You nailed it! I’m an amateur pianist and I will attest that the competition in the music industry is insane. But people always value a live performance because there’s just something pleasant about it, something more human and “real” about people actually playing instruments as opposed to just cranking up a CD.
But the recording industry has the effect of crowding out all but the “select few”. Music - particularly pop music - is an inherently “diverse” line of production… people want variety, a variety of music from a variety of artists. The copyright protections are reducing the amount of variety and squeezing out innumerable potential artists in favor of endowing a few chosen artists with untold fortunes and this is sold to us as “capitalism”, the “necessary risk/reward to incentivize musical production”… complete and total nonsense.
Tex & Phi - thanks for those suggestions, I will check thos eout properly and come back to the discussion - seems like they are a prerequisite.
Basically I’m learning, and I’m here with an open mind, but with issues / questions I’m trying to resolve - so I don’t know which side of the argument I’m going to come down on yet. I see benefits both ways, but my final concern is simply in principle (which I believe logically is always going to work out to be the best practical concern as well, it just naturally follows), what is logically the most practical, just, sound etc system. If that turns out to be a world without IP, so be it. I don’t believe in compromise to the point that if I had to just work out something else to do, well I’ll just have to do that.
Clayton don’t you think the monopolistic media empire is the ones who create that homogenised sound through content filtration and by rewarding a sound that they deem is what people want - McDonaldising music? - and I believe that social control / social design has a lot do with why they do that and what material is selected for a start. It’s not music it’s mostly mind numbing garbage. The internet is the antidote to that of course, but mainline media still has the iron fist on these things. Their monopolism is really due to the federal reserve system ultimately - at the higher level it’s not about music but about corporate homogeny, so the music is irrelevant at that stage. They know they can sell anything to the dumbed down masses if they tell them it’s the new thing. I don’t see how copyright is causal in that.
Have you read the links that have been provided? In particular, have you read Against Intellectual Monopoly? If so, how are they failing to make the connection between copyrights and the piss-poor quality of modern music, for example?
Well, I think those resources - particular AIM - will help you see the connection. The Fed is not to blame for Justin Bieber. The recording industry is - through their ultra-powerful lobby in Washington.
To give you an idea of what is wrong with copyrights, just check out this YouTube search. Now, when the YT user who wrote this (“artofcounterpoint”, Giovanni Dettori) released it about a year and a half ago, there was only just one rendition that a friend of his did on piano. Since then it has exploded (it’s “viral” by classical music standards!) and look how many different renditions and variations. These are all based around a theme that Lady Gaga - on the strict view of intellectual “property” - owns. Shouldn’t these people all be paying her - actually, her label - royalties? What an absurdity! The fact is that no one owns any patterns, sounds, numbers or any abstract thing. And this is precisely the powerhouse of human creativity, the very engine that is driving human progress.
Edit: There was a video posted in the low-content threads some time back… a young, hip-looking guy, released through TED but not a TED speech… basically he goes on a riff about how ideas mix together… can someone find this?
Edit again: One more note on the Lady Gaga Fugue: What people don’t realize about the “boring” classical composers like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, etc. is that their music sounded to the ears of their contemporaries just as this LG fugue does to your ears. You hear a well-recognized folk (popular) tune/theme, surrounded by a musical tapestry that provides greater depth and variation to the bare theme. Much of Bach’s music was based on folk themes of the time. Daniel Dennett discusses this in one of his lectures and terms Bach the “first memetic breeder”, that is, the first individual to consciously apply principles of artificial selection to memes.
What I do is sell my work and the only way my work is able to be sold is if it’s protected as an idea that nobody else can just arbitrarily copy and produce.
@Mike The key word is sold. You made a trade with another person, your music in exchange for money. If you did not want them to have it, then why do you sell it? I disagree that without IP no one would buy your music. It has to get out in the first place, and the only other way besides stealing it from you would be to buy.
Also, ideas are limited in supply, that’s the point of IP, to keep the idea limited. Ideas are limited by the number of people that know it and the number of available resources to impliment it. If 50 out of 100 people know how to make a paper airlplane then that knowledge is limited, if there is only 20 pieces of paper to make the plane then it is again limited.
Well I will try not to comment further until I get through that material, and I’ve been busy all day so haven’t had a chance, then I’ll try to comment on what you’ve said. Maybe I’ll agree with you. I have to say my position when I started posting on here was 50/50, which is why I posted.
But in regards to music sales, sure the first 100 - 1000 people may buy the album or song but very soon someone is going to repost it for free, and people will just go there. So that argument doesn’t make sense.
