71–80 of 302 posts
"The distribution might be virtually free, but the production certainly isn’t." Well, all of the music available on iTunes, Amazon, and the Pirate Bay has already been produced, it just needs to be distributed. If I want to pay for music to be produced , I use Kickstarter. (Or go to concerts, since playing a song live could be considered a new production) It's a historical accident that we use charging for distributi…
I'll just cherry pick this gem here: "What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations? The same as if you couldn’t charge for lines of computer code: there’d be less of it." Spotted the massive, gaping flaw in the argument yet? It's 2012, if you make this argument then I am done with you. Linux is how old? How much of the internet runs on it? Done. Edit: Wow, really? Why is this still a necessary ar…
> Linux is how old? How much of the internet runs on it? Done. The argument is that there would be less computer code, not no computer code. Saying that one specific project would still exist is not a counterexample.
Consider the costs of production and distribution.
Production. Frank McCourt's memoirs were the end result of a life of telling stories socially and on stage. People who heard him tell the stories would say "you should write a book". Today his listeners wold have videoed his performances with a camera phone, posted them on YouTube, and he would be a viral star before he knew it.
Distribution. Suppose I have a head mounted camera that simply records everything I see — it's part of version 5 of the android glasses google is working on. Then along comes a third party and releases an app that simply recognizes anything I look at that's a printed page and captures it. If I read a book, I have an digital image of its pages and an OCRed text for indexing.
The cooking smells analogy is actually more accurate than the writer realizes, because all this technology makes production easier too.
Although there was some to disagree with in Graham's essay, he had some interesting insight. The restaurant smells analogy is the least bad I've heard so far. This response was flimsy. > This is a flawed analogy. Cooking smells are a > positive externality – they’re generated as a > by-product of providing a service to paying patrons. > But commercially released music is produced > specifically for the purpose of bei…
I don't know why this is upvoted so much. PG's article seems pretty clear. The problem I have with this article is the association of investment with a 'right' to recoup that investment. There is no inherent right to recoup investment money of this type. NONE! It doesn't matter how hard something is to produce, there is no inherent right to make a profit based on that effort. People paint, write, sing and act all the…
> People paint, write, sing and act all the time without compensation of any kind. Because they choose not to exercise their right to profit from it?
Coming from Nashville/Austin I can assure you, the reason people are interested in distribution channels is because that IS the music industry.
All this copyright hubbub is just a natural protectionist attempt to keep the high cost/barrier of entry for musicians (not just to distribution but profitability) by established entities like clearchannel, et al. You can't convince a new musician to sign a predatory contract when they have reached profitability through an easier distribution channel.
From an artists perspective: Talent isn't going away, at first the internet made the talent acquisition process easier and faster for studios, but Talent now has easier options for sustainable profitability through these new distribution channels. Studios have come to simply hate how much harder contract negotiations become when the artist they are targeting is already "making enough".
There is a lot more nonsense in this article regarding "Lines of Computer Code", "Forced Open Source" and the like, along with absurdist FUD like "What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations?", give me a break.
"What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations? The same as if you couldn’t charge for lines of computer code: there’d be less of it." This sums up why I disagree with the author. People have been playing and composing music way before "selling records" was the way to make money. Just like people don't contribute to open source "for the joy of it". Very serious business is being done around open s…
The difference is that nobody stops you from making "Open-Source" films and music, and many people do. The masses however seem to prefer commercial films, music and software.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linux is subsidized by large players who need an open platform on which to provide other services. This includes companies like Google who provide advertising based upon things that run on linux and companies like IBM who sell proprietary software that runs on Linux and support contracts for those products. There are very few viable, large-scale open source projects that are run on developer free time alone.
Tell that to the GCC folks, GIMP developers, Blender developers, Tremulous developers, Firefox developers, Mono developers, Rails developers, Python developers... (we all know GTK is a labor of love, 'cause you couldn't expect people to pay for it.)
I'll just cherry pick this gem here: "What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations? The same as if you couldn’t charge for lines of computer code: there’d be less of it." Spotted the massive, gaping flaw in the argument yet? It's 2012, if you make this argument then I am done with you. Linux is how old? How much of the internet runs on it? Done. Edit: Wow, really? Why is this still a necessary ar…
Linux is probably an exception, and not the rule, and it is such an exception that large companies are willing to subsidize it. I've been looking for some good sound editing software, and the only solution I could find that was good at altering tempo without creating weird artifacts was closed-source and proprietary. I've also rarely played any open-source games that were as good as the closed-source ones.
The point is, if someone does something that creates value, they should get compensated somehow. Asking musicians to produce music for nothing more than the sheer joy of it is exploiting them, and impolite, besides. If someone gives you value, you ought to give value back. I don't agree that the RIAA's way of getting back that value is correct, but that doesn't mean that copyright is a bad idea.
I'll just cherry pick this gem here: "What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations? The same as if you couldn’t charge for lines of computer code: there’d be less of it." Spotted the massive, gaping flaw in the argument yet? It's 2012, if you make this argument then I am done with you. Linux is how old? How much of the internet runs on it? Done. Edit: Wow, really? Why is this still a necessary ar…
Linux is subsidized by large players who need an open platform on which to provide other services. This includes companies like Google who provide advertising based upon things that run on linux and companies like IBM who sell proprietary software that runs on Linux and support contracts for those products. There are very few viable, large-scale open source projects that are run on developer free time alone.