Ahh, yes. Even as a raging Leftie, I cannot help but praise the free market philosophy here. Crowdfunding is for both indie artists AND mainstream artists.
In fact, on this issue, it is one of those very rare occasions where I WANT the counter-culture to become the over-the-counter-culture. Because the sooner crowdfunding becomes the mainstream way of financing artists, the better. It will be fun to see copyright believers attempt to dismiss it. A way of funding artists' fruits of labour that DOESN'T depend on copyright, and does not come with any liberty compromises? Nooooo? It COULDN'T be? AND derivative artist's fruits of labour are protected to boot? GET OUT!
Yes indeed: the words "capitalism" and "revolution" can be uttered in the same breath.
"[We want to] change social attitudes toward downloading. Many people know it is illegal but they continue to do it... Our collective goal is not to sue everybody… but to change the sense of entitlement that people have, regarding Internet-based theft of property.”
Perhaps it is your social attitude that needs to change, in particular when people feel that it is appropriate to lock people up for doing the same thing as borrowing DVDs from friends.
And perhaps you need to change the sense of unjustified entitlement copyright law has when it comes to claiming authority despite its irrationality.
It is probably better to say this: "piracy" does not really exist in an economic system where creativity is treated as services, not products. That sounds tautological, but considering how it is a much better way of stopping people from free-riding it is worth talking about.
You may be opening doors with me if you said there are some costs required for the storage of data. For example, Dropbox, MediaFire, MegaUpload, etc all have fees of their own; specifically for the speed of downloads and for the uploading of large files. There has to be money involved somewhere for hosting servers.
That I think is legitimate. But what I cannot see being sensible is trying to use these costs to guard the IP solely. That is quite different from the storage of data. If what you say is true, that paywalls are inevitable for one reason or another, you have still said nothing about how to stop the piracy of the internet.
The punishment for that is less quality work, or even nothing at all. Remember, in order to get the great production effects, action sequences, etc of a movie it costs millions. That is on top of what the artists think they are worth. A pirate will know the consequences of his actions because he may not get the great movie he wanted for free. Artists can hold pirates to account very powerfully like this.
If the pirate pledges, he can rest assured that he won't be ripped off himself (it will get to the point where studios will refund pledges if the movie gets cancelled halfway - studios take the fall in this way already) and he also will not be ripped off by a middleman, legitimate or not, who may profit from someone not acting on the behalf of the artist. Legal retailers, remember, do not necessarily participate in fair capitalism when they sell bulk DVDs at a profit - if you follow IP philosophy closely, this profit could be seen as a form of IP theft.
Lets actually take this much further: I can watch a legal copy of a DVD for free while following all the copyright laws - by borrowing from a friend, reselling through Ebay or watching it at a friend's house - I can free ride without any sense of accountability whatsoever.
Kickstarter, on the other hand, makes even THOSE kinds of unspoken free-riders accountable. Even the people who supposedly "contribute" to the artist by getting the DVDs second hand (they don't) will have to pitch in with the pledges in a much more direct way. That's the beauty of this. Copyright cannot do anything about these kinds of free-riders while crowdfunding can. So there's an additional advantage there.
It's an argument ad capitalism, isn't it? Well... if there is such a phrase.
I'm as much of a Leftist as most people when it comes to taxing the hell out of the 1% even if Kickstarter themselves fall into that category one day (and believe you me, they will), but the free-market is the only sane perspective we can have here. People have a right to spend their money on whatever they like.
The whole thing is probably a secret distaste of Kickstarter in general. People generally don't like change. Or anything anti-copyright.
By the way, you must always remember that corporations can themselves place Kickstarter bids. Even the ones engaged in piracy. All the way from Google to Megaupload: they'll all start placing refundable pledges of their own (remember, nobody has anything to lose). They'll eventually see that this is in their best interests in order to make a profit from advertising. The balance of power swings over to the artists.
Watch as more and more crowdfunding artists will put their work into the public domain after creation. Watch as more and more pirates are held accountable in ways that copyright could never begin to dream about.
With crowdfunding, if a pirate doesn't pay up, he has nothing to pirate. But with copyright, if a pirate doesn't pay up, he can get away with it.
Crowdfunding websites are the intellectual radicals here. They're not even aware of it themselves.