As for the Gaga argument, I don’t disagree with you, there is no argument that those people playing her music owe her money. Those are performance royalties… the question is are they making money off it? Then yes I think if they are making money on the back of someone elses song, because they can’t write their own song, they should pay a percentage royalty. My point is more about, if someone now is taking a Lady Gaga CD and copying it and distributing free mp3’s to everyone, you’re saying that’s a good thing for the artist?
Consider if the first farmer had copyrighted the art of growing corn. He copyrighted how he put a seed in the ground, covered it up with dirt, fertilized it with organic matter, kept the weeds off it, then harvested it when it was ready. How is his idea different from the idea of a song? Or would it be best for society if everyone who wanted to eat or raise corn had to pay royalties to his descendants? Maybe we should find the descendants of the man who invented the wheel, the world owes them a ton of royalties!
People pirate the songs/games/movies already even with draconian “IP Protection” in place. What happens with the digital age now is that the marginal cost of copying data has fallen to near 0.
What has to happen instead of complaining about people not paying you, is competing using alternative methods (aka, being an entrepeneur).
As was mentioned previously with the examples of Steam, Amazon Prime, Netflix. They came up with a way to compete against the pirates in the realm of delivery, and trustworthiness. Those companies have made it so easy and dirt cheap to deliver you the goods that you want, many people will shift towards actually paying for the content instead of pirating. You are guaranteed to get the product that you want and paid for, and the companies have their reputations on the line if something goes wrong.
There are also different methods of selling games such as the Humble Bundle (pay any price that you want for this bundle of games, if you pay above the average you get extra goodies), you can release free albums on your site and have a “pay whatever price you want” button. You could be paid by advertisers, or referrals (join site XYZ using this link, and they give me a % of the sale). You can have things like Kickstarter where if you hit a certain limit, you will release your album/book/whatever, (and those who donate beyond certain Intervals can get extra goodies… for example, a signed copy).
You will never get rid of the pirates, even if you charged $.01 for your song, but those people were never your customers in the first place! If you watched that video I linked to earlier… you have to give your customers a REASON TO BUY.
Yes, it is a fantastic thing. For example, I listen to metal. You will never hear metal on the radio, I had no friends that listened to metal (couldn’t borrow a CD), I had no one to talk to about it, I would never have known such music existed. A long time ago, I put on a patch and stumbled into the land of pirates, I found one metal song/band and enjoyed it, I took a look at what other music this person shared. From there, it expanded to two bands, then three, then five, and now into every single band I like now. I have purchased many of their CDs, I have visited them in concert, and I have bought a few of the band’s shirts.
A key thing to note as well is… I have spread the word of these bands to many of my friends, who in turn have spread the word to their friends, and on and on. This all occured because of me pirating and finding bands I enjoyed all those years ago. All of this would not have been possible without that initial piracy! Think of all the great things that pirate did for the world, he has made those bands hundreds/thousands of dollars which otherwise would have never occured!
While you are only focusing on the DIRECT benefits (getting paid by someone who purchases the songs), there are many indirect benefits created by releasing the ideas/music/books for free. For example, the stance that the Mises Institute takes on books. Most publishers think giving books away for free is madness, well the Institute has shown that it actually allows MORE physical books to be sold than ever before (plus spread the ideas to every corner of the globe).
Two side notes. Since Jeffrey Tucker has moved onto Laissez Faire Books, he has created a LFB Book Club. You pay $10 a month, and you get exclusive forums where everyone can discuss the books, you get Jeff Tucker’s reviews/interviews, and you get a free ebook every single week. Sure, you can have people releasing those books for free on the internet (I don’t believe Jeff Tucker would mind that though), but LFB has created a reason to buy, you have many people paying the $10 a month because it is such a great value!
Thank you Tex, that’s a good practical example that I can relate to. I’ll check those links out when I’m done with the first links I haven’t managed to get around to checking out yet, and get back to you! Thanks again for the suggestions.
If you listen to the IP course by Kinsella, he covers this very topic. Most of the people who discuss IP (ESPECIALLY on the pro-IP side), know nothing about actual IP Law, they just assume that is how IP Law works, but nothing can be further from the truth. Copyrights and Patents are monopoly grants by the state in order to stop a third party from using their own physical property in a given way, for an arbitrary amount of time. Kinsella can explain it much better than I can… so get to listening to those lectures!!!
It is also great to look at sectors which have no Intellectual Monopoly protection (Recipes, Fashion/Clothing), or sectors which did not have patents until recently (software).
You can copy any recipes you want and say they are your own, you can put them online for all to see… But there are still massive amounts of cookbooks being sold. Who would buy these when the recipes are free for anyone to use/copy?
