I have a bad feeling about this • Hacker News Board

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#171

Post by shoham » Fri, Feb 10, 2012, 5:47 AM UTC

logic wrote: post #146

angersock wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you do realize that the information is free to duplicate, right? And that there is no way of ensuring you get paid for rent on a resource you can't control the duplication of--at least without causing massive headaches for everyone else? Dude, sell tickets to shows, sell merch at shows, don't perform unless paid before hand. If all else fails, consider that maybe you don't have a product worth buying, and then im…

> If all else fails, consider that maybe you don't have a product worth buying, and then improve or leave. This point bears repeating. As a musician, like it or not, you're an entrepreneur. You can outsource your marketing and collections to a third party in exchange for a percentage of profit (or even in exchange for an advance on anticipated profits), but it doesn't make you any less of a businessperson. Everyone r…

"Everyone reading Hacker News knows the statistics when it comes to startup success. Why would the music industry (or any artistic endeavor) be any different in this regard?"

This is the failed model that leads to the kind of monopolies all too well known to artists like myself.. It's sure not the American model for entrepreneurship. This hits "business" business model is for the fucking birds, and this line "If all else fails, consider that maybe you don't have a product worth buying, and then improve or leave." is bullshit. Ask Mozart, Van Gogh, Stephen Foster and lots of other great artists who died penniless.

"As a musician, like it or not, you're an entrepreneur"

Sorry, I know this and I like it. And as an entrepreneur, what I hate about about the hits business model that started in music, and is making its rounds to software is that it's not a very healthy one -- it's a winner take all, zero sum game, ans it's naive to not understand that most successful business models cannot run this way. Yesterday music, today movies, tomorrow software.

TL;DR thank you so much for the lecture, hacker bro. When it comes to: "Make something people want, at a price they're willing to pay."

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#172

Post by shoham » Fri, Feb 10, 2012, 5:49 AM UTC

figglesonrails wrote: post #144

angersock wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's small, independent businesses and artists who shape, have shaped, and will always shape the world that you live." General Electric, Du Pont, Mobil, AT&T, Sun, Oracle, Microsoft, and Google certainly have been overshadowed by the powerful snowflakes of the world!

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Netscape, Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Dow Chemical (lol), Monsanto (lol), Pilgrim's Corp (lol) EDIT: You didn't say shaped "for the better". :\

It's kind of myopic, there's a hundred million + small businesses worldwide, these guys may be on top of the food chain (this week), but remember, the bigger they are, the harder they fall...

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#173

Post by lists » Fri, Feb 10, 2012, 6:02 AM UTC

There's also the problem that IP law is premised on what amounts to folk psychology.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#174

Post by slowpoke » Fri, Feb 10, 2012, 8:05 AM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #148

drcube wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read your words, but all I hear is "I want to use the police and courts to demand income in perpetuity because I thought up something somebody thought was clever once." "I don't think you should restrict sharing" is not the same thing as "I don't think you deserve to be paid". Find a business model that isn't based on prohibiting what everyone's mother has encouraged them to do since they were toddlers. Sharing is…

It sounds to me like you are arguing for the abolishment of patents, copyright, et al? Also, for the record, I am not a music/movie/etc artist, and I do not hold IP.

It's a very valid and reasonable stance to be against all forms of copyright, patents or similar forms of "intellectual property". In my opinion, they are among the worst mistakes in the history of mankind.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#175

Post by rooshdi » Fri, Feb 10, 2012, 8:11 AM UTC

I have a bad feeling too...but for different reasons. I fear society just doesn't give a damn anymore. I fear all our warnings will steadily fall on deaf ears and we will eventually become ostracized into oblivion. I fear humanity will embrace a system which pushes profits before people, ego over empathy, and lust above love. I fear elitists will eliminate innovation and erase the integrity of the internet and information. I fear for our future, but I have some hope in knowing their future fears us. Game on.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#176

Post by Helianthus » Fri, Feb 10, 2012, 8:22 AM UTC

twainer wrote: post #166

Helianthus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And yes - the current urge is selfish - as you point out it grows out of having taken a freedom - not having worked to be 'granted' anything - and then had that freedom 'revoked'. I suppose that is accurate as far as it goes, but labeling that "selfish" seems to be a point of view connotation rather than a necessary one. That is to say, whether or not a thing is a right or an overzealous demand is in the eye of the…

In my eyes, your take on things is very far from the live-and-let-live stance that you appear to want to adopt. It's more like social engineering. You continue to be free to do your art for free and without concern for profit; in no way does someone else doing their art for profit affect your ability to make your choice. So what gives you the right to champion something that 'removes economic concern from the art'? H…

>In my eyes, your take on things is very far from the live-and-let-live stance that you appear to want to adopt.

That's because I want to kill. I want to throw away copyright, I want those musicians that sign up to work with greedy suits--not to cast aspersion on your (former?) line of work which seems to be good-faith and productive--to have to find other ways to express themselves, I want the systems that were _once_ our best effort at promoting artistic expression to die.

I want these things dead because after they're dead the absurd but somehow sometimes true accusations of "selling out" won't have any weight.

I _actually don't care_ that people will lose jobs because copyright is dead.

>I think one bad side-effect of the internet is that it has removed people so far from the means of production that they are incapable of appreciating the work that goes into what appears in front of them.

I think this is the most insightful sentence of your post. It attacks the central barrier to removing copyright with a few swift words.

