Creativity is free

[Reginald Ret]

A thief can still intrude to take your physical property.  (i.e. knock the door down).  Just as there is an intrusion when music, movies, etc. are illegally procured and then distributed.   It's the same idea as someone breaking and entering, and then putting the loot in the black market.  I don't buy that because one is solid and one is not that means that which is not solid cannot be protected.  It can be, it may be harder, but sometimes the hard things are worth doing.  This is a case where I believe it is worth doing. 

i think you are forgetting that the artists sell the music.
imagine me buying (a copy of) a song, now i also own that song but i'm not allowed to share it with my friends, why is my ownership less of an ownership than the ownership of the artist?

The theft isn't of the object itself, its the potential earnings.

To this point was my golden toiletseat comment aimed. if you believe ownership does not apply in the same way to information as to physical objects, then the earnings are more properly called desired. Just because you want it does not give you the right to have it.

[Cain]

O rly?

So artists should stfu and starve in the meantime? 

Way to go.  If small artists dont survive, they wont be worth investing in, and the bands themselves wont bother to produce music.  They may not have a choice, depending on their education, skills and local job market.  And in the meantime, the big companies will refuse to task risks on smaller bands, and less well appreciated genres.

I hope you like shitty pop and r'n'b, since thats all I'd invest in right now.  Why bother tasking a risk on say, The Empties when I can hire on a proven earner like Justin Timberlake?

Until you can change the economic system itself all you are doing is driving smaller artists who dont have the means to produce music by themselves, all day long, into the ground and clearing the path for larger artists, who can suffer the hits of downloads and still bring profits.  Or make music the province of rich playboys and other sorts of people who dont have to worry about working for a living.

[Reginald Ret]

Until you can change the economic system itself

I agree with your proposed order of implementation. Just because my view is impractical to implement right now doesn't reduce its theoretical value.

[AFK]

A thief can still intrude to take your physical property.  (i.e. knock the door down).  Just as there is an intrusion when music, movies, etc. are illegally procured and then distributed.   It's the same idea as someone breaking and entering, and then putting the loot in the black market.  I don't buy that because one is solid and one is not that means that which is not solid cannot be protected.  It can be, it may be harder, but sometimes the hard things are worth doing.  This is a case where I believe it is worth doing. 

i think you are forgetting that the artists sell the music.
imagine me buying (a copy of) a song, now i also own that song but i'm not allowed to share it with my friends, why is my ownership less of an ownership than the ownership of the artist?

You own the product, not the means to make and reproduce the product.  That is what the copyright is for.  The artist owns that which was used to make the product, the lyrics and the music.  They, or the Record Company, own the rights to reproduce that.  What you are proposing is like breaking into the Hershey plant, stealing their assembly line, and then taking it home to make Hershey bars that you will then hand out to all of your friends.  You've infringed on Hershey's earning power by procuring their production process and giving the product away.  You do the same thing when you take an artist's song and then distribute it to people through the internet or some other means.  

Let me put it in real world terms.  You've got an underground metal band.  In the metal world they might be somewhat of a name, but outside they are a blip on the radar.  They are lucky if they sell 10,000 copies of an album they produce.  Now, let's say you have procured a digital copy of that album, you put it on the internet, suddenly 2000-3000 of those people who would've bought the CD now have it for free.  Now this band is only going to sell 7,000 copies.  This is drastically going to impact their earning power, they will have less money to put into the next album, nevermind their livelihood.  Take it further, worse case scenario, say 5000 or 6000 get the album, illegally for free.  Now you're talking about an impact that can potentially put the band in a situation where they need to close up shop because they can't afford to continue.  So, not only has the band's earning power been impacted, but now you've got 4000-5000 fans, who've faithfully, legally purchased music from the band, without their favorite band.  

[AFK]

So, we've been having a similar debate on the My Dying Bride forums.  I just wrote something there I want to share here that may better illustrate my P.O.V. on this topic:

Here's the way I look at it. The dollar, or whatever your national currency is, is a vote. When you spend money on something, in essence, you are casting a vote of support for a product or service. For example you pay for a Cheeseburger because you support Cheeseburgers, while you don't particularly like Tuna Sandwhiches, so you don't buy Tuna Sandwhiches.

