4 ms·

Show me a single creator who can't feed him or herself due to a site like this.

caryhartline 12y ago
It's difficult to give examples of causation (which no on should have to do because it's so obvious), but you can see artists that are doing more concerts and appearances or placing more ads in their videos in order to make up for the lack of sales. It's an industry-wide effect.
- stefantalpalaru 12y ago
  > artists that are doing more concerts and appearances Good, because this has actual value, unlike copies of digital data.
  - Buge 12y ago
    So a movie or a song recording have no actual value?
    - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
      No, just a price tag enforced by artificial means like copyright laws. There is simply no way to sell on the free market objects with an almost infinite supply without appealing to outside forces like state regulators.
      - realityking 12y ago
        Serious question, as you seem to be a developer. How would you feel about companies using GPL licensed code in close source products?
        stefantalpalaru 12y ago
        I seem to, indeed :-) In what context? A laissez-faire economy without patents and copyright? You'd have to also eliminate law enforcement when it comes to licenses to render GPL useless, but I don't see how is this relevant to the discussion about the intrinsic economical value of digital data that can be copied at an almost zero cost.
        realityking 12y ago
        The GPL is enforceable thanks to copyright. So if copyright was abolished, the GPL would loose all meaning. The point I'm trying to make is, that the protection offered by copyright extends beyond monetytization as it's often reduced to. (understandable in a capitalist econonmy, where Almosen everything has a price) Instead it allows the right holder to limit how it's distributed or attach conditions to the distribution. The GPL with its limitations on how I may use a piece of software licensed under it is one outgrowth of that. If you reject copyright, especially for digital goods, you should be fine with the GPL becoming useless.
        stefantalpalaru 12y ago
        > If you reject copyright, especially for digital goods, you should be fine with the GPL becoming useless. You have a point. Yes, the loss of enforceable licenses would be acceptable in a system without artificial means to stop the flow of data. It's not like most of us have the means to go to court over GPL infringements anyway.
- iamdave 12y ago
  GOOD. More concerts is a good thing, direct sales to the customer, direct profit for the venue and artist, more exposure. Relying on one channel for revenue is a disastrous rolling of the dice. I'm not here to apologize for people who willfully engage in subverting the purchasing process to get music they want, but I'm also not going to show sympathy for an industry that wants to remain rigid and inflexible with a changing marketplace either.
- Karunamon 12y ago
  Examples of causation are pretty damn important. Just because something intuitively appears to make sense does not mean that's the actual way things are. Really, even the industry cartels can't prove it. (And their attempts are laughably bad and transparent) Can you? But lack of sales, okay. The music industry reports record profits year over year, so those artists you speak of don't represent the larger trend in any case. Let's pretend that it did for a moment - is that drop in sales due to: * A minority of consumers downloading, rather than buying * More choice in the marketplace (more stuff for people to buy meaning the existing players get a smaller slice of the pie) * Less quality in the marketplace (pandering to the lowest common denominator resulting in flagging sales due to a percieved less quality product) * The economic downturn meaning less got spent on entertainment anyways * or something else?
anigbrowl 12y ago
As I mentioned above, I find it harder to get paid to work in indie movies than I did a few years ago, notwithstanding the economic recession. Small-budget projects without famous actors are increasingly hard to finance because revenue projections are so unreliable. Private film investment was always a high-risk venture - people put money into for some social cachet but with a measurable probability of breaking even or making a profit (which was estimated based on a slate of similarly situated films). As that probability falls towards zero, so does the willingness of investors to take risks on it. I don't want to name-drop, but I could point you to a film with multiple award (including Oscar) nominations that failed to break even and which led to investors dropping out from future projects - but which are hugely popular on file-sharing sites, with many thousands of seeders & leechers over a year after release despite the availability of the film on Netflix. And please don't bring up 'Hollywood accounting.' This is based on personal acquaintance with executive producers at a large production company who personally lost millions of dollars, not some dentist in Pomona who wasn't able to buy a new Mercedes. That made it a lot more difficult for the director to place the next project - which I also anticipate will be Oscar-nominated - and required working with a much lower budget. That film is dying even more horribly at the box office (because there was no marketing budget worth speaking of) but it's one of the hottest torrents. Explain that to me, how a film can't get a wide release and therefore deserves to fail even though there are over 4000 people downloading it according to a popular tracker. So while people at the top end of Hollywood obviously have things way better than people making no-budget films (sub $1 million) and don't have to worry about day-to-day costs of living, yes, there are people losing really substantial amounts of money and extremely high-quality directors that are having trouble raising money to make films despite their work being among the most popular movie torrents.
- ticviking 12y ago
  Please do name drop. In this case I would consider it a matter of citing your work, and gives me the opportunity to support the projects mentioned if I think they're worthwhile.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    Well, in that spirit look at the popularity on torrent trackers of the Master and Inherent Vice, both directed by PT Anderson, and compare with their box office performance at boxofficemojo.com (plus the wikipedia entries on the films have some additional information about budgets). I don't feel comfortable discussing how that played out from the producers' standpoint (I'm not one of the producers, so I'll limit myself to saying it has lost money overall), but I hope you can see the incongruity of a highly acclaimed director making serious artistic work seeing ever-widening box office losses while simultaneously enjoying enormous-but-unpaid popularity via file-sharing. The Master has been available on Netflix streaming for months (at least in the US) and yet there are, um, over 9000 seeders for just the most popular torrent on oldpiratebay.org, closer to 35,000 if you add up all the active torrents for different formats, foreign language versions and so on, plus 35-40,000 leechers. Regardless of how ones feels about it aesthetically, I think it's fair to say that the film is quite popular (measured against a random basket of 2012 films with better box office performance). But because it didn't do well in its initial release window, the longer-term popularity isn't reflected by its financial performance. Piracy is a real problem for films that depend on long-tail revenue, which is one reason you see so many franchise films and aesthetically conservative genre pics - they're an easier sell even though they don't necessarily age well.

