4 ms·

Thomas, I honestly don't know how you do it. Every time the copyright debate comes up, you tirelessly try to inject reason into it. But they're not having it.

by oz 13y ago

Thomas, I honestly don't know how you do it. Every time the copyright debate comes up, you tirelessly try to inject reason into it. But they're not having it. I simply cannot, for the life of me, understand why people think that it's their RIGHT to copy the works of others. I'm no saint - I love me some isohunt - but I don't have the self-entitled mindset that says "I'm supposed to be able to pirate your stuff, your hard work be damned." "Oh, well technology has outdated their business model, artists need to get with the times!" Well technology has updated the NSA's surveillance model, but everybody's mad? If ease of copying is a justification for piracy, then ease of data collection is a justification for mass surveillance. But the HN crowd is unaffected, because they're relying on SaaS to make money. I keep waiting for the day when someone invents a way to reverse engineer webapps, and all and sundry will be able to download $SociaLocalMobileStartuply.com's code, and freely use it to create their own competitor to it. Then we'll see the hypocrisy of these entitled pirates. You don't have a right to people's stuff. If you did, it'd be your stuff. Keep up the fight, Thomas. You're a better man than I am.

ThomPete 13y ago
Do you know how much musicians copy from each other? If you really want to take this logic to it's full extend then be prepared to a much much more diluted payback. Music has become a commodity business. Deal with it.
- tptacek 13y ago
  That argument is also stale. Your favorite artists might be Girl Talk and Public Enemy, but Parquet Courts and Neko Case don't do a whole lot of sampling, do they? Again: the problem is not that music is "becoming a commodity business". IT CLEARLY IS NOT, because consumers don't want "commodity music"; they demand Yeezus, Magna Carta, Hail To The King and Random Access Memories. A commodity business is one in which prices are driven down by substitutes. But unlawfully downloaded copies of Daft Punk albums aren't a real market substitute for authorized copies of Daft Punk albums. Instead, music is a market in which middlemen of varying stripes have achieved control over the market sufficient to dominate the returns for recording music in the first place. The middlemen of 2013 are actually worse in some ways than the middlemen of 1990; record labels worked on the VC model and signed artists were often ensured a middle-class standard of living, but today's middlemen are companies like Google that aren't in any way incentivized to compensate artists at all. Music has been made to seem like a commodity by what is in effect a monopsonistic cartel. But that commodity status is an illusion, not a valid market outcome.
  - ThomPete 13y ago
    People choose between the choices they have. If Daft Punk didn't exist people would listen to something else and have the posters up on their wall of someone else. They wouldn't instead buy a car. The easier it is to learn and make the music, the more people will make music, the more competition there will be, the harder it is to make money. Music IS the product. That is by all intents and purposes of this discussion a commodity and the music industry which includes musicians copy each other all the time. How do you think musicans learn to play music? Do you think they learn it by purely taking theory and turning it into songs out of the blue or could it be that they learn a lot of songs other have played, transcribe and through that build their own sense of music. Copying existing music is the way most people learn. By copying others. You don't need samplers for that. The middlemen in the 90's decided who should get access to their distribution. It is a far cry from the ability for anyone today to put out their own records on their own terms. The ability for musicians to record a song once and sell it infinitely has nothing to do with being a musician. The copy of your original is NOT the you it's a copy and that is a commoditized business.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      The question isn't whether Daft Punk will or won't exist. It's whether people will pay for authorized copies of Daft Punk, or unlawfully download unauthorized copies. You keep using this term "commodity" as if it meant "any market where offerings have a low cost". But that's neither a good description of the music market nor a valid characterization of commodities markets, which include pork bellies which are used to make bacon like you might find in a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich as well as gold, silver, and crude oil, which aren't cheap. A commodity market is one in which good are standardized to the point where one provider's offering is as good as any other's, and so the only determinant of price is cost; commodities markets often feature low prices as a result of competition. But Daft Punk isn't competing with Blaft Smunk and Zaft Tunk for who can offer the cheapest dance album. Music consumers demand Daft Punk and will not accept substitutes. You comments pretend that what's happening is that music consumers are driving prices down by avoiding artists who don't pay for licensing on consumer-friendly terms. But of course that's not what's happening. Instead, consumers acquire content that isn't licensed at or near "free" by unlawful mechanisms ranging from ad-supported P2P networks to Google's ad-supported Youtube site. P2P networks and Youtube don't reliably remit any payments to artists, and their significant impact on pricing is a market inefficiency; they're free-riders. What makes music appear to be a commodity market is the coercive impact of technology coupled with the market power of a cartel of specific buyers which makes it untenable for almost any artist to sell music directly to consumers. Music is made cheap by piracy, and cheaper still by the fact that a monopsony effectively controls authorized sales. I might feel like these were pedantic points, except that you're the one who keeps invoking economics in defense of the status quo, as if there were real economic principles supporting it.
- oz 13y ago
  Yes, we all know that "great artists steal." And of course, every musician has been inspired by some one before. There are only so many chords. But that's a red herring. When musicians directly copy another's work, i.e., sampling, don't they need to get permission? And if the owner of sampled work says "no, you can't have it", then that's that. Again, easy to do =! ethical. Mass surveillance has become widespread. Deal with it.
