeing to it because they don’t want to be targeted in an RIAA suit. It’s happened before.
December 19th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
Commenter example (#5) says: “When you download from someone, you’re not violating copyright.”
WRONG. See, e.g., A&M Records v. Napster, 239 F.3d 1004 (9th Cir. 2001) (”Napster users who download files containing copyrighted music violate plaintiffs’ reproduction rights.”); BUG Music, et al. v. Gonzalez, 430 F.3d 888, 889 (7th Cir.
2005) (”[P]eople who post or download music files are primary infringers.”)
December 19th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
example (#5): Of course, there are some P2P networks that upload as you download, such as bittorent.
All of the P2P networks are both up and download networks. It’s built into their design as a way to improve throughput: distribute the bandwidth use and decentralize storage among many peers. A user can usually configure their client s/w to disable upload or download, but most do not.
If you use Bittorrent, LimeWire, or whathaveyou to grab a release of Linux (legal) or T-Payne (not), your client is grabbing pieces of the whole from a variety of other computers. Some of these systems may be the originator, but most are other people who’ve downloaded a copy before you.
I don’t agree with the new RIAA approach, since they’ve been prone to fingering the wrong people. However, I can see why they’d switch from suing individuals to talking ISPs into cutting connections. I can also see why ISPs would go along. P2P networks can be and often are enormous bandwidth hogs, especially if everyone and their uncle is leaving their clients running for a couple of days at a stretch.
Those portions of University networks attached to the dorms *really* feel the pain, and have been attempting to adjust.
December 19th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
JimboSlice, read the constitution. Article I, Section 7.
December 19th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Novakant brings up a good point Matt.
You’re the producer of a book that can be shared now.
P2P book sharing would reduce your incentive to write the book under some circumstances but more importantly, you are in a position to figure out exactly what those circumstances are.
Matt Yglesias could make a very completely filled-out anecdote about the relationship between an artist’s investment in a creative work and copyright protection of the payoff.
December 19th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
For completeness: on most P2P networks, the moment your client has finished downloading a predefined segment of whatever you’re looking for, it turns around and offers it up to other clients. Hence, if you’re downloading, you’re probably uploading as well, and therefore a potential lawsuit target.
For that reason, when my son got his first MP3 player, I made the following deal: pretty much free reign to hit the iTunes store, in exchange for taking a pass on P2P. If he goes P2P anyway, his system hits Craigslist. I run a PC-based router, so I can trust, but verify.
December 19th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
http://marketpublishers.com/lists/1673/news.html
December 19th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Re scythia’s comment “If someone made Matt’s writing freely available on the internet, I bet he wouldn’t be so smug.”
——————-
Er.. there’s actually some sinister organizations whose sole purpose is to buy books and share them with other people.
I don’t know of any that have bought Matthew’s book , however.
December 19th, 2008 at 9:38 pm
The RIAA is one of the primary reasons we’re saddled with a set of copyright laws I can’t even pretend to respect.
December 19th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Why should I read that? How does how a bill becomes a law apply to this situation at all? Are you suggesting the only reason we have IP laws is because people have bought off congress for the last 150 years?
BTW, as someone else noted before Lord Yglesias book is copyrighted, and is not available for free, he only makes the unedited drivel on his blog free….
http://books.google.com/books?id=-P6PnNuVE4AC&pg=PP1&dq=matthew+yglesias#PPA3,M1
Although the marginal cost of making this book free to download is close to zero.
December 19th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
Matt, I’ve been following you for years and usually value your take on policy, but your misrepresentation of IP law is stunning. It is beyond stunning, it is either willfully ignorant or dishonest.
Before you try to explain the purpose and function of IP law, perhaps you should do a bit of reading first or perhaps take a class on the topic. Seriously, you said that “The purpose of intellectual property law is to protect the interests of consumers.” I know a lot of IP lawyers and IP activists but I cannot think of a single one who would think that statement is accurate.
Your last post on the subject was very nearly as ignorant. Hint: RIAA has never suggested eliminating the existing fair use safe-harbors. Works that falls within those safe-harbors are not going to result in legal actions against users or distributors.
Why do you discuss policy in an area where you clearly don’t understand either the existing policies or the commonly proposed alternatives? Isn’t there a little voice in your head that says “perhaps I shouldn’t post this” when writing about policy topics you have never studied?
December 19th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
The statement that the RIAA has never suggested eliminating the safe harbors is simply wrong. Numerous record execs and others have suggested exactly that – that even making a BACKUP COPY of your media is infringement.
The record labels want total control of every single use to which you put your purchase – which means they want you to PAY for every single use to which you put your purchase. If you back it up, you PAY. If you copy it to another device, you PAY. If you don’t PAY, it just disappears after X amount of plays or time passes. If you do pay and the service requires updating and they decide to cut off the service, your purchase disappears (that has actually happened already for one service).
This is called EXTORTION in every other instance of law.
December 19th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
@Anthony Damiani
You blame RIAA for IP law? How does that fit with the fact that we had extensive IP laws for 100 years prior to the existence of RIAA (arguably, much more restrictive than current law), and all industrialized countries have broadly similar laws even though RIAA has no presence in most of those countries?
Why do you think IP is so complex? It is far more internally consistent and easy to understand that criminal law, tax law, contract law, etc.
The fact that millions of Americans break existing copyright law (and do not want to change that behavior), does not mean the law is too complex or that it is unjust. I am not suggesting that the current law is ideal, but suggesting that much of the heat on this issue is generated by people who are acting out of a combination of naked self-interest and ignorance of the existing laws.
December 19th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Actually his point is only slightly relevant.
To use the analogy of Matt’s book:
Can Matt object to a library that allows a patron to check it out for free?
Or a thrift store that sells a used copy?
Or a friend who passes it on?
No. These are clearly not copyright violations, and Matt or his publisher will not get their cut.
