"Winning a Nobel prize may lend a speaker a certain cachet, but how important is that cachet with respect to intellectual property? These people are just like any other. They have an opinion based on their personal beliefs, which may or may not have societal value and factual support."
Scientists are often full of shit, it's true. But not nearly as full of shit as you are.
"I just wanted to point out that the band does not get to spend that advance. The recording studio, the producer, the engineers all need to get paid. The parties thrown by the labels are paid for out of the advance. The packaging of the CDs. All marketing materials, including the CDs sent to DJs and radio stations are paid for out of the advance."
And don't forget, the label dictates how you make the album, where you record the album, who engineers the album, and which songs you put on it. If they think that you need 'that analog sound', and that you should use 2 inch tape at 300 bucks a reel (about 15 minutes of recording time) that's what you use. No matter how stupid you think it is, no matter how wasteful it is to have someone using a razor blade on magnetic tape when they could do all of the editing in seconds using any standard DAW, that's what you use.
C'mon AC, tell us how all of this good for the art of music. I am looking forward to it.
"First, you assume that I actually WANT a bunch of t-shirts or to attend concerts. I don't. What I want is the music (or the movie, or the software, or the book)."
Is someone asking you to? Are people not selling CDs anymore?
"Selling me a bunch of crap simply in order to pay for people to produce what I originally wanted in the first place is counter-intuitive at best, and resource intensive at worst. (Not to mention asinine.)"
I don't think that it's really about you. You already buy these things. It's about getting something from the people who don't buy them, like getting lemonade from lemons. Those freeloading bastards who download, say, music can help create hype concerning said music. Without hype of some sort, no one will come to see your shows, in fact no one will buy anything from you, because who the fuck are you?
Hype can be monetized, anonymity can't.
"So much for finite goods."
Well OK, you don't like to go see concerts, you said that, but you realize that other people do go to see them, right? I mean, I certainly do, and there are certainly other people there when I do. Plus, I know all kinds of other people who go to shows ALL OF THE TIME. Which bands do they go to see? That's right, the ones with lots of hype surrounding them, because those are the ones they have heard of.
And yes, T-Shirts are stupid, but there are people who wear them almost exclusively (I know this because I used to be one of them). These are people who will pay YOU to advertise YOUR BAND. How is that not a good thing?
"And finally, visit, say, Slashdot sometime. Plenty of the "information wants to be free" crowd hangs out there, and they do say it. At every opportunity. If you think it's "mythical" just do a Google search."
So you are saying that every time someone refers to the 'information just wants to be free crowd' they are talking about Slashdot? Are Linux nerds really so influential that Rupert Murdoch and Ken Davis are talking about them?
Sure there are people who say 'information wants to be free'. There are also people who don't say it, but who are constantly accused of saying it anyway, because 'well...you know that's what they are thinking....'. I think that the latter group probably gets a little tired of this.
"They want to pay nothing. Period. And they'll piggyback on any scarce-goods finite-model you want to discuss, hoping that someone else--anyone else--will subsidize their entitlements."
This obviously bothers you, but I am not sure what could actually stop it. It's like stopping the flow of illegals from Mexico. People get so damn mad about illegals taking American jobs, and spend so much time and money trying to stop them. And they just keep failing. And I am glad that they do, because some of the best workers I have known in my life were here illegally.
'Freeloaders', however defined, are a constant. They will always be there. There will always be a perfectly good reason to get really mad about them. The question is, why would you want to?
If the only business that you can imagine running requires the elimination of freeloading, you probably shouldn't be in business. And yes, I know, 'no one is trying to eliminate it, just to reduce it to a reasonable level...' but that 'reasonable level' changes all of the time. Remember 'home taping is killing music'? Wouldn't the recording industries just love to go back to the time when cassette tapes were the infringer's tool of choice? Was that a reasonable level?
Who could forget that travesty? A situation akin to a dog trying to fart Beethoven's 1st.
And it wasn't banned from existing, only from being sold. They are not the same thing. With the internet, it's no longer possible to ban a book."
2 paragraphs of vituperation that completely fail to address the point at hand.
Almost like you are a jerk or something.
"No, what that it is, is quite a stretch. J.D Salinger is still alive whereas Hollinshed had been dead for around 30 years before Shakespeare used his HISTORICAL, NON-FICTION work for his HISTORICAL plays."
Holinshed is hardly historical, there is no source criticism and clearly dubious stories are printed without comment. You might as well call the Arabian Nights 'historical'.
And Shakespeare's earliest historical plays were written less than 20 years after Holinshed died. And in any case we were talking about a scenario in which contemporary copyright law was applied to Elizabethan England. And as I am sure you know, it extends to not 30 years but 70 years after the death of the author. You're kind of bad with numbers, it seems.
And you still failed to address the point. I will remind you: you said that Girl Talk wasn't art because he "doesn't add anything new, he just rearranges what's already been done" whereas "Shakespeare on the other hand didn't just rearrange another author's writing, he re-wrote it completely." Now when someone points out that by this test that godawful 'Catcher in the Rye' sequel should be legally OK, you make a fart joke.
I mean, it's almost as if you just grab any cheap debating tactic that comes to mind at the time, and count on the fact that no one knows who you are to avoid having it pointed out when these debating tactics contradict each other.
"Who are you to define how "exceptional" it was?"
I didn't define it. Generations upon generations of educated people have. But pray, tell me who the modern equivalents of Shakespeare and Jonson and Marlowe are?
"There have never been more professional artists than there are now, in this largely copyrighted world. Even more to the point, the abundance of modern literary output is (by a very large margin) coming from two countries with two of the strongest copyright systems on the planet."
I wasn't talking about the gross tonnage of 'literary output'. The number of 'professional' artists is similarly irrelevant.
"Shouldn't these freeloading, freewheeling countries with all their supposed creative freedom, be producing more and largely BETTER works?"
Giving people creative freedom doesn't guarantee artistic greatness. Nothing does. It occurs only occasionally in the best of circumstances.
"I have considered it. With copyright, artists now have a better chance of making a living than any other time in the history of civilization. I consider that progress."