It's difficult to give examples of causation (which no on should have to do because it's so obvious), but you can see artists that are doing more concerts and appearances or placing more ads in their videos in order to make up for the lack of sales. It's an industry-wide effect.

stefantalpalaru 12y ago
> artists that are doing more concerts and appearances Good, because this has actual value, unlike copies of digital data.
- Buge 12y ago
  So a movie or a song recording have no actual value?
  - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
    No, just a price tag enforced by artificial means like copyright laws. There is simply no way to sell on the free market objects with an almost infinite supply without appealing to outside forces like state regulators.
    - realityking 12y ago
      Serious question, as you seem to be a developer. How would you feel about companies using GPL licensed code in close source products?
      - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
        I seem to, indeed :-) In what context? A laissez-faire economy without patents and copyright? You'd have to also eliminate law enforcement when it comes to licenses to render GPL useless, but I don't see how is this relevant to the discussion about the intrinsic economical value of digital data that can be copied at an almost zero cost.
        realityking 12y ago
        The GPL is enforceable thanks to copyright. So if copyright was abolished, the GPL would loose all meaning. The point I'm trying to make is, that the protection offered by copyright extends beyond monetytization as it's often reduced to. (understandable in a capitalist econonmy, where Almosen everything has a price) Instead it allows the right holder to limit how it's distributed or attach conditions to the distribution. The GPL with its limitations on how I may use a piece of software licensed under it is one outgrowth of that. If you reject copyright, especially for digital goods, you should be fine with the GPL becoming useless.
        stefantalpalaru 12y ago
        > If you reject copyright, especially for digital goods, you should be fine with the GPL becoming useless. You have a point. Yes, the loss of enforceable licenses would be acceptable in a system without artificial means to stop the flow of data. It's not like most of us have the means to go to court over GPL infringements anyway.
iamdave 12y ago
GOOD. More concerts is a good thing, direct sales to the customer, direct profit for the venue and artist, more exposure. Relying on one channel for revenue is a disastrous rolling of the dice. I'm not here to apologize for people who willfully engage in subverting the purchasing process to get music they want, but I'm also not going to show sympathy for an industry that wants to remain rigid and inflexible with a changing marketplace either.
Karunamon 12y ago
Examples of causation are pretty damn important. Just because something intuitively appears to make sense does not mean that's the actual way things are. Really, even the industry cartels can't prove it. (And their attempts are laughably bad and transparent) Can you? But lack of sales, okay. The music industry reports record profits year over year, so those artists you speak of don't represent the larger trend in any case. Let's pretend that it did for a moment - is that drop in sales due to: * A minority of consumers downloading, rather than buying * More choice in the marketplace (more stuff for people to buy meaning the existing players get a smaller slice of the pie) * Less quality in the marketplace (pandering to the lowest common denominator resulting in flagging sales due to a percieved less quality product) * The economic downturn meaning less got spent on entertainment anyways * or something else?