Thus I think it important to describe the manner in which I find that it misses the mark. The Internet is bringing people into contact with the arts of gardening, cooking, woodworking, electronics as never before.

Absurdly the disconnect between production of food and appreciation for food has grown _so large_ that food production is looked at as an art--that is, just another mode of human expression!

And I couldn't be happier about that. Appreciation of art is the act of appreciating the work that goes into it.

---

The problem, of course, is that our economic woes _far_ overshadow our cultural ones. You speak from the side of "There is no free lunch," and we may well be on a course where that is alarmingly and devastatingly true. If the Euro collapses, if America can't afford to keep its carrier fleet's Pax Americana running, it may turn out that the debate over copyright was not important at all.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#177

Post by Helianthus » Fri, Feb 10, 2012, 8:33 AM UTC

Helianthus wrote: post #176

twainer wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my eyes, your take on things is very far from the live-and-let-live stance that you appear to want to adopt. It's more like social engineering. You continue to be free to do your art for free and without concern for profit; in no way does someone else doing their art for profit affect your ability to make your choice. So what gives you the right to champion something that 'removes economic concern from the art'? H…

>In my eyes, your take on things is very far from the live-and-let-live stance that you appear to want to adopt. That's because I want to kill. I want to throw away copyright, I want those musicians that sign up to work with greedy suits--not to cast aspersion on your (former?) line of work which seems to be good-faith and productive--to have to find other ways to express themselves, I want the systems that were _onc…

This is a test post to see if HN auto-downvotes old threads.

Edit: Huh. Well, someone downvoted that post ridiculously fast I guess.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#178

Post by route66 » Fri, Feb 10, 2012, 9:10 AM UTC

logic wrote: post #146

angersock wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you do realize that the information is free to duplicate, right? And that there is no way of ensuring you get paid for rent on a resource you can't control the duplication of--at least without causing massive headaches for everyone else? Dude, sell tickets to shows, sell merch at shows, don't perform unless paid before hand. If all else fails, consider that maybe you don't have a product worth buying, and then im…

> If all else fails, consider that maybe you don't have a product worth buying, and then improve or leave. This point bears repeating. As a musician, like it or not, you're an entrepreneur. You can outsource your marketing and collections to a third party in exchange for a percentage of profit (or even in exchange for an advance on anticipated profits), but it doesn't make you any less of a businessperson. Everyone r…

/rant starts > Why would the music industry (or any artistic endeavor) be any different in this regard?

"why would" indicates you did not think about it but you just want to fit the arguments to your position. Answer is: why should it? Like everyone here on HN you should know that softwareland is not only filled with startups but that there are infinitely more ways to run a software company. Same with music. It's not about being Michael Jackson or starving poor.

I have seen all kind of spoiled brat arguments of entitled hard drive owners seen coming along here and they are in the end just that: sense of entitlement and "i want" spelled out in different forms.

Foremost I read it from the snarky tone with which BS "tips" are given like "sell you underwear", "if people don't pay just f* off" ... I was even reading from people who think that artists principally have no rights on their creations, others were going pseudo philosophical with "the bits of my hard drive are free", (Oh yes physical property is still sacred, can someone tell me why?).

And then to witness the shit storm breaking loose if a company uses designs of 37 signal. Then the wannabe startups come out of their holes, they already see their ios-apps floating around in freedom and not generating money anymore.

Here it is: If a content creator creates something it's at his will to decide what happens to it, if it's free, it's free. If he wants to be attributed or paid, then it be so. All else is not at your discretion. Running away with a 1TB hard drive full of downloaded content and then screaming "it's good for your resume" is just an insult. Not more.

This has got nothing to do with entrepreneurship. Apparently music motivates people to buy gadgets for several 100 bucks to have it 24/7, so let them take the free stuff, let them pay for the stuff with a price tag.

To paraphrase: consider it a product worth buying and pay or just leave.

As an aside: I do not make and do not intend to make money from music anymore and always have profited from very liberal use of copyright laws. But when I played copyrighted material I always made note of it and paid dues where applicable. Why is this such a difficult concept for the elite hanging out here? And why this kind of annoyed lecturing?

/rant ends.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#179

Post by rbanffy » Fri, Feb 10, 2012, 10:05 AM UTC

mathattack wrote: post #161

rbanffy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Great social change requires number 1. Movie studios and the recording industry can, at best, delay the inevitable. Artificial scarcities are against the laws of thermodynamics. Of all the money these industries make, only the tiniest fraction of it goes to the people who actually produced the good. Most of it is inefficiently applied in side operations such as promoting sales, manufacturing the physical support fo…

Fair points though the Internet delivery model won't make advertising or sales promortion go away. More efficient, yes, but not gone.

Any quantitative change of a couple orders of magnitude brings along a qualitative change.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#180

Post by seclorum » Fri, Feb 10, 2012, 1:14 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #116

seclorum wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't understand how politicians in the free enterprise countries, especially American republicans with their distaste of market regulation, could consider extremely long copyright protection to be a net benefit to the market/country. Copyright doesn't just protect entertainment content - it protects enlightening content, as well. Science and technology are the real industry markets that will 'benefit' from these…

What does society gain from extending the copyright of a dead artist? Will the artist then rise from the dead and start creating again, with such a powerful incentive?

No, but the powerful organization they leave behind may do something with it. Or not.