Material progress. This is altogether different from artistic progress.
"The "fecund" (Do I smell a Scrabble champion in my midst? LOL) eras to which you refer are littered with examples of amazing artists who died destitute, figuratively if not literally, in the gutter. You can call that success if you want but I happen to think it's terrible."
I don't think that it's good but it is probably inevitable. People just don't give a shit about artistic greatness. Copyright sure as hell didn't earn James Joyce a living.
And for the record: I lose at Scrabble whenever I play it, which is rarely.
"Additionally, I think that people who purport such eras to be shining examples of how things used to be better -- are assholes."
That's because you don't care about art. I doubt you would recognize a great work of contemporary literature if it fell on your head.
"You apparently haven't been on the Internet very long....."
Not true.
I guess I have seen more stupid things here and there. Certainly I have seen worse spelling. But the sour mixture of smug condescension and profound ignorance that this guy brings to the table is pretty unique.
In any case I have certainly never seen anything that was conspicuously more stupid than: "Was Shakespeare an artist? For his day, sure. In today's terms, where everyone would be aware of his duplication of other's works? Nope. He would be so busted, and long forgotten"
I mean, it sounds like something that the Onion would write, though not nearly as clever.
"Was Shakespeare an artist? For his day, sure. In today's terms, where everyone would be aware of his duplication of other's works? Nope. He would be so busted, and long forgotten."
!!!
That is quite simply the most stupid thing I have ever read on the internet.
"No. He wrote new stories based on common mythology that would arguably have been in the public domain. Again, that is "wrote" not "remixed". Girl Talk (for instance) doesn't add anything new, he just rearranges what's already been done. Shakespeare on the other hand didn't just rearrange another author's writing, he re-wrote it completely. Girl Talk would be shit-out-of-luck without four decades of proven hits to compile. Somehow, I think Shakespeare could have gotten along just fine if, like you suggest sans evidence, the works he based some of his plays on weren't legally available."
But the author of "60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye" that was banned in the US also 'didn't just rearrange another author's writing' but instead 're-wrote it completely' but apparently you forgot about that. Certainly what Shakespeare did with stories from Hollinshed was, from a contemporary legal standpoint, quite similar. And before you say it, no I am not saying that this book was on the level of Shakespeare. The comparison isn't artistic, but legal.
"This is besides the fact that it's rather silly to compare 16th century England to now. There are lots of things that we do everyday that would be in violation of 16th century English laws, perhaps someone should look into legally regulating hairstyles again? Your near-constant citing of 600 year old examples helps only to show the frailty of your position."
1 Shakespeare wrote 400 years ago, not 600 years ago. Mozart and Ray Charles are even more recent.
Duh.
2 The reason for bringing up Elizabethan examples is that Elizabethan literary culture was rich and fecund. In fact it was one of the greatest explosions of exceptional literary activity in history. Only Periclean Athens is really on the same level. Now compare these two copyright-free literary achievements to the literary achievements of our time. Now consider the fact that our own population is much greater than the population of those civilizations.
"But a true artist can take their knowledge and push past and develop something new."
Sadly, very few people in the world will have any interest in it. That is, if it's really new. Chances are that it's not. Chances are that it is 'new' in the same sense that Lily Allen or Puddle of Mud is 'new'.
"Sorry, but a musical track isn't an instrument, at least not in any real sense. It's someone else's work being re-used."
Well sure. But see above, regarding Lily Allen, Puddle of Mud, etc. Is any of their music any less derivative? The fact that they aren't using someone else's audio files isn't really very impressive when you consider that every phrase that comes out of their mouths is a cliche; that every riff they use is just like a thousand other riffs that date back to the 90's or the 70's or even the 60's; that every song is in 4/4 time and in one of about 10 different 'grooves' which are as stereotyped as the cliche lyrics.
"For me, it is like buying a cake at the store, dropping a cherry on top, and having the balls to call myself a baker. I am not a baker, I am at best a "cherry placer" or perhaps a "presentation enhancer". I certainly didn't bake anything."
Kind of like what Timbaland does, right?
You do realize that this is far from being representative of remixing as a whole? No, I guess you don't. Try googling DJ Shadow for some enlightenment. DJ Shadow has created more original sounding tracks than the top ten major label acts in the country combined. And I say this not because I am a fan of his. I am not. But credit where credit is due.
And speaking of which, you do know, don't you, that most 'superstar' original artists of the recent past like Lily Allen and Michael Jackson and Madonna and Cher and Brittney and Gwen Stefani and so on all have staffs of people doing the lions share of their 'writing' with them? That if they were given a guitar or a piano and nothing else most of them would be as impotent to create anything new as a tone deaf soccer mom? That they have a huge entourage of talented professionals airbrushing and retouching and editing and autotuning their every move? That it is this entourage that does all of the actual work?
"It's funny how people are free to state the "fact" that piracy actually helps movie sales without fear of contradiction but when someone has the gall to suggest the opposite everyone jumps down their throat and asks where they get their "facts" from? It's a two-way street. I doubt there are enough facts to fully support either supposition."
I, too, doubt that there are enough facts to know the answers to such complex questions as 'In an alternative universe where there was no internet but which was otherwise exactly the same, would Zombieland have made more or less money?' But my skepticism isn't due to the fact there haven't been enough facts compiled 'yet'. My skepticism is due to the fact that no one can never really know the answers to such questions. Pretending that we can ever know the answers to such questions is a form of self deception.
But why are such questions even being considered?
"People point out that Batman was the highest grossing movie of the year and was also the most pirated. Ok, but that doesn't mean pirating made that movie successful. "
Ah, this is why such questions are being considered. It's because people are convinced that some sort of causality has to be proven.
But causality doesn't have to be proven, nor is that the point. The Dark Knight cost $185,000,000 to make and has a total lifetime gross of $1,001,921,825. That is well over a fivefold return on investment. The fact that it was the most downloaded movie of last year AND the fact that it made $816,921,825 is all that is needed to show that 'piracy' doesn't keep movies from being profitable.
"It could just mean that like everyone else freeloaders wanted to see that movie."
