Again, I think you overestimate the altruism of music fans. Also, again, I’m aware that this is how things are going to be. I do wonder what it’s going to be like. I honestly don’t see enough people freely donating enough money so a large number of musicians will be able to support themselves from their craft. Maybe there’ll be some sort of academic/ corporate sponsorship, though I’m worried that music will become bland like PBS or hermetic and unlistenable like modern poetry.
Yeah, like all ideas involving autogestion, I think it overestimates the intelligence, and/or sense of responsibility of your average human quite a bit.
I’ll provide anecdotal evidence : I’m friend with and a big fan of an underground anarchist artist who preaches personnal responsibility (among lots of things).
His shows are priced according to this principle : to get in, you may pay whatever you can afford and feel his art is worth to you, from a couple Euros if you’re a bum, up to 50 if you’re rich. As he emphatically says himself when explaining this to the crowd before the show, he’s not asking for charity, but giving you an exercize in self-responsability.
Lots of Eurocents in the cashbox…
And the problem with wealthy patrons is that the art suffers. A lot. If the Coca-cola company invests in John Lennon, John Lennon won’t sing many songs denouncing the abuses of capitalism, now will he ? Hell, he might even be coerced into writing Coca-cola jingles, the poor hairy bastard.
Is there any kind of evidence to support this statement? Based on my experiences and analysis of human behavior, there would be a very small number of people willing to pay the artists.
I think it’s correct that the model needs to change due to necessity, but I also think the arguments about “go on tour” or “sell t shirts” are not well thought out and therefore don’t see the possible side effects of no IP protection. Here’s an example: Artist A is a great song writer but every song he/she writes get copied and performed by other people immediately, possibly other performers with more money and better shows, why exactly would artist A continue to write songs when he/she can’t make money?
Think back to how things used to be a century or so ago, before recording or broadcasting technologies existed. Lots of musicians made a living from their art. Few, if any, got wealthy from it. After the record industry, radio, and TV become established the music market became totally different. A tiny handful of stars were able to become enormously wealthy. (Some, no doubt, became stars because they were actually more talented than most others. Clearly others became stars for quite different reasons.) Now I can’t really prove this, but it seems more than likely that, with the stars sucking in such a large proportion of the money people were and are willing to spend on musical entertainment, a good deal less (proportionateley to population, and general levels of wealth) was and is available to support non-star musicians. Because of that, it seems likely that many who could have made a decent living from their art in earlier times (and who may in many cases be quite as talented and hardworking as even the most deserving stars) have found that they could only make a meager living from their music, or no living at all. Some hang on a while in the hope that they will eventually get to be stars, and a very few succeed, but most, by the nature of the music market in the era of copyright recordings, do not, and eventually have to give up.
Recording and broadcasting technologies, together with copyright, have, in fact, hugely distorted the music market (and the entertainment market in general) over the past century or so. It seems to me that widespread copying of digital music files, so that a musician’s main income no longer comes from selling recordings or broadcast rights, has the promise of returning the music market to something much more like its former state. Potentially, that could be a very good thing both for most musicians and for the state of music itself. Recordings will become mainly a way of getting your work known, so that people will come and pay to see you play live. Few, if any, musicians will become super-rich stars this way, but quite a lot more might be able to make a decent living.
from Vox Imperatoris
#1 - calling the libertarians rantings about economics a full fledged SCHOOL is an oxymoron. They reject the scientific method as a tool in testing their theories and thus are rejected themselves by many actual economists. In fact, the one of its founders - F. Hayek, of this so called school of economics was not even allowed to attend department meetings when he was hired at the University of Chicago because of this fact.
I disagree with this. The concept of copyright works perfectly well with digital filesharing. The problem is with a segment of the population thinking that the ability to create a free copy of something means you have the right to own it for free. The problem is also with the music industry acting like dinosaurs, and refusing to work with digital filesharing, making that distribution channel the enemy, and trying to destroy it.
