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As a teenager, I thought I had a right to enjoy their work without paying for it. But this attitude surprises me from adults. Why don’t bands deserve to be paid

As a teenager, I thought I had a right to enjoy their work without paying for it. But this attitude surprises me from adults. Why don’t bands deserve to be paid for their product?

blandflakes 6y ago
I want to pay artists for their work. I don't want to lease the bytes representing my access from a company, and then have them vanish later, because some kind of licensing agreement changed. Metallica was a huge driving force and public supporter behind the shitshow behavior. Do you like rootkits? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
- VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
  well the industry corrected itself by pushing a la carte subscription music services which is what the freedom fighters hate but it turns out it's exactly what the people wanted all along.
  - blandflakes 6y ago
    I think it's pretty valid to want to pay a price for music, and then take that file wherever you go, without having to reconnect to update a license (I both pay for a subscription to Spotify and mp3s a la carte). Of course, that's also available today, but that's not really relevant to the problem being discussed, which is: it's possible to want to pay artists, while also finding overzealous enforcement of the DMCA problematic.
    - ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
      I don’t think so. You have no right to ownership just because you buy the song. You didn’t commission it, you didn’t write it, produce it, market it, and so on. All you did was pay a couple dollars. In effect, all you’re doing is buying a license to play the song for personal use, not the right to keep the file forever.
      - blandflakes 6y ago
        This is a weird take. There are stores that literally grant you that right, today. I'm pretty sure that even in the US, a court is not going to grant a musician the right to force you to delete the MP3s you bought off Amazon music. What is the basis for your belief that you don't have a right to the file you bought? Or are you disagreeing with the existence of stores that operate that way? Or with... basically the entire history of hard copy distribution, like cassettes, CDs, vinyl...
        ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
        https://www.zdnet.com/article/who-owns-your-digital-downloads-hint-its-not-you/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/who-owns-your-digital-download... Amazon actually will delete music from your hard drive. 5. Reservation of Rights Except for the rights explicitly granted to you in the Terms of Use, all right, title and interest in the Service, the Software and the Digital Content are reserved and retained by us, our Digital Content providers, and our licensors. You do not acquire any ownership rights in the Software or Digital Content as a result of downloading Software or Digital Content. And yeah I do disagree with the license of hard copy distribution. I don’t think just because I buy a book I can do whatever I want, even burning it. I really think the supposed harm to consumers is vastly exaggerated in HN; on the other hand, the harm to artists and creators is serious, especially to those without the privilege of patronage.
        blandflakes 6y ago
        That article spends its whole time talking about whether you can transfer the rights. From your source, for example: You may copy, store, and burn iTunes Plus Products as reasonably necessary for personal, noncommercial use. All of the agreements cited are pretty clear that you can copy and store the bytes for your own use. I agree with the thrust that "purchasing" music is certainly weirder with these overreaching legal agreements (and I think it's more fraught when it comes to video or video games), but I disagree with the perspective that: A) That this is a lease of the music B) That that condition is justified because you didn't create an exclusive commission. It seemed to me that, legality aside (and forgive me if I'm misunderstanding), you were asserting that customers have no business expecting indefinite access to an MP3 they paid for, and I... disagree, but if the recording industry wants that to be the case, they're welcome to yet another scenario where pirates have a better customer experience than paying customers. Blech, an edit: What I have seen that applied to is subscription-based music, where the license agreement around whether that song is available for subscription changes. Is there an example of this happening to a "purchased "song or album? I've never seen an effort by a publisher to reclaim hard-drive-bound songs that have been paid for (and I imagine spicy legal cases about expecting refunds). Edit again: I realize I'm sort of meandering. My point is only that it's not unreasonable to expect that, I agree that licensing agreements for digital purchases of all kinds have surprising details about what you actually "own".
  - mrgordon 6y ago
    Nobody said it’s what the people wanted all along. I miss the days where my songs don’t just disappear from Spotify because they renegotiated a contract. But there’s no risk of being sued and it’s cheap enough so it’s easy to subscribe even if it’s not your preferred solution