Freeloaders have always been there. They used to be the ones who sneaked in the fire exits. They probably still are. Freeloaders are a constant. Worrying about them is like worrying about the weather: it doesn't help, it just gives you something else to be pissed off about. The good thing about internet freeloaders is that, unlike the fire exit guys, at least they aren't potentially interfering with the experience of paying customers by taking up seats and being obnoxious.
"And comparing his reaction to those of the people behind the movie "Ink" is bogus. "Ink" was a small indy film that had no PR behind it so it needed the publicity."
ALL movies need that kind of publicity. The idea that only 'small indy films' need to worry about it is false. No amount of PR can substitute for it. Hudson Hawk had a much bigger PR budget than "Ink" and look what good it did.
"It's just that for every person I come across that touts the "noble" downloader (the person who also buys whatever they download) I find 10 others that scoff at the idea of paying for music of movies no matter what. "Why pay when you can get it for free?" I've been asked on a few occasions. Nice attitude."
To be honest I don't buy into the 'noble downloader' either. Nor do I buy into the 'scumbag downloader'. As far as I am concerned there is only one kind of downloader: the inevitable kind.
"Bad news for you: Reo Speedwagon is still on the road, still playing shows, still getting plenty of "classic rock" airplay, and still have a dedicated fanbase (I know one). Not all music is to anyone's taste, but that doesn't make it more or less "good".
However, it's like anything. McDonalds isn't great food, but almost everyone eats there. Not all of us are going to spend $100 a plate for lunch, it's something we might do once or twice a year. In the same manner, most people will listen to pop, rock, or other forms of current popular music, and they may only sit down to jazz or classical once in a while.
To each his own - musical taste has nothing to do with the concepts of business models and systems here."
Which is something that I would ordinarily agree with.
But the fact is that we have to read on a daily basis about how 'free music made by amateurs will never be able to compete with major label music'. The post that I quoted in my last post said essentially just that. When people say these things they invariably bring up the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, as if they were representative of the music industry as a whole. I simply gave some random examples of music that is, shall we say, somewhat less obviously great than the Beatles and Led Zeppelin.
"The current system, in many ways, does not optimize for musical quality. However, it at least ties money directly to music (on plastic discs or otherwise). The business models proposed here tie money to everything but the music: live performances, T-shirts, good feelings, etc.
I can't see how this will promote the creation of better music than the current system. I've a feeling it won't: quality and longevity will be exchanged for increased quantity and ephemerality. As I've said before, we will trade ounces of the finest creme brulee for pounds of Twinkies. This is what "the market" wants, I guess.
The amazing thing to me is how excited everyone is about the impending Twinkie harvest."
You know, I am starting to feel a bit like a broken record, but something keeps getting forgotten in these discussions that is really pretty relevant as far as the art of music goes: NOT ALL MUSIC IS POP MUSIC.
Yes, it's true, there is all kinds of this non-pop music in the world. There always has been.
Now to some people, the real Crème Brûlée, (and feel free to substitute Tiramisu, Croquembouche, Gateau St Honoré or any other pretentious European dessert that tickles your fancy) has always been found amidst this non-pop music. To these people, and they are among the most educated of music listeners, pop music, all pop music, is nothing more than a huge warehouse filled with Twinkies.
Now I myself do not agree with these people, but their perspective is a healthy corrective to the attitude that would place the industry created megastars of the past 40 years on some kind of pedestal. Because neither the Beatles nor the Stones nor Led Zeppelin nor even Steely Dan could play any but the simplest passages written by Webern or Ives or Bartok or Varese or Nancarrow.
20 years ago, most of the music of these obscure but gifted people was almost impossible to find. But because of the internet, today this music is almost as easy to obtain as the music of the aforementioned megastars. If the internet is also filled with the forgettable music of talentless idiots (and it is, no question), this is a small price to pay for the increased access to all kinds of musical culture.
And finally, for those who like to look at the industry's past through rose colored glasses, a few glimpses of some of their less than legendary past accomplishments:
"Yes, which is why you shouldn't end a sentence in a preposition..."
Yes, but then the clause in question would become: "...but isn't it important to understand the language in which you are writing?", which sounds prissy as all hell.
Grammar, properly understood, is a study of the structure of language. The linguistic etiquette that many people understand to be 'grammar' hasn't been taken seriously by the real language experts, people like Chomsky or Hjelmslev or Lamb or Pike and their followers, for many years.
The only reasons to worry about linguistic etiquette are either aesthetic or social. These are not unimportant concerns, and anyone who wants to be taken seriously or even just left alone in a given social circle should observe and conform to the language patterns of it's members.
But the people who obsess over other peoples linguistic usage should not be called grammar nazis, they should be called by their proper name: schoolmarms.
"The problem, again, seems to be that the folks at the movie studios (just like those at the record labels) only like to count the big hits as successes -- rather than the smaller projects that actually make money and make up the majority of the actual market. It's the same sort of thinking that makes movie studio people insist that we need to explain to them how they can keep making $200 million movies. That's the wrong question. The question is how do you make profitable movies. The technology has advanced such that it's cheaper and cheaper to make movies (which is why we have more of them). But notice that the studios never focus on ways to make movies in a more economical way, but how can they keep spending."
This has been a huge problem in the music industry as well.
A skilled person can make really good recordings for dirt cheap. You can set yourself up with a netbook based studio that the Beatles would have envied for about 600 dollars. A few hundred more could get you some decent monitors, and another couple hundred more would allow you to do a perfectly acceptable DIY room treatment. You can start with Naiant microphones, which are insanely good and only cost between 40 and 80 dollars apiece, add a couple of Chinese condenser microphones and a couple of sm57s and you're in business.
So for about 3000 to 4000 dollars, we're talking about a recording studio that has infinite tracks, hundreds of automatable effects, samplers beyond the dreams of the people who payed 20,000 dollars for a Fairlight in the early eighties, virtual instruments like the famous Crystal...the possibilities are quite overwhelming.
