Yes the things people did before file sharing, and still do to this day.
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Filesharing - A way for you to sample music.
Music festivals - A way for you to sample music.
Borrow from a friend - A way for you to sample music.
Listen to artists websites - A way for you to sample music.
Internet radio - A way for you to sample music.
Regular radio - A way for you to sample music.
Fooling anyone? Pull your head out of your ass.
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Then you buy some of the CDs that got a good review.
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Yes they do.
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Yes, because nobody listened to a wide variety of music before Napster. :rolleyes:
I’d like to hear some practical solutions from you about how you think big-budget films (like LOTR) would be funded if copyright did not exist.
If artists aren’t worth getting paid; if they are “going to do it anyway,” then how would expensive projects get funded?
How can these big-budget movies recover their investment if they are not allowed to have a copyright on the work they create? Once it’s done and in the can, anyone can make a copy of it, anyone can distribute it, and the original creators are out in the cold. Who can afford to do that?
And even if you were to so graciously “allow” copyright to last, say, 14 years, how is that going to help the person who cannot get their work noticed for several years? Many forms of “alternative” sort of work or “non-mainstream” work do not immediately take off. They may take a long time to finally earn a little money for their creator. With a short copyright limit, there will be less incentive for people to risk doing “non-mainstream” work. Better to stick with faddish and lowest-common-denominator-crap and have a hope of making a profit.
They wouldn’t be funded. And thus the shitty Hollywood blockbuster big-budget movie would disappear. That’s a good thing. Meanwhile, legitimate art like music, painting, sculpture, and literature would continue to survive.
Maybe you get invited to the travelling music festivals that feature long dead artists who perform as ghosts, but I’m not that lucky. I don’t see many music festivals at all around here, let alone magical ones like yours.
My cd collection is far better than that of any of my friends. They have nothing for me to borrow. And this wouldn’t help with out of print or obscure albums anyway.
Well yeah, obviously. But not every artist has a good variety of songs to download on their web page, do they?
I do listen to internet radio. I don’t download the songs that I hear on internet radio. But the fact remains that if I want to hear some songs to see if I should buy an album, or if I want to hear songs that don’t get played on the radio, I have to use file sharing.
Again, I don’t use file sharing for songs I hear on the radio.
And you still haven’t answered - how would I have heard Pour Down Like Silver or Starsailor without file sharing?
Your suggestions are not all useless. But they just aren’t adequate. Not even close.
File sharing remains the only option for hearing a wide variety of music. Old music, obscure music, live music, out of print music, and all the songs that don’t get played on the radio.
I don’t see why you would even argue with the fact that file sharing is absolutely the only way to listen to a wide variety of music. It’s not even debatable. The only debate is over whether or not that justifies it.
To me, it does. Being able to hear a wide variety of music is a good thing, and an important thing. As long as there is no other way to do it, file sharing is a valuable necessity.
I apologize Nightime, I really thought you were talking about radio. I thought you were arguing against requests as being a way to hear new music over the radio. I do agree with your assesment of “genre”. Music can’t be broken down into 10 easy to classify catagories that lend themselves to radio “programming”.
I still think that you are dead wrong about file sharing being the only way to find new music. Where do you live? If it is a decent sized city, I would suggest listening to the university radio station. In fact, my favourite radio station is the University of Calgary station CJSW. Give them a listen. They play such a wide variety of music, you are bound to find something.
People do make demands, but I get so many suggestions and have so much on my to-do list already that I don’t pay much attention to individual suggestions or demands unless (1) a large group of users all want the same thing, (2) I think it’s a great idea that I would use, (3) it’s a popular feature that another program already has, or (4) they slip me a few bucks for my effort. And naturally I pay more attention to “suggestions” than “demands”.
