Can any of you think of a way that a musician would be able to stop his music from being used in a movie without his consent in a free market?
Unbreakable cryptology.
Personally, this isn’t a big deal to me. I think low-brow pop music is vastly overproduced and promoted by the IP laws that create a monopoly on mass-appeal music. I would love to see writers and musicians make less money. It’d knock 'em down a peg or two.
Writers and musicians make a lot of money right now? Aside from some people Thomas Harris and Lil Wayne, especially in regards to authors of novels, it’s already terrible hard to make a living off that job alone. I agree with you on the bullshit, over-produced pop songs, but there are great writers like Cormac McCarthy who already make nothing on their work, and that’s with IP laws
And the unbreakable cryptology wouldn’t do anything if the film producer simply bought the CD and used it as a part of his soundtrack, would it?
sure, only play music in front of live audiences where the venue bans the concert goers from bringing in audio recording devices.
why would any musician want to do that? Well, maybe if that movie was “offensive” to him. Then I could see the need, but otherwise, it’s free advertisment.
If you want to remove your music from particular movie that its authors used without your permission, then just ask them politely. If they refuse, then contact their and your DRO or similar agency and ask if there is anything they can do. If that doesn’t work, boycott the movie, tell everyone, that they “illegally” used your music etc, put it on the facebook for example, become a victim. ??? Profit.
Tell them to only play live? Give me a break. And then what? Have authors read everyone to sleep at night?
Because they want to get paid for their work being used in a film. Music makes half of the movie sometimes.
Boycotting won’t do much when producers end up doing it with such abundance. Everyone tried to boycott Avatar: t**he Last Airbender due to the skin color of the characters, but it didn’t do anything. The movie made $319 million. People won’t start boycotting ever film because someone stole someone else’s song. The only modern example I can think of is The Catcher in the Rye. The courts have stopped it from happening so far (although Chapter 27 basically stole Holden’s character anyway), but I highly doubt anyone will see the film adaptation if it were to come out simply because it has been such a big deal due to the courts hearings.
What do you mean by, “his music?”
I’ve heard it said that most musicians make the bulk of their money touring. I could be wrong, as that’s only hearsay. Maybe somebody could confirm that?
Anyway, if the above is the case, then abolishing IP wouldn’t hurt that much. Most of the record companies as I understand it are middlemen who have been outgrown. With the expansion of the Internet, they’re wailing and thrashing around, but they won’t be able to beat the market in the end. I think bands would be smart to just have donations and have the customers buy MP3s off of their Web sites for 50 cents a piece. I think most fans would show band loyalty if that were the case.
“I’ve heard it said that most musicians make the bulk of their money touring. I could be wrong, as that’s only hearsay. Maybe somebody could confirm that?”
I remember there was a Mick Jagger quote on the Mises blog where he said there was only a brief (15-20 year) period where artists made a lot of money from selling records. I think touring and the extra sales that come with touring (merchandise, cds, downloads) is where most of the money is made. Where I live the top music venue seats 15,000 and the tickets for the big-name artists usually start at $150 (sometimes up to $500 for the front block). They don’t fly half-way around the world for nothing.
I know people like Dave Mustaine from Megadeth doesnt care about it… He claims that most of the money from record sales go to the record company… he says most of the money the bands makes as a whole comes from doing concerts…
Don’t know about such boycott, but it sounds very stupid. Why boycott due to skin color? Was this color “stolen” from someone?
It’s the problem of the artist if he wants his music to be removed to make everything to get the credit at least. But then again, how many examples there are in a real world? Where big movie corp steals poor artist’s music and then uses it and doesn’t even pay him a penny?
If you found such examples, then we could more easily analize them, otherwise it’s just one of the future uncertainties, who knows how artists could achieve that. Maybe creating some musician guild or something and “licensing” their music, just in case and if such problem happens, then they are more “visible” and “stronger” to expose the evil movie corporations.
It’s the problem of an artist to make sure that his intellectual work doesn’t get used without his permission. The easiest way is to not create such intangible goods, patterns that can be easily copied. Sure, there are other ways, but they do not protect entirely, but partly. If an artist doesn’t have at least basic entrepreneurship skills, then maybe he should find another job.
I don’t have any hard data for it either, but I do listen to a lot of bands that are fairly “underground” and not at all popular. They make hardly any off the sale of album’s but these groups tour extensively around the world. When done they have a brief vacation then hit the studio and go back out on tour again. Touring is their day job.
The problem is that I can’t give you any examples of these since we do have IP laws for that kind of thing.