But instead of using such humble but powerful studios, instead of experimenting, testing and analyzing the recording process to see if it's costs could be pared down, the industry spends assloads of money in Hollywood and NY studios that charge thousands of dollars a day for studio rental, with thousands more for the personnel, and 300 dollars for every 15 minutes worth of that 2 inch analog tape that you just have to use. And then there are the drum techs and rented drums, the rented vintage amps and guitars...
Seriously, anyone who is unfamiliar with this stuff should google the Mixerman diaries. The waste that takes place in the music industry is staggering. The 'spare no expense, just deliver a huge hit' mentality was born in a world where the resources necessary to make recordings were scarce, expensive, complex to operate, and difficult to maintain. It came from the way the Beatles made records: fuck around all day until you find something that sounds cool. It never really made sense as a strategy, but you sure couldn't complain about the results from a business standpoint: the Beatles made lots and lots of money.
But the fact of the matter is that the Beatles would have gone apeshit over the freeware tools that 15 year old kids bitch about these days. The possibilities opened up by these tools are endless. Things like:
multiple automation lanes (essentially, a bunch of invisible hands you can set to change the levels and settings on virtual instruments and effects in real time),
audio with absolutely no surface noise and over 100 db of dynamic range,
having as many tracks as you could ever imagine using,
non destructive, click and drag audio editing and manipulation, on an intuitive graphic interface that has the color scheme of your choice.
One could go on and on. But this kind of thinking is antithetical to the ethos of the industry. Paring down costs, an absolutely essential business practice that is a matter of course in most businesses, makes no sense to them. 'Big Records are recorded in Big Studios for Big Money! Any idiot knows that!' is the common wisdom.
But the absolute triumph of the mp3 on the popular market proves that most people really just are not obsessed with sound quality the way audio professionals are. They care about the song and the performance and they demand that the recording conveys the song and the performance. The number of people who will know or care whether the drums in a song were processed with a free compressor plugin on the one hand, or a 40 year old Fairchild limiter on the other, are vanishingly small. And yet, those 40 year old limiters can fetch over 10,000 dollars on the open market, because, that's right, that's the limiter that the Beatles used, and there are people in the industry who believe that it has some kind of magic pixie dust that will help them sell records.
But all the listening public cares about is that the drum part, however recorded, makes them shake their collective ass spontaneously when they hear it. And that has absolutely nothing to do with the technology used to record the drums.
"What you are missing is that the current "successes" are limited to either people with so much money they can fail and look good (NIN, Radiohead), or to marginal players for whom making slightly more than working in a warehouse is good."
All of the great geniuses of 20th century music were such 'marginal players'. None of them, not a single god damn one of them, was able to make enough money off of record sales to make a living. They all had to do something other than compose full time to live: teach composition, teach Piano, conduct other people's music, perform other people's music, arrange music for the theater, or something.
This applies to most of the big names you will find in a history of twentieth century music: Bartok, Webern, Schoenberg, Ives, Messiaen, Partch, Nancarrow, Ligeti, Berg, Cowell, Satie, Boulez, Barraque....
The only one who came close to composing full time was Stravinsky, who had to depend on the private patronage of the very wealthy to survive. Needless to say, 'the industry' had nothing to do with arranging this patronage. Because, as a creator of 'that weird modern music' stuff, he would never move enough units to make a profit.
And we are supposed to get all weepy because the careers of people like Beyonce and Barbara Streisand are suffering from file sharing?
"It's the tricky world of building up "facts" based on other "facts" that aren't facts at all."
Whereas taking random pot shots anonymously isn't tricky at all.
No one knows who you are, so they can never point out any inconsistencies. Your words aren't easily found via google because they aren't conveniently arranged by date and subject matter in a publicly available data base.
You aren't a tough guy if the only punches you ever land are sucker punches.
In any case, this isn't an isolated case and it isn't unusual. Large media conglomerates frequently make these sorts of mistakes with other people's copyright material. Mistakes that they would never countenance from others. This blog entry of Robert Fripp's involves exactly this kind of disagreement with EMI.
I mean, how much slack are we supposed to cut these people?
"Maybe we should increase our educational focus on topics like statistics. "
What 'we' should or should not make our 'educational focus' has little to do with what people actually learn. People can be force fed statistical analysis, certainly. But unless they actually care about what they learn and use it regularly it will enter the cognitive netherworld whence goes peoples knowledge of how to create a valid proof of the Pythagorean theorem, or the exact date that the Stamp Act was repealed. Most Americans have learned these things in grade school, but I dare say that very few remember them.
"Maybe we should make taking basic statistics more mandatory, or at least more attractive. Maybe we should try to standardize objective quality measures for different kinds of analysis. Maybe we should focus on researching new visualization methods that make it easier to make sense of large amounts of data without eliding important details."
Or, maybe we could simply stop acting as if statistics were a direct hot line to enlightenment. There is this horrible anti-philosophical tendency in our culture to act as if any assertion not 'backed up' by statistics is 'merely anecdotal'. And yet most of the great books of the western world are 'merely anecdotal' in this sense. At the same time, even economists who are in general agreement can argue endlessly over how to interpret a particular body of statistics.
Now I am not saying statistics are meaningless, just that they aren't exactly a solid basis to build an epistemology on. If people stopped trying to do this, or worse, assuming that this is the only possible basis for knowledge, there would be less need for hand-wringing of the sort that Lessig is engaging in here.
No matter how impeccable your demi-glace is, no matter how lacy and delicate your latke's happen to be, no matter if you only use Plugra butter for your Pate Brisee, or organically grown heirloom tomatoes to make your arrabiata; no matter what you make or how you make it, it's all going to come out of your ass the next day.
You would think that this consideration would keep foodies from taking themselves so fucking seriously, but clearly this is not the case.
"I'm sorry, but I don't see how this is much different than allowing google to do a site called "google music" where they put downloadable songs for free, along with the sheet music (because we all would want to be able to play the song), along with the music video."
This has nothing to do with reality.
Here is an example of what Google books does with a popular copyrighted book that the publisher doesn't want to share in any way. Notice that it is just a description. No preview, no extracts, no snippets, nothing. Just the publishing information and some reviews.