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  Metallica had nothing to do with what your issue is then. Not a single thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compact_discs_sold_with_Extended_Copy_Protection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compact_discs_sold_wit...
  - blandflakes 6y ago
    Metallica lobbied and was publicly the face of anti-piracy sentiment, and are therefore very much responsible for my issues AND their own, in this scenario.
    - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
      Let me guess, you also don’t like police.
      - blandflakes 6y ago
        Or maybe just engage the statement on its merits instead of trying to create a strawman.
        lawnchair_larry 6y ago
        Your whole argument is a straw man. You’re blaming Metallica suing napster for a sony rootkit. It’s nonsense. I pirated the shit out of music on napster. But Metallica was still right to shut it down. I didn’t have any right to that music. I didn’t have any right to the $10 people paid me to burn CDs of napster content for them either.
        blandflakes 6y ago
        Cool. I don't have a right to free music either. I pay for music, as I mentioned. But I'm frustrated to see that you rabidly think that any critique of how we enforce anti-piracy means that I don't think artists deserve income. Here's a twist for you. I work on a team responsible for, among other things, DRM for a major streaming video company. I believe in paying for multimedia. Please stop making assumptions about me that are not at all implied by my comments (that I steal artists' work). Also, it looks like the majority of HN readers understood what I was saying, and found your argument to be nonsense, so maybe... let's just let it go? I don't care to keep explaining this to you and you don't care to perceive any degree of nuance, whether the fault is mine in explaining or not.
- Hydraulix989 6y ago
  I wasn't aware Metallica ever rootkit'd anybody? I already knew about the Sony incident that you linked.
  - blandflakes 6y ago
    The point is that efforts to prevent piracy, pushed by Metallica and obviously the recording companies at large, can be harmful, and it's possible to want to support artists but to prefer that they don't take measures which actively hurt consumers. This is the same community that really hates ebook lending, and it's very much the same set of consumer-limiting control over intellectual property that curtails piracy but also makes things really inconvenient for the legitimate customer. I'm surprised but also not that people aren't able to think about this as more than a (false) dichotomy.
    - Hydraulix989 6y ago
      Again, Metallica did not rootkit anybody. How are they hurting legitimate consumers of their work? Rootkits are not mere inconveniences, they are intentional data breaches. Obviously spreading mis-information using this particular false example is going to distort peoples' understandings of Metallica's actual stance and actions. Hacking consumers directly vs. using the court system to shut down an illegal piracy application is a very real dichotomy. Properly implemented DRM is fine! Spotify has been a huge success, for example. Watching Netflix fully brings the convenience of streaming to legal content consumption. The only inconvenience here is that you can no longer pirate anything.
      - blandflakes 6y ago
        > Again, Metallica did not rootkit anybody. And, to use a facile and touchy example, Donald Trump didn't revolt at the capital. But fine: > what is a very real dichotomy Help me out here - why are the only two choices: 1. rampant piracy 2. automated systems that allow corporations to trivially take down content, legitimate or not, with generally no recourse unless you get e.g. Google's attention on twitter? Why are people so convinced there's no middle ground here, and that everybody with an opinion that #2 is perhaps a little problematic must be totally pro-piracy? > Properly implemented DRM is fine! Perhaps the argument is that we don't yet live in the land of properly implemented IP controls. I didn't realize we'd reached utopia; I'll go back to buying ebooks and reusing them across whatever devices I please. Spotify and Netflix are great examples of exactly proof that a convenient form of consumption will get paying customers, and I was certainly more willing to buy MP3s when they stopped coming with DRM attached to them. The fact these work does not somehow render the point that, well, the original article, occurs, as a result of these things, and that it's ironic that it happens to Metallica, who would probably prior to this have been pleased that an automated system takes down anything approximating Enter Sandman.
- ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
  But that implies you own the song, which you don’t. You’re always leasing access to the song. Just because you pay a couple dollars doesn’t mean you get to listen to it forever.
  - blandflakes 6y ago
    Already asked this, but where are you getting this interpretation? Not only is it now how most license agreements for music stores read today, it's also simply unreasonable.
VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
no no no they're supposed to give their music away for free and then make money on concert tickets and t-shirts
- sidpatil 6y ago
  That's essentially what most musicians end up doing when they stream on platforms like Spotify.
dcwca 6y ago