You can find some information about it here. I really don’t understand the problem of it. I mean, the series was created for television by these non-Asian guys, but it was set in an Asian-influenced world. So it’s not ruining some old Asian tradition or something. Plus they clearly had permission from the series’ producers to turn it into a film.
This has been a problem since the days of Mozart and Haydin. Even today, with IP-obsessed record companies and their legions of lawyers, there’s no guarantee it cannot happen: say the music is used in a movie filmed in a country with radically different IP laws which say (an absurd example) any music older than twenty five years becomes free domain and IP rights cannot be renewed. One example are BBC programs: being a government entity BBC can use pretty much any music they want without bothering too much about copyright due to local laws. There’s nothing Sony and Geffen lawyers can do about it so they don’t even try. When BBC programs are sold abroad they come without soundtrack: the buyer will have to provide one himself while complying to local copyright rules. That’s the reason foreign users cannot follow popular programs like Top Gear in streaming straight from BBC websites. So they turn to peer-to-peer websites…
Personally I think conventional record companies are on their way out. Their business model is deeply flawed and the Internet makes sure there are simply far too many “music thieves” (remember those wacky educational ads from the ‘80s?) to make wide scale persecution worthwhile. Once in a while a boy or girl gets saddled with a monumental fine he/she’ll never be able to repay because record companies live by Mao’s maxim “Hit one to educate a hundred”. While this is a tragedy it also affects the record companies’ credibility: going after a poor boy with his computer while your top stars snort cocaine, devastate hotel rooms or get involved in a shooting? Nobody will miss them when they are gone.
Ding! Giving a way music = promotion for shows which, of course, are the money makers for the artists. All this IP BS coming out of the big publishers is nothing more than pissing and moaning over a dying business model.
Yeah, as a huge M. Night Shyamalan fan, though, I saw only the trailer of Avatar Bender last year and I am not happy about this crap at all. I liked his horror movies more. Anyway, judging from the article this boycott seems retarded to me. The movie looks so bad, that many people won’t bother watching it anyway, haha.
in a music world without IP, granted some record companies will go out of business but is that a bad thing? innovation and technology has nearly surpassed the use of record companies. Back in the 1950s, 1960s, it was almost a need for a band to have a major label backing them but that is definately not the case today. For example, look at that Justin Beiber kid, he didn’t use a record comapny to gain popularity, he used Youtube and he is not the only example of using Youtube to gain mainstream popularity. Also bands back then needed the record companies for their pro studios, but comapnies have developed programs and new technology that almost anyone can make a whole album at home using in home studio equipment. People are afraid that if we abolish IP, record companies would go out of business, and it is true, but what is the purpose of keeping a company that is not in demand in the free market system? It has no purpose…
I have no worries about record companies. People can always find very easy ways to record good-quality music. And, yes, Justin Bieber used YouTube to gain prominence like columnists intern/write for free at newspapers before they get a job. The question is what happens afterwards when anyone can sell/share your music and your writing simply by putting it on their computer. Newspapers and everything would literally have no reason to hire writers. For television/movies it may be different due to writers being paid beforehand, but, for newspapers, there would be no reason to pay writers except for the first-look deal.
Well again, for music artists, most of their money comes from concerts. So file sharing music is not necesarrily a problem for artists, just record companies. For writers though, that is a bit more difficult. But take e-books for example, the Mises Institute has a lot of books for free… yet those authors whose books are free online still write books, articles, and blogs… right? Since those authors continue to write, books, articles, etc. are still in demand right, or else they wouldn’t be doing it. Not only that but the best sellers link has books like Human Action, Man Economy and State, Economics in One Lesson, and Failure of the New Economics… all those books are free, yet they are the best sellers in the Mises store…
I don’t want to speak for all libertarian writers, but I think it their writing has much more to do with the promotion of liberty than anything else. There’s a big difference between writing for a philosophy in which you deeply believe (whether full-time or part-time, and even for free in many cases) than authors who write fiction because they are simply very good at it. Take J.K. Rowling, for example. Pretending she didn’t enjoy writing in general, she may have realized that she was very good at writing and decided to persue it. Without IP laws protecting what she views as legitimate property, there’s no other reason for her to write. Hopefully this paragraph made sense. It’s hard to explain.
Yes, that’s true. But, if they were still alive today and it was someone other than the Mises Institute selling the books, Mises and Rothbard and Hazlitt may not be getting any kind of compensation from that company. I wasn’t questioning whether the books would sell, only whether their authors would be paid for them.