"The premise of this statement fails to account for scale. Libraries have very few copies of books. The damage they do to an author or the publisher is minimal. For example, I recently went to the library to find a book, and saw that I was in line behind 6 others waiting to check out the same book. So I went out and bought it."
1: See above
2: Even when a book has a limited preview, it isn't enough to replace the book. It's missing something like 1 out of every 4 pages.
3. What if the book is in the public domain, and your library doesn't have it? What if you can't even buy it?
On the post: Yet Another Nobel Prize Winner Says That Intellectual Property Is Harming Science
Scientists are often full of shit, it's true. But not nearly as full of shit as you are.
On the post: Warner Music's Royalty Statements: Works Of Fiction
And don't forget, the label dictates how you make the album, where you record the album, who engineers the album, and which songs you put on it. If they think that you need 'that analog sound', and that you should use 2 inch tape at 300 bucks a reel (about 15 minutes of recording time) that's what you use. No matter how stupid you think it is, no matter how wasteful it is to have someone using a razor blade on magnetic tape when they could do all of the editing in seconds using any standard DAW, that's what you use.
C'mon AC, tell us how all of this good for the art of music. I am looking forward to it.
On the post: That Mythical 'Information Wants To Be Free' Crowd
Is someone asking you to? Are people not selling CDs anymore?
"Selling me a bunch of crap simply in order to pay for people to produce what I originally wanted in the first place is counter-intuitive at best, and resource intensive at worst. (Not to mention asinine.)"
I don't think that it's really about you. You already buy these things. It's about getting something from the people who don't buy them, like getting lemonade from lemons. Those freeloading bastards who download, say, music can help create hype concerning said music. Without hype of some sort, no one will come to see your shows, in fact no one will buy anything from you, because who the fuck are you?
Hype can be monetized, anonymity can't.
"So much for finite goods."
Well OK, you don't like to go see concerts, you said that, but you realize that other people do go to see them, right? I mean, I certainly do, and there are certainly other people there when I do. Plus, I know all kinds of other people who go to shows ALL OF THE TIME. Which bands do they go to see? That's right, the ones with lots of hype surrounding them, because those are the ones they have heard of.
And yes, T-Shirts are stupid, but there are people who wear them almost exclusively (I know this because I used to be one of them). These are people who will pay YOU to advertise YOUR BAND. How is that not a good thing?
"And finally, visit, say, Slashdot sometime. Plenty of the "information wants to be free" crowd hangs out there, and they do say it. At every opportunity. If you think it's "mythical" just do a Google search."
So you are saying that every time someone refers to the 'information just wants to be free crowd' they are talking about Slashdot? Are Linux nerds really so influential that Rupert Murdoch and Ken Davis are talking about them?
Sure there are people who say 'information wants to be free'. There are also people who don't say it, but who are constantly accused of saying it anyway, because 'well...you know that's what they are thinking....'. I think that the latter group probably gets a little tired of this.
"They want to pay nothing. Period. And they'll piggyback on any scarce-goods finite-model you want to discuss, hoping that someone else--anyone else--will subsidize their entitlements."
This obviously bothers you, but I am not sure what could actually stop it. It's like stopping the flow of illegals from Mexico. People get so damn mad about illegals taking American jobs, and spend so much time and money trying to stop them. And they just keep failing. And I am glad that they do, because some of the best workers I have known in my life were here illegally.
'Freeloaders', however defined, are a constant. They will always be there. There will always be a perfectly good reason to get really mad about them. The question is, why would you want to?
If the only business that you can imagine running requires the elimination of freeloading, you probably shouldn't be in business. And yes, I know, 'no one is trying to eliminate it, just to reduce it to a reasonable level...' but that 'reasonable level' changes all of the time. Remember 'home taping is killing music'? Wouldn't the recording industries just love to go back to the time when cassette tapes were the infringer's tool of choice? Was that a reasonable level?
On the post: New Economics Paper Explains How Shorter Copyright Stimulates More Music
Who could forget that travesty? A situation akin to a dog trying to fart Beethoven's 1st.
And it wasn't banned from existing, only from being sold. They are not the same thing. With the internet, it's no longer possible to ban a book."
2 paragraphs of vituperation that completely fail to address the point at hand.
Almost like you are a jerk or something.
"No, what that it is, is quite a stretch. J.D Salinger is still alive whereas Hollinshed had been dead for around 30 years before Shakespeare used his HISTORICAL, NON-FICTION work for his HISTORICAL plays."
Holinshed is hardly historical, there is no source criticism and clearly dubious stories are printed without comment. You might as well call the Arabian Nights 'historical'.
And Shakespeare's earliest historical plays were written less than 20 years after Holinshed died. And in any case we were talking about a scenario in which contemporary copyright law was applied to Elizabethan England. And as I am sure you know, it extends to not 30 years but 70 years after the death of the author. You're kind of bad with numbers, it seems.
And you still failed to address the point. I will remind you: you said that Girl Talk wasn't art because he "doesn't add anything new, he just rearranges what's already been done" whereas "Shakespeare on the other hand didn't just rearrange another author's writing, he re-wrote it completely." Now when someone points out that by this test that godawful 'Catcher in the Rye' sequel should be legally OK, you make a fart joke.
I mean, it's almost as if you just grab any cheap debating tactic that comes to mind at the time, and count on the fact that no one knows who you are to avoid having it pointed out when these debating tactics contradict each other.
"Who are you to define how "exceptional" it was?"
I didn't define it. Generations upon generations of educated people have. But pray, tell me who the modern equivalents of Shakespeare and Jonson and Marlowe are?
"There have never been more professional artists than there are now, in this largely copyrighted world. Even more to the point, the abundance of modern literary output is (by a very large margin) coming from two countries with two of the strongest copyright systems on the planet."
I wasn't talking about the gross tonnage of 'literary output'. The number of 'professional' artists is similarly irrelevant.
"Shouldn't these freeloading, freewheeling countries with all their supposed creative freedom, be producing more and largely BETTER works?"
Giving people creative freedom doesn't guarantee artistic greatness. Nothing does. It occurs only occasionally in the best of circumstances.