There are cases where it’s less important for bands to be paid for their music than it is to not sue children and not cripple consumer technology.
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  Who in this discussion was advocating suing children?
  - dcwca 6y ago
    Metallica
zucker42 6y ago
How exactly does what happened here -- hundreds of streams, including the official Twitch stream, muting themselves to avoid losing their careers or getting sued for absurd amounts of money -- contribute to bands getting paid?
ouid 6y ago
Lets say that all of the earths water becomes polluted except for an infinite well that only you have access to. Do you not have the right to get paid for it? Shouldn't you get paid something like the value added to humanity? So, everything? You should get paid everything? What if the situation were different, and there where billions of people searching for infinite wells when all of the water became polluted and you were the lucky one to find it. Do you deserve everything now? How else were you supposed to have been incentivized to search for infinite wells if not for the possibility that everything would be yours upon finding it. Alright, what if it weren't water? What if it were something that, instead of keeping you alive, just made life worth living? I reckon you probably couldn't get everything for it, but surely you could get a lot. Does that seem like a bad system to you? I tell you what. I have a lot of money, I'll pay you to go searching for the infinite well of happiness (you can't survive on credit forever), and in exchange, it becomes mine when you find it, and then I can sell it for everything. The premise that monopoly rights on distribution are necessary to incentivize the searching is pretty severely undermined by the fact that those monopoly rights are aggregated by companies which incentivize the searching via other means.
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  You’re comparing a routine transaction of paying someone for their performance, to an unrealistic hypothetical involving the monopolization of a critical resource required to survive more than 3 days. It’s hard to take that argument seriously. You’re misusing the word monopoly. Everyone has a monopoly on their own labor. But they don’t have a monopoly on music, and neither does Metallica. You’re not entitled to a man’s song and dance under any circumstances that don’t involve him entering into a mutually agreeable transaction with you. If this makes life not worth living, hopefully you can find someone else willing to accept your offer of giving them nothing in exchange for it. If you can’t, well, tough shit I guess. You still don’t deserve it for free. It’s not Lars’ problem if you will die without his music.
  - ouid 6y ago
    I'm not talking about a transaction where someone performs for me, that's not what copyright refers to, I'm talking about an infinite well. And the comparison was between any infinite well and an infinite well of water. Granting someone scarcity rights on an unscarce resources is inefficient. Society would, instantaneously, produce a lot more value if all of the things that were free to reproduce were reproduced at the quantity demanded. The question of copyright has ALWAYS been one of incentive, and I think my argument to that point is pretty clear. Further, I am not misusing the word monopoly. Copyright is precisely monopoly distribution rights.
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
> Why don’t bands deserve to be paid for their product? The presentation suggests that Metallica goes unpaid for their product. I suspect there are many fat bank deposits that indicate otherwise. What I feel is more important is that the assertion obfuscates the primary motivation in play. Wealthy and powerful copyright interests want to control what customers get to do with the product they purchase. This government-granted privilege isn't one that's enjoyed by the vast bulk of producers. Worse, copyright gatekeepers have twisted the constitutional purpose of copyright - from encouraging the progress of science and the useful arts - into a pampered entitlement of never-ending profit.
- lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  > Wealthy and powerful copyright interests want to control what customers get to do with the product they purchase. No, this is not a story of the evil capitalist overlord oppressing the little guy. Save the hero narrative. Even the broke bands (which is most of them) want people to pay them for their work. The good news is there are actually a lot of them who don’t, and that’s their personal decision. You’re allowed to take it for free if they set their price at zero, but you’re not allowed to set their price at zero for them.
  - WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
    > Even the broke bands (which is most of them) want people to pay them for their work. Broke bands aren't who are paying legislators for ever-racheting copyright laws - each of which comes at the public's expense and further betrays the bargain between copyright holders and the public. and - Corruption fueled copyright laws tend to favor powerful, wealthy gatekeepers (by design). For everyone else there are far better methodologies to making a living. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120210/02273417726/how-being-more-open-human-awesome-can-save-anyone-worried-about-making-money-entertainment.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120210/02273417726/how-b...

