What arguments am I making for the MPAA and RIAA, exactly?
I would say there are big differences between copyright and selling tickets: copyright necessarily compromises other freedoms, while selling tickets does not. Not to mention that you can still steal from artists when you are following copyright law, while selling tickets makes it impossible to steal and not break laws. A band can choose not to go ahead with the gig if they do not sell enough tickets at a venue, which is the "all-or-nothing" model as described by Kickstarter. A band can therefore hold the free-riders accountable: if not enough people pay, the free-riders cannot gain anything. This is a vital insight that gets overlooked. Crowdfunding has a greater chance of making pirates pay for content than copyright law does.
And do not underestimate this form for big budget stuff: I promise you that within the next ten years you will see the big companies using crowdfunding as their primary means of gaining incentives, and it will become THE model for artists. It will not be Netflix nor Spotify. If someone like Justin Bieber announced on his Facebook and Twitter feeds to his hopeless cult followers that he will be gaining funding for his next album through enough Kickstarter/IndieGoGo funds, I promise you he will make millions within days.
And as for this issue of buying "finished products" over funding creativity as a service, I should mention that one of my criticisms of crowdfunding websites is that they seem to not want to keep funding campaigns open after the deadline has passed, and after the artist has successfully gathered initial funds. I am not sure why the sites do this, as they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from pledges put after deadlines (5% of each pledge).
I claim that this is one of the best things they can do because it will culturally affirm that the more money people put in, the higher quality work will come out. It will also mean the chance to hold money until the consumer gains more information about the project as it progresses. As the project moves forward and as more progress is displayed on the page, the more people will be willing to fund after the deadline in order to boost the quality to a standard they want. This is backed up by the proliferation of "stretch goals" that you are seeing on crowdfunding websites - if the artists get more money, they'll make more stuff. Accountability forced upon the market, in other words.
In fact, the "stretch goals" are more or less the "limited access" that you are asking for.
If Copyright did not exist, then the instant I wrote a book, anyone could copy it and give it to whomever they want.
How would I make a living if I could not charge for my work?
This assumes two things: first, that a world without copyright would mean that artists could not charge anything, which is what I refute with treating the property as a service via crowdfunding and accountability of free-riders; second, which is far more important, that it is somehow not possible to steal from the artists while following every copyright law in the book... when it is.
If a retailer were to sell a DVD to a person who walks into his shop, he would have no problem. But he may have a problem with twenty people of the same crowd walking in at the same time demanding to buy a single DVD for them all to watch. The copyright advocate must say that it should be perfectly legal for all twenty of them to watch that single DVD, either simultaneously or taking it in turns by passing the DVD between them. In any case, the artist loses out on nineteen sales. Copyright is ultimately a utopia in this sense - free-riders can still work around the system and still follow all the rules.
"But we'd raise the initial prices to compensate for that" is often the rebuttal here, but you still do not solve this problem, you only displace it further. A rise in prices would encourage more DVD swapping and reselling - or a slowdown of sales as a result of the free-riders waiting for either the original or resale price to drop. Indeed, you only need to buy, watch and then resell whenever you want to experience the creativity again. If you believe in the way that IP can be stolen from a party by people within their own private spheres, which is what is meant by unauthorised copying, you have to see the comparison.
Isn't that retailer entitled to sell twenty copies instead of one? If so, why so?
Another conundrum is the following: if a retailer were to buy CDs at £10 each from the artist, then go on to resell them at £20 each because the artist was not aware of the potential market, is the retailer taking part in fair capitalism or committing IP theft? There is no way to know. But of course, at this point copyright advocates will cherry-pick physical property rights at just this moment when it suits them, saying that the profit making is justified here.
And to your other points: it is perfectly possible to create a form of crowdfunding without the internet. As long as we can communicate with each other, we can keep ourselves updated on how the project is going, as well as collecting refundable pledges. So do not mistake me as somebody who is only advocating crowdfunding because of the internet. I would be advocating it whether the internet existed or not. Ticket-based admission has been around for hundreds of years.
And on the contrary, I think I defend "intellectual property", i.e. the Lockean sense of Life, Liberty and Property, much stronger than copyright advocates do. As you know, the "intellectual property" of derivative artists gets stamped on and in some cases the very existence of their Life, Liberty and Property is denied. The euphemism that is often to describe this behaviour is "you must make your own works and not use works that do not belong to you". A complete and utter refusal to acknowledge the rights of artists to fruits of labour, in other words. Try demanding the shutting down of deviantArt on this basis, and see how far you get. Or indeed, insist that Disney should not have retold certain stories. Or even further, stop the swapping of fan fiction. Or even more, insist that all remixes, anime music videos, etc should be forbidden.
The rebuttal to this is usually "but if everyone makes derivative works from originals, there would be no investment in originals and the derivative artists would lose out, too." Not with crowdfunding. Here, BOTH these markets can exist (why is it that nobody is willing to trust the free market to do the right thing when it actually CAN, for a change?).