"I have considered it. With copyright, artists now have a better chance of making a living than any other time in the history of civilization. I consider that progress."
Material progress. This is altogether different from artistic progress.
"The "fecund" (Do I smell a Scrabble champion in my midst? LOL) eras to which you refer are littered with examples of amazing artists who died destitute, figuratively if not literally, in the gutter. You can call that success if you want but I happen to think it's terrible."
I don't think that it's good but it is probably inevitable. People just don't give a shit about artistic greatness. Copyright sure as hell didn't earn James Joyce a living.
And for the record: I lose at Scrabble whenever I play it, which is rarely.
"Additionally, I think that people who purport such eras to be shining examples of how things used to be better -- are assholes."
That's because you don't care about art. I doubt you would recognize a great work of contemporary literature if it fell on your head.
On the post: New Economics Paper Explains How Shorter Copyright Stimulates More Music
Not true.
I guess I have seen more stupid things here and there. Certainly I have seen worse spelling. But the sour mixture of smug condescension and profound ignorance that this guy brings to the table is pretty unique.
In any case I have certainly never seen anything that was conspicuously more stupid than: "Was Shakespeare an artist? For his day, sure. In today's terms, where everyone would be aware of his duplication of other's works? Nope. He would be so busted, and long forgotten"
I mean, it sounds like something that the Onion would write, though not nearly as clever.
On the post: New Economics Paper Explains How Shorter Copyright Stimulates More Music
!!!
That is quite simply the most stupid thing I have ever read on the internet.
On the post: New Economics Paper Explains How Shorter Copyright Stimulates More Music
But the author of "60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye" that was banned in the US also 'didn't just rearrange another author's writing' but instead 're-wrote it completely' but apparently you forgot about that. Certainly what Shakespeare did with stories from Hollinshed was, from a contemporary legal standpoint, quite similar. And before you say it, no I am not saying that this book was on the level of Shakespeare. The comparison isn't artistic, but legal.
"This is besides the fact that it's rather silly to compare 16th century England to now. There are lots of things that we do everyday that would be in violation of 16th century English laws, perhaps someone should look into legally regulating hairstyles again? Your near-constant citing of 600 year old examples helps only to show the frailty of your position."
1 Shakespeare wrote 400 years ago, not 600 years ago. Mozart and Ray Charles are even more recent.
Duh.
2 The reason for bringing up Elizabethan examples is that Elizabethan literary culture was rich and fecund. In fact it was one of the greatest explosions of exceptional literary activity in history. Only Periclean Athens is really on the same level. Now compare these two copyright-free literary achievements to the literary achievements of our time. Now consider the fact that our own population is much greater than the population of those civilizations.
Is that clear enough for you?
On the post: New Economics Paper Explains How Shorter Copyright Stimulates More Music
Sadly, very few people in the world will have any interest in it. That is, if it's really new. Chances are that it's not. Chances are that it is 'new' in the same sense that Lily Allen or Puddle of Mud is 'new'.
"Sorry, but a musical track isn't an instrument, at least not in any real sense. It's someone else's work being re-used."
Well sure. But see above, regarding Lily Allen, Puddle of Mud, etc. Is any of their music any less derivative? The fact that they aren't using someone else's audio files isn't really very impressive when you consider that every phrase that comes out of their mouths is a cliche; that every riff they use is just like a thousand other riffs that date back to the 90's or the 70's or even the 60's; that every song is in 4/4 time and in one of about 10 different 'grooves' which are as stereotyped as the cliche lyrics.
"For me, it is like buying a cake at the store, dropping a cherry on top, and having the balls to call myself a baker. I am not a baker, I am at best a "cherry placer" or perhaps a "presentation enhancer". I certainly didn't bake anything."
Kind of like what Timbaland does, right?
You do realize that this is far from being representative of remixing as a whole? No, I guess you don't. Try googling DJ Shadow for some enlightenment. DJ Shadow has created more original sounding tracks than the top ten major label acts in the country combined. And I say this not because I am a fan of his. I am not. But credit where credit is due.
And speaking of which, you do know, don't you, that most 'superstar' original artists of the recent past like Lily Allen and Michael Jackson and Madonna and Cher and Brittney and Gwen Stefani and so on all have staffs of people doing the lions share of their 'writing' with them? That if they were given a guitar or a piano and nothing else most of them would be as impotent to create anything new as a tone deaf soccer mom? That they have a huge entourage of talented professionals airbrushing and retouching and editing and autotuning their every move? That it is this entourage that does all of the actual work?
Original My Ass.
On the post: Zombieland Director Goes After Fans, Doesn't Understand Popularity
I, too, doubt that there are enough facts to know the answers to such complex questions as 'In an alternative universe where there was no internet but which was otherwise exactly the same, would Zombieland have made more or less money?' But my skepticism isn't due to the fact there haven't been enough facts compiled 'yet'. My skepticism is due to the fact that no one can never really know the answers to such questions. Pretending that we can ever know the answers to such questions is a form of self deception.
But why are such questions even being considered?
"People point out that Batman was the highest grossing movie of the year and was also the most pirated. Ok, but that doesn't mean pirating made that movie successful. "
Ah, this is why such questions are being considered. It's because people are convinced that some sort of causality has to be proven.
But causality doesn't have to be proven, nor is that the point. The Dark Knight cost $185,000,000 to make and has a total lifetime gross of $1,001,921,825. That is well over a fivefold return on investment. The fact that it was the most downloaded movie of last year AND the fact that it made $816,921,825 is all that is needed to show that 'piracy' doesn't keep movies from being profitable.
"It could just mean that like everyone else freeloaders wanted to see that movie."
Freeloaders have always been there. They used to be the ones who sneaked in the fire exits. They probably still are. Freeloaders are a constant. Worrying about them is like worrying about the weather: it doesn't help, it just gives you something else to be pissed off about. The good thing about internet freeloaders is that, unlike the fire exit guys, at least they aren't potentially interfering with the experience of paying customers by taking up seats and being obnoxious.