It is a vote of support because if I want there to be more Cheeseburgers for me to enjoy, it is in my interest that the Cheeseburger-makers have this financial vote of support so that they may continue to make their Cheeseburgers which I can enjoy. If I an my fellow Cheeseburger-fans just raid the burger joint and take the Cheeseburgers, not only are they out that product, but they have no money now, to make more Cheeseburgers. So, not only have I screwed the Cheeseburger-makers but I've screwed myself because the Cheeseburgers are going to dry up. I'm not going to have to consider the Tuna Sandwhiches, which I really don't like.

In other words, if many people start just downloading and stealing the music and art from a bands like MDB who aren't world-wide famous, they may no longer be able to produce more music for us, and we will have to settle for something far less palatable, like *gasp* H.I.M.

Please, buy the CD's. I hate Tuna Sandwhiches, and I really, really hate H.I.M.

[Triple Zero]

i haven't quite followed the discussion for the last page, but i think that's stupid reasoning.

money or currency is not a vote. there's no "official" score. it's just lubricant for trading goods and services.

when i buy something, it is because i want to trade part of the effort of my services that earned me that money for whatever other goods or service i want to acquire.

i just think that reasoning is flawed. i'm not saying that money isn't supporting the band, but looking at my money as some sort of thing to throw away as a "vote", it's a bit more than that, IMO.

adding to that, in the before previous post, you seem to imply there's a 1/1 relationship between people downloading an album and people buying an album. tell you one thing, nearly everybody i know who is "into" downloading music, has downloaded WAY more music than they would ever buy, my guess, 10 times on average (and much over a 100 times if i compare my CD rack with my mp3 music collection). i have a couple of MDB albums on my computer (didnt download them btw, ripped them from my ex-gf's CDs, but the point is the same, it's music i do not own--even though in the netherlands legislation doesnt criminalize this particular form of copyright violation), would i have bought them? of course not, i don't like MDB all that much.
same goes for 95% of the rest of my music collection. most of it i do like, sort of, but if i had to buy the CD, i wouldnt have bought it, but just done without that music.

so with your example, if the band gets 2000-3000 illegal downloads, i would sooner guess that would count to a loss of 200-300 CD sales. (and therefore a gain of 1800-2700 people being exposed to their music who would otherwise never have heard them at all)

oh and while i'm at it, you seem to have mistunderstood my previous post ITT:

one example why intellectual property inherently cannot be granted the same protection as physical property is that no matter what the law says, you can protect your physical property simply by holding onto it.
this is why people lock their doors, even though it would be illegal for a thief to take their physical belongings if the door was open.

A thief can still intrude to take your physical property.  (i.e. knock the door down).  Just as there is an intrusion when music, movies, etc. are illegally procured and then distributed.  It's the same idea as someone breaking and entering, and then putting the loot in the black market.  I don't buy that because one is solid and one is not that means that which is not solid cannot be protected.  It can be, it may be harder, but sometimes the hard things are worth doing.  This is a case where I believe it is worth doing.

these things are not the same at all.

see, the difference is, breaking and entering is putting yourself at risk. it takes effort to break down a door. the point is that is it at all possible to protect physical property, even without laws.

protecting intellectual property, information, is not just "harder", it is incredibly hard, to the point that right now we haven't found yet a proper technological solution to do it without severely damaging the merchandise and estranging the customers. DRMed music just doesnt work.

it is impossible, because the ability to copy information is intrinsic to information itself. this is why it's made of fundamentally different stuff than physical property.

another example, right the other way around. this is just to show you how different these things are.

say you capture two spies, one has a secret technology device (physical property), the other has some secret knowledge about enemy bases (intellectual property).

- you can knock the first guy over the head and take his device.
- but to get the other guy's property you need to torture him, and even then you don't know if you got the right information (plus the bad PR torture gives).

you shouldn't want to protect information like that -- In My Opinion, at least. I love information, I love it exactly for those weird properties it has compared to physical objects. therefore I think it is wrong to try to take that away.