I would like to know on what basis the free market "corrects" the issue of bad contracts here, as Libertarians would probably claim.
In free market theory, if an alternative label in this case were to offer a better deal to an artist, the artist would take that deal instead, meaning that the other labels would likewise have to offer those kind of deals in order to stay competitive. The end result is supposedly economic value that best reflects what everybody thinks they are worth.
But with copyright, you can never really be sure this is the case. It is perfectly possible for all artists across the world to unite together and insist to ALL labels that they will never give them their copyrights (instead, negotiating profits separately). Surely, with something as powerful as copyright, an artist would want to hold onto it, right? Therefore free market theory must say that the best reflected value is that artists retain all copyrights, right? But it is not like this. Labels can and do insist that their word is final when it comes to snatching up the copyrights of hard-working artists, and the free market cannot correct it.
Why do labels do it? Because they can. Because they are able to. Because it is merely possible for them to do it. This is why copyright is so poisonous: it creates a buck of power that's existence was never necessary, and for those of us who think that the separation of powers is a real thing, we have to be skeptical about bringing in certain unnecessary powers of our own choosing. According to copyright, the only way artists can make any living at all is to pass on this buck of power, their "natural" rights, to the middlemen - in this case the broadcasters - and the middlemen do this because, as I need to stress again, they can. The artists get locked out of their own "property", supposedly in their own best interests.
The above gives you a brief summary of what I am on about. This quote sums it up:
Bernie [Rhodes] had a meeting in The Ship in Soho after the Anarchy Tour. He said he wanted complete control...I came out of the club with Paul [Simonon] collapsing on the pavement in hysterics at those words.
Complete Control. It is no wonder that The Clash named their famous anti-label song with this title. I really do not think the criticism of "well, you should have known that the labels would take total control over your band when you signed away your copyrights to them" is valid, since those making this criticism have no way of explaining how the artists can stand up for themselves.
Labels wield this unwelcome sword because they have many vulnerable, desperate and/or naive artists to exploit. This is disgraceful. The ability to strip an artist of his deserved natural rights would be impossible if copyright did not exist to begin with. Those natural rights can be defended so much more eloquently: we have crowdfunding, which quite rightfully treats creative arts as services, which is what they ultimately are. The labels are terrified of crowdfunding for this reason: they will never be able to strip an artist of his rights in the same way if artists can turn to crowdfunding instead of copyright.
This is an exaggeration, but I am going to say it anyway (the person I'm about to reference was a much, much greater emancipator): crowdfunding (the peak of ticket-based admission economics) is to copyright as what Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was to religious creationism: an Occam's Razor explanation that explains so much while using as few constants as possible. Everything claimed by advocates of John Locke, primarily "life, liberty and property", can be defended with tickets/crowdfunding. They surely have to appreciate that no private liberties need to be sacrificed in order to enforce a futile "fence", and that free-riders can be held to account through the simple fact that if they free-ride too much, what they hope to gain won't be as high a standard as they wanted.
Plus, derivative artists will obtain THEIR rights to life, liberty and property that has been blocked by copyright for so long. They have fruits of labour worth defending, in my opinion. And they don't get nearly enough recognition. Lockeans, take note.
So in this case, I have to side with the artists who find it hard to compete with the labels who wield the power to say "We can take copyrights to works we never worked on, because we hold the gates to the communication channels and noone can challenge our ability to do this. What are you going to do about it? You want a living, don't you? Then give us your rights!" Artists do not have to put up with it. Which is why copyright needs to be abolished. Why is the process of giving copyrights to a label called "selling the rights to" the record, anyway? Hasn't it occurred to anybody how disgusting that tone of voice is? The very idea that I could "sell" rights to anybody, anywhere, anytime, ever...
They said release 'Remote Control' but we didn't want it on the label
They said, "Fly to Amsterdam", the people laughed but the press went mad
Someone's really smart
Complete control, that's a laugh
On the last tour my mates couldn't get in
I'd open up the back door but they'd get run out again
And at every hotel we was met by the law, come for the party, come to make sure
Have we done something wrong?
Complete control, even over this song
You’re my guitar hero
They said we'd be artistically free when we signed that bit of paper
They meant let's make a lotsa money and worry about it later
I'll never understand
Complete control, lemme see your other hand
I don’t trust you, so why should you trust me?
All over the news spread fast
They’re dirty, they're filthy, they ain't gonna last
This is Joe Public (Control) speaking
I'm controlled in the body (We always hate control), controlled in the mind
This is the top rockers (Control)
With your zone in the price you whore, comes to me (C, O, N, control)
Total, see you all in control
Total (Parent, control), see you all in control
We’ve got the rock ‘n’ roll ?????????? (C, O, N, control)
That means you
I kick it, I fight it, I gotta get up at it (C, O, N, control)
I gotta kick it
Copyright is an enemy to everybody's fruits of labour.