"And comparing his reaction to those of the people behind the movie "Ink" is bogus. "Ink" was a small indy film that had no PR behind it so it needed the publicity."
ALL movies need that kind of publicity. The idea that only 'small indy films' need to worry about it is false. No amount of PR can substitute for it. Hudson Hawk had a much bigger PR budget than "Ink" and look what good it did.
"It's just that for every person I come across that touts the "noble" downloader (the person who also buys whatever they download) I find 10 others that scoff at the idea of paying for music of movies no matter what. "Why pay when you can get it for free?" I've been asked on a few occasions. Nice attitude."
To be honest I don't buy into the 'noble downloader' either. Nor do I buy into the 'scumbag downloader'. As far as I am concerned there is only one kind of downloader: the inevitable kind.
On the post: UK Music Critic: This Is The Golden Age For Music
However, it's like anything. McDonalds isn't great food, but almost everyone eats there. Not all of us are going to spend $100 a plate for lunch, it's something we might do once or twice a year. In the same manner, most people will listen to pop, rock, or other forms of current popular music, and they may only sit down to jazz or classical once in a while.
To each his own - musical taste has nothing to do with the concepts of business models and systems here."
Which is something that I would ordinarily agree with.
But the fact is that we have to read on a daily basis about how 'free music made by amateurs will never be able to compete with major label music'. The post that I quoted in my last post said essentially just that. When people say these things they invariably bring up the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, as if they were representative of the music industry as a whole. I simply gave some random examples of music that is, shall we say, somewhat less obviously great than the Beatles and Led Zeppelin.
Sorry if I offended anyone's taste.
On the post: UK Music Critic: This Is The Golden Age For Music
I can't see how this will promote the creation of better music than the current system. I've a feeling it won't: quality and longevity will be exchanged for increased quantity and ephemerality. As I've said before, we will trade ounces of the finest creme brulee for pounds of Twinkies. This is what "the market" wants, I guess.
The amazing thing to me is how excited everyone is about the impending Twinkie harvest."
You know, I am starting to feel a bit like a broken record, but something keeps getting forgotten in these discussions that is really pretty relevant as far as the art of music goes: NOT ALL MUSIC IS POP MUSIC.
Yes, it's true, there is all kinds of this non-pop music in the world. There always has been.
Now to some people, the real Crème Brûlée, (and feel free to substitute Tiramisu, Croquembouche, Gateau St Honoré or any other pretentious European dessert that tickles your fancy) has always been found amidst this non-pop music. To these people, and they are among the most educated of music listeners, pop music, all pop music, is nothing more than a huge warehouse filled with Twinkies.
Now I myself do not agree with these people, but their perspective is a healthy corrective to the attitude that would place the industry created megastars of the past 40 years on some kind of pedestal. Because neither the Beatles nor the Stones nor Led Zeppelin nor even Steely Dan could play any but the simplest passages written by Webern or Ives or Bartok or Varese or Nancarrow.
20 years ago, most of the music of these obscure but gifted people was almost impossible to find. But because of the internet, today this music is almost as easy to obtain as the music of the aforementioned megastars. If the internet is also filled with the forgettable music of talentless idiots (and it is, no question), this is a small price to pay for the increased access to all kinds of musical culture.
And finally, for those who like to look at the industry's past through rose colored glasses, a few glimpses of some of their less than legendary past accomplishments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HejVjzhKTY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-mw1HGJjdA
http://w ww.youtube.com/watch?v=oR62_JuVR8M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEzh10_xoqw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E9Wu1rhalo&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92e0JnS7wLg&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c71 RCAyLS1M&feature=related
On the post: Grammar Nazis: Useful Language Experts, Or Elitist Snobs?
Yes, but then the clause in question would become: "...but isn't it important to understand the language in which you are writing?", which sounds prissy as all hell.
On the post: Grammar Nazis: Useful Language Experts, Or Elitist Snobs?
Grammar, properly understood, is a study of the structure of language. The linguistic etiquette that many people understand to be 'grammar' hasn't been taken seriously by the real language experts, people like Chomsky or Hjelmslev or Lamb or Pike and their followers, for many years.
The only reasons to worry about linguistic etiquette are either aesthetic or social. These are not unimportant concerns, and anyone who wants to be taken seriously or even just left alone in a given social circle should observe and conform to the language patterns of it's members.
But the people who obsess over other peoples linguistic usage should not be called grammar nazis, they should be called by their proper name: schoolmarms.
On the post: Internet Hating Sony Pictures CEO Insists Piracy Is Killing Movie Business; But Facts Show Otherwise
This has been a huge problem in the music industry as well.
A skilled person can make really good recordings for dirt cheap. You can set yourself up with a netbook based studio that the Beatles would have envied for about 600 dollars. A few hundred more could get you some decent monitors, and another couple hundred more would allow you to do a perfectly acceptable DIY room treatment. You can start with Naiant microphones, which are insanely good and only cost between 40 and 80 dollars apiece, add a couple of Chinese condenser microphones and a couple of sm57s and you're in business.
So for about 3000 to 4000 dollars, we're talking about a recording studio that has infinite tracks, hundreds of automatable effects, samplers beyond the dreams of the people who payed 20,000 dollars for a Fairlight in the early eighties, virtual instruments like the famous Crystal...the possibilities are quite overwhelming.
But instead of using such humble but powerful studios, instead of experimenting, testing and analyzing the recording process to see if it's costs could be pared down, the industry spends assloads of money in Hollywood and NY studios that charge thousands of dollars a day for studio rental, with thousands more for the personnel, and 300 dollars for every 15 minutes worth of that 2 inch analog tape that you just have to use. And then there are the drum techs and rented drums, the rented vintage amps and guitars...
Seriously, anyone who is unfamiliar with this stuff should google the Mixerman diaries. The waste that takes place in the music industry is staggering. The 'spare no expense, just deliver a huge hit' mentality was born in a world where the resources necessary to make recordings were scarce, expensive, complex to operate, and difficult to maintain. It came from the way the Beatles made records: fuck around all day until you find something that sounds cool. It never really made sense as a strategy, but you sure couldn't complain about the results from a business standpoint: the Beatles made lots and lots of money.