The problem with the RIAA’s definition of “intellectual property” is that it doesn’t behave like property. You can never truly own it. You can buy Led Zeppelin IV on LP, eight track, cassette tape, CD, and iTunes…but you’re just renting it.
Instead, it behaves more like the mafia. F@$% you, pay me.
December 19th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
Also…this:
I hate to point this out, but literacy precedes making money from book-selling by, oh, a couple thousand years. What was the incentive of those writers? Oh yeah…culture.
And that’s the ultimate goal of IP law. To provide a temporary economic incentive to create lasting cultural works.
December 20th, 2008 at 12:12 am
the RIAA cannot force me to buy a CD, and if they succeed in doing this thing with the ISPs then IT WILL BE A COLD FUCKING DAY IN HELL BEFORE I BUY A CD AGAIN, EVER.
There are so many ways for me to get the music I want. I can record an internet radio stream. I can record one of the many digital music channels on my satellite which I like a lot.
FUCK THE RIAA.
December 20th, 2008 at 12:14 am
utter bullshit. They have steadily chipped away at fair use to the point that they even consider making a mix CD for one’s enjoyment, an infringing use.
yes,they pay lip service to fair use. But in practice, they have worked hard to make fair use as narrow and meaningless as possible.
December 20th, 2008 at 12:16 am
Put aside the sub-Petey shite, and you have in Slice yet another person proud to be completely fucking ignorant of the history of copyright.
How does that fit with the fact that we had extensive IP laws for 100 years prior to the existence of RIAA (arguably, much more restrictive than current law)
Really? That must explain why Charles Dickens had to give reading tours in order to make money from his work in the US. The US used to be the home of one kind of copyright arbitrage, in which renewable fixed-terms took precedence over European life-of-the-author terms, which suited American publishers just fine in a period where they profited from knockoffs. In the era of recorded music and movies, all that changed for some strange reason.
December 20th, 2008 at 12:26 am
The problem is the concept of IP itself. A simple glance at who’s leading the Bitchfest about it shows why: on paper IP is supposed to protect & encourage creativity, when in practice the only thing it encourages is extortion by people who don’t create anything.
Most musicians get virtually nothing from their recordings anyway. If you aren’t selling millions, usually that means you owe the label.
December 20th, 2008 at 1:19 am
@R€nato
Of course the RIAA has sought enforcement against reproductions that were, when litigated, found to fall within fair use. That is not the same as trying to get the safe-harbor laws changed. Most P2P sharing of recordings clearly does not fall within fair use under any of the existing legal precedents. They do not need to change the fair-use laws because the majority of these reproductions are already clearly illegal under current law.
@pseudonymous
There have obviously been changes to US copyright law over the last century. However, it is worth noting that widespread reproduction and redistribution of works that were protected by copyright (such as is currently done on P2P networks) would have been prohibited even under US laws in the nineteenth century. The protections would, however, be briefer than today and would require rights holders to explicitly register the work in the US. The major changes in copyright law since the 1960’s have been to make it easier for small/self publishers to gain copyright protections, to lengthen the time of protection, and to carve out explicit safe-harbors for fair use (rather than using precedent alone). Of those changes, only one benefits the RIAA, two arguably work against them.
The bottom line is that P2P file sharing in 2008 regularly violates existing copyright laws. Much of it would also have violated the laws as they existed in in 1908.
You can (and should) blame RIAA for fighting against proposed new, larger carve-outs for fair use, i.e., relaxing the copyright protections of music that would allow legal P2P sharing. However, the laws and standards for fair use that make P2P sharing illegal developed before P2P networks were imagined (and even before cassette tapes were common). For the most part, they developed before RIAA existed.
Just for the record, I am not defending the existing laws as workable in the modern world.
December 20th, 2008 at 1:21 am
@TLS: It is my belief that other countries have IP law despite the absence of the RIAA because they haven’t been given a choice. It’s been a priority in US trade negotiations for years, and adherence most of to the Berne convention is essentially mandatory for WTO membership– and the matter was only made worse with the WIPO Copyright Treaty. We couldn’t back out now if we wanted to, absent a herculean effort.
The fact that vast numbers of Americans ignore the law is prima facie evidence that something’s seriously wrong with it; they’re the ones from whom the legislative power is, in theory, derived. Any time you’re criminalizing a significant percentage of your population, and it still doesn’t solve the problem, you’re doing something seriously wrong.
I don’t pretend to have a genuinely good answer, but the hegemonization of copyright law is of extreme frustration to me, because it prevents the experimentation with and discovery of better options. At least with health care, we can look at how different countries do it, and compare the results. With IP law, we’ve made that essentially impossible.
December 20th, 2008 at 3:54 am
Great post – vintage MY. Of course, IP must be justified by benefits to the consumers and/or the wider public.
Now this:
Can we be a bit more precise about what has happened here? I agree that there’s lots of new music available, but it strikes me that it’s extremely unlikely that the “free download” era and associated lost revenues in the music business haven’t had some sort of upstream effect on the sorts of music that gets made, the amount of money-intensive resources available to new-ish bands, the type of musical careers that people try to live, etc. Is there something worth reading on this topic?
December 20th, 2008 at 4:14 am
Another point that needs to be mentioned is what Tori Amos calls “value”: do you value the music?
The answer she doesn’t give, because it would upset her, is: for most people, no.
That is, most people regard music and other art as add-ons to their lives. They really don’t have any artist’s appreciation of art. Plus, for most of human history, art was “consumed” by going to the place where the artist was and viewing or listening or whatever. Reproducible art didn’t exist until the advent of the press.
Take music. For centuries if you wanted to listen to music you found a musician and paid him to play. You were paying for his time and effort, not the music. As the Grateful Dead used to say, “The music’s free, the concert costs.”
For decades people listened to music in bars, pubs, music halls, etc. Then somebody invented reproducible music. Immediately thereafter some BUSINESS people, not artists, started reproducing music and distributing it – without, mind you, paying the artists. When the available store of free IP ran out, they started hiring artists as indentured servants to make more. Wallah! The music industry. They then regularly cheated those servants up until maybe the last decade or two when the artists started to get some clout.
