Why lossless matters (aka why I won't pay for AAC or mp3)
The AAC post above already mentioned this, but the responses to it seemed to miss the point by focusing on the CD purchase which is currently the only legitimate way to get a lossless encoding of most music.
When you rip to a lossless format like FLAC, you can then transcode to *any format you like* without losing any additional audio quality beyond that lost by the format you are transcoding to. If your "original" is in a lossy format like AAC or MP3 though, then if you transcode it to a different format you will get a lower quality result because the file will not only be missing the signal information thrown away by the format you are transcoding to, but it will also be missing the signal information that was never included in the lossy original.
Actually, why *do* musicians have a right to get paid more than once per performance?
People do *lots* of things without having any expectation of getting paid. Quite often, people actually *pay* for the privilege of doing things. (Sport is a good example: the professionals may get paid boatloads of cash, but the amateurs are usually handing over money for use of equipment or facilities)
It all comes down to supply and demand: just because you *want* to be paid to do something doesn't mean that anyone out there is going to pay you to do it.
When it comes to music, you have two forces at work:
- people like making music
- people like listening to music
In the days before any kind of recorded music, the first group got paid by putting on live performances, the latter group either went to those live performances or created their own music.
Recorded music is a recent aberration where some musicians discovered they could get paid multiple times for a single performance. Creating each new copy wasn't all that easy, but it was still a lot easier than doing a whole new performance. This was obviously a pretty sweet deal for the musicians, so it is hardly surprising that it become a very common way of providing music to those that wanted to listen to it.
Fast forward to today, and the cost of creating each new copy has dropped so far that the ability to do it is ubiquitous and essentially free. We've moved from the original situation where the supply of recorded music was non-existent to one where the supply is effectively infinite.
Either extreme means that getting paid for copies of recordings isn't going to happen. But just as nothing could save the buggy whip manufacturers, the recording industry as it currently stands is pretty much doomed - the problem is right there in the industry's name.
I'm a software developer. I get paid pretty well to spend forty+ hours a week developing custom software for single customer.
Know what I do when I go home? Spend even more time writing, designing and discussing software (specifically, the reference interpreter for the Python programming language: http://www.python.org) on a purely voluntary basis.
I get a hell of a lot out of it:
- education (there are some *very* smart people involved in CPython's development and I get to learn from them)
- personal satisfaction (Python gets used in lots of places, and I get to feel that I have contributed in some way to each of those uses)
- entertainment (involved discussions about a complex topic of shared interest? sign me up...)
- professional development (potential employers pretty much have to take my word for it when I describe what I have done for previous employers - but my contributions to Python are a matter of public record)
Practical software development has too many functional constraints to be a pure artform - if the computer doesn't understand it, it isn't going to work, and if it doesn't help the end user achieve the task then the software has failed in its purpose. But the intellectual challenge and stimulation in reducing a complex problem to terms so simple that even a computer can understand them? That's something many good software developers will happily tackle for free.
The point Yosi misses is that most software (aside from games) is *functional*. It has *zero* value in and of itself. Software is valuable only in what it allows *people* to do (or to do more efficiently). In the case of Python, it allows other software developers to program more efficiently - hence, it is natural for developers to be interested in it for their own reasons. While some other CPython developers are like me and contribute solely on their own time, others are consultants that use it for paying clients and hence contribute to improving their own toolset, while still more are employed by companies that use Python and the company receives value by improving the shared (infinite) resource by contributing a bit of their own employees' time.
A similar situation applies for a lot of other commodity software like operating systems, office applications, and Internet infrastructure (including web browsers) - various individuals and organisations using the distributed infrastructure of the 'net to collaborate in a fashion where the whole (received in toto by participants and non-participants alike) vastly exceeds what any one participant would be capable of on their own. (And not only are such businesses almost entirely free of the need to be concerned about software license audits, in many cases, even after accounting for the cost of contributing something back, the overall cost will still be less than the rent-seeking of some commercial software vendors).
The "boring" software that Yosi talks about is almost all customised one-off business rules stuff. Even if a competitor *did* copy the underlying utility applications, nearly all of that software is so flexible that configuring it to handle a *specific* situation is a programming task in and of itself (hence the widespread use of consultants in those fields). In other words, the value isn't completely tied up in the product: a lot of it is in the expertise needed to take that product and apply it to real world problems.
Useful software will be developed even if nobody is getting paid for copies of it later - it gets created because people want it for what it lets them *do*. Whether the actual creation is done collaboratively by self-motivated companies and individuals or on commission from end users or speculatively by a vendor hoping to be able to sell it to users later is largely irrelevant - one way or another it *will* get created eventually.
Now, a different aspect, where software development definitely *is* art is game development: games don't have the same functional constraints that practical software does, so they have many more characteristics in common with other artistics endeavours (especially movies). However, in that area, many game developers are proving far more adaptable than the older copyright industries. Platforms like Steam, or software-as-a-service approaches like World of Warcraft are all designed so that end users either get a big gain in convenience from paying reasonable prices, or else they gain access to additional elements by being legit (such as online play or free updates). In pure online games like WoW, Blizzard actually give away the client for free - it's essentially useless without an account on their servers, and that you pay for (although still far, far less than it would cost to go to the movies regularly).
Note also that software doesn't have any of that nonsense about royalties: software developers are paid for the time they spend developing the product. Whether their employer then goes on to sell a single copy of that software, no copies or millions of copies doesn't much matter - the original developers typically won't get a cut (and, IMO, that is as it should be - books/music/movies are the aberration here, not the norm).
