5 ms·

I hope one day you come to think about what you are really saying. It's too hard to protect the interests of artists, fuck 'em.

baremetal 15y ago
What he is saying is that the output from artists and the resulting copyrights has next to no value when compared with the value of the internet. I tend to agree, people will still make music even if they cant easily profit from it, yet if we lose the internet we are back in the stone age of communication. So what if a few special interest groups pay the price via a failed business model, empires rise and fall as it has always been and will continue to be.
- k-mcgrady 15y ago
  Losing the internet would not send us back into the 'stone age of communication'. Losing culture/art would be much more costly. I agree that people will still make music even if they can't profit from it but the best music is made by someone who can invest all of their time into it. Having a full time jobs and trying to create great music will likely result in mediocre music.
  - dantheman 15y ago
    Or the business model changes, perhaps we revert back to patronage. Or they make money by touring and through merchandising; isn't that how most artists earn money anyway?. Or better yet, their fans still buy their stuff even though they can get it for free because they want to support them.
  - dissident 15y ago
    Copyright is not the only way to financially motivate progress in culture. Public subsidy toward individuals who have enhanced culture is already a working model, and we've also had institutions like this in the past (even in the U.S. government, see Federal Project Number One). If people create useful original content, others can reward them so as to promote future development. Donating to your favorite artist or an emerging talent should be the nature of our cultural progress, rather than the selfish strive for exuberant compensation. If money is actually necessary to produce better than what you'd call "mediocre" content, we can establish public systems to direct money for those purposes. I highly doubt money is so necessary anyway, considering audio and video equipment and editing software are easier and easier to attain. There are kids creating music and uploading it to Soundcloud every single day, giving it away, and forming networks to distribute this content with their friends. Some of them can produce some really amazing music with _very_ cheap equipment. I could produce objectively more sophisticated music in thirty minutes with a kaossilator I've had sitting in my garage for five years, than probably any song in the top-100 charts right now -- sans auto tuned vocals. I know that's "mainstream" hit piece, but it's true. You can't honestly tell me when you think "progress in culture" you imagine that most of our cultural funding should go toward "artists" who do not actually produce their own content, but rather sell their public image. Somebody with barely any experience in music production can produce a pop song similar to most of the popular content out there. It's all being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, who is then conditioned to expect even dumber content in the future. How easy is it for actually creative music to be accepted by a wider audience? Not easy, when the distribution channels are owned by the people representing the distributors and producers of the content. Then the Cable companies also are owned by those organizations too, and it becomes a sick and twisted mess. Further proof is shown in television. BBC and NOVA and NPR and other organizations have far more accurate and superior scientific and culturally educational programming and journalism, but they're publicly funded. Whereas the History channel probably hasn't played a single history program for years, and runs "Modern Marvels" reruns every hour on the weekend until the next primetime spot for "Ice Road Truckers" opens up. The Science and discovery channels almost never produce unique or interesting content. These organizations and their strangleholds on our legislative process keep the status quo of copyright intact, even despite grave consequences to our personal liberties, knowing full well that their financial benefit has a more immediate and self-perpetuating impact on society. It's disgraceful. Why can't a more universal public funding system be embraced, considering we have the technology to do it? If we care about personal liberties and advances in communication, we should take innovative steps in that direction.