This, I agree with. You constantly hear people calling it theft, when it isn’t, and never was. It’s copyright violation, a crime just as legitimate as theft, and accurate. May as well call murder “theft of life” then spend the next hour arguing if it’s really theft, since the murderer can’t keep “life” in his pocket.
This is exactly as I see it, but better written. The “Industry” has controlled the state of play for too long, and they have had their day. Either they accept this, adapt, and survive, or they can die kicking and screaming. Personally, I hope it’s a slow painful death, considering some of the shit my eyes and ears have been inflicted to.
Do you have a cite for that? I cannot fathom why a university would would hire someone but then bar him from department meetings. It makes no sense. If he’s good enough to be part of the faculty he’s good enough to attend meetings. Or perhaps he’s so good he doesn’t have to attend them. (that last part was a joke)
Also, since when was economics subject to the scientific method?
Odesio
Getting back to the OP, I’d say the invention of the printing press would be analogous. It made it possible to run off hundreds of identical copies of a book - a task which would have taken hundreds of scribes months of labor to do by hand.
Odesio
this is from the Wikipedia article on Hayek
If you need more I will try to find it although you will probably be as successful as I was. DISSENT magazine had a large article on Hayek a while back - if you google the combination you probably can come up with it.
The Wikipedia article on the Austrian School of Economics explains the whole scientific method issue far better than I can and why the Austrian School is rejected by many economists who regard it as mere axiomatic beliefs which cannot be tested or measured.
this is from the WIkipedia entry
You can get much more if you just google Austrian School of Economics wikipedia… the go to the article and look for the section marked Criticism.
Having addressed the OP, I’ll now join in the debate already in progress.
I’m in complete agreement with a system that’s designed to get money to the artist from the people who enjoy the art. But that’s not what we have. We have a system that’s designed to divert 95% of the money to middlemen before the remaining five percent reaches the artist.
A more rational system would be to cut out the middlemen who are creating nothing, reduce the price by 90%, and pay that money directly to the artist. The audience would be happy to have its costs reduced to a tenth. And the artists would be happy to get at least twice what they’re getting now (probably more because more art would be purchased at a lower price). The only ones who lose are the middlemen and, not surprisingly, they’re the ones fighting change. They’re not upset with file-sharing because you’re stealing from the artist; they’re upset because you’ve taken away their opportunity to steal from the artist.
And that’s a critical point. People who worry that future artists will get much less compensation for their efforts are forgetting that present artists get a tiny fraction of the money from CD sales. I won’t argue that record companies are wholly parasitic but the artists themselves get almost nothing.
Artists essentially have to give away their first couple of albums to the record companies when they sign a contract. Only long established stars have the negotiating power to demand a significant share of CD sales. New musicians today have to treat their first few albums as loss leaders…they give them away to the record companies in return for promotion. With today’s information economy they could give their music away to the audience rather than the record companies and make just as much money.
Yes. And in a fully communist system, the problem is that a segment of the population won’t work “according to their abilities” if they can get money “according to their needs” anyway. Otherwise, it would work perfectly.
You’re not going to change human nature. If people can get something for free instead of paying for it, they will, even if you can somehow convince them all that everything would be better if they didn’t. That’s a reality you can’t ignore.
That would be the first time I’m convinced by a libertarian’s argument.
But even at 10% of original price a huge percentage of those with an internet connection won’t pay. When Radiohead reduced the price of their recent album, In Rainbows to ZERO some people chose filesharing networks (Cite).
Also there’s a ‘selling lemons’ type scenario that develops when you sell music., as I’ve found from personal experience in the field. If you retail a CD or a download at too far below market price, potential buyers perceive it as less valuable or even worthless.
A friend of mine used to try to hand out CDs of his music after gigs. Most of the time people wouldn’t take them. He got rid of far more of them when he started selling them. Because they weren’t purchased, even the audience at his gigs couldn’t see the value of them.
Addressing the OP, I would say the invention of the photocopier was the closest precedent to filesharing online. People can quickly, easily and anonymously make copies of material that is supposedly protected by copyright.