Why don’t I sell my work? Several reasons:[ol]
[li]I signed a contract with the original author of Visual IRC, and one of the terms is that it must remain freeware.[/li][li]Some of the third-party components I use have different licensing terms for commercial software, but I can use them for free if my software is also free.[/li][li]There are plenty of free competitors. Although I feel that my software is, naturally, the best IRC client that has ever been written or ever will be written, even I would have a hard time convincing myself to pay $20 for it when I could use a dozen others for free.[/li][li]I use and enjoy other people’s software for free every day, and I want to give back to the community.[/li][li]I don’t want to deal with the hassles and restrictions that come with selling software: I can set my own release dates. I can go weeks without writing a line of code if I don’t feel like it. I don’t have to work on features that don’t interest me. I don’t need a flashy web site. I can leave rough edges or put off writing manuals, because other people are willing to donate patches and documentation if I donate the code. And of course, no one tells me six weeks into a project, “The customer doesn’t want it like that anymore. Can you do it this way instead?”[/li][/ol]
Not a lot of other people’s deal? There are over 700,000 developers registered at SourceForge, which is just one free software development site. You may not understand the mindset, but there are plenty of people who are willing to give their artistic work away for free, whether it’s software, music, animation, or anything else.
Those 700,000 people might not all have the same expectations or motivation for writing free software, but the bottom line is that it gets done. Millions of lines of code are written and given away on principle. It even happens with music - you just don’t hear about it as much because the media devotes more time to illegal file sharing.
Copyright might be a necessary incentive for certain people to make art, but it’s not at all necessary for art to be made in general. The purpose of copyright from the beginning has been to benefit society - to get art out of an artist’s head and into the public domain, by way of an incentive for him to work. However, when copyright only serves the artists, and not the rest of society, then it’s time to reexamine the reasons for the law.
True, she doesn’t have to lift a finger for them. But there’s a difference between someone else asking her to perform for free, and someone else making his own free copy of her performance without inconveniencing her.
There seem to be a lot of you who think a person who creates art has some natural right to judge who else is allowed to enjoy that art, even after it leaves the artists’ hands, and that enjoying art without the creator’s permission is a sin. That concept is as foreign to me as I’m sure free contribution must be to you.
Not true. Who pays for the free content you can find at mp3.com or homestarrunner.com? Who pays for Linux, GCC, and GIMP? (OK, there are a handful of programmers from major companies paid to work on those - now. There weren’t ten years ago.)
And by that same token, you don’t understand the mindset that some people want to choose how their work is distributed.
The whole subculture (I guess that’s one way of putting it) of programming is just one area of creative effort. There are a lot of different forms of creative expression and creative works.
I also like to “give away” some of my work. I show examples of my artwork and photographs on my website(s). They are low-res, and I get to choose what I show, what res it will be, etc. etc. And I also have the legal right to dictate how my work can be (legally) displayed. (Personal computer wallpaper is OK, a few copies printed out to put on the wall is OK, putting on another website, not OK.)
But some people wouldn’t want to “give away” nearly as much as I give away. Are they wrong? Of course not. Each of us gets to choose how much of our work we will “give away.” I would be supremely arrogant if I decided that because I’m OK with giving away some computer wallpaper that everyone else should want to do so as well.
You know software and programming, and that’s fine. But there’s a whole lot of other types of creative work out there. Some of the creative projects people work on are very expensive (LOTR, for instance). A lot of creative people have different “emotional investments” in their work, and so forth. And because of that, they feel differently than you do about the lines of code that you write. One size does not fit all. You can’t use your examples of giving away code and think it’s going to apply to filmmakers, designers, or artists.
I am guessing that the lines of code that you write are not autobiographical. Or that they show some deeply felt personal feeling or issue. Now, maybe some other people who write code manage to do this, but I don’t think you have ever claimed that you do. So maybe you just don’t know how some people may feel about their work, and how they can “own” their work in a way that maybe–just maybe–you don’t feel for your own work.
She works for long hours on her music with a certain goal in mind. She doesn’t want her music distributed in a way or performed in a way that might be distressing to her (her music is religious). She might some day get a religious music publisher to distribute her music. And because she owns the copyright, she knows that her music will never be adapted or changed to be non-religous.
But if people could just copy her music and do whatever the hell they wanted to with it, they might use it in a way that would be offensive to her.
She worked hard on this music, and I think if she ever thought that people would “bastardize” the music that she feels very strongly about, she’d never allow it to be heard in public.
Without copyright, I think a lot of artists, composers, writers, etc., would think twice about even allowing their work to be released. They feel it is “theirs,” and they don’t want some leech bastardizing it. At least not while they are alive.
So, copyright protects them and allows them some feeling of assurance that they’ll never live to see “bastardization” of their work. Without copyright protection, these people just wouldn’t bother to share. Oh, they might still do the work, but they wouldn’t share it. What’s in it for them? Not much money. And the risk of the leeches getting a hold of it and screwing it up. Sounds like a pretty bad deal.
