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Some background: I developed a software binary sandbox, in the 90's; patent cited 500+ times ... mostly by developers of DRM. Now, I am working on an open sourc

Some background: I developed a software binary sandbox, in the 90's; patent cited 500+ times ... mostly by developers of DRM. Now, I am working on an open source project. IMO, DRM extends a presumption of scarcity. Hunters share their meat, whereas farmers guard their harvest. For the hunter, the kill is a short term abundance of value; if it isn't shared, it will spoil. For the farmer, the harvest is a long term store of value. Scavengers exploit the asymmetry of effort in which to obtain that value. Once value became easy to copy, the symmetry of effort has shifted. As a result, culture is shifting with it. Freely copied recorded music shifted the value back to live concerts. Back to a short term abundance of value. When was the last time you posted on Twitter or FB? These are freshly hunted moments. Wait too long and that muse will spoil.

eropple 9y ago
> Freely copied recorded music shifted the value back to live concerts. Overall, I get what you're saying and I don't disagree with the premise (though I'm ambivalent about the conclusion), but the word "shifted" doesn't usually mean "eradicated"--most live concerts net vanishingly little money and that's a real impact on creators. Whether that's a net societal good or not can be argued about, but "shifted", IMO, paints a misleading picture.
- 0xbear 9y ago
  Most other distribution methods for those artists have also been shown to net vanishingly little money. If you can't make money with a live performance, you sure as heck aren't making any selling CDs through a record company.
  - DanBC 9y ago
    Have you ever played live in a band?
    - nine_k 9y ago
      Have your ever been selling music via a label, or via a service like iTunes or Bandcamp? How much, as a percent of sales, did you receive? (Not rhetorical questions, I'm genuinely interested.)
      - ZoomZoomZoom 9y ago
        As a percent of which other sales exactly? If you mean selling merch and getting paid for the gigs, it's vanishingly small. At least for a band that does live performances. The funny thing is, for a vast majority of bands there's almost no sense to sell their recorded music (in a digital form), only to give the fans the feeling of making a contribution.
- musesum 9y ago
  Live music exceeds the revenue of the top 2 music publishers, Universal and Sony, as per: http://variety.com/2017/music/features/live-nation-concert-business-1201979571/ http://variety.com/2017/music/features/live-nation-concert-b... [Addendum] For a perspective on independent musicians, here's Steve Albini: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-...
TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
There is no presumption of scarcity, because scarcity is a real phenomenon. There is a vast qualitative difference between the output of ten thousand amateurs and one highly trained and exceptionally talented artist (working in whatever medium.) This an immensely unfashionable idea. But the real problem with DRM isn't that it does or does not enable copying, but that it presupposes that artistic output is a commodity that can be copied. In fact artistic output - considered as the cultural influence of an entire career, and not as a series of copyable files or performances - is not fungible. Not all content creators are equal. If you want quality as opposed to quantity, you need to set up a feedback function that makes some effort to reward and support quality, based on a more sophisticated metric than a lowest-common-denominator unit sales count in a mass market. This is even more true of science. Ten thousand PhDs do not add up to one Newton or Einstein. And politics. Ten thousand mediocre politicians do not add up to one Nelson Mandela or Gandhi. By the time everyone is having the DRM or no-DRM argument they've already missed the point - which is that commodifying cultural output as "content" for industrial distribution mechanisms (including live tours) is to misunderstand how culture propagates and evolves. And if you can't invent a system that finds and rewards talent - without reducing every transaction to the vapid foolishness of markets - then your culture, science, politics, art, and general joy in invention will stagnate and eventually disappear. DRM is barely a footnote here. It's nowhere close to being the main problem.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > But the real problem with DRM isn't that it does or does not enable copying, but that it presupposes that artistic output is a commodity that can be copied. But does it? I thought one of the bigger arguments studios use is that art is not a commodity, hence licensing (enforced by DRM) and copyrights and please pay us. > This is even more true of science. Ten thousand PhDs do not add up to one Newton or Einstein. > And politics. Ten thousand mediocre politicians do not add up to one Nelson Mandela or Gandhi. I'm less and less convinced of that. "Breakthrough discoveries" in sciences seem to be very incremental steps. That's, I think, the reason so many of those achievements were made simultaneously by different people in different parts of the world. When scientific knowledge reaches a given level, some discoveries become ripe for the taking, and they get plucked by whichever smart guy manages to figure it out first. I suspect the similar may be true of politics - even though history lessons tend to focus on individuals, it seems to me that big events were always much more about the environment than any individual decision. That is to say, if anything, science is much bigger a commodity than creative arts - by very virtue of being constrained by reality. All practically useful maps of the same territory will look alike, after all. > DRM is barely a footnote here. It's nowhere close to being the main problem. I'm having trouble seeing what is the main problem you think about. If I try to do a root cause analysis of DRM, I always end up concluding the main problem is that content creators have to create content for a living - i.e. if creative work were to be entirely decoupled from monetary interests, more people would have access to more and better cultural works.
audi100quattro 9y ago
If this were true in media, Mickey Mouse wouldn't still be copyrighted. DRM is recent, very recent, compared to analog media. It seems like the industry binged on copyright a little too much and by the time digital distribution came around, instead of using it to develop new talent and audiences, they decided to lock everything down with DRM. Must protect our copyrights! Prevent theft! Nevermind that DRM is mostly an added cost for the consumer, in exchange for no benefit, and the profits all seem to flow upwards regardless. Social media is much better, and the cultural pay-off is much better in that what I create isn't being locked down and is available through APIs. Have you followed a twitter hashtag recently? People are as creative as ever. This does have it's own challenges as we saw in the last election. No substitutes for media literacy and good content...

