And I bet you can’t find an author who is against libraries. That is where people become introduced to their works. I probably buy 50 books a year, and in 95% of the cases I became introduced to the author by either borrowing someone’s book, or checking it out of the library. I look at filesharing a huge unauthorized library. I look at real (moral) copyright infringement as those five dollar dvd’s and two dollar cd’s hawked on the streetcorner. And a law does not equal morality. One of my daughter’s was judged the most moral person on her campus. Amoung the many morally correct buy illegal questions she answered was “If you needed a medicine for your child but could not afford it, would you steal it if the opportunity presented itself?” The legal answer is no, the moral answer is a resounding yes.
So if you need the new song by Clay Aiken but cannot afford it, should you steal it? The moral answer is a resounding yes?
The Sunday newspaper has just arrived. I have high hopes that it will have fewer strained analogies than this conversation.
Except that in a library, there’s only one copy, the copy is paid for, and the borrower doesn’t get to keep it as long as they want. Other than that though, exactly the same, right?
Pffft.
The whole reason this is even remotely controversial is because of the zeal with which the RIAA and record companies are protecting what is arguably an obsolete business model, and they’re doing it at the expense of the very people they should be courting as customers. (See this for why Sony has been singled out.) In other words, Sony has assumed the position they were fighting twenty years ago. That’s why it’s ironic.
Robin
Who put all these spoons here?
My example was to demonstrate that legal does not equal moral. It is in no way analogous to the whole copyright thing. It was to make an entirely different point.
And actually, with a library, the individual does, for all intents and purposes, gets to keep it as long as they want, which is long enough to read.
You want irony? I got your irony right here (from your Wiki link)
Well, if trying to prevent downloading over peer-to-peer programs was all that Sony and the other entertainment companies were doing, i’d agree with you.
But Sony has, as others have observed, gone well beyond that with their rootkit-laden CDs, installing software on customers’ computers without permission and without the customers’ knowledge.
Also, the vigorous lobbying of the entertainment companies has resulted in a law, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, that arguably does prevent content from being used even under the provisions of Fair Use. Part of the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent ANY digital protection system, no matter how trivial or insecure, on a CD, DVD, or other digital medium. Because any attempt to break the protection system is illegal, that makes it effectively illegal to copy any part of an encrypted DVD, despite the fact that the Fair Use provisions of Title 17 clearly allow copying of portions of a work if certain conditions are met.
Make no mistake, the content providers are not only hostile to theft, they are, in large measure, hostile to Fair Use as well, as evidenced by their constant efforts (and considerable success) to circumvent Fair Use through backdoor strategies like the DMCA.
I’m also still pissed at the companies, and at the spineless fucking hacks in Congress, for extending copyright limits by 20 years in the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, aka the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.
Myself, I’ve had a beef with Sony ever since in the 80s they sued Sony Florendo, a Baltimore restaurant owner, to make her change the name of her business (Sony’s). Eventually, of course, they outspent her in court into submission. Considering how unlikely it is that anyone will confuse a maker of home entertainment gear with a purveyor of Filipino food, it has cast Sony Corp. in my mind as something of a corporate bully ever since.
OTOH, the whole DMCA deal is to me an entire other kettle of fish, and definitely not Congress’s finest hour. However worthy the desire to enforce intellectual property rights, the methods being used do NOTHING to dissuade or even slow down REAL pirates. Their approach is akin to busting kids for simple possession of a few joints while ignoring multi-ton shipments.
(Preview)
Oh, and what mhendo said. The content companies would very much want us to RENT content and have to pay-per-view in every single case.
Some fun math:
Average cost of song on iTunes or whatever: 99 cents
Average cost of a lawsuit/pre-suit: $3,000 to $5,000
Therefore, like my friends have done, as long as you download up to or over the pre-suit amount, downloading illegally can actually save you money. Say you download 6 or 7 thousand songs - not that hard to do, if you want to collect everything a artist has done for around 500 artists. Well, now you are talking about an average cost per song of somewhere around 45 to 83 cents. That’s a 16 to 50 percent discount!