  - quanticle 15y ago
    Recording industry != art & culture. The recording industry is an artifact of a particular distribution medium (e.g. records and radio). The Internet has rendered both of those distribution mechanisms obsolete. Therefore, unless the recording industry can adapt and adopt new methods of distribution, it deserves to die. Conflating the recording industry with art and culture (or even music) in general is like conflating Amtrak with the concept of 'transportation' in general. Losing the recording industry won't deny us music any more than the loss of Amtrak will deny us transportation.
  - barrkel 15y ago
    Mass-distribution recorded music has existed for barely more than a century. Are you suggesting that the only music of any value ever created, was created in the last century? There are even better (as in, economically more efficient) ways of financing culture production with technology. For example, consider a situation where playback devices were (perhaps intermittently) connected to the internet, were able to track audio fingerprints of music they played back, and had a tax on their sale. The proceeds of that tax could be redirected in proportion to the popularity of particular works. You wouldn't have to worry about sharing or lending. Everyone could consume as much as they wanted to, and there would still be the benefits of competition. But instead, we have anti-free-market approaches that institute monopolies. And companies have massive vested interests in perpetuating those government-granted monopolies. The purpose of copyright is to incentivize the creation of works of art. Extending the copyright term for existing works has no such justification; but that's exactly what corporations were able to convince Congress to do with the Sonny-Bono act.
  - tomjen3 15y ago
    But the thing is that we won't lose what culture we already have. Books aren't scarce anymore. You could not, in several life times, read all the books on project Gutenberg. Yet not a single one of those is protected by copyright today.
sbronstein 15y ago
Look Joey, if you want to argue that the DMCA is flawed and we should have a stronger law to protect rightsholders, then you really need to spell out what you want that law to look like. Because it turns out that whenever anyone tries to suggest a "compromise", that compromise will break the internet in some fundamental way. That is the point that tomjen3 is making. So tell us - how to you propose to "fix" the DMCA? Because if you won't give us any specifics except saying that the DMCA is flawed, and you won't come out against SOPA, then guess what - the recording industry is just showing the rest of us who you really are.
- shasta 15y ago
  Some kind of audio/video fingerprint registry that allowed copyright holders to once and for all register their copyrights seems like it could be a good balance.
  - chris11 15y ago
    Places like youtube already use methods like that to keep track of copyrights. But that still doesn't deal with the problem of convincing every website to use a registry. Places like TPB definitely wouldn't. And I doubt some file locker services like MegaUpload would willingly go along with it. And if you still have websites that ignore the regulation, it basically becomes useless. So what is the benefit?
    - shasta 15y ago
      My suggestion was that the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA be weakened so that you only qualify if you've taken reasonable technological steps to identify copyrighted content. You're right that's not a solution to overseas websites.
      - burgerbrain 15y ago
        Who pays for those "reasonable technological steps"?
      - 15y ago
kiba 15y ago
I do not care about the 900,000th totally unoriginal song. Nor do I care if they keep on doing it. It wouldn't do a thing to my universe of musics, nor the fact that there are too many songs in the world to consume within my lifetime, or the next lifetime. In this context, whether or nor the music record industry lives or die have zero impact on my music collection other than when it's about dying time, or rather they think it's dying time, they must poison the landscape and everything else. The record industry is not dying. They are actually thriving. Nor are they particularly significant. However, they want to destroy the internet in the ways it work. I resent that.
soult 15y ago