  - ThomPete 13y ago
    Sampling isn't the only way to directly copying other peoples music.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      Musicians who play covers are required to arrange licensing fees.
      - ThomPete 13y ago
        We aren't just talking about covers. We are talking about passages, melodies, riffs, fills, rythms etc. It is much more complex than you seem to be aware of.
        tptacek 13y ago
        That's a weird thing to say. These are all questions that copyright jurisprudence has had to deal with. The copyrightability of riffs should be well known to anyone who watched MTV in the Vanilla Ice years.
        ThomPete 13y ago
        Why? Playing a melody over a different chord progression or a re-arragned progression, different instrument, add a few lifts etc. the possibilities are litterally endless. You can't apply copyright to these things unless they are blatantly obvious, which they in most cases aren't and not something that really matters to the bigger picture. But the actual act of copying them. Most music is composed that way. Thats also called inspiration. Which is just a nicer way of saying a less obvious way of copying.
mechanical_fish 13y ago
I simply cannot, for the life of me, understand why people think that it's their RIGHT to copy the works of others. I don't think it's that hard to understand. The key is to realize that logic doesn't drive behavior. Rather, people do what comes naturally – i.e. that which is habitual – and then rationalize it as needed. The rationalization process is very strong. Logic is a mere speedbump on that road. The only time people think carefully through a course of action is if they have no habits to fall back on. People pirate music because they're habituated to think of music as free. The training process has been going on longer than digital music has existed, actually. Which brings me to my observation that, of all the many dying forms of media, recorded music feels especially screwed. Yes, people pirate movies, books, and software, but somehow things seem a lot more dire among the poor musicians. Why is that? I wonder if it's just a perfect storm of coincidence. So many things about recorded pop music make it extra-susceptible to piracy. * Until recently, music was designed to be learned and performed by other people. That was the only way to hear it more than once. So not only is there a centuries-old tradition of performing other people's music, but there's techniques and instruments based on that art and schools to teach you how. People often did this by ear. There's a story about Allegri's Miserere, the subject of the most famous act of music piracy in history: The Miserere was the personal property of the Pope, and would-be copyists of the work were threatened with excommunication. For 150 years it was only performed in the Sistine Chapel during Holy Week. Then Mozart came to town at age 14, heard the piece at the Wednesday service, went back to his room and wrote the whole thing down from memory, came back on Friday night to listen again and make minor corrections, and gave the transcript away to be published. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri) It may seem obvious, but if we took any modern Mozart to see Pacific Rim no amount of talent would enable him to produce a reasonable cover version in a day. It would take a year and hundreds of millions of dollars. Memorizing and recopying a novel is much more achievable, but the result would not be impressive except as a stunt: It's culturally understood that novels are intended to be printed verbatim, not reinterpreted or "covered", and it would be clear to everyone that the copied version was "plagiarism", not an homage or an interpretation. And many people are literally blind to features of a novel's "performance", such as its typesetting or the quality of its paper. Novels were born in the age of cheap printing and are adapted to it. I predict that we will soon evolve genres of music that are similarly adapted to the era of cheap copying. It's not a difficult prediction, because the selection pressure that will drive this trend is starkly obvious. * It's human nature to repeat the music that one hears. You can't stop humming. Often even if you want to. * There's a tradition going back nearly a century of pretending that music is free: Music on the radio, and Muzak in stores. Of course, this music is all subsidized, but people don't think about that, if they even know. If I were David Lowery and someone handed me a time machine and a gun, of course I'd probably go back and shoot Hitler, like you do. But then I'd hunt down the inventor of Muzak. Because after two generations of being marinated in free music it's no wonder people are habituated to think that music is free-as-in-oxygen. * Pop music's designers spent half a century promoting a culture of repeat listening, in order to encourage everyone to buy singles. So we're trained to think of pop songs as something you collect, then listen to over and over. And we know that the best pop songs are the ones that are being heavily promoted, because being able to play "the latest single" is a fashion statement, even today. Repeat-consumption of media is not some kind of natural law, it's genre-specific. I'm a big re-reader, but I think I'm an odd case: The majority of people read books only once, which explains why, even if they do read, they don't have a house full of books. Pauline Kael wrote about movies for a living, but never watched a movie more than once. And I have a huge Pinboard log of bookmarks, but I essentially never revisit them. And, now that the money's been sucked out of the market for "original" recordings by the "original artists", there's no reason why musical culture should continue to encourage playing the same thing twice. Many genres don't: "Never the same way twice" pretty much defines jazz. (Unfortunately, jazz also evolved in an era awash with talented, classically-trained club and theater musicians, who eventually ran out of gigs because recording had been invented. The present and future of jazz is hip-hop and club music, built of improvised rhythm and rhyme instead of improvised melody and harmony, and of sampled recordings instead of sampled melodies and progressions.)