Now the tables are turned, and technology has made reproducible music cost nothing. This is technology’s JOB – make things cheap – even free – and available as air. Just because your business model was dependent on obsolete technology – the phonograph record, before the reel-to-reel and cassette tape recorders, and the ability to rip CDs – doesn’t mean you have some moral or legal authority to change the laws to let you continue to get rich. The proper course of action is for you to go out of one business and go into another where technology allows you to make your monopoly profit.
Today that means subscription Internet broadcast of live (and pre-recorded live) performance. In other words, a return to the days when an artist’s revenue depended on his performances, not the reproductions of his performances. But today’s technology allows both: live performance, then reproduction of that performance as a loss leader for further live performances.
In Brazil, they have numerous bands who give live performances and sell CDs of their music for $1.50 to attract audiences to their live performances.
This is the future of the business.
And once again, it’s irrelevant what the law says because there is no way that music or other artistic downloading can be stopped by any known technological means or legal maneuvers.
First of all, there is no technology which can prevent copying and uploading art. As long as the art must eventually transfer from whatever medium to the eyes and/or ears of a human, it can be tapped at that point by at least one individual with the right equipment who will then be able to make a full-fidelity digital recording.
Once you have one such recording, distribution is impossible to prevent.
If you can’t stop the physical distribution of drugs and weapons, how do you stop the digital distribution of information?
The ONLY thing you can do is create a black market and drive up the price of the product by trying law enforcement. This is the lesson of all black markets. As long as there is a market for the product, it will be manufactured and delivered. Eventually the cost of the law enforcement will exceed the social value of whatever it is the law is trying to enforce.
Therefore, no amount of DRM, suing people, or ISPs tinkering with their customer’s data flows is going to change the situation one iota.
The RIAA is on the verge of admitting defeat. It will take five minutes for every P2P network on the planet to use encryption to defeat any amount of ISP surveillance. And most ISPs will not bother to try to defeat their customers use of their data flows.
And if they do try, well, entire new networks based on new data communications technologies that are not so controlled by the incumbents will arise, and the P2P traffic will move to them – as the old ISPs go out of business.
Go right ahead and try if you think this can be stopped. As Linus Torvalds described Bill Gates photo on the cover of Gates’ book, “The Road Ahead”: “Anybody standing in the road looks like roadkill to me.”
You’re either part of the steamroller or you’re part of the road.
December 20th, 2008 at 5:18 am
Can Matt object to a library that allows a patron to check it out for free?
Or a thrift store that sells a used copy?
Or a friend who passes it on?
No. These are clearly not copyright violations, and Matt or his publisher will not get their cut.
Oh please, these examples get trotted out in every single discussion on these matters and they’re absolutely useless. If you cannot see the fundamental difference between a library, a thrift store or lending a book and a P2P network which can distribute millions of copies identical to the original at the click of a button – then there is no basis for a rational discussion.
Most musicians get virtually nothing from their recordings anyway.
Most writers get somewhere between 5 and 10% of the cover price of their books (15-20% tops), that doesn’t make stealing books legal or moral.
The fact that vast numbers of Americans ignore the law is prima facie evidence that something’s seriously wrong with it; they’re the ones from whom the legislative power is, in theory, derived. Any time you’re criminalizing a significant percentage of your population, and it still doesn’t solve the problem, you’re doing something seriously wrong.
Goodness, should we allow speeding, driving while intoxicated or ignoring parking restrictions then? How about tax evasion, corruption or discrimination against women and minorities?
Seriously, I have my doubts about certain forms of copyright enforcement and think a discussion of copyright law and the music industry in the digital age can be worthwhile. But making extreme, disingenuous and nonsensical claims isn’t going to help, rather it will hurt those who bring forth genuine and rational concerns.
December 20th, 2008 at 5:46 am
If you cannot see the fundamental difference between a library, a thrift store or lending a book and a P2P network which can distribute millions of copies identical to the original at the click of a button – then there is no basis for a rational discussion.
The difference is that the library does a great thing and that filesharing can do a great thing even faster and more efficiently.
The societal benefits of super-efficient sharing of digital material are enormous. We should not deprive society of these benefits just so we can cling to an outdated model of how to get money into the hands of content creators.
What I don’t get, though, is why pro-copyright people want to talk about books and music. Great books and great music were produced as a matter of course long before copyright and would continue to be produced in large quantities even if we were to simply abolish copyright law. It just doesn’t cost that much to produce these things. Now, great movies and great television series – those things are genuinely expensive and it’s more difficult to see how they would be produced in a zero-copyright world.
Still, current copyright law is tyrannous and unacceptably restricts personal freedom. Upheaval in the world of television production would not be too high a price to pay for freedom.
December 20th, 2008 at 6:49 am
We should not deprive society of these benefits just so we can cling to an outdated model of how to get money into the hands of content creators.
So how do you want to get money into the hands of content creators? Or do you not care about them? Writing books and making music certainly isn’t free, it’s both a vocation and a full-time job and people want to be able to make a decent living. That’s hard enough or even impossible as it is, but depriving people of the fruits of their labour certainly doesn’t help.
December 20th, 2008 at 7:45 am
So how do you want to get money into the hands of content creators?
Not something I’m really concerned about when it comes to books and music. There are lots and lots of people writing books without having any serious income from it – people did so before copyright law, do so under copyright law and will continue to do so without copyright law. Enough people will, anyway. Some goes for musicians, though they can make some money with live performances.
But if we, as a society, do want to spend a bunch of money on supporting writers and musicians then there are surely more efficient ways of doing that with fewer middle-men than the current system which, as you say, makes it “hard enough or even impossible” for most of the people involved to make a living out of it.
But the most important point is that no-one has a natural right to a monopoly on copying things and trying to create and enforce such a right has led to unacceptable infringement of personal liberties. People naturally want to copy the stuff they have and share it with others – that’s a completely ridiculous thing to crack down on.