I do care about the artists. I don't care for the labels. In a world where listening to music is as easy as downloading a file from Amazon they just don't add any value. You want me to find a copyright enforcement law that is better than SOPA and DMCA? I'll do you one better. I want you to find an artist compensation mechanism that cuts out the fat middle-man (the labels).
- njloof 15y ago
  Agreed. Conflating the interests of artists with the interests of media companies is the best strategy the latter have found. And I really never thought I'd read anyone saying that the DMCA wasn't strong enough to protect the rights of copyright holders. Amazing.
  - soult 15y ago
    I don't think strong enough is what earbitscom was talking about; after all, SOPA is a stronger version of the DMCA. I actually have to agree with him that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is broken because it serves neither party well, as the current Megaload vs. Universal case shows: Megaload makes a lot of money with ads on their download site, but at the same time calls itself a "safe harbour". And on the other side we Universal abusing the DMCA to oppress free speech. My point is that we could go and try to make a law that fixes both these problems. Or we could just accept that if we put the infrastructure in place to stop all copyright infringement, the same infrastructure will be very effective in stopping freedom of speech. And only after we accepted this, will we be able to start thinking about a better way to fairly(!) compensate artists for their work.
mixmastamyk 15y ago
Yes, they'll shift to different business models just as buggy-whip manufacturers did. Whether or not you take it personally, history has spoken.
reitzensteinm 15y ago
I make video games, so I'm in exactly the same boat as musicians with respect to piracy. It sucks, sure. But it is not worth destroying the internet to try to fix it. I would rather go bankrupt than live in the world this bill is pushing us towards. A free and open internet is on track to do more to progress humanity than any other invention in history. Trying to derail it because musicians are finding it hard to sell CDs is selfish at best and borderline psychopathic at worst.
- eridius 15y ago
  From everything I've seen, the Internet has made distribution, sales, and publicity of indie video games vastly easier than before. This is especially true with high-profile distribution channels like Steam and Humble Indie Bundle and others. The indie video game industry seems like an industry that really does get the internet and understands that it can be a powerful force for good rather than just a means for people to pirate your stuff.
orangecat 15y ago
It's too hard to protect the interests of artists, fuck 'em. On some level I would agree with that. If the rights of party A can be protected only by draconian laws that trample the rights of parties B, C, and D, then we shouldn't pass those laws even if it really is unfair to A. And in the real world that formulation is overly generous to the record labels, who do have means to enforce their rights, just not as conveniently as they'd like because they have to deal with annoyances like evidence and due process.
barkingtoad 15y ago
Let's put that concept to bed straight away. Nobody was protecting the interests of artists before the Internet. Nobody. 0.1% got Ozzy-level rich, 0.9% did OK, the rest of the artists were not even allowed to sell their out-of-print back catalog. READ THIS http://www.negativland.com/albini.html http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
- ricardobeat 15y ago
  Everyone interested on the matter should read that. Record labels used to be a way of getting access to top equipment, producers, marketing and studios. This is all cheap nowadays, so why keep the old middlemen?
quanticle 15y ago
>It's too hard to protect the interests of artists, fuck 'em. It's too hard to protect the interests of buggy-whip makers. Let's outlaw automobiles. It's too hard to protect the interests of barges. Let's outlaw trains. It's too hard to protect the interests of ocean liners. Lets outlaw air travel. No one is entitled to a living. No one should have to rely on the government to protect their business model. If your business model doesn't work in an Internet-enabled world, too fucking bad. We didn't bail out the buggy whip makers for having a business model that couldn't survive in an automobile enabled world. We didn't bail out the barge and steamboat industry when trains