by oz 13y ago

ThomPete 13y ago

Do you know how much musicians copy from each other? If you really want to take this logic to it's full extend then be prepared to a much much more diluted payback. Music has become a commodity business. Deal with it.

tptacek 13y ago
That argument is also stale. Your favorite artists might be Girl Talk and Public Enemy, but Parquet Courts and Neko Case don't do a whole lot of sampling, do they? Again: the problem is not that music is "becoming a commodity business". IT CLEARLY IS NOT, because consumers don't want "commodity music"; they demand Yeezus, Magna Carta, Hail To The King and Random Access Memories. A commodity business is one in which prices are driven down by substitutes. But unlawfully downloaded copies of Daft Punk albums aren't a real market substitute for authorized copies of Daft Punk albums. Instead, music is a market in which middlemen of varying stripes have achieved control over the market sufficient to dominate the returns for recording music in the first place. The middlemen of 2013 are actually worse in some ways than the middlemen of 1990; record labels worked on the VC model and signed artists were often ensured a middle-class standard of living, but today's middlemen are companies like Google that aren't in any way incentivized to compensate artists at all. Music has been made to seem like a commodity by what is in effect a monopsonistic cartel. But that commodity status is an illusion, not a valid market outcome.
- ThomPete 13y ago
  People choose between the choices they have. If Daft Punk didn't exist people would listen to something else and have the posters up on their wall of someone else. They wouldn't instead buy a car. The easier it is to learn and make the music, the more people will make music, the more competition there will be, the harder it is to make money. Music IS the product. That is by all intents and purposes of this discussion a commodity and the music industry which includes musicians copy each other all the time. How do you think musicans learn to play music? Do you think they learn it by purely taking theory and turning it into songs out of the blue or could it be that they learn a lot of songs other have played, transcribe and through that build their own sense of music. Copying existing music is the way most people learn. By copying others. You don't need samplers for that. The middlemen in the 90's decided who should get access to their distribution. It is a far cry from the ability for anyone today to put out their own records on their own terms. The ability for musicians to record a song once and sell it infinitely has nothing to do with being a musician. The copy of your original is NOT the you it's a copy and that is a commoditized business.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    The question isn't whether Daft Punk will or won't exist. It's whether people will pay for authorized copies of Daft Punk, or unlawfully download unauthorized copies. You keep using this term "commodity" as if it meant "any market where offerings have a low cost". But that's neither a good description of the music market nor a valid characterization of commodities markets, which include pork bellies which are used to make bacon like you might find in a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich as well as gold, silver, and crude oil, which aren't cheap. A commodity market is one in which good are standardized to the point where one provider's offering is as good as any other's, and so the only determinant of price is cost; commodities markets often feature low prices as a result of competition. But Daft Punk isn't competing with Blaft Smunk and Zaft Tunk for who can offer the cheapest dance album. Music consumers demand Daft Punk and will not accept substitutes. You comments pretend that what's happening is that music consumers are driving prices down by avoiding artists who don't pay for licensing on consumer-friendly terms. But of course that's not what's happening. Instead, consumers acquire content that isn't licensed at or near "free" by unlawful mechanisms ranging from ad-supported P2P networks to Google's ad-supported Youtube site. P2P networks and Youtube don't reliably remit any payments to artists, and their significant impact on pricing is a market inefficiency; they're free-riders. What makes music appear to be a commodity market is the coercive impact of technology coupled with the market power of a cartel of specific buyers which makes it untenable for almost any artist to sell music directly to consumers. Music is made cheap by piracy, and cheaper still by the fact that a monopsony effectively controls authorized sales. I might feel like these were pedantic points, except that you're the one who keeps invoking economics in defense of the status quo, as if there were real economic principles supporting it.
oz 13y ago
Yes, we all know that "great artists steal." And of course, every musician has been inspired by some one before. There are only so many chords. But that's a red herring. When musicians directly copy another's work, i.e., sampling, don't they need to get permission? And if the owner of sampled work says "no, you can't have it", then that's that. Again, easy to do =! ethical. Mass surveillance has become widespread. Deal with it.
- ThomPete 13y ago
  Sampling isn't the only way to directly copying other peoples music.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Musicians who play covers are required to arrange licensing fees.
    - ThomPete 13y ago
      We aren't just talking about covers. We are talking about passages, melodies, riffs, fills, rythms etc. It is much more complex than you seem to be aware of.
      - tptacek 13y ago
        That's a weird thing to say. These are all questions that copyright jurisprudence has had to deal with. The copyrightability of riffs should be well known to anyone who watched MTV in the Vanilla Ice years.
        ThomPete 13y ago
        Why? Playing a melody over a different chord progression or a re-arragned progression, different instrument, add a few lifts etc. the possibilities are litterally endless. You can't apply copyright to these things unless they are blatantly obvious, which they in most cases aren't and not something that really matters to the bigger picture. But the actual act of copying them. Most music is composed that way. Thats also called inspiration. Which is just a nicer way of saying a less obvious way of copying.