The arguments against Kickstarter have been laughably baseless. Remember how Amanda Palmer was attacked for a) promoting piracy of her works (which even copyright advocates have to say is within her rights to do so) and b)making too much money? I thought, "Well, there you have it. A system which can help people encourage piracy of their own works by essentially putting it in the public domain and still become filthy rich... and the copyright advocates just want to stick their fingers in their ears and yell 'I'm not listening!' Absolutely perfect."
The logical elegance of assurance contracts cannot be overstated here. Tickets, preordered content, crowdfunding, all of it has tons of evidence to back up a way of thinking that completely discredits copyright.
Paywalls do little to stop people from getting what they want without paying, are easy to walk around with the use of proxies, waste everybody's time and effort, and are fundamentally futile and self-ridiculing.
In fact, they are just about as useful as the U.S.'s Mexican border fence.
Copyright never ceases to be intellectually dishonest.
If this were crowdfunding, it'd be impossible for a label to oppress artists like this. The artists would have them by the balls.
Also, there would be no way for labels to cheat on royalties. The money would be there for all to see, and labels would have to pay their share: no excuses, no exceptions.
Assurance contracts intellectually trump everything here. Tickets, crowdfunding, all verifiable and backed up by evidence. With no human rights compromises.
If you think it is bad now, just imagine how worse it would have been if Saddam Hussein was still in power. Or his two sadistic sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein.
Always remember: Middle Eastern revolutions gained inspiration and ground on the days that Saddam Hussein was tried for war crimes on TV for all to see. The U.S. mass media decided to keep all of that unreported for so long.
Remember how lots of people laughed at the "domino theory" and democracy being spread across the region? Well what do you call the mass toppling of dictators and huge spread of Arab Spring movements? That's what we on the Left call "destabilisation". We don't say it like it's a bad thing.
Getting rid of Saddam, the 1984-esque totalitarian dictator, was a move that was finally on the right side of history.
Re: Worry about something in your supposed economics, Mike:
Maybe if I just SHOUT my words LIKE this, that WILL give THEM MORE rationality and JUSTIFICATION. CAN I be TAKEN MORE seriously NOW that I am screaming SOME OF my SELECTED words at YOU?!
See, look what you've done. My throat now hurts. I was having fun.
Every notice how religious loonies do the same thing on the internet? If they just capitalise "GOD" enough times that will somehow make it true?
Re: "one of the few actual victims" -- Right, if omit movie studios
I love how copyright believers "slant" the idea that copyright solves the free-rider problem and pretend that someone can't take from the artist without paying through means of borrowed/resold DVDs.
From what I recall in George Orwell's 1984, the proles did not have any telescreens in their homes because the Inner Party did not see the proles as a threat due to their naivety and lack of education.
I don't think Orwell could have predicted a capitalist society where everybody genuinely does have a telescreen of some sort even if they are not wired directly to central government servers - the modern day equivalent would be your laptop and webcam.
Instead of cameras all hooked up to a central government server, what we have is a mass web of cameras where everybody can potentially be their own Big Brother, and record anything on the street with their camera phones, which might become a massive viral YouTube hit.
This can be both good and bad. Both cyber utopianism and cyber dystopianism need to be criticised, but utopianism more so as it is more prevalent. This RSA Animate video does a good job:
What is particularly interesting is the way he points to how fascists can crowdsource protest videos in order to identify protesters and report them to their dictators. It is not always the case that the internet can be beneficial in movements like these: sometimes it can be the secret police's best weapon. In cases like these, you really do have your Big Brother situation.
Having said all this, it can be hard to see why CCTV cameras should be treated as the biggest privacy threat. Surely ALL cameras pose a risk of some sort, whether a close-up one on your phone that can capture faces perfectly, or a slow moving, blurry, low-frame rate camera on top of some obscure pole with a crap view of things. A policeman can either confiscate everybody's camera phone's hard drives just as much as they can take CCTV tapes, or just look at YouTube.
Google Glasses do not seem like such a big deal now, do they? At the end of the day, it is just another camera that is no more significant than hidden fiber cameras journalists hide in their ties. Whatever can be done on those glasses in terms of facial recognition, or video recording, can all be done on a regular phone anyway. And don't forget that we only have so much storage space to hold all the footage before a) we run out of storage or b) we have to be charged for the storage. I do not know how much longer YouTube can go on taking its (last I checked) 72 hours a second upload rate before it has to start charging or removing old videos.
