91–100 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…
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The author, and the content industry in general, are misunderstanding basic economics: Just because there is a cost to produce something does not mean that it has market value . pg was right in pointing out that the content industry is built on the economics of scarcity, and that this scarcity no longer exists. You could charge someone to see a movie in a theatre when doing so was the only way to see the movie. You c…
> Just because there is a cost to produce something does not mean that it has market value.
What shows market value is the desire for that product. The only reason that music is pirated now (when it used to be purchased) is because it's easy and without consequence. Let's say hypothetically in the future stealing a car becomes easy and without consequence (even though it's still illegal) does that mean there is no market value for cars? Of course it doesn't. It shows that people care more about saving money
If pirating music was impossible many people would return to paying for music, the only reason they don't now is because stealing it is consequence free.
The convenience argument is also (for want of a better phrase) complete and utter bullshit. I can switch to itunes right now, type in a search term, hit purchase and have the song on my hard drive (and iphone and any other device I have connected to my itunes account) within 10 seconds. Hell, I'll open my screen recording program now and record me proving this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA2wzb0-4Pg
People pirate music because it's free, consequence free (the reason they don't steal cars is consequence) and everyone spends all day every day justifying it. It's not a matter of convenience, people go to more effort pirating than they would purchasing (except for cases where the music is not available commercially, but those instances are "rare" and not a worthy consideration for the sake of this argument).
PG seems to be advocating a pragmatic approach, based on the difficulty of enforcement. Goods can be excludable or non-excludable. Excludable goods are anything that can be effectively locked down (like most physical goods, or movie tickets). Non-excludable goods can't (like air, fish in the sea, and IP). You can make a non-excludable good excludable by creating laws (like Carbon Taxes or IP laws), but it's not always practical.
But he kind of misses the other half - rivalry.
Goods can also be rivalrous or non-rivalrous. Ideas are non-rivalrous as you don't lose anything (except a competitive advantage) if other people also have it. In fact, IP may be the opposite to rivalrous (which is a rare enough thing to not have a name, though I like the name "network goods"), because it's worth more if everyone has it. If more people can speak a language, it's more useful to everyone. The Lord of the Rings is more interesting if you can talk to your friends about it.
While there's a good reason to try to make common goods (rivalrous but non-excludable) goods more excludable (by introducing laws which prevent over-exploitation), it's perverse to make non-rivalrous excludable. You don't tax breathing if there's plenty of air.
The main reason you want to make a public (non-rivalrous non-excludable) good more excludable is to incentize its creation (another reason might be because it's judged to be a "de-merit" (bad) good - such as a porn or a method of manufacturing weapons). But since IP is an input to creating IP, there's very good reasons why you want to make copyright and patents expire in a short time - bringing down the cost of creating new IP may outweigh the lost incentive. Also, the anti-rivalrous nature of IP may even encourage people to make more, simply because it's so useful have more people using it - Linus got his own private kernel debugged and extended at a lower cost by sharing it.
If a good cannot be easily made excludable, then it's all very sad (assuming that the lost incentive to create more of it outweights the loss from more people having access to the existing stuff, and the stuff that's made voluntarily) but there's not much you can do without heavy regulation.
Music will still be made. Musicians will make money on gigs. Advertisers will pay musicians for annoying jingles. It's not the 1700s, there's literally millions of talented musicians who will eke out a living actually connecting with the community (concerts, teaching, playing in pubs) who should be able to produce far more (in aggregate) than Mozart, Beethoven and the like. Without copyright, many of those musicians may make a better living, as they can draw on other people's material more easily.
The fat distribution pipe (distributors, promoters, producers, broadcasters) will mostly die, but no-one really cares - they don't create much value. OK, the definition of value is rubbery, but if you make money by convincing people that they need something (i.e. tell them that folk music is daggy, and you have to buy the latest pop hit to be cool) then you're really destroying value, then offering a band-aid.
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…
OP said that there would be less of it, not that it would be nonexistent. 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…
"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…
So in your view the entirety of the 99 cent charge should go to Apple? The song you wanted to download just popped into existence before hand with no time, effort or talent from an artist at all (or discovery by a label)? Please tell me more about this magical music tree.
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…
OP said that there would be less of it, not that it would be nonexistent. 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…
We might not get epic movies... or we might, if CGI continues to dwindle in cost. We probably won't get as much pop/dance music... but we might.
There won't be as many huge star winners, that's all that can really be said to be likely.
Why does YCombinator deserve equity (value) from successes of the YC program, these are internet companies, aren't msot of the company's benefits intangible "smells" much like music? Wait. Let me guess... because they invested, so they deserve to profit right? So somebody please explain to me why the media industries are different. If anybody thinks music is free please go price out studio time before replying.
And the other day, I turned on a $20 tape recorder.
Perhaps you should expand your ideas of what constitutes publishable music.
Why does YCombinator deserve equity (value) from successes of the YC program, these are internet companies, aren't msot of the company's benefits intangible "smells" much like music? Wait. Let me guess... because they invested, so they deserve to profit right? So somebody please explain to me why the media industries are different. If anybody thinks music is free please go price out studio time before replying.
$400 dollars for a full day of recording ( http://www.inthejarstudios.com/rates.htm ). I have to pay for my own woodworking tools and computers, but I don't expect people to subsidize me in my hobby. And if I decided to go pro--which in the case of computers I have--I would make sure I only make things the market wants, and not take on shitty contracts signing away future sale equity until some vaguely defined point…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So in your view the entirety of the 99 cent charge should go to Apple? The song you wanted to download just popped into existence before hand with no time, effort or talent from an artist at all (or discovery by a label)? Please tell me more about this magical music tree.
I didn't say anything about where the money should go.