8 ms·

That's way down from when 10/10 music consumers were pirates, just trading songs with each other around campfires and town squares without deep thought paid to

That's way down from when 10/10 music consumers were pirates, just trading songs with each other around campfires and town squares without deep thought paid to credit. Seriously, exclusive rights to music creation and reproduction are a pretty new thing; I think humanity will survive this "recent" trend.

jMyles 8y ago
You're sentiment is more charitable than mine. If anybody ever tries to control some other person's activity in this way, and it happens to be my music that's at issue, that will certainly not be an appropriate position to take vis a vis my creation. (Not that my music is really worth anything to anyone, except maybe my song at DjangoCon 2012 :-) ). I just don't understand how these ideas have even become so pervasive. The idea that I can own a song (or any data) to the exclusion of preventing someone from copying bytes from one drive to another... it's just so strange.
- mordae 8y ago
  People don't really care and just repeat the narrative. "Musician has to eat, too, right?" Most conservative people around me don't really care about IP right. Heck, they don't even understand them at all! I've seen them repeatedly pirating images from Google or copying their music using ripping tools while still advocating for copyright.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Also patents. People are all for patents because they believe that one day they'll have a brilliant idea and make money this way. Well, patents are[0] how you deprive society of being able to use that idea when the time is ripe for it to be used. -- [0] - with the possible exception of pharmaceuticals.
    - Ajedi32 8y ago
      Why are pharmaceuticals an exception? What makes them different?
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Absurdly high costs of drug research (and then absurdly high costs of getting successful ones approved). We're talking about billions of dollars of investment for something that, once developed, can be copied for pennies by cheap chemical plants. I accept that there needs to be a way for "big pharma" to recoup the development costs, or else they won't even bother with drug research. It seems to me that cost/benefit of patents make them justified in this case. But not in most other industries, not with the patent lengths of today (and lack of any details that would let people reproduce the invention after patent expiration).
        Ajedi32 8y ago
        Maybe the solution is to just make patents more expensive to obtain. That way companies won't bother patenting trivial "inventions", while products that require lots of resources to develop would be worth the extra cost.
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        This would disadvantage individual inventors though, who would be less likely to afford the application than a company. My current and somewhat layman opinion is that we need to take a serious look at the duration of patent protection. For instance in software, a patent longer than 2-3 years is IMO absurd, and just serves to enrich the patent owner while retarding the progress of technology. Similar calculation could be made for other industries, based on typical time-to-market and rate of progress. The application process should IMO be also more strict, to a) not let through so many patents on obvious things, and b) ensure that patent description actually allows to reproduce the invention. Lastly, we need to find a way to stop companies from stockpiling patents as if they were nuclear weapons. And speaking of that, I wish regulators could also take a look at the duration of copyright protection, and curb the practice of extending it in perpetuity.
    - snowwrestler 8y ago
      This is backward, the point of a patent is that it guarantees the invention will become public knowledge. The exclusivity period is compensation for that. There is no law forcing a person or company to file for a patent. They are free to keep their trade secrets a secret forever, if they want.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        This may be backwards, but it's how regular people see it, from what I've observed. They dream of patenting something and then licensing/selling it to companies. It's easier than making use of the invention by themselves. As for guaranteeing the invention will be public knowledge, these days it's just bait-and-switch.
        snowwrestler 8y ago
        Using an invention to create a product is a way (maybe the most popular way) of making the invention public knowledge. The dream of licensing is not a perversion of the patent system, it's part of the point: to get inventions out of people's heads and secret workshops, and into forms that benefit the public at large.
  - Nition 8y ago
    I sometimes think about the fact that in the Feeding Of The Multitude, Jesus made and gave out numerous free copies of bread and fish without any thought for the bakers or fishmongers.
edanm 8y ago
> Seriously, exclusive rights to music creation and reproduction are a pretty new thing; I think humanity will survive this "recent" trend. I mean, by that standard, the entire legal system, not to mention having state police departments vs random mob justice, are also pretty new things. Do you think that we can do away with those too cause they're new? Do you give any credence to the idea that part of the reason the last few hundred years have been incredibly productive for humanity (both in terms of general economic welfare, but also art), is partly because of things like the patent/IP system? I'd be happy to know why not, if not.
- fixermark 8y ago
  Legal systems are basically as old as, depending on how you slice it, writing. If you mean a specific US-centric model of a legal system, it dates back about a thousand years or so. Copyright dates back to about the invention of the printing press, so about 600 years old. Common law has a good 400 years on that (and law itself, a couple thousand years on common law). Copyright is a baby by comparison. And given that it was functionally co-birthed with the printing press (since before that time, every copy was a blessing---a work of hand-crafted art someone had bothered to invest substantive human toil into because they thought a thing deserved to be recorded in more than one place), I don't think I have the tools to divide the benefits to society of copyright law from the benefits to society of mass, cheap reproduction of writeable concepts. It may have helped. It probably helped more in some spaces than in others. But by-and-large, it provided a system for a person to go live the "life of the mind" and exchange art for money instead of something else, and it's unclear to me that copyright did more than, say, the patronage system to that end. ... all of which is divorceable from the concept of, God help us, exclusive rights to perform a work, which is the weird space music lives in. Because we don't even charge by the written copy there; we often charge (to the best of the ability of the copyright holder) for every instance of "reading" the record and re-broadcasting it into someone's ears. Yes, I think one can build a case that the cost of upkeep, overhead, tracking, and maintenance to move money around in that system offsets the benefit to society. I think it's incumbent upon the rent-holders and copyright owners to explain how, absent their Byzantine system of moving money around, our public spaces would be silent and dead, devoid of creative works. The history of humanity and our simple desire to sing makes that strike me as profoundly unlikely.