came along. Why should we bail out the recording industry because they can't hack it in an Internet-enabled world? Because that's what this is. A bailout. This a bailout that dwarfs the bank bailout in terms of the harm it can do to our economy and our liberty. And it's not even a bailout for artists. It's a bailout for a parasitic monster that, as far as I can tell only serves to funnel money from consumers to lobbyists. EDIT: By your logic, even the recording industry itself shouldn't exist. The recording industry killed off the "home-performance" industry and drastically cut sheet music sales by making and distributing recordings of performances. So who's looking out for their interests?
- earbitscom 15y ago
  That's the thing, no one is entitled to free music, either. Your argument is ridiculous because we're talking about a product that everybody still wants. It's not a buggy whip. It's music. If you don't want it enough to pay for it, then you just don't need to have a copy. Is that really such a hard concept for you to grasp?
  - quanticle 15y ago
    >Your argument is ridiculous because we're talking about a product that everybody still wants. Is it a product that everybody wants? Or is it a product that everybody says they want? If music were truly as appreciated as you say it is, then more people would be paying for it, no? And guess what? More people are paying for music. iTunes is selling millions of tracks each year. Amazon is doing the same. Do you really think that artists would go out of business if they got the whole share of their iTunes proceeds, rather than having to split it with the recording industry? As another comment below me says so eloquently, "Louis CK gets it. Trent Reznor gets it. Radiohead gets it. The recording industry doesn't get it and neither do you."
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
Natsu 15y ago
It's not just "too hard", it's impossible. You need to control every computer, everywhere, perfectly. One failure is all it takes, then its game over for your protection scheme. Technical people have been trying--and failing--to stop the piracy of computer programs. I've watched them do it for pretty much my entire life and I'm over 30. And piracy of computer programs is, in theory, an easier problem than the one faced by music because the programs have to be executed and they can try to check if they're legit or not, while music is just data. Dongles, type the Nth word on page X from the manual, code wheels, code that breaks when run in a debugger... I can relate to you the entire, long, history of failure and tell you why the schemes do not work and cannot be made to work. It's like trying to watch people prove that 2==1, convinced that they could make it work if they could find a bigger one or a maybe a smaller two. The techs are upset because the new ways people are proposing won't just fail, they'll create all sorts of new problems in addition to failing. Nobody hates the artists. Why would they? Artists give us great entertainment! Without the artists, we'd have nothing to enjoy. There are solutions, though. The solutions don't require new laws, they require new ways of doing business. Maybe that's not fair, but I can't help you there. No one can help you there. It's like we're trying to convince one of King Canute's advisers that a more strongly-worded rebuke will not, in fact, turn back the tide that's swallowing up their property and they're stubbornly holding their breath, waiting for a proclamation that works. The way forward is more like using the waves to provide power. Use piracy as marketing. Money comes from other things: signed products, live appearances, merchandising. There are creative ways to solve these problems. You can even get your fans to help, like that guy I pointed to who holds parties with his fans while they help him ship his books. Anyone who is not doing this kind of thing, but instead holding their breath, waiting for techies, lawmakers or even King Canute to solve them is going to suffocate. It's not fair, but that's life for you. If it could be changed, it already would have.
WalterSear 15y ago
As an artist, I assure you, the recording industry has done way more damage to me than the internet has.
WalterSear 15y ago
As an artist, I assure you, the recording industry has done way more damage to me than the internet has.
WalterSear 15y ago
As an artist, I assure you, the recording industry has done way more damage to me than the internet has.