anigbrowl 12y ago

As I mentioned above, I find it harder to get paid to work in indie movies than I did a few years ago, notwithstanding the economic recession. Small-budget projects without famous actors are increasingly hard to finance because revenue projections are so unreliable. Private film investment was always a high-risk venture - people put money into for some social cachet but with a measurable probability of breaking even or making a profit (which was estimated based on a slate of similarly situated films). As that probability falls towards zero, so does the willingness of investors to take risks on it. I don't want to name-drop, but I could point you to a film with multiple award (including Oscar) nominations that failed to break even and which led to investors dropping out from future projects - but which are hugely popular on file-sharing sites, with many thousands of seeders & leechers over a year after release despite the availability of the film on Netflix. And please don't bring up 'Hollywood accounting.' This is based on personal acquaintance with executive producers at a large production company who personally lost millions of dollars, not some dentist in Pomona who wasn't able to buy a new Mercedes. That made it a lot more difficult for the director to place the next project - which I also anticipate will be Oscar-nominated - and required working with a much lower budget. That film is dying even more horribly at the box office (because there was no marketing budget worth speaking of) but it's one of the hottest torrents. Explain that to me, how a film can't get a wide release and therefore deserves to fail even though there are over 4000 people downloading it according to a popular tracker. So while people at the top end of Hollywood obviously have things way better than people making no-budget films (sub $1 million) and don't have to worry about day-to-day costs of living, yes, there are people losing really substantial amounts of money and extremely high-quality directors that are having trouble raising money to make films despite their work being among the most popular movie torrents.

ticviking 12y ago
Please do name drop. In this case I would consider it a matter of citing your work, and gives me the opportunity to support the projects mentioned if I think they're worthwhile.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Well, in that spirit look at the popularity on torrent trackers of the Master and Inherent Vice, both directed by PT Anderson, and compare with their box office performance at boxofficemojo.com (plus the wikipedia entries on the films have some additional information about budgets). I don't feel comfortable discussing how that played out from the producers' standpoint (I'm not one of the producers, so I'll limit myself to saying it has lost money overall), but I hope you can see the incongruity of a highly acclaimed director making serious artistic work seeing ever-widening box office losses while simultaneously enjoying enormous-but-unpaid popularity via file-sharing. The Master has been available on Netflix streaming for months (at least in the US) and yet there are, um, over 9000 seeders for just the most popular torrent on oldpiratebay.org, closer to 35,000 if you add up all the active torrents for different formats, foreign language versions and so on, plus 35-40,000 leechers. Regardless of how ones feels about it aesthetically, I think it's fair to say that the film is quite popular (measured against a random basket of 2012 films with better box office performance). But because it didn't do well in its initial release window, the longer-term popularity isn't reflected by its financial performance. Piracy is a real problem for films that depend on long-tail revenue, which is one reason you see so many franchise films and aesthetically conservative genre pics - they're an easier sell even though they don't necessarily age well.