"if it moved to sneakernet,I don't think they would be concerned. It is incredibly hard with a hand to hand passing of information to create the same harm as high speed, world wide illegal file sharing."
'Home Taping is Killing Music'.
What was home taping if not the Sneakernet?
Admit it, these people will demand whatever they think they can get away with demanding.
The idea that they will stop worrying about one kind of infringing because they think they have 'beaten' another kind is rather hard to believe, given their history.
All it would take would be one prominent news story about the 'reviving of the sneakernet', perhaps festooned with some questionable statistics regarding estimated numbers of albums traded per month, for a whole bunch of lobbyists to demand a new, bigger tax on blank media.
"You are perfectly happy that you and the hijacker will escort a woman out of a club at last call and she will see his 2010 Mercedes and go home with him and give him incredible sex and you will go home and jerk off..."
That is one of the creepiest things I have read so far this year.
"But you do make one important point: a lot of Shadow's art expands on other people's copyrighted art. I'm quite surprised he took this stance."
Sadly, it is all too common. Every new generation creates it's own version of 'but that's cheating!!
Just go to any electronic music forum (e.g. Dogs on Acid, KVR) and ask people if they use drum loops. You might be shocked at the number of people who regard anyone who uses 'prefab' drum loops with contempt. It's amazing to watch a bunch of trance kiddies, people who couldn't make a single noise without a a step sequencer or a piano roll, heap contempt on mere 'loopers'.
It's been going on forever. The Beatles and Led Zeppelin are the favorite poster children for lost greatness, but let's face it, compared to Andre Segovia, Jimmy Page and George Harrison were extremely sloppy players.
The level of musicianship expected of a popular band member in the US circa 1940 was much higher than the level of musicianship expected of almost any popular band of the 60's. The guys in the Beatles or the Beach Boys would almost certainly have failed an audition with Benny Goodman's band. They simply wouldn't have had the chops or the reading skills.
What the conservatives of every generation miss is that the later musicians also had to do things that they didn't. e.g. few of the great Jazz players were expected to be songwriters, and few of the old rockers knew anything about the recording process.
In the end, all that matters is the music that comes at the end of the process. And so far as I can tell, that has long stayed at a more or less constant ratio of 98% forgettable crap to 1.5% decent music to .5% truly great music.
"If anything, those AI kids who were born with baby faces and amazing voices have God's blessing to choose music as a career."
I can't help but notice that you mention their looks first and their musical ability second.
This is pretty much par for the course in celebrity 'music' culture. It is also why his assessment of American Idol as 'grotesque' was one of the few points that I agreed with.
At least he is honest enough to admit that he is a technophobe right at the beginning of the post.
But it's not really a very coherent rant. Aside from him saying that he doesn't like the internet very much, it's hard to find much of an argument there.
"I don't think you're making your case very strongly. Why does this cheapen the cause? All you've said so far is that it sucks. So basically all we can take from your comments up to now is that you're not interested in defending the fair use of this video because you think it's bad. Or maybe even (though this is a stretch) that you think it isn't fair use because it's bad.
Marcus' point is that you not liking a music video has nothing to do with its fair use merit. So tell us what it is about this that hurts the cause of fair use. Is it that you think others will judge the value of the fair use principle based on how much they like this video, and that they won't like it? Or is there something more?"
Actually, I was more detailed than you are letting on, but what the hell.....
My opinion of this song is not the point. I don't like it, true, but I don't like a lot of things, most of which I never bring up in public.
The point is that IT IS BAD PR.
If you are trying to convince people of the vital importance of fair use, why are you making a mashup of the 25 most popular songs of the past year? It's like a commercial for VH1. Do we really want to defend the vital importance of every persons right to make and broadcast their own VH1 commercials?
And does anyone really think that they are going to convert people who are on the fence about these issues with a video that consists of songs that the media is already saturated with? Why not use some of the thousands of orphan works that James Boyle is always talking about? Why not some of the millions of older recordings that are forgotten but still impossible to do anything with because no one can figure out who owns the rights to them?
But in the end, it comes down to this: if I knew nothing about any of these issues; if I were completely ignorant about the harms caused by ever-expanding copyright law; if I had the exact same ignorant beliefs that Mark Helprin was rightly derided for having; if all this were true, and I saw THAT video, and someone were to say to me: 'See? great entertainment like this would be impossible without fair use', it would not only not make me a believer in fair use, it would do the opposite.