As a teenager, I thought I had a right to enjoy their work without paying for it. But this attitude surprises me from adults. Why don’t bands deserve to be paid for their product?

blandflakes 6y ago

I want to pay artists for their work. I don't want to lease the bytes representing my access from a company, and then have them vanish later, because some kind of licensing agreement changed. Metallica was a huge driving force and public supporter behind the shitshow behavior. Do you like rootkits? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
well the industry corrected itself by pushing a la carte subscription music services which is what the freedom fighters hate but it turns out it's exactly what the people wanted all along.
- blandflakes 6y ago
  I think it's pretty valid to want to pay a price for music, and then take that file wherever you go, without having to reconnect to update a license (I both pay for a subscription to Spotify and mp3s a la carte). Of course, that's also available today, but that's not really relevant to the problem being discussed, which is: it's possible to want to pay artists, while also finding overzealous enforcement of the DMCA problematic.
  - ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
    I don’t think so. You have no right to ownership just because you buy the song. You didn’t commission it, you didn’t write it, produce it, market it, and so on. All you did was pay a couple dollars. In effect, all you’re doing is buying a license to play the song for personal use, not the right to keep the file forever.
    - blandflakes 6y ago
      This is a weird take. There are stores that literally grant you that right, today. I'm pretty sure that even in the US, a court is not going to grant a musician the right to force you to delete the MP3s you bought off Amazon music. What is the basis for your belief that you don't have a right to the file you bought? Or are you disagreeing with the existence of stores that operate that way? Or with... basically the entire history of hard copy distribution, like cassettes, CDs, vinyl...
      - ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
        https://www.zdnet.com/article/who-owns-your-digital-downloads-hint-its-not-you/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/who-owns-your-digital-download... Amazon actually will delete music from your hard drive. 5. Reservation of Rights Except for the rights explicitly granted to you in the Terms of Use, all right, title and interest in the Service, the Software and the Digital Content are reserved and retained by us, our Digital Content providers, and our licensors. You do not acquire any ownership rights in the Software or Digital Content as a result of downloading Software or Digital Content. And yeah I do disagree with the license of hard copy distribution. I don’t think just because I buy a book I can do whatever I want, even burning it. I really think the supposed harm to consumers is vastly exaggerated in HN; on the other hand, the harm to artists and creators is serious, especially to those without the privilege of patronage.
        blandflakes 6y ago
        That article spends its whole time talking about whether you can transfer the rights. From your source, for example: You may copy, store, and burn iTunes Plus Products as reasonably necessary for personal, noncommercial use. All of the agreements cited are pretty clear that you can copy and store the bytes for your own use. I agree with the thrust that "purchasing" music is certainly weirder with these overreaching legal agreements (and I think it's more fraught when it comes to video or video games), but I disagree with the perspective that: A) That this is a lease of the music B) That that condition is justified because you didn't create an exclusive commission. It seemed to me that, legality aside (and forgive me if I'm misunderstanding), you were asserting that customers have no business expecting indefinite access to an MP3 they paid for, and I... disagree, but if the recording industry wants that to be the case, they're welcome to yet another scenario where pirates have a better customer experience than paying customers. Blech, an edit: What I have seen that applied to is subscription-based music, where the license agreement around whether that song is available for subscription changes. Is there an example of this happening to a "purchased "song or album? I've never seen an effort by a publisher to reclaim hard-drive-bound songs that have been paid for (and I imagine spicy legal cases about expecting refunds). Edit again: I realize I'm sort of meandering. My point is only that it's not unreasonable to expect that, I agree that licensing agreements for digital purchases of all kinds have surprising details about what you actually "own".
- mrgordon 6y ago
  Nobody said it’s what the people wanted all along. I miss the days where my songs don’t just disappear from Spotify because they renegotiated a contract. But there’s no risk of being sued and it’s cheap enough so it’s easy to subscribe even if it’s not your preferred solution
lawnchair_larry 6y ago