Part of the confusion is that some people treat copyright as some sort of natural right, and violations of copyright as malum in se. But this is nonsense. Copyright is an attempt by the government to advance the useful arts and sciences by granting to creators the exclusive right to copy their works for a limited time. The theory is that if creators get this exclusive right they’ll make money and since it turns out that people like money that means they’ll create more art and more science which is good for everyone. And so violation of copyright is malum prohibitum, it is wrong in the same way that driving on the wrong side of the street is wrong.
But granting this exclusive right to creators only makes sense if it really does advance the useful arts and sciences. If it no longer benefits the public, then the public doesn’t have to agree to continue to grant this right.
If anyone wants to know what the future of recorded music, the answer is simple. Every song ever recorded since Edison’s first experiments, available any time, any where, in any format, on any device, instantly, with no additional cost to the listener. This is going to happen, just see Youtube for an example of something almost like this. You can type in almost anything you like and listen to it for free via Youtube. Youtube only exists because the record companies didn’t understand that it was really an on-demand free music player until it was too late. And the funny thing is, it is physically impossible to play a song on Youtube without copying that song to your local computer, it’s just that the song is saved in your cache.
Since the ultimate destination is easy to see and since we’re already halfway there today, the reasonable thing to do is to ask if there is some method that will give creators some incentive to create new works in the future, now that enforcing copyright is no longer a workable arrangement. Maybe we’ll figure out some such method and we’ll have plenty of new high quality music, maybe we won’t and we’ll have plenty of new amatuer music that people record just for fun. But enforcement of copyright will have no place in this future world of the future.
What about other IP though? There are alot of industries that are predicated upon protected IP. If music copyright is allowed to fall by the wayside what about trademarks, patents, et al?
Trademarks and patents are a bit different. While it is trivially easy to copy a corporate logo, there’s nothing to be gained by doing so. It isn’t hard to prevent someone selling computers from calling themselves “Intel” and putting the Intel logo on those machines. There’s no incentive for a guy in his mom’s basement to misuse the Intel logo, while there is an incentive for him to copy the latest Brittney single. Patents are a bit different, but again, the usual motive for patent infringement is to profit from the new process. If you just had to press a button to get a copy of a patented invention it would be one thing, but instead today you have to actually manufacture it. Maybe in the future with automated fabrication it will be different, but for now there’s no incentive for a guy to try to manufacture most patented inventions in his mon’s basement, it’s still much easier to just buy one from WalMart.
And this is why copyright protection used to work pretty good as a rough method for allowing creators to benefit. Until electronic methods of copying became available there was never any incentive for an average person to violate copyright. If you wanted to copy a new book or a new vinyl album, you’d need a printing press or a vinyl pressing factory. Now, there were plenty of people who owned printing presses but it would take much more effort to set up the printing press to make a copy of the book for personal use than it would just to buy the book from the legitimate producer. The only logical reason to produce pirate copies of the book would be if you wanted to sell them. And when you offer to sell those copies you are pretty easy to track down. The copyright system was pretty easy to enforce because the only reason to pirate books or vinyl albums was the hope of making money.
But nowadays the vast majority of copying is not done by people who want to make money, they just want a free copy for themselves and they don’t care if other people make a free copy of their free copy because it costs them nothing.
Yet, somehow, burglaries, robberies, muggings fraud and theft aren’t exactly an epidemic, even though they all involve getting something for free instead of paying/working for it.
The only difference with breaking copyright law in the digital age is that it’s much easier to get away with it. I don’t know how that opens up a legitimate debate into the applicability of copyright law to digital copies. It applies, it’s just very difficult to enforce, so people break the law all the time. That fact, in and of itself, doesn’t strike me as a reason to claim that the law is wrongheaded.
I’m not saying I have perfect answers. But I will say that the system we have right now is badly broken. A system that only half works would be an improvement.
Like it or not, we’re heading towards a realization that artistic content is not bound to the package. People are not going to pay a dollar for the art when it comes in a twenty dollar package. The package sellers are trying to maintain an artificial system that is inevitably going to fall. They should instead be making plans on finding a role in the future rather than trying to deny the future is going to arrive.