@Thom: these days you can go a long way just reading stuff on the internet. That doesn't invalidate your point, but it does mean it could technically be legitimate for someone to answer your question about reading books in the negative :)
On the post: Swedish Regulators Say The Word 'bank' Not Allowed In Any Domain Names... Except If You're A Bank
On the post: Looking For The $0.69 Songs On iTunes
Why lossless matters (aka why I won't pay for AAC or mp3)
When you rip to a lossless format like FLAC, you can then transcode to *any format you like* without losing any additional audio quality beyond that lost by the format you are transcoding to. If your "original" is in a lossy format like AAC or MP3 though, then if you transcode it to a different format you will get a lower quality result because the file will not only be missing the signal information thrown away by the format you are transcoding to, but it will also be missing the signal information that was never included in the lossy original.
On the post: Can We Please End The Myth That Anyone Is Trying To Take Away 'The Right Of Musicians To Get Paid'?
Actually, why *do* musicians have a right to get paid more than once per performance?
It all comes down to supply and demand: just because you *want* to be paid to do something doesn't mean that anyone out there is going to pay you to do it.
When it comes to music, you have two forces at work:
- people like making music
- people like listening to music
In the days before any kind of recorded music, the first group got paid by putting on live performances, the latter group either went to those live performances or created their own music.
Recorded music is a recent aberration where some musicians discovered they could get paid multiple times for a single performance. Creating each new copy wasn't all that easy, but it was still a lot easier than doing a whole new performance. This was obviously a pretty sweet deal for the musicians, so it is hardly surprising that it become a very common way of providing music to those that wanted to listen to it.
Fast forward to today, and the cost of creating each new copy has dropped so far that the ability to do it is ubiquitous and essentially free. We've moved from the original situation where the supply of recorded music was non-existent to one where the supply is effectively infinite.
Either extreme means that getting paid for copies of recordings isn't going to happen. But just as nothing could save the buggy whip manufacturers, the recording industry as it currently stands is pretty much doomed - the problem is right there in the industry's name.
On the post: Software Development Is A Scarce Good
Know what I do when I go home? Spend even more time writing, designing and discussing software (specifically, the reference interpreter for the Python programming language: http://www.python.org) on a purely voluntary basis.
I get a hell of a lot out of it:
- education (there are some *very* smart people involved in CPython's development and I get to learn from them)
- personal satisfaction (Python gets used in lots of places, and I get to feel that I have contributed in some way to each of those uses)
- entertainment (involved discussions about a complex topic of shared interest? sign me up...)
- professional development (potential employers pretty much have to take my word for it when I describe what I have done for previous employers - but my contributions to Python are a matter of public record)
Practical software development has too many functional constraints to be a pure artform - if the computer doesn't understand it, it isn't going to work, and if it doesn't help the end user achieve the task then the software has failed in its purpose. But the intellectual challenge and stimulation in reducing a complex problem to terms so simple that even a computer can understand them? That's something many good software developers will happily tackle for free.
The point Yosi misses is that most software (aside from games) is *functional*. It has *zero* value in and of itself. Software is valuable only in what it allows *people* to do (or to do more efficiently). In the case of Python, it allows other software developers to program more efficiently - hence, it is natural for developers to be interested in it for their own reasons. While some other CPython developers are like me and contribute solely on their own time, others are consultants that use it for paying clients and hence contribute to improving their own toolset, while still more are employed by companies that use Python and the company receives value by improving the shared (infinite) resource by contributing a bit of their own employees' time.
A similar situation applies for a lot of other commodity software like operating systems, office applications, and Internet infrastructure (including web browsers) - various individuals and organisations using the distributed infrastructure of the 'net to collaborate in a fashion where the whole (received in toto by participants and non-participants alike) vastly exceeds what any one participant would be capable of on their own. (And not only are such businesses almost entirely free of the need to be concerned about software license audits, in many cases, even after accounting for the cost of contributing something back, the overall cost will still be less than the rent-seeking of some commercial software vendors).
The "boring" software that Yosi talks about is almost all customised one-off business rules stuff. Even if a competitor *did* copy the underlying utility applications, nearly all of that software is so flexible that configuring it to handle a *specific* situation is a programming task in and of itself (hence the widespread use of consultants in those fields). In other words, the value isn't completely tied up in the product: a lot of it is in the expertise needed to take that product and apply it to real world problems.
Useful software will be developed even if nobody is getting paid for copies of it later - it gets created because people want it for what it lets them *do*. Whether the actual creation is done collaboratively by self-motivated companies and individuals or on commission from end users or speculatively by a vendor hoping to be able to sell it to users later is largely irrelevant - one way or another it *will* get created eventually.
Now, a different aspect, where software development definitely *is* art is game development: games don't have the same functional constraints that practical software does, so they have many more characteristics in common with other artistics endeavours (especially movies). However, in that area, many game developers are proving far more adaptable than the older copyright industries. Platforms like Steam, or software-as-a-service approaches like World of Warcraft are all designed so that end users either get a big gain in convenience from paying reasonable prices, or else they gain access to additional elements by being legit (such as online play or free updates). In pure online games like WoW, Blizzard actually give away the client for free - it's essentially useless without an account on their servers, and that you pay for (although still far, far less than it would cost to go to the movies regularly).
Note also that software doesn't have any of that nonsense about royalties: software developers are paid for the time they spend developing the product. Whether their employer then goes on to sell a single copy of that software, no copies or millions of copies doesn't much matter - the original developers typically won't get a cut (and, IMO, that is as it should be - books/music/movies are the aberration here, not the norm).
@Thom: these days you can go a long way just reading stuff on the internet. That doesn't invalidate your point, but it does mean it could technically be legitimate for someone to answer your question about reading books in the negative :)
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