A particular cookbook might be laid out in an innovative way, or a way which specifically fits your needs (Breakfast/Lunch/Desert, Low Sodium, Chicken/Beef/Lamb/Octopus). Perhaps it can be a cookbook completely dedicated towards Sushi, maybe the images that you take of the food makes the book much more appealing towards customers. You can make the food at home if you wanted, but sometimes it just “doesn’t turn out right.” People still pay chefs to cook for them as it is more convenient than going out and buying all of your own ingredients and spending your time.
The First Mover Advantage (Against Intellectual Monopoly covers this very well) is a huge deal in the realm of ideas. A great example in Fashion is Uggs. There are people who pay a premium for the official Uggs over the knockoff brands, and there was a good deal of time (months/years) before many competitors started to create the same style of shoe. Over time, other companies chip in with their own versions (lower quality, different materials, slightly different styles), but the Ugg name has already gotten the foot in the door and can sell at a premium above those versions.
Here is a fascinating TED talk on the subject of Fashion:
Against Intellectual Monopoly also does a fascinating job of looking at the history and also countries which did not have patents/copyrights, with those that did. For a long time the United States did not recognize foreign copyrights. If I remember correctly, they compare the sales of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, and how well it sold in the US (no copyright), and Great Britain (copyrighted). He made more royalties from the “pirated” US sales, than he did in Great Britain, while the US version of the books were much much cheaper than the British counterparts, and much more widespread.
Another area that has no copyrights is government documents. Against Intellectual Monopoly goes through the example of the “9/11 Commission Report”, and how even though anyone can get the documents and print them, there is still lots of money to be made for being a First Mover.
Ok, the rest of your argument notwithstanding - regarding books you aren’t explaining how bootleggers fit into this. You say recipies are freely gotten, so why would anyone buy a book, but why would they buy YOUR book, when they can buy the copy for half the price, from someone who didn’t take the troulbe to take the pictures, lay out the text, take the risk of marketing it before finding it had a market, select the recipies etc.
Ok and sorry re Charles Dickens yes I know about early US copyright laws / lack of them and that’s a compelling argument but you say he made more money from US royalties?? How could that be if people were selling his books and not paying him?
No, you do mean you wish to copyright the idea of a song. To copyright a song would be like one copy you had on a disc, for example, and your copy right would mean that no one could copy the file on that disc without your expressed permission. But for you to say no one can take a copy they got somewhere else and make a copy, or to say that no one may play the guitar, drums, bass, piano, and sing the words you sing ever and make copies of that is copyrighting the idea of the song. This is vital. This is what allows copyright owners to exert control over others’ bodies and property.
This is why I used the example I did. Legitimate use of property rights would be for the farmer to say, “No one may take the ear of corn I produced with my labor and property.” Illegitimate would be if the farmer were to say, “No one may, using tools like I did or otherwise, with motions my hands did or otherwise, use cornseed, dirt, and fertilizer to produce an ear of corn like I did, without my expressed permission, for to do so would be to copy the art form I have developed through the years.”
a) Most musicians are dying for people to just hear a few of their songs, let alone get paid for it.
b) If something can be done so cheaply that people will do it for free, then shouldn’t that be a hint that it’s a very low-value activity and that it doesn’t make sense for the recording industry to be raking in billions of dollars for doing something that can be done practically for free today?
c) The net effect of all that “pirating” is that people’s stuff gets heard. BitTorrent is, in effect, a broadcasting system.
d) Value-add and marketing questions are always solvable. By your theory, no one should have ever set up the first TV or radio broadcast station… there was no way to earn a revenue. But then the broadcasters discovered bundling… they just slip in advertisements between content and voila, a broadcast station is a revenue-generating business.
Doesn’t matter how artists solve the problem. They might do it through bundling. They might do it by periodical release of “certified” copies that come with special perks such as artwork books, interviews, making-of, raw studio recordings and so on. And if you know at the outset your stuff is going to be copied, you can plan your releases in a staggered form so as to maximize your “lead” (hence, revenue) over the copiers.
And, finally, you can actually perform your stuff live… imagine that! There was a time when performers performed. Of course, dinosaurs roamed the Earth and head-hunting cannibals gorged themselves on the bowels of their fellow man in the darkest caverns and life was generally like a Bosch painting of perdition.
Who’s to say which is which? Lady Gaga certainly couldn’t have written the Lady Gaga Fugue, so maybe she should be paying Mr. Dettori royalties since he is generating free publicity for her with music she could never have written. This is silly.
I don’t know whether it’s good or bad - for the vast majority of artists, it’s good, for a few of the biggest names, yes, it’s bad for them. It’s not stealing from them, that’s for sure.