Metallica had nothing to do with what your issue is then. Not a single thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compact_discs_sold_with_Extended_Copy_Protection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compact_discs_sold_wit...
- blandflakes 6y ago
  Metallica lobbied and was publicly the face of anti-piracy sentiment, and are therefore very much responsible for my issues AND their own, in this scenario.
  - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    Let me guess, you also don’t like police.
    - blandflakes 6y ago
      Or maybe just engage the statement on its merits instead of trying to create a strawman.
      - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
        Your whole argument is a straw man. You’re blaming Metallica suing napster for a sony rootkit. It’s nonsense. I pirated the shit out of music on napster. But Metallica was still right to shut it down. I didn’t have any right to that music. I didn’t have any right to the $10 people paid me to burn CDs of napster content for them either.
        blandflakes 6y ago
        Cool. I don't have a right to free music either. I pay for music, as I mentioned. But I'm frustrated to see that you rabidly think that any critique of how we enforce anti-piracy means that I don't think artists deserve income. Here's a twist for you. I work on a team responsible for, among other things, DRM for a major streaming video company. I believe in paying for multimedia. Please stop making assumptions about me that are not at all implied by my comments (that I steal artists' work). Also, it looks like the majority of HN readers understood what I was saying, and found your argument to be nonsense, so maybe... let's just let it go? I don't care to keep explaining this to you and you don't care to perceive any degree of nuance, whether the fault is mine in explaining or not.
Hydraulix989 6y ago
I wasn't aware Metallica ever rootkit'd anybody? I already knew about the Sony incident that you linked.
- blandflakes 6y ago
  The point is that efforts to prevent piracy, pushed by Metallica and obviously the recording companies at large, can be harmful, and it's possible to want to support artists but to prefer that they don't take measures which actively hurt consumers. This is the same community that really hates ebook lending, and it's very much the same set of consumer-limiting control over intellectual property that curtails piracy but also makes things really inconvenient for the legitimate customer. I'm surprised but also not that people aren't able to think about this as more than a (false) dichotomy.
  - Hydraulix989 6y ago
    Again, Metallica did not rootkit anybody. How are they hurting legitimate consumers of their work? Rootkits are not mere inconveniences, they are intentional data breaches. Obviously spreading mis-information using this particular false example is going to distort peoples' understandings of Metallica's actual stance and actions. Hacking consumers directly vs. using the court system to shut down an illegal piracy application is a very real dichotomy. Properly implemented DRM is fine! Spotify has been a huge success, for example. Watching Netflix fully brings the convenience of streaming to legal content consumption. The only inconvenience here is that you can no longer pirate anything.
    - blandflakes 6y ago
      > Again, Metallica did not rootkit anybody. And, to use a facile and touchy example, Donald Trump didn't revolt at the capital. But fine: > what is a very real dichotomy Help me out here - why are the only two choices: 1. rampant piracy 2. automated systems that allow corporations to trivially take down content, legitimate or not, with generally no recourse unless you get e.g. Google's attention on twitter? Why are people so convinced there's no middle ground here, and that everybody with an opinion that #2 is perhaps a little problematic must be totally pro-piracy? > Properly implemented DRM is fine! Perhaps the argument is that we don't yet live in the land of properly implemented IP controls. I didn't realize we'd reached utopia; I'll go back to buying ebooks and reusing them across whatever devices I please. Spotify and Netflix are great examples of exactly proof that a convenient form of consumption will get paying customers, and I was certainly more willing to buy MP3s when they stopped coming with DRM attached to them. The fact these work does not somehow render the point that, well, the original article, occurs, as a result of these things, and that it's ironic that it happens to Metallica, who would probably prior to this have been pleased that an automated system takes down anything approximating Enter Sandman.
ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
But that implies you own the song, which you don’t. You’re always leasing access to the song. Just because you pay a couple dollars doesn’t mean you get to listen to it forever.
- blandflakes 6y ago
  Already asked this, but where are you getting this interpretation? Not only is it now how most license agreements for music stores read today, it's also simply unreasonable.