"I hope you two know that as soon as you shift the debate to being about what YOU like and what YOU think is worthwhile culture, based on your subjective tastes, you pretty much remove your opinions from consideration.
Nobody cares if YOU think this is valuable. Go start the Ministry of Culture if that's how you think society should work. This is about the laws that dictate whether artists can create what THEY think is valuable in a free society.
Enjoy being crotchety old men bitching about young people music. You are officially obsolete."
Wow.
Either I am mistaken, or you are lumping me in with TAM on the basis of my expressing an opinion about a single video.
Seems a trifle intolerant. It's not like I am against what it is. I don't care if people want to make such music, or if they want to buy it, or burn it. I am saying that I, personally, would have trouble taking a bullet over someone's right to make this kind of video. It seems an empty, in-your-face gesture that cheapens the cause, the vitally important cause, of fair use.
Obviously, you disagree.
But it's pretty arrogant to presume to you know who is or is not obsolete on the basis of an opinion about a single video. I may 'bitch about young people music', but that hasn't kept thousands of young people from downloading literally millions of copies of my drum loops at this point. They get used in mashups of every description, every day.
And for the record, I also bitch about 'old people music'.
Wait a minute, mashups like that are supposed to be examples of what is good about fair use?
Some of DJ Shadow's work is admittedly pretty impressive, and the Grey Album was at least kind of cute.
The video above was neither.
I remember when the 2LiveCrew controversy took place, a number of hardcore anti-censorship advocates lost their enthusiasm when they found out that the free expression they were defending consisted of a guy telling some hypothetical girl to 'stick it in her mouth'. It's not that any of them actually thought songs like 'Me so Horny' deserved to be censored. It's just that they couldn't get excited about volunteering their time to advocate on it's creator's behalf.
That video made me feel the same way about fair use.
"Freely-available alcohol has been a major boon for the country. Can you imagine how awesome things would be if heroin were legal and freely available? It's not like the "drug war" is working anyway. Hell, who wouldn't go for a couple of Klonopins and a little Meth chaser right now? Can you imagine how many smart people will be freed up to do useful work once we get rid of the need for pharmacists?"
So, seriously, what are you saying?
Really, we want to know. Some of us just don't have the faculties necessary to differentiate between snark, sarcasm, and an obviously altruistic desire to replace the chaos of modern life with a more ordered and obedient world.
We realize now that we just don't know how to make a proper Crème Brûlée, and we are sick of eating all of this shit.
Interesting how the resident trolls (e.g. Dr. Strange, the Anti-Mike, etc.) aren't showing up for this one.
Almost like they understand that Wilhelms really knows what he is talking about, and that his words are a rather grim indictment of the practices that they usually defend so vociferously.
Artists are generally a pretty flaky lot. Talented novelists are among the worst. I mean, just read James Ellroy's 'My Dark Places'.
Tin foil hats definitely don't interfere with the creative process, even if they do make one look rather silly.
Expecting such people to be anything more than artists is bound to end in disappointment.
The problem is that people will take her seriously, because she is a celebrity author. I have never understood why people take the pronouncements of celebrities more seriously than they take the pronouncements of anyone else, but they do.
That's why e.g. sportscasting has become the domain of illiterate jocks.
"If labels REALLY wanted to stop the infringement of their licenses like in this case, shouldn't they do a better job of prominently informing their customers what they're buying?"
It's kind of like shrinkwrap software licenses. You get the impression that they are trying to pull a fast one on their customers.
But that's wrong of course. It is the citizens job to understand and be informed about the arcana of IP law before they buy anything. If they don't like the restrictive and unintuitive licenses that are underhandedly attached to all of the stuff they buy, they shouldn't buy stuff.
It's that simple.
All of you slashdot-reading freetards just pretend that it's complex so that you can steal stuff with a clean conscience.
"Whatever that accountability is, I hope it is both fair and consistently applied. If a $TEXAS judgment against a run-of-the-mill college kid is unfair (and I think it is), then it's also unfair when applied to the record company (even if they do their best to crucify that college kid when given the opportunity). Doling out ridiculous punishments all over the place feels good, but I can't see how it makes things better in the long run."