On the post: Some Data: Big Kickstarter Projects By Famous People Actually Help Other Projects
In fact, on this issue, it is one of those very rare occasions where I WANT the counter-culture to become the over-the-counter-culture. Because the sooner crowdfunding becomes the mainstream way of financing artists, the better. It will be fun to see copyright believers attempt to dismiss it. A way of funding artists' fruits of labour that DOESN'T depend on copyright, and does not come with any liberty compromises? Nooooo? It COULDN'T be? AND derivative artist's fruits of labour are protected to boot? GET OUT!
Yes indeed: the words "capitalism" and "revolution" can be uttered in the same breath.
On the post: Canadian Anti-Infringement Enforcement Company Caught Using Infringing Photos On Its Website
Perhaps it is your social attitude that needs to change, in particular when people feel that it is appropriate to lock people up for doing the same thing as borrowing DVDs from friends.
And perhaps you need to change the sense of unjustified entitlement copyright law has when it comes to claiming authority despite its irrationality.
On the post: Once Again Top Downloaders Are Top Spenders, According To UK Gov't Study
Re: Re: Re: NOT "a valuable contribution to the field" -- IT'S A SURVEY.
Why shouldn't they? It is theft to take something from the artist without giving anything in return, isn't it?
On the post: Hangin' With Mr. Cooper: Prenda's Fight Against Alan Cooper Flailing Badly
Re: WALL OF TEXT is Mike's homage to stupid lawyers.
On the post: There Is No Logic To The Argument That Zach Braff Shouldn't Use Kickstarter
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Silliest Argument Ever: Just Because A YouTube Paywall Launches It Means More Money Is Made
Re: Re:
That I think is legitimate. But what I cannot see being sensible is trying to use these costs to guard the IP solely. That is quite different from the storage of data. If what you say is true, that paywalls are inevitable for one reason or another, you have still said nothing about how to stop the piracy of the internet.
On the post: There Is No Logic To The Argument That Zach Braff Shouldn't Use Kickstarter
Re: Re: Re:
If the pirate pledges, he can rest assured that he won't be ripped off himself (it will get to the point where studios will refund pledges if the movie gets cancelled halfway - studios take the fall in this way already) and he also will not be ripped off by a middleman, legitimate or not, who may profit from someone not acting on the behalf of the artist. Legal retailers, remember, do not necessarily participate in fair capitalism when they sell bulk DVDs at a profit - if you follow IP philosophy closely, this profit could be seen as a form of IP theft.
Lets actually take this much further: I can watch a legal copy of a DVD for free while following all the copyright laws - by borrowing from a friend, reselling through Ebay or watching it at a friend's house - I can free ride without any sense of accountability whatsoever.
Kickstarter, on the other hand, makes even THOSE kinds of unspoken free-riders accountable. Even the people who supposedly "contribute" to the artist by getting the DVDs second hand (they don't) will have to pitch in with the pledges in a much more direct way. That's the beauty of this. Copyright cannot do anything about these kinds of free-riders while crowdfunding can. So there's an additional advantage there.
On the post: There Is No Logic To The Argument That Zach Braff Shouldn't Use Kickstarter
Re: Interesting
I'm as much of a Leftist as most people when it comes to taxing the hell out of the 1% even if Kickstarter themselves fall into that category one day (and believe you me, they will), but the free-market is the only sane perspective we can have here. People have a right to spend their money on whatever they like.
The whole thing is probably a secret distaste of Kickstarter in general. People generally don't like change. Or anything anti-copyright.
On the post: There Is No Logic To The Argument That Zach Braff Shouldn't Use Kickstarter
Re:
Watch as more and more crowdfunding artists will put their work into the public domain after creation. Watch as more and more pirates are held accountable in ways that copyright could never begin to dream about.
With crowdfunding, if a pirate doesn't pay up, he has nothing to pirate. But with copyright, if a pirate doesn't pay up, he can get away with it.
On the post: There Is No Logic To The Argument That Zach Braff Shouldn't Use Kickstarter
The arguments against Kickstarter have been laughably baseless. Remember how Amanda Palmer was attacked for a) promoting piracy of her works (which even copyright advocates have to say is within her rights to do so) and b)making too much money? I thought, "Well, there you have it. A system which can help people encourage piracy of their own works by essentially putting it in the public domain and still become filthy rich... and the copyright advocates just want to stick their fingers in their ears and yell 'I'm not listening!' Absolutely perfect."