VWWHFSfQ 6y ago

no no no they're supposed to give their music away for free and then make money on concert tickets and t-shirts

sidpatil 6y ago
That's essentially what most musicians end up doing when they stream on platforms like Spotify.

dcwca 6y ago

There are cases where it’s less important for bands to be paid for their music than it is to not sue children and not cripple consumer technology.

lawnchair_larry 6y ago
Who in this discussion was advocating suing children?
- dcwca 6y ago
  Metallica

zucker42 6y ago

How exactly does what happened here -- hundreds of streams, including the official Twitch stream, muting themselves to avoid losing their careers or getting sued for absurd amounts of money -- contribute to bands getting paid?

ouid 6y ago

Lets say that all of the earths water becomes polluted except for an infinite well that only you have access to. Do you not have the right to get paid for it? Shouldn't you get paid something like the value added to humanity? So, everything? You should get paid everything? What if the situation were different, and there where billions of people searching for infinite wells when all of the water became polluted and you were the lucky one to find it. Do you deserve everything now? How else were you supposed to have been incentivized to search for infinite wells if not for the possibility that everything would be yours upon finding it. Alright, what if it weren't water? What if it were something that, instead of keeping you alive, just made life worth living? I reckon you probably couldn't get everything for it, but surely you could get a lot. Does that seem like a bad system to you? I tell you what. I have a lot of money, I'll pay you to go searching for the infinite well of happiness (you can't survive on credit forever), and in exchange, it becomes mine when you find it, and then I can sell it for everything. The premise that monopoly rights on distribution are necessary to incentivize the searching is pretty severely undermined by the fact that those monopoly rights are aggregated by companies which incentivize the searching via other means.

lawnchair_larry 6y ago
You’re comparing a routine transaction of paying someone for their performance, to an unrealistic hypothetical involving the monopolization of a critical resource required to survive more than 3 days. It’s hard to take that argument seriously. You’re misusing the word monopoly. Everyone has a monopoly on their own labor. But they don’t have a monopoly on music, and neither does Metallica. You’re not entitled to a man’s song and dance under any circumstances that don’t involve him entering into a mutually agreeable transaction with you. If this makes life not worth living, hopefully you can find someone else willing to accept your offer of giving them nothing in exchange for it. If you can’t, well, tough shit I guess. You still don’t deserve it for free. It’s not Lars’ problem if you will die without his music.
- ouid 6y ago
  I'm not talking about a transaction where someone performs for me, that's not what copyright refers to, I'm talking about an infinite well. And the comparison was between any infinite well and an infinite well of water. Granting someone scarcity rights on an unscarce resources is inefficient. Society would, instantaneously, produce a lot more value if all of the things that were free to reproduce were reproduced at the quantity demanded. The question of copyright has ALWAYS been one of incentive, and I think my argument to that point is pretty clear. Further, I am not misusing the word monopoly. Copyright is precisely monopoly distribution rights.

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago

> Why don’t bands deserve to be paid for their product? The presentation suggests that Metallica goes unpaid for their product. I suspect there are many fat bank deposits that indicate otherwise. What I feel is more important is that the assertion obfuscates the primary motivation in play. Wealthy and powerful copyright interests want to control what customers get to do with the product they purchase. This government-granted privilege isn't one that's enjoyed by the vast bulk of producers. Worse, copyright gatekeepers have twisted the constitutional purpose of copyright - from encouraging the progress of science and the useful arts - into a pampered entitlement of never-ending profit.

lawnchair_larry 6y ago
> Wealthy and powerful copyright interests want to control what customers get to do with the product they purchase. No, this is not a story of the evil capitalist overlord oppressing the little guy. Save the hero narrative. Even the broke bands (which is most of them) want people to pay them for their work. The good news is there are actually a lot of them who don’t, and that’s their personal decision. You’re allowed to take it for free if they set their price at zero, but you’re not allowed to set their price at zero for them.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  > Even the broke bands (which is most of them) want people to pay them for their work. Broke bands aren't who are paying legislators for ever-racheting copyright laws - each of which comes at the public's expense and further betrays the bargain between copyright holders and the public. and - Corruption fueled copyright laws tend to favor powerful, wealthy gatekeepers (by design). For everyone else there are far better methodologies to making a living. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120210/02273417726/how-being-more-open-human-awesome-can-save-anyone-worried-about-making-money-entertainment.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120210/02273417726/how-b...