Two things:
1: It probably makes sense to hold organizations that are largely responsible for drafting IP law to a higher standard of compliance than ordinary citizens who will never see a copy of the DMCA in their life. It won't happen, but if it did, there is certainly more justification for it than 'it feels good'.
2: Still, it does feel good, and the public engages in this sort of schadenfreude all of the time. Remember when Bill Bennett (you know, the 'Book of Virtues' guy who smugly told modern civilization what was wrong with it all of the time) got caught gambling? Not just occasional gambling mind, but obsessive gambling, to the tune of losing 8 million dollars. How can people not enjoy that? It's the same thing here.
"So at this point of time it's pretty obvious that you are a paid shill."
Nah, he's a paid shill wannabe at best.
I've met lots of people like him over the years: people who have embraced the most wretched practices of this wretched industry because they think it makes them 'hard nosed realists' who have an edge on all of the naive artistic idealists who don't have what it takes to 'play ball' with 'the big boys'.
Now his hard nosed reality is going up in smoke and the resulting cognitive dissonance is making him go a bit loopy.
"Just a thought here herodutous but as the "informed" shouldn't you share that information to your comrades?
The first step in dealing with a problem is to be AWARE of it..."
Oh, absolutely. And I do try to so inform them. But I am afraid that musicians are generally a lazy lot. It's hard enough to get them to learn a damn song.
Part of the reason I started doing this sample business thing was to help these people make money in spite of themselves. I have plenty of work doing ALL of the web development, and ALL of the sample editing, and mapping, and format conversions, and so on. Trying to get them to actually help is a lost cause.
But seriously, changes of this sort always take time. The people who are most aware of the possibilities, the early adopters, as it were, aren't necessarily the people who are most able to benefit from them.
Why is everyone so damn impatient about this stuff? Is it just a short attention span?
It took 13 years after the phonograph was invented to even think of selling recordings on a large scale. And another 10 years after that for stuff to really take off in the selling-shellac-discs-and-cylinders business.
These things take time. Most musicians worth listening to are actually kind of involved in, you know, making music. Not all of them want to become businessmen, and some of them don't even have an internet connection.
Don't get me wrong, I think it is foolish to be ignorant of these matters, and in the long run I think the majority of musicians will come around. But these things take time.
Not everyone is all that net savvy. Among the musicians that I know personally, I am the only one who is even remotely aware of this stuff.
On the post: Dear Recording Industry: Three Strikes Won't Save Your Business
'Home Taping is Killing Music'.
What was home taping if not the Sneakernet?
Admit it, these people will demand whatever they think they can get away with demanding.
The idea that they will stop worrying about one kind of infringing because they think they have 'beaten' another kind is rather hard to believe, given their history.
All it would take would be one prominent news story about the 'reviving of the sneakernet', perhaps festooned with some questionable statistics regarding estimated numbers of albums traded per month, for a whole bunch of lobbyists to demand a new, bigger tax on blank media.
On the post: Give A Man A Fish... And Make It Illegal To Teach Fishing
That is one of the creepiest things I have read so far this year.
On the post: Nina Paley vs. Jaron Lanier
Obviously.
But not as much as the 'make snide oversimplified generalizations anonymously' game. You excel at that one.
Personally, I've never liked either game very much.
On the post: If Your Options Are To Change With The Times Or To Just Complain About Them, Which Is More Likely To Work?
Sadly, it is all too common. Every new generation creates it's own version of 'but that's cheating!!
Just go to any electronic music forum (e.g. Dogs on Acid, KVR) and ask people if they use drum loops. You might be shocked at the number of people who regard anyone who uses 'prefab' drum loops with contempt. It's amazing to watch a bunch of trance kiddies, people who couldn't make a single noise without a a step sequencer or a piano roll, heap contempt on mere 'loopers'.
It's been going on forever. The Beatles and Led Zeppelin are the favorite poster children for lost greatness, but let's face it, compared to Andre Segovia, Jimmy Page and George Harrison were extremely sloppy players.
The level of musicianship expected of a popular band member in the US circa 1940 was much higher than the level of musicianship expected of almost any popular band of the 60's. The guys in the Beatles or the Beach Boys would almost certainly have failed an audition with Benny Goodman's band. They simply wouldn't have had the chops or the reading skills.
What the conservatives of every generation miss is that the later musicians also had to do things that they didn't. e.g. few of the great Jazz players were expected to be songwriters, and few of the old rockers knew anything about the recording process.