baremetal 15y ago

What he is saying is that the output from artists and the resulting copyrights has next to no value when compared with the value of the internet. I tend to agree, people will still make music even if they cant easily profit from it, yet if we lose the internet we are back in the stone age of communication. So what if a few special interest groups pay the price via a failed business model, empires rise and fall as it has always been and will continue to be.

k-mcgrady 15y ago
Losing the internet would not send us back into the 'stone age of communication'. Losing culture/art would be much more costly. I agree that people will still make music even if they can't profit from it but the best music is made by someone who can invest all of their time into it. Having a full time jobs and trying to create great music will likely result in mediocre music.
- dantheman 15y ago
  Or the business model changes, perhaps we revert back to patronage. Or they make money by touring and through merchandising; isn't that how most artists earn money anyway?. Or better yet, their fans still buy their stuff even though they can get it for free because they want to support them.
- dissident 15y ago
  Copyright is not the only way to financially motivate progress in culture. Public subsidy toward individuals who have enhanced culture is already a working model, and we've also had institutions like this in the past (even in the U.S. government, see Federal Project Number One). If people create useful original content, others can reward them so as to promote future development. Donating to your favorite artist or an emerging talent should be the nature of our cultural progress, rather than the selfish strive for exuberant compensation. If money is actually necessary to produce better than what you'd call "mediocre" content, we can establish public systems to direct money for those purposes. I highly doubt money is so necessary anyway, considering audio and video equipment and editing software are easier and easier to attain. There are kids creating music and uploading it to Soundcloud every single day, giving it away, and forming networks to distribute this content with their friends. Some of them can produce some really amazing music with _very_ cheap equipment. I could produce objectively more sophisticated music in thirty minutes with a kaossilator I've had sitting in my garage for five years, than probably any song in the top-100 charts right now -- sans auto tuned vocals. I know that's "mainstream" hit piece, but it's true. You can't honestly tell me when you think "progress in culture" you imagine that most of our cultural funding should go toward "artists" who do not actually produce their own content, but rather sell their public image. Somebody with barely any experience in music production can produce a pop song similar to most of the popular content out there. It's all being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, who is then conditioned to expect even dumber content in the future. How easy is it for actually creative music to be accepted by a wider audience? Not easy, when the distribution channels are owned by the people representing the distributors and producers of the content. Then the Cable companies also are owned by those organizations too, and it becomes a sick and twisted mess. Further proof is shown in television. BBC and NOVA and NPR and other organizations have far more accurate and superior scientific and culturally educational programming and journalism, but they're publicly funded. Whereas the History channel probably hasn't played a single history program for years, and runs "Modern Marvels" reruns every hour on the weekend until the next primetime spot for "Ice Road Truckers" opens up. The Science and discovery channels almost never produce unique or interesting content. These organizations and their strangleholds on our legislative process keep the status quo of copyright intact, even despite grave consequences to our personal liberties, knowing full well that their financial benefit has a more immediate and self-perpetuating impact on society. It's disgraceful. Why can't a more universal public funding system be embraced, considering we have the technology to do it? If we care about personal liberties and advances in communication, we should take innovative steps in that direction.
- quanticle 15y ago
  Recording industry != art & culture. The recording industry is an artifact of a particular distribution medium (e.g. records and radio). The Internet has rendered both of those distribution mechanisms obsolete. Therefore, unless the recording industry can adapt and adopt new methods of distribution, it deserves to die. Conflating the recording industry with art and culture (or even music) in general is like conflating Amtrak with the concept of 'transportation' in general. Losing the recording industry won't deny us music any more than the loss of Amtrak will deny us transportation.
- barrkel 15y ago
  Mass-distribution recorded music has existed for barely more than a century. Are you suggesting that the only music of any value ever created, was created in the last century? There are even better (as in, economically more efficient) ways of financing culture production with technology. For example, consider a situation where playback devices were (perhaps intermittently) connected to the internet, were able to track audio fingerprints of music they played back, and had a tax on their sale. The proceeds of that tax could be redirected in proportion to the popularity of particular works. You wouldn't have to worry about sharing or lending. Everyone could consume as much as they wanted to, and there would still be the benefits of competition. But instead, we have anti-free-market approaches that institute monopolies. And companies have massive vested interests in perpetuating those government-granted monopolies. The purpose of copyright is to incentivize the creation of works of art. Extending the copyright term for existing works has no such justification; but that's exactly what corporations were able to convince Congress to do with the Sonny-Bono act.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  But the thing is that we won't lose what culture we already have. Books aren't scarce anymore. You could not, in several life times, read all the books on project Gutenberg. Yet not a single one of those is protected by copyright today.

sbronstein 15y ago

Look Joey, if you want to argue that the DMCA is flawed and we should have a stronger law to protect rightsholders, then you really need to spell out what you want that law to look like. Because it turns out that whenever anyone tries to suggest a "compromise", that compromise will break the internet in some fundamental way. That is the point that tomjen3 is making. So tell us - how to you propose to "fix" the DMCA? Because if you won't give us any specifics except saying that the DMCA is flawed, and you won't come out against SOPA, then guess what - the recording industry is just showing the rest of us who you really are.