The logical elegance of assurance contracts cannot be overstated here. Tickets, preordered content, crowdfunding, all of it has tons of evidence to back up a way of thinking that completely discredits copyright.
On the post: Silliest Argument Ever: Just Because A YouTube Paywall Launches It Means More Money Is Made
In fact, they are just about as useful as the U.S.'s Mexican border fence.
On the post: Streetlight Manifesto Can't Fulfill Pre-Orders Because Label Refuses To Give Them Their Own Records
Copyright never ceases to be intellectually dishonest.
Also, there would be no way for labels to cheat on royalties. The money would be there for all to see, and labels would have to pay their share: no excuses, no exceptions.
Assurance contracts intellectually trump everything here. Tickets, crowdfunding, all verifiable and backed up by evidence. With no human rights compromises.
On the post: Iraqi Government Shutters Television Stations It Doesn't Like
Progress will be made... now that it can.
Always remember: Middle Eastern revolutions gained inspiration and ground on the days that Saddam Hussein was tried for war crimes on TV for all to see. The U.S. mass media decided to keep all of that unreported for so long.
Remember how lots of people laughed at the "domino theory" and democracy being spread across the region? Well what do you call the mass toppling of dictators and huge spread of Arab Spring movements? That's what we on the Left call "destabilisation". We don't say it like it's a bad thing.
Getting rid of Saddam, the 1984-esque totalitarian dictator, was a move that was finally on the right side of history.
On the post: EFF Gives Prince A 'Lifetime Aggrievement Award' For DMCA Takedown Abuse
Re: Worry about something in your supposed economics, Mike:
See, look what you've done. My throat now hurts. I was having fun.
Every notice how religious loonies do the same thing on the internet? If they just capitalise "GOD" enough times that will somehow make it true?
On the post: John Steele, Silent In Court, Keeps Talking To The Press; Says New Lawsuits Are Being Filed
On the post: Royalty Collection Agency SABAM Sues Belgian ISPs In Pursuit Of Its Fantasy 'Piracy License'
On the post: Author Of To Kill A Mockingbird Sues Agent For Swiping Her Copyright
Re: "one of the few actual victims" -- Right, if omit movie studios
On the post: Author Of To Kill A Mockingbird Sues Agent For Swiping Her Copyright
On the post: The Fight Over DRM In HTML5 Should Represent The Last Stand For DRM
Re:
On the post: Moral Panic Over Google Glass: White House Petition Asks To Ban Them To Prevent 'Indecent' Public Surveillance
I don't think Orwell could have predicted a capitalist society where everybody genuinely does have a telescreen of some sort even if they are not wired directly to central government servers - the modern day equivalent would be your laptop and webcam.
Instead of cameras all hooked up to a central government server, what we have is a mass web of cameras where everybody can potentially be their own Big Brother, and record anything on the street with their camera phones, which might become a massive viral YouTube hit.
This can be both good and bad. Both cyber utopianism and cyber dystopianism need to be criticised, but utopianism more so as it is more prevalent. This RSA Animate video does a good job:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk8x3V-sUgU
What is particularly interesting is the way he points to how fascists can crowdsource protest videos in order to identify protesters and report them to their dictators. It is not always the case that the internet can be beneficial in movements like these: sometimes it can be the secret police's best weapon. In cases like these, you really do have your Big Brother situation.
Having said all this, it can be hard to see why CCTV cameras should be treated as the biggest privacy threat. Surely ALL cameras pose a risk of some sort, whether a close-up one on your phone that can capture faces perfectly, or a slow moving, blurry, low-frame rate camera on top of some obscure pole with a crap view of things. A policeman can either confiscate everybody's camera phone's hard drives just as much as they can take CCTV tapes, or just look at YouTube.
Google Glasses do not seem like such a big deal now, do they? At the end of the day, it is just another camera that is no more significant than hidden fiber cameras journalists hide in their ties. Whatever can be done on those glasses in terms of facial recognition, or video recording, can all be done on a regular phone anyway. And don't forget that we only have so much storage space to hold all the footage before a) we run out of storage or b) we have to be charged for the storage. I do not know how much longer YouTube can go on taking its (last I checked) 72 hours a second upload rate before it has to start charging or removing old videos.
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