December 20th, 2008 at 8:09 am
Partly because ISPs want to be the marketer or market intermediary for the purchase of music and video. It’s in their own interest, too, to choke off the flow of file sharing. Verizon want to sell me music. Comcast want me to pay-per-view. Both would like me to pay to play on one of their video game channels.
Agreed that they’re sidestepping the whole issue of due process, but (and forgive me for extrapolating too much from MY’s argument), I think they can get around any First and Fourth Amendment issues by claiming that their terms of service agreement is “voluntary,” that you don’t have to use their service if you don’t like the rules they impose.
Heh, indeedy.
December 20th, 2008 at 8:39 am
I was under the impression that the entire reason, in the first place, that the RIAA was going with the lawsuits plan was because they couldn’t get the ISPs to cooperate with them to inflict punishment on their consumers at the RIAA’s say-so. So this looks like a pretty big step backwards, to me.
Unless, of course, the RIAA is stopping the lawsuits because they weren’t achieving their intended objective (serving as deterrent), and is making a show of trying to get the ISPs’ cooperation instead only for obligatory PR purposes (so the message isn’t “okay, that’s it, we give up!”), before they eventually fail at it once more. (What are the chances that this is actually the reality of the situation? Mr. Yglesias?)
December 20th, 2008 at 8:48 am
As for musicians’ income, anyone have some data on what proportion of it comes from concert tickets vs. album sales? I recall reading that the former makes up the vast majority of it, because barely any of the money the RIAA makes on an album actually gets sent along to the artists, but I can’t find where I read this.
December 20th, 2008 at 9:04 am
Re: If you wanted to share it with your friends, that was your right as well.
This isn’t quite the same as sharing. If I share a physical book or a physical CD with a friend, the item is no longer in my possession until it is returned.
Re: I hate to point this out, but literacy precedes making money from book-selling by, oh, a couple thousand years. What was the incentive of those writers? Oh yeah…culture.
Ancient bards were paid, at least in kind, for their work by wealthy patrons. Later, rulers paid to have oral works transcribed to papyrus and parchment for libraries, which had become a civic status symbol. When codexes (essentially, the first true books) were invented a small market for private book buying came into being, catering to the upper classes, and public readings at auditoriums would be oragnzied as well where everyone else could, for a small fee, hear works read aloud. Bottom line: people always expected to be paid for their artistic works.
Re: Any time you’re criminalizing a significant percentage of your population, and it still doesn’t solve the problem, you’re doing something seriously wrong.
Two words: Speed limits. There seem to be certain actions that the public thinks should be illegal (how many people would press for the complete repeal of speed limits?) but almost everyone will nevertheless violate those laws anyway.
December 20th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Please when insulting me pick to quote a statement that I actually made, otherwise you look like a complete idiot when I point out you were quoting TLS. But hey, please be completely fucking ignorant of who you are quoting pseudonymous.
December 20th, 2008 at 9:57 am
“Not something I’m really concerned about when it comes to books and music.”
Why stop at books and music? Why should we bother putting money into the hands of anybody who works for a living, regardless of what they do?
December 20th, 2008 at 11:13 am
The RIAA doesn’t work for a living. Most artists want nothing to do with them. They only survive because of government corruption not putting an end to the obvious collusion of recording companies and the formation of a defacto monopoly.
They are legalized scammers who survive entirely because of government corruption. They do not produce anything. They do not offer any kind of service. The bully people into working with them, and then steal almost all of their money.
December 20th, 2008 at 11:24 am
I forget who pointed it out first, but when you criminalize an activity in which the majority of young people take part, you create an environment in which they come to think of themselves as criminals. This can only have a negative effect on the rule of law.
The simple truth of the matter is that if the RIAA had figured out how to make a workable business model when the internet first became popular, we wouldn’t be in this mess. The fact that record companies weren’t out front on the new paradigm is their own damn fault. They thought the Spice Girls-Britney-Backstreet Boys era would last forever and that teen pop would be a major cultural force forever and that they thus could ignore other markets, but they were wrong. They could have used the internet to reach out to smaller subgroups that make up a greater whole – underground rap, indie rock, etc. – but they didn’t. The vast majority of albums I’ve bought over the past ten years were ones I downloaded first. It’s like watching a show on TV before buying a season on DVD (I could deal with advertising in CD inserts if it meant lower prices).
Also, you know why people download? BECAUSE CD PRICES ARE SO ARTIFICIALLY HIGH. If you don’t have a good indie record store near you and have only FYE, Virgin, etc. in your town, you can pay $20 per CD. The nearby indie rap store had El-P’s “I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead” for only $7.99. I haven’t seen Gnarls Barkley’s “The Odd Couple” anywhere for under $16. Guess which one I bought? You want to cut down on illegal downloading? Then cut CD prices. It’s that simple. Each individual CD costs very little to manufacture. The record labels focus their marketing dollars on a very narrow range of artists. CD’s can compete with free downloads because CD’s a reliable, you don’t lose your data when your computer crashes, etc. Free downloads made Americans savvier consumers, but the RIAA is still operating under the myth that they can force Americans into being gullible enough to buy every album with only one good song. That time is over and the market needs to allow groups like the RIAA to die, but regulatory capture keeps the RIAA on life support.
Also, illegal downloading allows culture to cross boundaries. China does not allow many foreign acts to sell their CD’s in China, yet many acts that are banned from selling, like Linkin Park, are huge in China because of downloads. Many bands have been able to make a decent amount of cash in China from concerts despite not being able to sell CDs there because of downloads.
December 20th, 2008 at 11:39 am
As for books, perhaps no book has been downloaded as often as the Harry Potter books. Last I checked, JK Rowling is doing pretty good for herself. Nobody is going to print out 300 pages on their own printer (too expensive), their office printer (too easy to get caught with that much paper), library printers/Kinkos (too expensive), etc. Kindles are never going to become as popular as iPods, especially since you can’t do to a book on a Kindle what you can on paper (make marginal notes exactly how you would like, etc.). The bigger problem is the rising cost of paper.