shasta 15y ago
Some kind of audio/video fingerprint registry that allowed copyright holders to once and for all register their copyrights seems like it could be a good balance.
- chris11 15y ago
  Places like youtube already use methods like that to keep track of copyrights. But that still doesn't deal with the problem of convincing every website to use a registry. Places like TPB definitely wouldn't. And I doubt some file locker services like MegaUpload would willingly go along with it. And if you still have websites that ignore the regulation, it basically becomes useless. So what is the benefit?
  - shasta 15y ago
    My suggestion was that the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA be weakened so that you only qualify if you've taken reasonable technological steps to identify copyrighted content. You're right that's not a solution to overseas websites.
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      Who pays for those "reasonable technological steps"?
    - 15y ago

kiba 15y ago

I do not care about the 900,000th totally unoriginal song. Nor do I care if they keep on doing it. It wouldn't do a thing to my universe of musics, nor the fact that there are too many songs in the world to consume within my lifetime, or the next lifetime. In this context, whether or nor the music record industry lives or die have zero impact on my music collection other than when it's about dying time, or rather they think it's dying time, they must poison the landscape and everything else. The record industry is not dying. They are actually thriving. Nor are they particularly significant. However, they want to destroy the internet in the ways it work. I resent that.

soult 15y ago

I do care about the artists. I don't care for the labels. In a world where listening to music is as easy as downloading a file from Amazon they just don't add any value. You want me to find a copyright enforcement law that is better than SOPA and DMCA? I'll do you one better. I want you to find an artist compensation mechanism that cuts out the fat middle-man (the labels).

njloof 15y ago
Agreed. Conflating the interests of artists with the interests of media companies is the best strategy the latter have found. And I really never thought I'd read anyone saying that the DMCA wasn't strong enough to protect the rights of copyright holders. Amazing.
- soult 15y ago
  I don't think strong enough is what earbitscom was talking about; after all, SOPA is a stronger version of the DMCA. I actually have to agree with him that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is broken because it serves neither party well, as the current Megaload vs. Universal case shows: Megaload makes a lot of money with ads on their download site, but at the same time calls itself a "safe harbour". And on the other side we Universal abusing the DMCA to oppress free speech. My point is that we could go and try to make a law that fixes both these problems. Or we could just accept that if we put the infrastructure in place to stop all copyright infringement, the same infrastructure will be very effective in stopping freedom of speech. And only after we accepted this, will we be able to start thinking about a better way to fairly(!) compensate artists for their work.

mixmastamyk 15y ago

Yes, they'll shift to different business models just as buggy-whip manufacturers did. Whether or not you take it personally, history has spoken.

reitzensteinm 15y ago

I make video games, so I'm in exactly the same boat as musicians with respect to piracy. It sucks, sure. But it is not worth destroying the internet to try to fix it. I would rather go bankrupt than live in the world this bill is pushing us towards. A free and open internet is on track to do more to progress humanity than any other invention in history. Trying to derail it because musicians are finding it hard to sell CDs is selfish at best and borderline psychopathic at worst.

eridius 15y ago
From everything I've seen, the Internet has made distribution, sales, and publicity of indie video games vastly easier than before. This is especially true with high-profile distribution channels like Steam and Humble Indie Bundle and others. The indie video game industry seems like an industry that really does get the internet and understands that it can be a powerful force for good rather than just a means for people to pirate your stuff.

orangecat 15y ago

It's too hard to protect the interests of artists, fuck 'em. On some level I would agree with that. If the rights of party A can be protected only by draconian laws that trample the rights of parties B, C, and D, then we shouldn't pass those laws even if it really is unfair to A. And in the real world that formulation is overly generous to the record labels, who do have means to enforce their rights, just not as conveniently as they'd like because they have to deal with annoyances like evidence and due process.

barkingtoad 15y ago

Let's put that concept to bed straight away. Nobody was protecting the interests of artists before the Internet. Nobody. 0.1% got Ozzy-level rich, 0.9% did OK, the rest of the artists were not even allowed to sell their out-of-print back catalog. READ THIS http://www.negativland.com/albini.html http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

ricardobeat 15y ago
Everyone interested on the matter should read that. Record labels used to be a way of getting access to top equipment, producers, marketing and studios. This is all cheap nowadays, so why keep the old middlemen?

