Now I’m totally confused. Art can be copied freely and does not harm the artist yet at the same time the artist will receive fair market value for their work because of all the free copies floating around?
What step am I missing in that process?
I don’t understand the whole concept of wanting all music to be free. How are musicians supposed to make money? Does that mean they should only play free concerts too? And I guess they have to work another job to pay their bills?
This is just really strange to me. If you walk into a store , and steal something everyone agrees that is a crime. But if that is music , somehow that is OK?
It’s not that music should be free, it’s that it is free. Forcing people to pay for individual copies of something when the cost to duplicate it is zero is not a feasible prospect.
As for whether bands should have to play shows for free, of course not. They can play music for whomever they want, and charge whatever they want (though they’ll probably have to deal with the fact that someone in attendance is almost certainly going to record it). This isn’t about punishing musicians or devaluing their work. It’s about confronting an economic reality. The price of something trends inevitably toward the real costs to produce it.
We could ratchet the power of law up to try to change the incentives. I’d guess that that will be about as successful as the War on Drugs has been. Except imagine how much less effective the War on Drugs would be if 80% of US households had grow lights installed (that’s how many households have computers).
We could try to change the mores of society. That has a better chance of working, although I don’t know how stable that sort of thing is. I think it seemed stable for quite a long time, but the technological disruption of computation seems to have sent it careening in the other direction. Compare old people’s views of copyright and young people’s and it’s clear that there’s a major shift going on. It’s going to take a lot to turn that around.
Or, we could accept that the genie of computation cannot possibly be put back in the bottle, and explore other ways that artists and content creators can be paid (a few possibilities: government subsidy, paid by escrow before the work is released, patronage, non-profits created to encourage and provide for the arts…). Maybe all of those ideas are dumb and won’t work. But perhaps trying these out would be better than fighting a losing battle with a prohibitionist mindset.
I’m all for exploring different ways that artists and content creators can be paid. Not by passing experimental new laws, but by leaving ownership of the content in the hands of the creators or those to whom they’ve transferred the copyright, and letting them make the decisions and do the experimenting.
Repealing copyright laws strikes me as unjust, because it would be a betrayal of everyone who’s invested major time, effort, and/or resources in creating works with the understanding that they would then own the rights to those works.
Well, the fair market value of something that costs nothing to create is zero, and the marginal cost of a digital copy of a track is zero, so in that sense they are receiving the fair value.
A more useful way to determine the market value of the work is to observe what people are actually willing to pay for it, and it’s notable that, despite the availability of free music, both legal and illegal, the amount of money spent on music is increasing. What is in fact happening is people are hearing music, for free, that they may not otherwise have heard, deciding that it does have value to them and paying the creators for it.
Many musicians are also creating extra things to go with the music, something tangible that one buys along with the mp3s or whatever. These can be traditional things like posters or t-shirts, or more interesting ones such as hand made cd wallets with an individual message in them, or handwritten lyric sheets. I’ve also seen an increase in the amount of vinyl records sold in extremely high quality packaging, and I’ve known plenty of people who buy them as display pieces, not to actually listen to, as they already have the digital files.
The point is that technology has changed the market, and both producers and consumers need to adapt. My guess is that, for musicians, this will lead to a greater focus on live performance and merchandise sales at gigs as the revenue stream, and actual sales of music being low volume, high value deluxe items bought by hardcore fans. Streaming and downloading of music will mostly be seen as advertising for the actual product.
I suspect the business model for other arts will change less, though. Going to the cinema is already more like going to a concert than listening to an album, and the Hollywood model plans revenue on ticket sales, not DVD and other after-sales.
Books could be more difficult, if people decide they are as happy to read on a Kindle as from paper, and piracy of digital books becomes rampant. There isn’t the same connection between a novelist or poet and their fans that there is with a musician. Perhaps that will have to change. Technical writers, journalists, photographers, and similar will be least affected, as most of their work is to order for a specialised audience. If anything, we will see a return to an older model of fixed payment for the work, rather than royalties (I believe many photographers, such as wedding photographers, already work this way).
I’m not suggesting a complete removal of copyright laws. The creator of a work should be the only one entitled to profit from their work (although they can of course transfer that right if they wish). To take someone’s work and sell it as your own can rightly be categorised as theft.
The short version is, people are not going to stop copying music , films, or anything else they can. Artists can either fight against it, and lose the battle (much like the “war on drugs”), or they can work with it and find a new paradigm that benefits both them and consumers.