I completely disagree.  Again, I personally have no problem sharing my creative pursuits free of charge, because to me it's just a hobby.  But I understand how someone who actually does it for a living wants to protect their investment of time and energy.  It may be information, but it is still a product of labor.  That you can't hold it in your hand, imo, makes no difference.

yes. and i agree with that, the notion that it is a product of labor.

but that wasn't what i said. it's just that you can't protect information from being copied, except with law enforcement. which makes it quite arbitrary to me.
see, the law forbids people from breakign and entering my house, so that i don't have to hit people over the head to prevent them from breaking into my house. but if the law didn't do that, i could still hit them over the head, it would just be messier and bloody.
when somebody copies or shares your intellectual property, there's nothing you can do about it, because most of the time you're not even aware that it's happening, let alone that you can find out who is doing it, where they live and go there and hit all of them over the head.

unless you got a lot of power, and an army of thugs .. kind of like the RIAA.


see i'm all for artists getting money for what they're doing. but i just don't see the point in trying to prevent digital information from being shared online.

hell, you know what's actually really REALLY bothering me about this? see you're a musician, you worry about your line of work being sold out to the big corporations that can keep up while the small ones can't.

you know what i see? i see awesome projects like Last.fm and Pandora. for starters, if it wasn't with all the copyright bullshit they could be about a 1000x more awesome. but what really sucks is, see i'm a web developer, i especially like to develop new and innovative applications. and guess what, i can't play in the Last.fm or Pandora market because i can't afford the army of lawyers i'd need to pull off something like that.

that pisses me off, there's this HUGE potential out there for organizing and sharing all this information in ways you and i can't even imagine yet, and yes there will be room for the artists to make their money in as well (otherwise, as you rightly say, where will the art come from), and it's getting there slowly, fortunately some people are more daring than others, willing to skate the edges of legality, but this copyright bullshit is clogging it all up and mostly taking away the money in this booming market from the rightful owners (being the artists and the software developers / social network creators / data infrastructure architects) to the big corporations that just use the money to spam old dead media like TV with ugly. oh and pay their managers.

[Triple Zero]

by the way, if the above post doesn't sound very nice, seeing as it starts out calling you "stupid", ehh sorry for that. i mean nothing but well

[AFK]

Well, I like the reasoning and so I'm sticking to it.  I buy a My Dying Bride CD, not only because I enjoy physically having the CD, the cover art, the lyrics, but because I enjoy giving my financial support to My Dying Bride.  They have put their blood and soul into an art that has really spoken to me and given me some level of joy.  The very least I can do is throw 10 bucks their way.  And considering how many times I've played their albums, 10 bucks is a pittance to pay really.  

I agree that physically protecting Intellectual Property on the same level, and in the same manner, as physical property is a monumentous undertaking.  I also agree that it can be taken to extremes.  For example, the RIAA has suggested that merely ripping a CD I own, to my computer, violates copyright.  That, I think is taking it too far.  However, ripping that CD to my computer, then uploading it to MiHD, and then distributing it to hundreds, maybe thousands, of people on the internet, in my opinion, is kind of crappy.  It eats into the financial well-being of the artist and can potentially jeapordize their viability in the industry.  And of course this varies by artist, because a band like say, Radiohead, who are most likely financially set for life, can afford to have an album ripped and illegally distributed on the internet.  But a band like MDB, who are lucky to sell 10,000 copies of an album, have far less leeway.  It won't take much to eat into what they need to continue to record and produce albums.  

But because a thing is hard to do doesn't mean we should not do it.  

[AFK]

by the way, if the above post doesn't sound very nice, seeing as it starts out calling you "stupid", ehh sorry for that. i mean nothing but well

no worries.  I've put on my thick-skin for the week.  (I'll need it for my performance evaluation on Thursday)

[Triple Zero]

Well, I like the reasoning and so I'm sticking to it.  I buy a My Dying Bride CD, not only because I enjoy physically having the CD, the cover art, the lyrics, but because I enjoy giving my financial support to My Dying Bride.  They have put their blood and soul into an art that has really spoken to me and given me some level of joy.  The very least I can do is throw 10 bucks their way.  And considering how many times I've played their albums, 10 bucks is a pittance to pay really.  