December 20th, 2008 at 11:42 am
novakant wrote: “So how do you want to get money into the hands of content creators? Or do you not care about them? Writing books and making music certainly isn’t free, it’s both a vocation and a full-time job and people want to be able to make a decent living.”
Copyright law is not designed to guarantee the distribution of money to content creators. Nor does it protect “content creators.” It protects rights-holders, who may or may not create anything, and allows them (again, allows not guarantees them) the ability to make money from their content.
Their ability to make money depends on the market, and if the market says that the content is essentially worthless (or, to be more accurate, worth less than it was during the analog era), then it’s going to be very hard to make money from it.
“Ancient bards were paid, at least in kind, for their work by wealthy patrons. Later, rulers paid to have oral works transcribed to papyrus and parchment for libraries, which had become a civic status symbol. When codexes (essentially, the first true books) were invented a small market for private book buying came into being, catering to the upper classes, and public readings at auditoriums would be oragnzied as well where everyone else could, for a small fee, hear works read aloud. Bottom line: people always expected to be paid for their artistic works.”
Sorry to mess with your historical conclusions there, but let me just bring up a single example of how cultural concerns trump (in a big way) any kinds of economic concerns when it comes to “artistic works.” And I’ll pluck my example from history, too:
The Bible.
The gospels in particular. Four similar books, some of which may have been based on a previous book (ie, derivative works), copied for centuries by hand (ie, copyright infringement).
And yet, the Bible is one of our culture’s most important “artistic works.” Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John weren’t paid for their efforts. (Indeed, it’s possible that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John didn’t even write those books. A handful of ancient authors must be burning from that snub.) The scribes who copied the works weren’t paid for their efforts. (Many of them were monks with their vows of poverty and silence and toiling for God’s glory.) The publishers of modern bibles have no qualms about reprinting these ancient words, or even updating them into modern language, such as the NIV.
Basically what I’m trying to say is that if “copyright” existed in ancient times, Christianity as we know it would not exist.
Now perhaps we should sacrifice culture unto the altar of commerce, but I don’t think that’s such a great idea. Culture wants to be free, despite all the wannabe industrialists who regard “artistic works” as little more than a product like toothpaste, bought and sold by the carton.
December 20th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Why stop at books and music? Why should we bother putting money into the hands of anybody who works for a living, regardless of what they do?
I’m fine with people paying other people to do something. You want to hire a band for your wedding? Great. Your company wants to commission a writer to write a book about the history of the company? Sure.
But if we do want to move money to writers and musicians beyond opportunities like that then there are any number of schemes that would do that without criminalizing productive, helpful and natural behavior.
December 20th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Also don’t forget that the music business and RIAA are not the only ones who are effected by copyright laws. I think the RIAA has made some bad business decisions pursuing their legal claims the way they have, but photographers (me); writers – that includes book authors as well as journalists, etc.; map makers; illustrators – they are all effected too. The big bad corporate music industry may be the most vocal and obvious, but lots of “little people” would be put out of business if IP laws were changed the way so many people here seem to want.
Also, to say that producing these things costs nothing is uninformed. The general business model is that there is a high up front cost (equipment, living costs while producing the work) that is then recouped by lots of relatively small future sales of the work. That’s the case in many types of photography as well as books and other mass media production. Sure some things would be created just because of the artistic satisfaction of creating them, but being a skilled author or musician is a full time job – there will definitely be a loss of quality if creators can’t regain the cost of that high-quality work through future sales.
And finally, someone who says that people don’t value music needs to do some introspection. When was the last time so many impassioned comments were made and so many expensive court cases fought over something people don’t value? Yes, music and other art is an add-on to life, but life would suck if it wasn’t there. Happy life = value.
December 20th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
To illustrate my point exactly, see the slide show here:
Photos of that quality require full time photographers, and somebody has to pay to keep them that way. IP law gives them the chance, if they choose to take it, to make some money and the work that they create provides value to society that wouldn’t otherwise be there.
December 20th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Eric: You are missing the point of IP law. Whoever first creates the IP has the right to do with it what they want.
If they work for a firm and have signed a contract that all IP created goes to the firm, then the individual has decided they want the firm to have it.
If that individual decided they want to work for free and give their IP to society for free, then they have that right too, and they should not sign that contract with the firm.
IP law doesn’t mean you have to sell your work at a profit, it means you can sell your work at a profit.
December 20th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Eric, as a bit of an amateur photographer myself who has dealt with the fact the up-front costs are staggering, you also have to face that a business model based on an outdated understanding of technology is not going to work. Copyright law as the RIAA and their ilk want it is simply unenforceable. The only way to kill off filesharing is to either make Americans so poor they can’t afford computers or to destroy all landlines used for internet access and kill the internet. Photographers can either adapt to the changing market or they can engage in photography for the sake of art under an outdated model, but making a living off it requires adaptation.
December 20th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
JimboSlice – re-read #58. I understand the point of IP law – if an individual signs their copyright to a company, then the company is then protected by IP law for that work, and has the chance, if they choose to take it, to attempt to profit from it. If the individual wants it himself, that’s ok too, if he can negotiate that, etc.
I agree it’s all about choice, but there is nothing in the law today that says you can’t give work away for free (see Creative Commons) but crippling IP law would take away many of the choices an artist has to profit from the work. And that’s part of the core of the issue. The monks in the above example chose to give their writing away because of their deep religious beliefs, but an artist shouldn’t be forced to put their work immediately into the public domain if they don’t want to (a key word in that sentence being “immediately”).
December 20th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
I’m fine with people paying other people to do something. You want to hire a band for your wedding? Great. Your company wants to commission a writer to write a book about the history of the company? Sure.