Many people who get music for free don’t care about the fair market value, they are just cheap.
I remember before itunes people said “give us an easy way to buy music and we will buy it” Well it’s easy to buy now and yet pirating has not slowed down at all.
So I guess they were liars about being willing to pay.
Then how do you explain the vast amount of digital sales, and paid for streaming services? Total sales of music are up, not down.
Of course digital distribution raises the possibility that an artist can cut out the middle man and keep all of the profits rather than getting the scraps left over.
Well first off, the Mona Lisa has been out of copyright for a little while, and there are prints of it commonly available.
That aside, I don’t agree that the artist should be able to obscure their work once it’s been released. Although I am more thinking of things like books or movies, it could reasonably apply to paintings and the like as well. I don’t feel that creating a work gives or even should give a person complete control over it once it has been in the public eye.
If I want to read a book that the copyright holders are no longer printing, and is not available from them digitally, I should be able to obtain it in some other manner that does not involve hunting down an original copy and paying exorbitant prices for it. I should only have to do that if I actually want the original copy for collection purposes. If the copyright holder is making no profit off it because neither he nor his authorized agents are selling the knowledge contained therein, then that knowledge shouldn’t cease to become available. Whether it’s a work of fiction, history, scientific, or any other sort of work, it benefits people as a whole to have knowledge available.
I don’t deny the author’s right to profit from something he’s created, but to then turn around and attempt to deny availability of this creation to humanity is not beneficial to the public at large.
Another non-vote for the missing option of “I support IP and the idea of copyright but think our current system isn’t working.”
We’ve got a system that’s the worst of both possible worlds - it favors neither the creators nor the general public. Our current system is designed to benefit the middle men.
Digital sales being high does not mean that pirating has stopped or gone down.
But it does mean that some people, at least, are willing to pay. Maybe the ones who said they’d be willing to pay, are paying (and hence, not liars). Who knows?
I have IP. I’m a jazz musician and occasional historian, so a lot of it is related to classic music of the abandoned works era - out of print but de facto legally unavailable in the USA until 2067. Even public archives can’t take the chance to preserve it because of a tangle of possible legal risks. What little audience interest there was has been effectively killed off outside of Europe.
The thing is, nobody discussing the copyright issue from any perspective gives much of a shit. The discussion is always from the POV of the artist or creator - whose right to profit I respect, but even there, one has to chalk some free distribution up to cost of doing business. It’s the best advertising there is for one’s work.
Still, if no distinction is made between small artists and large companies, or living and dead works, the dead stuff is going to be buried without a trace. Just having it will put you at risk once the record industry goes into its last throes and has to resort to lawsuits to make money. All because of some milquetoast mouse who’s nothing more than a trademark.
The current state of IP law is idiocy incarnate. I might start caring again when A) “rights holder” is more likely to mean “original author” and B) when copyright terms go back to something in the same general universe as sane.
Besides, I have personal experience in two separate performing groups that sales are significantly higher when our work is more generally freely available. Allowing previews to interested parties increases sales.
Correct. It means that piracy has no negative effect on sales, and a likely positive one.
Cite? And not just 2012/2011…how about the last decade?
I have IP and I favor reforms of current IP law so broad that I put myself down as being anti-IP, even though that really doesn’t describe my position.
Morally, copyrights are invented rights, not natural rights, and must be made to work within the framework created to preserve natural rights; pragmatically, the only natural right that IP touches on is plagiarism, which is why copyright violators don’t (often) plagiarize. It simply doesn’t happen, because the average person hates plagiarism. In fact, the average person seems to think plagiarism is what copyright law is about. Finally, the world does not owe anyone a living, especially if they’re trying to destroy natural rights to preserve a business model.
Will a cite that music sales were higher last year than everdo?
That wasn’t what I suggested, no. Keep your eye on the revenue box here:
What do ou think is happening there?
I support copyright, but not to the extent that it is used today. The science says that the best copyright is 14 years. So I support it up to that much. Well, sorta, as I’ve already expressed my feelings in other threads about how it isn’t stealing if I don’t cost you money by using your stuff, since you don’t lose out on a sale.
I of course have IP, as everyone does, but the way you are discussing the concept, I guess I don’t, since I don’t have anything I offer for sale. (An odd concept for property, but I digress.)
I can’t tell by your OP which way you would have me vote on the copyright portion, however. A literal reading would be “yes, I support copyright”, but, then, if you paper is more than 14 years old, I wouldn’t pay you for it.