In the end, all that matters is the music that comes at the end of the process. And so far as I can tell, that has long stayed at a more or less constant ratio of 98% forgettable crap to 1.5% decent music to .5% truly great music.
On the post: If Your Options Are To Change With The Times Or To Just Complain About Them, Which Is More Likely To Work?
I can't help but notice that you mention their looks first and their musical ability second.
This is pretty much par for the course in celebrity 'music' culture. It is also why his assessment of American Idol as 'grotesque' was one of the few points that I agreed with.
On the post: If Your Options Are To Change With The Times Or To Just Complain About Them, Which Is More Likely To Work?
But it's not really a very coherent rant. Aside from him saying that he doesn't like the internet very much, it's hard to find much of an argument there.
On the post: The Value Of Free As Analyzed By The Pizza Industry
I have never seen so many people insulting each other over which generation they belong to.
On the post: World Fair Use Day Wrapup
Marcus' point is that you not liking a music video has nothing to do with its fair use merit. So tell us what it is about this that hurts the cause of fair use. Is it that you think others will judge the value of the fair use principle based on how much they like this video, and that they won't like it? Or is there something more?"
Actually, I was more detailed than you are letting on, but what the hell.....
My opinion of this song is not the point. I don't like it, true, but I don't like a lot of things, most of which I never bring up in public.
The point is that IT IS BAD PR.
If you are trying to convince people of the vital importance of fair use, why are you making a mashup of the 25 most popular songs of the past year? It's like a commercial for VH1. Do we really want to defend the vital importance of every persons right to make and broadcast their own VH1 commercials?
And does anyone really think that they are going to convert people who are on the fence about these issues with a video that consists of songs that the media is already saturated with? Why not use some of the thousands of orphan works that James Boyle is always talking about? Why not some of the millions of older recordings that are forgotten but still impossible to do anything with because no one can figure out who owns the rights to them?
But in the end, it comes down to this: if I knew nothing about any of these issues; if I were completely ignorant about the harms caused by ever-expanding copyright law; if I had the exact same ignorant beliefs that Mark Helprin was rightly derided for having; if all this were true, and I saw THAT video, and someone were to say to me: 'See? great entertainment like this would be impossible without fair use', it would not only not make me a believer in fair use, it would do the opposite.
On the post: World Fair Use Day Wrapup
Nobody cares if YOU think this is valuable. Go start the Ministry of Culture if that's how you think society should work. This is about the laws that dictate whether artists can create what THEY think is valuable in a free society.
Enjoy being crotchety old men bitching about young people music. You are officially obsolete."
Wow.
Either I am mistaken, or you are lumping me in with TAM on the basis of my expressing an opinion about a single video.
Seems a trifle intolerant. It's not like I am against what it is. I don't care if people want to make such music, or if they want to buy it, or burn it. I am saying that I, personally, would have trouble taking a bullet over someone's right to make this kind of video. It seems an empty, in-your-face gesture that cheapens the cause, the vitally important cause, of fair use.
Obviously, you disagree.
But it's pretty arrogant to presume to you know who is or is not obsolete on the basis of an opinion about a single video. I may 'bitch about young people music', but that hasn't kept thousands of young people from downloading literally millions of copies of my drum loops at this point. They get used in mashups of every description, every day.
And for the record, I also bitch about 'old people music'.
On the post: World Fair Use Day Wrapup
Some of DJ Shadow's work is admittedly pretty impressive, and the Grey Album was at least kind of cute.
The video above was neither.
I remember when the 2LiveCrew controversy took place, a number of hardcore anti-censorship advocates lost their enthusiasm when they found out that the free expression they were defending consisted of a guy telling some hypothetical girl to 'stick it in her mouth'. It's not that any of them actually thought songs like 'Me so Horny' deserved to be censored. It's just that they couldn't get excited about volunteering their time to advocate on it's creator's behalf.
That video made me feel the same way about fair use.
On the post: Movie Studios Pissed Off At Netflix, Don't Want To Allow More Streaming Movies
So, seriously, what are you saying?
Really, we want to know. Some of us just don't have the faculties necessary to differentiate between snark, sarcasm, and an obviously altruistic desire to replace the chaos of modern life with a more ordered and obedient world.
We realize now that we just don't know how to make a proper Crème Brûlée, and we are sick of eating all of this shit.