jMyles 8y ago

You're sentiment is more charitable than mine. If anybody ever tries to control some other person's activity in this way, and it happens to be my music that's at issue, that will certainly not be an appropriate position to take vis a vis my creation. (Not that my music is really worth anything to anyone, except maybe my song at DjangoCon 2012 :-) ). I just don't understand how these ideas have even become so pervasive. The idea that I can own a song (or any data) to the exclusion of preventing someone from copying bytes from one drive to another... it's just so strange.

mordae 8y ago
People don't really care and just repeat the narrative. "Musician has to eat, too, right?" Most conservative people around me don't really care about IP right. Heck, they don't even understand them at all! I've seen them repeatedly pirating images from Google or copying their music using ripping tools while still advocating for copyright.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Also patents. People are all for patents because they believe that one day they'll have a brilliant idea and make money this way. Well, patents are[0] how you deprive society of being able to use that idea when the time is ripe for it to be used. -- [0] - with the possible exception of pharmaceuticals.
  - Ajedi32 8y ago
    Why are pharmaceuticals an exception? What makes them different?
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Absurdly high costs of drug research (and then absurdly high costs of getting successful ones approved). We're talking about billions of dollars of investment for something that, once developed, can be copied for pennies by cheap chemical plants. I accept that there needs to be a way for "big pharma" to recoup the development costs, or else they won't even bother with drug research. It seems to me that cost/benefit of patents make them justified in this case. But not in most other industries, not with the patent lengths of today (and lack of any details that would let people reproduce the invention after patent expiration).
      - Ajedi32 8y ago
        Maybe the solution is to just make patents more expensive to obtain. That way companies won't bother patenting trivial "inventions", while products that require lots of resources to develop would be worth the extra cost.
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        This would disadvantage individual inventors though, who would be less likely to afford the application than a company. My current and somewhat layman opinion is that we need to take a serious look at the duration of patent protection. For instance in software, a patent longer than 2-3 years is IMO absurd, and just serves to enrich the patent owner while retarding the progress of technology. Similar calculation could be made for other industries, based on typical time-to-market and rate of progress. The application process should IMO be also more strict, to a) not let through so many patents on obvious things, and b) ensure that patent description actually allows to reproduce the invention. Lastly, we need to find a way to stop companies from stockpiling patents as if they were nuclear weapons. And speaking of that, I wish regulators could also take a look at the duration of copyright protection, and curb the practice of extending it in perpetuity.
  - snowwrestler 8y ago
    This is backward, the point of a patent is that it guarantees the invention will become public knowledge. The exclusivity period is compensation for that. There is no law forcing a person or company to file for a patent. They are free to keep their trade secrets a secret forever, if they want.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      This may be backwards, but it's how regular people see it, from what I've observed. They dream of patenting something and then licensing/selling it to companies. It's easier than making use of the invention by themselves. As for guaranteeing the invention will be public knowledge, these days it's just bait-and-switch.
      - snowwrestler 8y ago
        Using an invention to create a product is a way (maybe the most popular way) of making the invention public knowledge. The dream of licensing is not a perversion of the patent system, it's part of the point: to get inventions out of people's heads and secret workshops, and into forms that benefit the public at large.
- Nition 8y ago
  I sometimes think about the fact that in the Feeding Of The Multitude, Jesus made and gave out numerous free copies of bread and fish without any thought for the bakers or fishmongers.

edanm 8y ago

> Seriously, exclusive rights to music creation and reproduction are a pretty new thing; I think humanity will survive this "recent" trend. I mean, by that standard, the entire legal system, not to mention having state police departments vs random mob justice, are also pretty new things. Do you think that we can do away with those too cause they're new? Do you give any credence to the idea that part of the reason the last few hundred years have been incredibly productive for humanity (both in terms of general economic welfare, but also art), is partly because of things like the patent/IP system? I'd be happy to know why not, if not.

fixermark 8y ago
Legal systems are basically as old as, depending on how you slice it, writing. If you mean a specific US-centric model of a legal system, it dates back about a thousand years or so. Copyright dates back to about the invention of the printing press, so about 600 years old. Common law has a good 400 years on that (and law itself, a couple thousand years on common law). Copyright is a baby by comparison. And given that it was functionally co-birthed with the printing press (since before that time, every copy was a blessing---a work of hand-crafted art someone had bothered to invest substantive human toil into because they thought a thing deserved to be recorded in more than one place), I don't think I have the tools to divide the benefits to society of copyright law from the benefits to society of mass, cheap reproduction of writeable concepts. It may have helped. It probably helped more in some spaces than in others. But by-and-large, it provided a system for a person to go live the "life of the mind" and exchange art for money instead of something else, and it's unclear to me that copyright did more than, say, the patronage system to that end. ... all of which is divorceable from the concept of, God help us, exclusive rights to perform a work, which is the weird space music lives in. Because we don't even charge by the written copy there; we often charge (to the best of the ability of the copyright holder) for every instance of "reading" the record and re-broadcasting it into someone's ears. Yes, I think one can build a case that the cost of upkeep, overhead, tracking, and maintenance to move money around in that system offsets the benefit to society. I think it's incumbent upon the rent-holders and copyright owners to explain how, absent their Byzantine system of moving money around, our public spaces would be silent and dead, devoid of creative works. The history of humanity and our simple desire to sing makes that strike me as profoundly unlikely.