mechanical_fish 13y ago

I simply cannot, for the life of me, understand why people think that it's their RIGHT to copy the works of others. I don't think it's that hard to understand. The key is to realize that logic doesn't drive behavior. Rather, people do what comes naturally – i.e. that which is habitual – and then rationalize it as needed. The rationalization process is very strong. Logic is a mere speedbump on that road. The only time people think carefully through a course of action is if they have no habits to fall back on. People pirate music because they're habituated to think of music as free. The training process has been going on longer than digital music has existed, actually. Which brings me to my observation that, of all the many dying forms of media, recorded music feels especially screwed. Yes, people pirate movies, books, and software, but somehow things seem a lot more dire among the poor musicians. Why is that? I wonder if it's just a perfect storm of coincidence. So many things about recorded pop music make it extra-susceptible to piracy. * Until recently, music was designed to be learned and performed by other people. That was the only way to hear it more than once. So not only is there a centuries-old tradition of performing other people's music, but there's techniques and instruments based on that art and schools to teach you how. People often did this by ear. There's a story about Allegri's Miserere, the subject of the most famous act of music piracy in history: The Miserere was the personal property of the Pope, and would-be copyists of the work were threatened with excommunication. For 150 years it was only performed in the Sistine Chapel during Holy Week. Then Mozart came to town at age 14, heard the piece at the Wednesday service, went back to his room and wrote the whole thing down from memory, came back on Friday night to listen again and make minor corrections, and gave the transcript away to be published. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miserere_(Allegri) It may seem obvious, but if we took any modern Mozart to see Pacific Rim no amount of talent would enable him to produce a reasonable cover version in a day. It would take a year and hundreds of millions of dollars. Memorizing and recopying a novel is much more achievable, but the result would not be impressive except as a stunt: It's culturally understood that novels are intended to be printed verbatim, not reinterpreted or "covered", and it would be clear to everyone that the copied version was "plagiarism", not an homage or an interpretation. And many people are literally blind to features of a novel's "performance", such as its typesetting or the quality of its paper. Novels were born in the age of cheap printing and are adapted to it. I predict that we will soon evolve genres of music that are similarly adapted to the era of cheap copying. It's not a difficult prediction, because the selection pressure that will drive this trend is starkly obvious. * It's human nature to repeat the music that one hears. You can't stop humming. Often even if you want to. * There's a tradition going back nearly a century of pretending that music is free: Music on the radio, and Muzak in stores. Of course, this music is all subsidized, but people don't think about that, if they even know. If I were David Lowery and someone handed me a time machine and a gun, of course I'd probably go back and shoot Hitler, like you do. But then I'd hunt down the inventor of Muzak. Because after two generations of being marinated in free music it's no wonder people are habituated to think that music is free-as-in-oxygen. * Pop music's designers spent half a century promoting a culture of repeat listening, in order to encourage everyone to buy singles. So we're trained to think of pop songs as something you collect, then listen to over and over. And we know that the best pop songs are the ones that are being heavily promoted, because being able to play "the latest single" is a fashion statement, even today. Repeat-consumption of media is not some kind of natural law, it's genre-specific. I'm a big re-reader, but I think I'm an odd case: The majority of people read books only once, which explains why, even if they do read, they don't have a house full of books. Pauline Kael wrote about movies for a living, but never watched a movie more than once. And I have a huge Pinboard log of bookmarks, but I essentially never revisit them. And, now that the money's been sucked out of the market for "original" recordings by the "original artists", there's no reason why musical culture should continue to encourage playing the same thing twice. Many genres don't: "Never the same way twice" pretty much defines jazz. (Unfortunately, jazz also evolved in an era awash with talented, classically-trained club and theater musicians, who eventually ran out of gigs because recording had been invented. The present and future of jazz is hip-hop and club music, built of improvised rhythm and rhyme instead of improvised melody and harmony, and of sampled recordings instead of sampled melodies and progressions.)