Show us the way.
Please!!
On the post: SoundExchange Claims To Open Up,
But Somehow Its List Of Unpaid Musicians Has Disappeared[Updated: List Found]Almost like they understand that Wilhelms really knows what he is talking about, and that his words are a rather grim indictment of the practices that they usually defend so vociferously.
Cowards.
On the post: Former Musician Now Lawyer Comes To Terms With What's Happening To His Music Online
Do you know of any internet forum, message board, chat room, etc. where the conversation doesn't consistently devolve into a pissing match?
Because I would love to see it, even if all of the conversations were about bilge pumps.
On the post: Ursula K. Le Guin Resigns From Authors Guild, Because It Didn't Keep Up Its Silly Fight With Google
Not surprising, really
Tin foil hats definitely don't interfere with the creative process, even if they do make one look rather silly.
Expecting such people to be anything more than artists is bound to end in disappointment.
The problem is that people will take her seriously, because she is a celebrity author. I have never understood why people take the pronouncements of celebrities more seriously than they take the pronouncements of anyone else, but they do.
That's why e.g. sportscasting has become the domain of illiterate jocks.
On the post: ASCAP Now Demanding License From Venues That Let People Play Guitar Hero
It's kind of like shrinkwrap software licenses. You get the impression that they are trying to pull a fast one on their customers.
But that's wrong of course. It is the citizens job to understand and be informed about the arcana of IP law before they buy anything. If they don't like the restrictive and unintuitive licenses that are underhandedly attached to all of the stuff they buy, they shouldn't buy stuff.
It's that simple.
All of you slashdot-reading freetards just pretend that it's complex so that you can steal stuff with a clean conscience.
COMMIES!!
On the post: Major Labels Accused Of $6 Billion Worth Of Copyright Infringement In Canada
Two things:
1: It probably makes sense to hold organizations that are largely responsible for drafting IP law to a higher standard of compliance than ordinary citizens who will never see a copy of the DMCA in their life. It won't happen, but if it did, there is certainly more justification for it than 'it feels good'.
2: Still, it does feel good, and the public engages in this sort of schadenfreude all of the time. Remember when Bill Bennett (you know, the 'Book of Virtues' guy who smugly told modern civilization what was wrong with it all of the time) got caught gambling? Not just occasional gambling mind, but obsessive gambling, to the tune of losing 8 million dollars. How can people not enjoy that? It's the same thing here.
On the post: More Creative Fiction In Warner Music Royalty Statements
Nah, he's a paid shill wannabe at best.
I've met lots of people like him over the years: people who have embraced the most wretched practices of this wretched industry because they think it makes them 'hard nosed realists' who have an edge on all of the naive artistic idealists who don't have what it takes to 'play ball' with 'the big boys'.
Now his hard nosed reality is going up in smoke and the resulting cognitive dissonance is making him go a bit loopy.
He deserves pity more than anything.
On the post: Time For Musicians To Take Charge: Stop Waiting For Others To Fix The Music Business
The first step in dealing with a problem is to be AWARE of it..."
Oh, absolutely. And I do try to so inform them. But I am afraid that musicians are generally a lazy lot. It's hard enough to get them to learn a damn song.
Part of the reason I started doing this sample business thing was to help these people make money in spite of themselves. I have plenty of work doing ALL of the web development, and ALL of the sample editing, and mapping, and format conversions, and so on. Trying to get them to actually help is a lost cause.
But seriously, changes of this sort always take time. The people who are most aware of the possibilities, the early adopters, as it were, aren't necessarily the people who are most able to benefit from them.
On the post: Time For Musicians To Take Charge: Stop Waiting For Others To Fix The Music Business
It took 13 years after the phonograph was invented to even think of selling recordings on a large scale. And another 10 years after that for stuff to really take off in the selling-shellac-discs-and-cylinders business.
These things take time. Most musicians worth listening to are actually kind of involved in, you know, making music. Not all of them want to become businessmen, and some of them don't even have an internet connection.
Don't get me wrong, I think it is foolish to be ignorant of these matters, and in the long run I think the majority of musicians will come around. But these things take time.
Not everyone is all that net savvy. Among the musicians that I know personally, I am the only one who is even remotely aware of this stuff.
On the post: Warner Music's Royalty Statements: Works Of Fiction
No, they don't need to. They just do it out of habit.
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