And that would mean less creative work out there, for everyone to enjoy.
Yeah. Maybe you’d understand better if you were someone like my mom. I don’t know, but maybe you’d understand.
You’re missing the point.
With copyright in place, people can (get this) make more money off their work. Some people can (get this) make a living off of their work.
Now, without copyright, less people can work fulltime on their art. Less time for art. More people working at the office and maybe sparing a few hours at night for creative work. (Or maybe just giving it up all togther. Some jobs are so stressful that people barely have time to think, let alone dredge up those creative juices.)
Less art. Less music. Less writing. No time. Gotta work. Can’t make much money off of their creative works, all the leeches demand it for free.
Oh, but if they want to spend more time with their art, music or writing, someone’s going to have to (get this) support them. Who is going to do that? Someone’s going to have to give them money to spend more time on their creative works. So, who? The taxpayers? “Benefactors”? Who? Certainly not the leeches–oh, God Forbid. Can’t expect the people who want to consume the work to pay a dime.
I think it is very telling that in a debate on file sharing nobody is capable of actually debating against file sharing, but rather are forced to argue against letting people use someone else’s song in a commercial or something without permission.
I think deep down even the most strenuous objectors to file sharing realize that it is an excellent and currently necessary tool for personal listening, and that is why the debate always tends to become “should copyrights exist?”
Personally, I think copyrights should serve a very important purpose, but that purpose has been twisted by laws that were bought and paid for. The current laws forget that copyrights are intended to benefit us all by encouraging creative effort. The sad fact is that the current copyright laws do the opposite of what is intended - they choke new creative efforts, and allow suppression of old creative works.
These twisted copyright laws are directly responsible for file sharing.
Copyright laws should result in people having the ability to benefit from a wide variety of creative works, and in encouraging and inspiring new creative works. But somewhere along the way, these goals were lost. Somewhere along the way copyright laws were turned completely backwards, and became a way to make future creative efforts exist in a vacuum. To suppress the very thing they should be encouraging.
Therefore file sharing is necessary to bring back these goals - to bring back the goal of people being able to benefit from a wide variety of creative works, to encourage and inspire new works by letting people learn from past works and by offering independants a way around the major label system.
Statements have been made about how artists shouldn’t expect to get paid (even though the leeches want to consume their hard work), or that people don’t own their work, and how copyrights should be done away with. And that movies (like LOTR) should be (I presume) allowed to “die on the vine” because they are Big Hollywood and crap anyway. All these things transcend the topic of mere file sharing.
Seriously. Can you see a reason why some of us would want to argue with that?
But that is exactly my point. The debate always goes off into such territory because the benefits of file sharing, and the RIAA’s unwillingness to provide an alternative, are so obvious.
I’m a musician and an artist, so you definitely don’t have to worry about me saying there should be no copyrights. But don’t you think there are problems with the current copyright laws? They are stifling new creative efforts, and suppressing older ones.
See, you are looking at it completely from the selling standpoint. But I am looking at it from the selling standpoint AND the standpoint of the people who want to benefit from past creative efforts, which will in turn help them to create new creative efforts!
The function of copyright laws should be to accomplish both of those things!
Right now each side of the debate is completely focused on their own side, with one side saying “you only get to benefit from the few creative works you can afford and find under the current system” and the other saying “free creative works for everyone”.
But the goal should be that people are able to benefit and learn from a wide variety of creative works, thus improving future creative works, AND that the artist themself profits from it.
As long as copyright laws only care about one side, file sharing must rise to create a balance.
Nightime, I can’t say that I know what the perfect balance is. But I sure as hell don’t want copyright done away with, and I don’t want anyone telling me that I ought to “give away” my work, or that it doesn’t “belong” to me once it’s “out there.” It especially grates on me when I’m told (in essence), “Well, you’d do work anyway, no matter what, so why do you also expect to get paid for it?” I cannot tell you how much that grates. That’s a typical leech mentality.
I don’t have any love for Disney, the RIAA, or for other such big corporations who have a stranglehold on certain creative works, but I don’t think the solution is to do away with copyrights all together. And yet you see on this thread, that’s what some people do want.