I agree that physically protecting Intellectual Property on the same level, and in the same manner, as physical property is a monumentous undertaking.  I also agree that it can be taken to extremes.  For example, the RIAA has suggested that merely ripping a CD I own, to my computer, violates copyright.  That, I think is taking it too far.  However, ripping that CD to my computer, then uploading it to MiHD, and then distributing it to hundreds, maybe thousands, of people on the internet, in my opinion, is kind of crappy.  It eats into the financial well-being of the artist and can potentially jeapordize their viability in the industry.  And of course this varies by artist, because a band like say, Radiohead, who are most likely financially set for life, can afford to have an album ripped and illegally distributed on the internet.  But a band like MDB, who are lucky to sell 10,000 copies of an album, have far less leeway.  It won't take much to eat into what they need to continue to record and produce albums.  

But because a thing is hard to do doesn't mean we should not do it.  

okay. if i'm going to argue against this, i'd reall be starting to repeat myself, so i won't

lest to say, i do the same thing, which is why i've bought the three Shpongle albums and one OTT album. I should probably also buy the 2007 Younger Brother album because it's insanely good, but right now I can't spare the money (10 bucks? more like 12-13 euro over here), so maybe another day, in a few months or so.

and the other thing, i don't have any solutions, but i think they must be looked for in a direction that uses filesharing and all these extra features information has when compared to physical property.

[barumunk]

this thread makes me sad  (i got about halfway, i'll give it another go in a minute.) see the thing is I've studied 4 years to be "a creative". yes i chose that path cus its IS rewarding, but also seeing as it is my learned-Trade to be "creative" that means that i've resigned my self to earn a living from what i enjoy.

twould seem people think living and enjoying ones self is mutually exlusive... 
but i'll get back to finishing the thread,

[after some thought]

In my not so recent past i only had pirated music (to be fair it was all pretty crap) but since being exposed to a variety of bands that (me being in a 3rd world country) i would not have had the oportunity to see live at a gig. I have now settled on the type of music and artists that i am willing to VOTE for  (as RWHN put it) and now have no qualms about paying up to double the price to import music i know i will enjoy.

[back to reading]

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

It may be worth noting that when you buy albums produced by major record labels, you're only sort of supporting the artist; you're supporting them in the sense that the record label will hopefully sell enough copies to continue putting out albums by that band, but financially, you'd be better off donating a quarter to them. What happens is the label gives the band a lump sum on signing, allowing them to quit their jobs, record an album, go on tour, etc. Then the label keeps the proceeds of record sales until that sum is (hopefully) paid back, after which it gives a very small percentage of record sales to the band. Most bands signed with major labels make almost all of their money from tours and merchandise like T-shirts and stickers.

So buy the T-shirt.

[AFK]

Yeah, but the little guys need you to buy the album too so that they can continue their recording career.  One of the bands I'm into has been in limbo for several years now because they can't find a label that will give them the money to record.  In this case it isn't due to downloading it's because they've turned into a ball of suck and fail, but it just illustrates the idea that album sales figures will be to the benefit of the artists' future viability. 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Totally, people should definitely buy albums whenever possible from little indie labels and bands who self-publish. Also, from Billy Nayer. He rules, and The American Astronaut is the best movie ever.

[e]

The theft isn't of the object itself, its the potential earnings.

To this point was my golden toiletseat comment aimed. if you believe ownership does not apply in the same way to information as to physical objects, then the earnings are more properly called desired. Just because you want it does not give you the right to have it.

Interestingly, the police do not believe a case of identity theft has taken place unless the thief successfully uses your identity to purchase something.  I spent about 10 minutes trying to get the officer to understand that it was, in fact, my fiance's identity that had been stolen, and thus that was the crime.  He continually said "Ah, but they didn't actually get the phones they tried to order with her social security number and identity, so no crime has taken place!"  No joke.  He also asked me quite discordian places like "Oh, your identity was stolen?  Well, where do you keep it?"  The bastard.