But the fact of the matter is that the Beatles would have gone apeshit over the freeware tools that 15 year old kids bitch about these days. The possibilities opened up by these tools are endless. Things like:
multiple automation lanes (essentially, a bunch of invisible hands you can set to change the levels and settings on virtual instruments and effects in real time),
audio with absolutely no surface noise and over 100 db of dynamic range,
having as many tracks as you could ever imagine using,
non destructive, click and drag audio editing and manipulation, on an intuitive graphic interface that has the color scheme of your choice.
One could go on and on. But this kind of thinking is antithetical to the ethos of the industry. Paring down costs, an absolutely essential business practice that is a matter of course in most businesses, makes no sense to them. 'Big Records are recorded in Big Studios for Big Money! Any idiot knows that!' is the common wisdom.
But the absolute triumph of the mp3 on the popular market proves that most people really just are not obsessed with sound quality the way audio professionals are. They care about the song and the performance and they demand that the recording conveys the song and the performance. The number of people who will know or care whether the drums in a song were processed with a free compressor plugin on the one hand, or a 40 year old Fairchild limiter on the other, are vanishingly small. And yet, those 40 year old limiters can fetch over 10,000 dollars on the open market, because, that's right, that's the limiter that the Beatles used, and there are people in the industry who believe that it has some kind of magic pixie dust that will help them sell records.
But all the listening public cares about is that the drum part, however recorded, makes them shake their collective ass spontaneously when they hear it. And that has absolutely nothing to do with the technology used to record the drums.
On the post: How The Record Labels Are Killing Innovative New Music Services: No Money, No Content
All of the great geniuses of 20th century music were such 'marginal players'. None of them, not a single god damn one of them, was able to make enough money off of record sales to make a living. They all had to do something other than compose full time to live: teach composition, teach Piano, conduct other people's music, perform other people's music, arrange music for the theater, or something.
This applies to most of the big names you will find in a history of twentieth century music: Bartok, Webern, Schoenberg, Ives, Messiaen, Partch, Nancarrow, Ligeti, Berg, Cowell, Satie, Boulez, Barraque....
The only one who came close to composing full time was Stravinsky, who had to depend on the private patronage of the very wealthy to survive. Needless to say, 'the industry' had nothing to do with arranging this patronage. Because, as a creator of 'that weird modern music' stuff, he would never move enough units to make a profit.
And we are supposed to get all weepy because the careers of people like Beyonce and Barbara Streisand are suffering from file sharing?
On the post: Universal Music Prevents Popular Play From Showing In Stockholm, Despite Not Having The Legal Rights
Whereas taking random pot shots anonymously isn't tricky at all.
No one knows who you are, so they can never point out any inconsistencies. Your words aren't easily found via google because they aren't conveniently arranged by date and subject matter in a publicly available data base.
You aren't a tough guy if the only punches you ever land are sucker punches.
In any case, this isn't an isolated case and it isn't unusual. Large media conglomerates frequently make these sorts of mistakes with other people's copyright material. Mistakes that they would never countenance from others. This blog entry of Robert Fripp's involves exactly this kind of disagreement with EMI.
I mean, how much slack are we supposed to cut these people?
On the post: So What's Wrong With Transparency Again?
What 'we' should or should not make our 'educational focus' has little to do with what people actually learn. People can be force fed statistical analysis, certainly. But unless they actually care about what they learn and use it regularly it will enter the cognitive netherworld whence goes peoples knowledge of how to create a valid proof of the Pythagorean theorem, or the exact date that the Stamp Act was repealed. Most Americans have learned these things in grade school, but I dare say that very few remember them.
"Maybe we should make taking basic statistics more mandatory, or at least more attractive. Maybe we should try to standardize objective quality measures for different kinds of analysis. Maybe we should focus on researching new visualization methods that make it easier to make sense of large amounts of data without eliding important details."
Or, maybe we could simply stop acting as if statistics were a direct hot line to enlightenment. There is this horrible anti-philosophical tendency in our culture to act as if any assertion not 'backed up' by statistics is 'merely anecdotal'. And yet most of the great books of the western world are 'merely anecdotal' in this sense. At the same time, even economists who are in general agreement can argue endlessly over how to interpret a particular body of statistics.
Now I am not saying statistics are meaningless, just that they aren't exactly a solid basis to build an epistemology on. If people stopped trying to do this, or worse, assuming that this is the only possible basis for knowledge, there would be less need for hand-wringing of the sort that Lessig is engaging in here.
On the post: NBC Sued For Over $2 Million... For Infringing On A Font
Re: Re: Law and Order?
Well, I'm going to say you got it wrong, my friend. I'm going to say it would more accurately be represented as:
"Dung Dung!"
However appropriate this might be as commentary on the issue, the proper onomatopoeia is "Doink Doink".
I have asked numerous literary professionals and they all agree.
On the post: Cook's Illustrated Editor: I Wish All Those Amateurs Out There Would Just Shut Up
No matter how impeccable your demi-glace is, no matter how lacy and delicate your latke's happen to be, no matter if you only use Plugra butter for your Pate Brisee, or organically grown heirloom tomatoes to make your arrabiata; no matter what you make or how you make it, it's all going to come out of your ass the next day.
You would think that this consideration would keep foodies from taking themselves so fucking seriously, but clearly this is not the case.
On the post: Focusing In On The Value: Google Books Provides An Amazing Resource
This has nothing to do with reality.
Here is an example of what Google books does with a popular copyrighted book that the publisher doesn't want to share in any way. Notice that it is just a description. No preview, no extracts, no snippets, nothing. Just the publishing information and some reviews.
"The premise of this statement fails to account for scale. Libraries have very few copies of books. The damage they do to an author or the publisher is minimal. For example, I recently went to the library to find a book, and saw that I was in line behind 6 others waiting to check out the same book. So I went out and bought it."
1: See above
2: Even when a book has a limited preview, it isn't enough to replace the book. It's missing something like 1 out of every 4 pages.
3. What if the book is in the public domain, and your library doesn't have it? What if you can't even buy it?
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