It is also rare that you would ever be in possession of one of these presuit letters, so you might even have a 100% discount. As long as your daughter has 3,000 or more songs, she either broke even or got some sort of discount. That’s around 250 albums or probably every album 40 or so bands have put out.
Am I mistaken or isn’t part of the suit terms that you are expected to destry all your irregular downloads, on whatever media? (Yeah, sure, like how the heck will you, or they, prove that you did or did not…)
We grant copyright to promote the progress of the sciences and useful arts. If the artists getting paid and not ripped off serves that purpose, that’s nice.
Laugh all you want as “social contracts”, but what happens when the artists are getting ripped off by the rights holders? What happens if the rights holders are impeding progress and productivity? The copyrights should be revoked or transferred back to the artists.
You have the money, you’d love to give Clay a few dollars for bringing so much joy into your life. But no one is selling what you want to buy. There are people giving it away for free but what’s being sold is either just as illegitimate as the free stuff or is of lower quality than the free offerings.
If you think about it, the cost you’re going to be able to charge for an MP3 these days is going to be based on quality of service and moral purity. The labels have so far not made any serious attempt to compete with the free offerings on QoS. Nor have they made any attempt to positively exploit the cost of conscience. Rather than saying “Hey, our stuff is just as good as the free stuff… but if you buy from us, you’re giving back to the artists you love.” they’re saying “This track will expire if monthly licensing renewal is not completed, may be copied to no more than three digital devices, if you wish to burn to CD that’ll cost extra, only available at 96kbps unless you want to pay more for “like free” quality, and though the track you buy from us has almost zero production cost per unit, and the monies we collect are basically pure profit, we’re going to continue running that money through our arcane royalty accounting system and the artists you love will see barely a fraction of a cent… and we round down on their share!”
Borrowing and copying are not the same thing. To put it in odd terms, borrowing is like theft with permission. You are deprived of the property while I’m borrowing it. If I borrow your book, there’s still only one book and only one of us is using it at a time. Analogizing digital copying as an equivalent of “borrowing” is no better than claiming it as “theft”.
You could talk about it as an extension of the physical concept of “sharing” into the digital realm. Or we could all just call it “copyright infringement”, and make a valid argument on points rather than trying to force a certain perception rhetorically.
No one should have to pay for Clay Aiken, ever. In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be a Clay Aiken to give money to.
See, I do download illegally, using a private bit-torrent site. The stuff I download are albums I find off of indie music blogs like You Ain’t No Picasso or Coke Machine Glow or whatever. If I like something, I’ll go to their show and give my money directly to the artist. As in, physically hand cash over to a band mate. Or, as I have done recently, I’ll go to a show, hang out with them for awhile, then score them some really good cheap… rock show essentials. I’m supporting the music that I like way more than I would if I sat at home and gave my money to Amazon or iTunes or whatever the hell kids do these days. Yea, it is illegal. I don’t care. It’s way better than wading through the hordes of Myspace band requests of no talent sausage biters or blindly throwing money at some annonymous grey wall of text that is online shopping.
I’m not arguing that Sony aren’t bastards - they are. I dislike them intensely, and never buy their CDs for some of the reasons you outline. But it’s still not ironic that they once found themselves defending their product against accusations of copyright infringement, because a court ruled that the use of their product was perfectly valid under fair use provisions.
It would be ironic if they were now losing a court case against a non-infringing technology they wished to restrict, but that’s not what’s happening. They are engaging in a short sighted and arguably pointless battle against what is unarguably an infringing technology. Betamax has no bearing, and their position in that case in no way implies some inconsistency in the position they currently find themselves in, i.e. defending their intellectual property rights. Cnut-like they may be in more than one sense, but as far as infringement goes they were in the right with Betamax, and they are in the right now.
Just for clarity, my position:
Sony are a bunch of bastards.
Filesharing is illegal and usually immoral.
Irony has a fairly clear definition, and there is none of it to be found here.