eropple 9y ago

> Freely copied recorded music shifted the value back to live concerts. Overall, I get what you're saying and I don't disagree with the premise (though I'm ambivalent about the conclusion), but the word "shifted" doesn't usually mean "eradicated"--most live concerts net vanishingly little money and that's a real impact on creators. Whether that's a net societal good or not can be argued about, but "shifted", IMO, paints a misleading picture.

0xbear 9y ago
Most other distribution methods for those artists have also been shown to net vanishingly little money. If you can't make money with a live performance, you sure as heck aren't making any selling CDs through a record company.
- DanBC 9y ago
  Have you ever played live in a band?
  - nine_k 9y ago
    Have your ever been selling music via a label, or via a service like iTunes or Bandcamp? How much, as a percent of sales, did you receive? (Not rhetorical questions, I'm genuinely interested.)
    - ZoomZoomZoom 9y ago
      As a percent of which other sales exactly? If you mean selling merch and getting paid for the gigs, it's vanishingly small. At least for a band that does live performances. The funny thing is, for a vast majority of bands there's almost no sense to sell their recorded music (in a digital form), only to give the fans the feeling of making a contribution.
musesum 9y ago
Live music exceeds the revenue of the top 2 music publishers, Universal and Sony, as per: http://variety.com/2017/music/features/live-nation-concert-business-1201979571/ http://variety.com/2017/music/features/live-nation-concert-b... [Addendum] For a perspective on independent musicians, here's Steve Albini: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-...

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago

There is no presumption of scarcity, because scarcity is a real phenomenon. There is a vast qualitative difference between the output of ten thousand amateurs and one highly trained and exceptionally talented artist (working in whatever medium.) This an immensely unfashionable idea. But the real problem with DRM isn't that it does or does not enable copying, but that it presupposes that artistic output is a commodity that can be copied. In fact artistic output - considered as the cultural influence of an entire career, and not as a series of copyable files or performances - is not fungible. Not all content creators are equal. If you want quality as opposed to quantity, you need to set up a feedback function that makes some effort to reward and support quality, based on a more sophisticated metric than a lowest-common-denominator unit sales count in a mass market. This is even more true of science. Ten thousand PhDs do not add up to one Newton or Einstein. And politics. Ten thousand mediocre politicians do not add up to one Nelson Mandela or Gandhi. By the time everyone is having the DRM or no-DRM argument they've already missed the point - which is that commodifying cultural output as "content" for industrial distribution mechanisms (including live tours) is to misunderstand how culture propagates and evolves. And if you can't invent a system that finds and rewards talent - without reducing every transaction to the vapid foolishness of markets - then your culture, science, politics, art, and general joy in invention will stagnate and eventually disappear. DRM is barely a footnote here. It's nowhere close to being the main problem.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
> But the real problem with DRM isn't that it does or does not enable copying, but that it presupposes that artistic output is a commodity that can be copied. But does it? I thought one of the bigger arguments studios use is that art is not a commodity, hence licensing (enforced by DRM) and copyrights and please pay us. > This is even more true of science. Ten thousand PhDs do not add up to one Newton or Einstein. > And politics. Ten thousand mediocre politicians do not add up to one Nelson Mandela or Gandhi. I'm less and less convinced of that. "Breakthrough discoveries" in sciences seem to be very incremental steps. That's, I think, the reason so many of those achievements were made simultaneously by different people in different parts of the world. When scientific knowledge reaches a given level, some discoveries become ripe for the taking, and they get plucked by whichever smart guy manages to figure it out first. I suspect the similar may be true of politics - even though history lessons tend to focus on individuals, it seems to me that big events were always much more about the environment than any individual decision. That is to say, if anything, science is much bigger a commodity than creative arts - by very virtue of being constrained by reality. All practically useful maps of the same territory will look alike, after all. > DRM is barely a footnote here. It's nowhere close to being the main problem. I'm having trouble seeing what is the main problem you think about. If I try to do a root cause analysis of DRM, I always end up concluding the main problem is that content creators have to create content for a living - i.e. if creative work were to be entirely decoupled from monetary interests, more people would have access to more and better cultural works.

audi100quattro 9y ago

If this were true in media, Mickey Mouse wouldn't still be copyrighted. DRM is recent, very recent, compared to analog media. It seems like the industry binged on copyright a little too much and by the time digital distribution came around, instead of using it to develop new talent and audiences, they decided to lock everything down with DRM. Must protect our copyrights! Prevent theft! Nevermind that DRM is mostly an added cost for the consumer, in exchange for no benefit, and the profits all seem to flow upwards regardless. Social media is much better, and the cultural pay-off is much better in that what I create isn't being locked down and is available through APIs. Have you followed a twitter hashtag recently? People are as creative as ever. This does have it's own challenges as we saw in the last election. No substitutes for media literacy and good content...