quanticle 15y ago

>It's too hard to protect the interests of artists, fuck 'em. It's too hard to protect the interests of buggy-whip makers. Let's outlaw automobiles. It's too hard to protect the interests of barges. Let's outlaw trains. It's too hard to protect the interests of ocean liners. Lets outlaw air travel. No one is entitled to a living. No one should have to rely on the government to protect their business model. If your business model doesn't work in an Internet-enabled world, too fucking bad. We didn't bail out the buggy whip makers for having a business model that couldn't survive in an automobile enabled world. We didn't bail out the barge and steamboat industry when trains came along. Why should we bail out the recording industry because they can't hack it in an Internet-enabled world? Because that's what this is. A bailout. This a bailout that dwarfs the bank bailout in terms of the harm it can do to our economy and our liberty. And it's not even a bailout for artists. It's a bailout for a parasitic monster that, as far as I can tell only serves to funnel money from consumers to lobbyists. EDIT: By your logic, even the recording industry itself shouldn't exist. The recording industry killed off the "home-performance" industry and drastically cut sheet music sales by making and distributing recordings of performances. So who's looking out for their interests?

earbitscom 15y ago
That's the thing, no one is entitled to free music, either. Your argument is ridiculous because we're talking about a product that everybody still wants. It's not a buggy whip. It's music. If you don't want it enough to pay for it, then you just don't need to have a copy. Is that really such a hard concept for you to grasp?
- quanticle 15y ago
  >Your argument is ridiculous because we're talking about a product that everybody still wants. Is it a product that everybody wants? Or is it a product that everybody says they want? If music were truly as appreciated as you say it is, then more people would be paying for it, no? And guess what? More people are paying for music. iTunes is selling millions of tracks each year. Amazon is doing the same. Do you really think that artists would go out of business if they got the whole share of their iTunes proceeds, rather than having to split it with the recording industry? As another comment below me says so eloquently, "Louis CK gets it. Trent Reznor gets it. Radiohead gets it. The recording industry doesn't get it and neither do you."

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

Natsu 15y ago

It's not just "too hard", it's impossible. You need to control every computer, everywhere, perfectly. One failure is all it takes, then its game over for your protection scheme. Technical people have been trying--and failing--to stop the piracy of computer programs. I've watched them do it for pretty much my entire life and I'm over 30. And piracy of computer programs is, in theory, an easier problem than the one faced by music because the programs have to be executed and they can try to check if they're legit or not, while music is just data. Dongles, type the Nth word on page X from the manual, code wheels, code that breaks when run in a debugger... I can relate to you the entire, long, history of failure and tell you why the schemes do not work and cannot be made to work. It's like trying to watch people prove that 2==1, convinced that they could make it work if they could find a bigger one or a maybe a smaller two. The techs are upset because the new ways people are proposing won't just fail, they'll create all sorts of new problems in addition to failing. Nobody hates the artists. Why would they? Artists give us great entertainment! Without the artists, we'd have nothing to enjoy. There are solutions, though. The solutions don't require new laws, they require new ways of doing business. Maybe that's not fair, but I can't help you there. No one can help you there. It's like we're trying to convince one of King Canute's advisers that a more strongly-worded rebuke will not, in fact, turn back the tide that's swallowing up their property and they're stubbornly holding their breath, waiting for a proclamation that works. The way forward is more like using the waves to provide power. Use piracy as marketing. Money comes from other things: signed products, live appearances, merchandising. There are creative ways to solve these problems. You can even get your fans to help, like that guy I pointed to who holds parties with his fans while they help him ship his books. Anyone who is not doing this kind of thing, but instead holding their breath, waiting for techies, lawmakers or even King Canute to solve them is going to suffocate. It's not fair, but that's life for you. If it could be changed, it already would have.

WalterSear 15y ago

As an artist, I assure you, the recording industry has done way more damage to me than the internet has.

WalterSear 15y ago

As an artist, I assure you, the recording industry has done way more damage to me than the internet has.

WalterSear 15y ago

As an artist, I assure you, the recording industry has done way more damage to me than the internet has.