Hey Haukur—name ONE major work of art/writing/theater/film of the last two hundred years that’s been produced using the model you describe. You think some patron would’ve paid F. Scott Fitzgerald to write “The Great Gatsby” solely for said patron’s personal reading pleasure and thereafter given the novel away for free on the Internet?
December 20th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Slice: pointing out that you’re an ignoramus was simply an aside, before engaging with more interesting comments. If you have difficulty with such things, then this website may be a better fit for you.
TLS: even before the RIAA and MPAA, the position of the US as a dominant producer in the age of audio-visual mechanical reproduction affected the development of copyright in the US. The copyright climate in China is, in many respects, similar to that in the US a century ago. The question remains whether a nation or organisation has the stones to try and resurrect perpetual copyright.
Lastly, it’s a sad historical truth that writing as a fully-fledged profession was just about made possible by the early fixed-term copyright laws, but then, only for a tiny percentage of authors. Patronage has always been wrapped up in the process, and while it can come in different guises these days — arts council grants, sponsored prizes, etc — the author that lives off his/her writing outside journalism or academic research is a rarity. (Even JK Rowling was, horreur!, a terrible single-mother welfare-queen at the start of her career.)
December 20th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
James Gary:
You do realise that Scott Fitzgerald was basically reliant upon patronage and work-for-hire for most of his life? The only novel of his that sold in decent numbers was This Side of Paradise, and his primary sources of income were short stories in magazines, film treatments and screenplays, and loans from his agent and literary editor.
December 20th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
If a person or firm labors to produce a good or service in the expectation that they will be compensated in the marketplace, then you are a thief if you do not compensate that person or firm for the goods or services they have labored to produce. What really makes music and books so completely different from cars, furniture, toaster ovens, or televisions?
December 20th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
People who are making the analogy between downloading books and downloading music should consider some of the facts separating the industries. before cd’s, when you bought a record, you owned that record, and it would play as long as you wanted unless you didn’t take care of it. when you buy a book, you read it, put it back on your shelf, and you can come back to it any time unless you destroy the book (spill, tear, burn, whatever). The music industry has, since the introduction of CD’s, essentially been boosting its profits by selling your old music back to you in a different format. This is where their massive profits started. Now that same thing is going on with dvd’s and now blu-ray. Unless you really really want that new copy of an old book, or now in a digital format, you’re not likely to find it necessary to keep repurchasing the same thing time and time again, because it is not necessary. People who may have enough money to buy their favorite Fleetwood Mac record in each new format may be fine with that but they’re being scammed. The problem with new releases? The market passed them by. There’s no more confidence or need in many people’s minds for a hard copy. They lost to Apple. But they control the reigns and they’re just throwing litigation all over the place instead of attempting to adapt. Who is adapting? Independent stores and labels, who now have started selling regular old LP’s and CD’s with free download links. You buy a record, play it on a turntable at home, download the music and put it on you mp3 player to take elsewhere, and there you go. What’s the problem with this? The industry at large has turned its back on its only viable format, the LP, and refuses to go back at its own peril. Trust me, record stores with diverse offerings are still filled with people, but all the congestion is in the used aisles because most people see that overpriced tag on a cd now days and say to the companies “f. that, f. you.” But the majors keep rolling out the musical equivalent of triple-sized Hummers and scratch their heads wondering what in the hell has happened.
December 20th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
his primary sources of income were short stories in magazines, film treatments and screenplays, and loans from his agent and literary editor.
Perhaps Fitzgerald wasn’t the best example, then.
On the other hand: under Haukur’s proposed model, magazines and films aren’t likely to exist in any kind of for-profit way (and are therefore highly unlikely to provide pay-the-bills work for novelists)—so maybe my example still has some merit.
December 20th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
A few points, I’m in a hurry:
Just because one doesn’t like the price of something doesn’t give one the right to disregard the law.
Just because an author or a company makes huge profits doesn’t mean you can steal their product.
Nobody expects a guarantee that artists will profit from their work, but the possibility of them making a profit if their works prove popular should indeed be guaranteed by IP law.
The fact that artists have always struggled to make ends meet and have always relied on various forms of patronage or subsidy does not mean that the law shouldn’t protect their products and revenues in the market.
While there certainly are some unsavory people among the “middle men” (just like in any other business) who market and distribute artists’ products, the “middle men” are necessary and I know enough labels and publishers who have supported artists over years, even though they have turned little or no profit, just because they liked their creations.
It’s fine to be critical of RIAA or whatever, but that doesn’t mean it’s justified to dismiss all of IP law, which exists to protect the rights of artists and rights holders.
The fact that the current system might not be ideal or just, doesn’t mean that one is allowed to add a further injustice by depriving artists of their profits.
You can get Gnarls Barkley’s The Odd Couple for $5.00 DRM free here.
December 20th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
How much does it cost to print out an entire novel, even one as short as “The Great Gatsby”? A lot. Paper costs a lot. Ink costs a lot. The only people who would do this are cheap dorks.
How often does it need to be repeated that musicians make very little profit off CD’s and make most of their profits off of concerts and merchandise?
All questions of morality aside, laws have to be realistic to be enforceable. The situation we are in makes probably the majority of Americans criminals. The RIAA is busy attacking windmills instead of evolving and creating viable business models in a new technological environment.
December 20th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
pseudonymous – Putting aside the fact that I called you out for being a completely ignorant asshole, if you truly meant the remark as an aside, then it is you who should learn how to rewrite your posts so people can understand how to read them. You might want to check out this website
December 20th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
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December 20th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
It’s fine to be critical of RIAA or whatever, but that doesn’t mean it’s justified to dismiss all of IP law, which exists to protect the rights of artists and rights holders.
That’s not why it should exist – it’s meant to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”. It’s meant to serve the public interest and it’s doing a horrible job of that at the moment. It’s my contention that no copyright law at all would better serve the public interest. Perhaps it’s possible to come up with a copyright law that would do some of the things copyright is meant to do and not unacceptably infringe on individual liberty. If you’ve got such a proposal I’m willing to listen to it. But any system which criminalizes normal helpful behaviour is too evil for me to support, whatever its supposed benefits.