I see this line a lot, and it never fails to puzzle me. Were the artists forced to sign their contracts at gunpoint or something? Who is this mythical ripped-off artist who has his copyrights stolen from him by some faceless megacorporation? Where are the pop artists living in penury because they accidentally scored a major label record deal? Do they actually exist?
According to one former A&R guy, something like 80% of artists who sign with a label will never have their output see the light of day, because of machinations by the execs at the label. And until fairly recently, the only way an artist could get their stuff recorded and out there was to sign a label contract, otherwise you were going to be stuck living in your van and playing in bars for the rest of your life.
I am no expert in this debate, but certainly you could make the same argument about pre-union laborers. The choice then was between playing by their rules (and getting screwed over) or getting another job.
The greatest injustices are the quiet ones, when the victims do not even get a voice. By the time there is widespread complaint, the battle is halfway won.
No you can’t, because major labels aren’t monopoly employers, or anywhere near it. There are hundreds, thousands of labels out there, many of them nothing whatsoever to do with the big four. Moreover, musical publishing is not subject to the same sort of geographical restrictions you saw in the sort of companies out of which the labour movement grew, where one company frequently dominated the local employment scene.
Maybe quiet injustice is the worse kind, but I’d like to see some kind of evidence that it exists at all. It seems to me that some musicians rarely have much compunction in holding forth on all sorts of topics, so it strikes me as unlikely that there is a huddled mass of public entertainers being roundly screwed, and yet inexplicably keeping mum.
Tuckerfan, much as it’s hard to disagree with the word of some unnamed “A&R guy”, I still find it hard to believe that this supposed 80% volitionally signed contracts that left them bereft of both money and copyright, unless the curse of drug use amongst aspirational musicians is akin to a nose-fight between Keith Richards and Pete Doherty. If record deals are so manifestly unfair, why on earth does every band still seem to want one, in this day and age when the barrier to publishing is lower than it’s ever been before?
What artists? Faceless Megacorporation™ employs performance contractors, not artists.
What happens if you sign up for a three album deal, with advances to cover the production of your first album. The first album does well and covers the advances. On to the second album! What? No advance? Well, I know my friend Pete with a studio… What? I have to use approved studios? I don’t have the money for that! I guess I’ll have to tour to make the money.
Album two also comes out and also does well… since you made it on your own dime, you expect a fat royalty check. What? Engineers, producers, mastering, printing, distribution, promotion? I could have gotten same or higher quality work from Pete for half that! The only reason I used those guys was because you made me! I can’t afford a third album! Screw you guys, I want OUT!
Wait, what do you mean I’m singing in a derivative style without proper authorization from the rights holder? This is my voice. I’ve always sung this way. Yes, I realize I signed a contract, but that contract made it impossible for me to make a fair wage… and what does that have to do with anything, this is MY VOICE and MY NAME… not your brand. What? That was in the contract, too? Should’ve read better, then. Shucks.
Hey, you’ve got that guy singing a song I wrote for my third album! It’s everywhere, wow! I’m shocked to realize something I’ve made is so popular! Where’s my cut? What? Failure to fullfill contract? You let me out of my contract! Retained all rights? Huh, yeah, probably should have seen that one coming.
You know what. I’m going to tell everyone about how fucked up you guys are. Signing with a major label is a kiss of death, that’s what I’ll say! Huh? Non disclosure? Severe civil penalties? Damn. Guess it’s back to waiting tables.
– fin –
applause
That’s really nice. The “fin” was a lovely touch. I hate to carp in light of all the effort you must have put into that, but do you have anything that you didn’t, y’know, just make up? Because if we’re trading solely in fiction, I have a short story that I’m working on in which P!nk rampages across the subcontinent, desecrating the places of worship of all the villagers while still managing to record ear-rapingly awful songs. I think it proves that if anything, we need more subjugation of artists by major record labels. Otherwise, one can only cower in horror at the thought of what an unfettered P!nk might get up to in our next madcap installment of Making Shit Up On The Internet.