December 20th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Of course, having no IP laws cuts both ways:
A movie studio or record label could then just grab some indie band’s recordings of the internet and put it in their film, no cost, no credit, nothing. Some might say that’s good publicity, but with no requirements on the movie studio’s part, there’s little publicity because people might not know who that great song came from.
If you put up a cute baby picture of your niece and Gerber decides it fits perfectly for their next ad campaign, I guarantee you are not going to get a little credit line in that next commercial. And of course they won’t pay you because they don’t have to.
Or since acquiring content wouldn’t cost anything, movie studios could just sweep up 100 videos off YouTube and put those out on DVD or in theaters. Sure, few people are going to go see that sort of thing, but it also didn’t cost the studio anything more than the cost of an intern’s afternoon and a web connection. The list could go on and on, and I’m sure the media conglomerates would find no shortage of ways to take advantage of us as much or more than we are of them.
This is all very far from my primary concern of a no IP law world, but for those not trying to create content for a living, maybe it’s something to think about.
December 20th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Or you could be an up and coming writer and send out your new book to have people in the biz read over it. Simon & Schuster decides they really love it. They’ll just have their editors go through it and print it up.
Oh yeah, sorry you don’t get paid or get credit. No IP law.
That sweet design you have for a new website, GoDaddy really loves it. They are going to start offering it to their clients, oh yeah and you don’t get paid.
December 20th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Eric: A picture of an identifiable person used in an ad campaign can raise issues outside the domain of copyright. Other than that, the stuff you suggest doesn’t seem harmful to me. Showing a selection of great videos from YouTube in theatres sounds fine to me. Who would be harmed by that? Using a song from an indie band in a film sounds fine too – and keep in mind that the film itself would be freely copyable and modifiable by anyone. Maybe the indie band would get a nice music video out of that. The film benefits and who would be harmed?
You seem concerned with attribution. Even without a legal requirement to give attribution, it would often be given. Are movie producers required by law to have the really really long end credits that the typical film currently has? Societal expectations can bring people to do things without any legal compulsion. And even if no credit is given to the indie band whose song is used in the film I’m sure this information would quickly become available on the internet. Anyone thinking “this film had a great song towards the end, I’m going to find out what band made it so I can maybe get some of their stuff or go see them live” would surely have a good chance of success.
Any more postcards from utopia?
December 20th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
All the positive benefits you just mentioned are perfectly available to anyone right now, plus they have legal recourse in case their work is used in a way they don’t like. Attribution is only a concern of mine if that is what you are expecting as payment for the use (as in the case of the band)- maybe that’s safe because of societal pressures, maybe not.
But also consider the reason for open source software under GPL (unenforceable without copyright law). There is a reason, in that case I think it’s mostly philosophical, for requiring others to keep their software open. But they should have the right to put those requirements on their software.
It still seems to me like a lot of people take their distaste for the RIAA’s business practices and apply it too broadly to all creative pursuits.
December 20th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Are movie producers required by law to have the really really long end credits that the typical film currently has?
Haukur: The credits in movies—both fore and aft the actual film—are the result of intensive negotiation between the movie studio and the actors and technicians (or the representatives thereof) who actually create the film.
I don’t want to be nasty, but for one to assume that movie credits are as long as they are because of “societal expectations” is just massively, massively naive.
December 20th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
I don’t want to be nasty, but for one to assume that movie credits are as long as they are because of “societal expectations” is just massively, massively naive.
Good thing I didn’t say that then. My point was that there is no direct requirement in copyright law for this sort of lengthy list of credits (though the negotiations that brought it about did certainly take place in a legal environment with copyright). Anyway, this is pretty far from the central points.
Eric: In a legal environment without copyright my guess is that most software would naturally be open-source. In any case, the point of free licenses like the GPL or the CC-BY-SA is to create a bit of freedom within an unfree world.
With the attribution again – I’m willing to countenance the idea that a law stating that certain things require attribution in certain contexts would be a positive thing.
The rest of your comment (about ‘positive benefits’) I didn’t understand.
December 20th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
Jimboslice,
Sorry, Jimbo, that would be plagiarism, not a copyright violation.
December 20th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
I think that Matt should back up his belief that artists should not be allowed to protect their interests in their art (and by extenstion authors) by offering his book for free on the Kindle for all who want it.
Better yet, why not offer it as a downloadable .pdf file on this website so that we don’t need a Kindle and can send it to our friends, etc. as we like.
December 20th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
How often does it need to be repeated that musicians make very little profit off CD’s and make most of their profits off of concerts and merchandise?
You can repeat that as often as you want – as a general statement this is simply false. It applies to certain artists, while for other artists just the opposite is true and for many it’s a mix of both that changes over the course of their career.
Anyway, this is all besides the point, because it’s certainly not up to the consumer to decide what revenue streams are important or not important to an artist. And artists have no obligation whatsoever to serve the public interest, but every right to reap the benefits of their creations.
December 20th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
Slice: it’s moderately amusing that you continue to operate a mechanical digger to deepen the hole you’re already in. Still, it’s sad that there’s always someone like you who’ll blunder into an online discussion on copyright knowing fuck-all about its origins and history, or what might have been in the mind of the people who set out the Copyright Clause.
Anyway, Bill Drummond makes an interesting tangential argument, which is that as music becomes ubiquitous and its cost of reproduction approaches zero, the social value with which it is held diminishes. (Ad jingles, commercial muzak, music when you’re on hold, ) His suggestion is that recorded music itself is a transitional medium, and that the ever-present soundtrack might give way to moments that aren’t recorded, or meant to be recorded. I think that’s a reach, but I also notice the number of people uploading themselves playing songs onto YouTube.
December 20th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
Novakant: “And artists have no obligation whatsoever to serve the public interest, but every right to reap the benefits of their creations.”
And as a result, we have every right to go tell them to scratch their ass as we download.
It’s not about who has an “obligation” – it’s about the results of the laws. The results of IP laws is a slowing of invention creation and the denial of those inventions to the species for longer than necessary. This has been established in several IP venues such as drug IP laws and by logic applies to all such laws.
Again, there has never been – and cannot be – a demonstration that IP laws have done what they are alleged to be for: stimulating inventions by creating monopoly profits for the inventors for a specified period of time. And the correct theory of economic action argues that all such laws must necessarily interfere with that actual goal just as ALL monopolies are coercive, do not last either because of technology or the monopolists screw each other, and inevitably harm everyone else.
December 21st, 2008 at 12:48 am
artists have no obligation whatsoever to serve the public interest, but every right to reap the benefits of their creations.
In which case, they should be happy getting used to writing in locked diaries kept in locked desk drawers, or singing to themselves in the shower. Call it “privatication”.
December 21st, 2008 at 9:55 am
“And as a result, we have every right to go tell them to scratch their ass as we download.”
And your boss should tell you likewise come payday.
December 21st, 2008 at 10:38 am
pseudo: Here’s how it works. Me pointing out that your an ignorant fuck because you mention me then quote someone else is pretty much indisputable, unless of course you continue to insists that your an ignorant fuck.
As to the thesis Lord Yglesias presents in this post, it is completely wrong: ”
You may want that to be the purpose, but clearly it is not.
Also, it is very hypocritical of him and others to whine about Prop 8 being the majority taking away the rights of minority groups then advocate doing the exact same thing to holders of IP. If we lived in a society with any common decency Justice would be going after those who pirate music and they would be looking at 1-5. But as it currently stands we only like to lock up poor black kids who steal. Middle class white kids who steal are heroic according to Lord Yglesias.
December 21st, 2008 at 11:16 am
The exceptions are pretty much huge acts like Metallica. This does not apply to the vast majority of artists. Your use of a false “on the one hand, on the other” equivalence here is dishonest.
December 21st, 2008 at 11:25 am
Also JimboSlice, I’m not going to take lectures on morality seriously from someone who is complaining about Jews in the other thread.
December 21st, 2008 at 11:40 am
Thats it Reality man. Any criticism of Israel or of the high % of Jewish people in finance is antisemitism. No one can ever point out that the regime in Israel is an apartheid regime, or point out that the insular nature of the financial industry is deleterious to the US. Nope pointing that stuff out is antisemitism.
December 21st, 2008 at 11:50 am
“For many fields, the differences between the proportions of graduates earning postsecondary degrees in the United States and other OECD countries in 2004 were relatively small. In education, physical and biological sciences, computer science, and mathematics, the United States was within 1 percentage point of the OECD average. In contrast, the United States was 7.7 percentage points higher than the international average in business, social sciences, and other fields combined1 (47.7 vs. 40.0 per-cent), and 3.8 percentage points higher in arts and humanities combined. The U.S. proportion of degrees in business, social sciences, and other fields combined1 (47.7) was higher than in any other reporting OECD country, except for Hungary (49.3) and Poland (66.8). Fields in which the U.S. proportion of graduates earning degrees was somewhat lower than the OECD average included health (4.1 percentage points) and engineering (5.8 percentage points).”
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2007/section5/indicator43.asp
December 21st, 2008 at 11:50 am
wrong thread…
December 21st, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Actually, I am quite critical of Israel’s actions. However, when you start going off about Jews, that is anti-Semitism.
December 21st, 2008 at 2:48 pm
The exceptions are pretty much huge acts like Metallica. This does not apply to the vast majority of artists.
That’s even more wrong than your initial statement – congratulations on making a total fool out of yourself.
December 21st, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Weird. I’ve been looking all over this site and I still can’t find where I can get a free copy of Matt’s book. I found some links to Amazon, but then I’d have to pay for it. It should be free to all, because it would benefit society more to have this free transfer of ideas. So why isn’t Matt just giving it to us?
December 21st, 2008 at 3:07 pm
God. I feel dirty after that last post. Like Hank Reardon’s brother or something. And no I’m not an Ayn Rand freak, but seriously that’s what this conversation reminds me of. A bad parody of Ayn’s caricature world.
December 21st, 2008 at 3:58 pm
To those saying it would be helpful and productive to have Matt’s book available online in such a way as to enable people to share digital copies easily – yes. Indeed. Of course! Having books easily available is great. Is Matt a hypocrite for not making a digital copy of his book easily available to everyone without charge? Not necessarily. He might be a hypocrite if people started organically sharing his book in a big way and he then started cracking down on it. But it’s still possible to be in favor of copyright reform and yet be working within the publishing system that we currently have. Not everyone can be a hero on every front.
December 21st, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Some old sayings that seem fitting:
“Put your money where your mouth is,” or how about
“If you’re going to talk the talk, you should walk the walk.” I also like “Be the change you want in the world.”
Take your pick. Perhaps he should set an example for the rest of the world as to how it should be.
December 21st, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Brian: Sure, that would be great. I’m just saying that not doing so isn’t necessarily any great hypocrisy. I’m sure Matt, like anyone else, picks his battles. I also don’t claim to speak for MY and in fairness I don’t know his views on copyright in detail. It’s possible that if I knew his views in more detail and his actions in more detail I’d think there was some hypocrisy but what I’ve seen doesn’t suggest that to me.
December 21st, 2008 at 9:10 pm
Quick look on amazon sees that Lord Yglesias book is published by Wiley. http://www.amazon.com/Heads-Sand-Republicans-Foreign-Democrats/dp/047008622X
Wiley belongs to the AAP (American Association of Publishers) which sued Google to stop Google Books Project.
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/10/19/google-sued-by-assoc.html
Bing Bang Boom hypocrite.
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:47 am
If we lived in a society with any common decency Justice would be going after those who pirate music and they would be looking at 1-5.
I’ll give JimboSlice that much – he doesn’t do hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit. He comes down firmly and clearly on the side of evil.
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