This is why I shall never put any arts I produce into the public domain. Who knows who will laugh at its purpose and legally jump around to buy it out again, and be able to lock me, the artist, out and away from the ability to copy and derive from my own works... never mind any subsequent derivative artists.
I shall obtain my incentives for my services through IndieGoGo and Kickstarter, then use a CC Licence and/or give irrevocable permission for everybody to copy my work however they like (I would still have authorship/plagiarism/defamation protection: these are concepts that have nothing to do with copyright but, unfortunately, they cannot be enforced separately and require copyright law for such enforcement, which makes me hate copyright law even more).
The only way I can trust that my work will stay in the public domain, and that my rights are protected, is if there is no copyright law to begin with. And not only that, but the fruits of labour of derivative artists will be protected, too.
Just remember: every time your fruits of labour is blocked by copyright, your rights to life, liberty and property get compromised. We, the orginal AND deviant artists, have crowdfunding. Both these groups can exist without the utopia that is copyright.
Copyright destroys the rights of a derivative artist to his life, liberty and property. Never forget it.
I would like to know how anybody can possibly be in a position to know where the boundaries of Fair Use lie.
We seem to have no problem with saying that nobody can possibly be good enough to police free expression without falling into corruption. But yet, we ARE good enough to know when it is fair to use and expand on subjective artistic works? Somehow when it comes to copyright, the slippery slope of corruption doesn't apply?
And of course, you see many copyright maximalists agreeing with this point, but then turn around and say that there should therefore be NO Fair Use whatsoever. And why shouldn't they? Either intellectual property is up for infringement or it isn't. Fair Use to them is the equivalent of breaking into a bank safe and only stealing a penny at most - which is still, at the end of the day, a form of theft. Well, at least the maximalists are being consistent.
I hate how copyright sets up gates in the middle of fields, and demands everybody walks through them.
It is the mere existence of the unnecessary gates that cause gatekeeperism, which in this case is the ability to hold onto not just a monopoly but THOUSANDS of monopolies, because each separate copyrighted work has monopolistic traits at least (you often hear how it is not a true monopoly because intellectual property is not physical - this is often claimed by those who cherry-pick when IP should and should not be treated as physical property whenever it suits them, creating a sense of unfalsifiability around copyright as a whole).
Why should it be possible for an organisation to hold the keys to someone else's gate anyway? How is it possible for an artist to be locked out of the rights to his own works in a world that claims this is in his best interests? Either the works "belong" to the artists or they do not. How can companies get away with taking what is apparently an inalienable right from artists? Quite simply: because they can. Because there is a buck of power that shouldn't be existing in the first place - and it is being passed around out of the hands of the artists and high up towards those who are in the best position to make the best of monopolies.
Intellectual property in the philosophical sense of "life, liberty and property" may indeed exist, but it definitely does not in the physical sense - because the philosophical meaning of property has two types: goods and services. Creativity is a service, and should be treated as such. Treating creativity as goods instead of services is ultimately dangerous to the artists - no other service that I know of is objectified in this way.
Treat creativity as services, and the rights of artists cannot possibly be trespassed on as much as they are now.
I love how Fox steals from Arrested Development, then claim they are the thieves.
This oppression towards Kickstarter lately has been all too predictable.
I wish copyright lobbyists would just get it over with already and put out all the scare stories about how crowdfunding is a threat to creators, a scam magnet etc and therefore it should be illegal.
All in the name of "fighting for the rights of artists to be funded", no doubt. Yep, fund an artist on Kickstarter and help him make a living, and you are participating in stealing.
Yes it is. The best way to describe memes is the "natural selection of ideas". Religions are superstitious nonsense that manifest from our tendencies to see patterns where no patterns exist, as well as our fear of death - and because all humans are similar in this respect, it is easy to see why a common idea that best suits the need for illusions would survive and spread.
It also explains why certain religions are more prominent in certain areas around the globe: simply being around a religious culture will make you more prone to taking on the ideas yourself, and is especially true when it comes to childhood indoctrination.
Memes and cultures are intertwined, and it is undoubtedly true that the internet is manifesting cultures of its own with its own memes due to the ease of putting together a video with a cheap camera, internet connection and CTRL C+V on a keyboard.
But yet, all this CTRL-Ving has to be resisted and oppressed according to copyright believers. This is hysterically delusional.
Watch as fools will try to say how all of this should be censored in the name of copyright. Absolute, fucking, fools.
Similar to how they would have censored the pirated copies of Animal Farm and 1984 that were circulating among those being oppressed by the Soviet Union in the name of, get this, "fighting the communist-pirate agenda". Either it is "communist", "terrorist", or just plain "thief". The one with the most interchangeable but contradictory insults is usually the one who is wrong.
We all know that SOPA and PIPA would have resembled the Soviet Union's methods of oppression as well as the Great Firewall of China's. They are in no fucking position to be saying they are "against communists". And we all know the piracy rate would have gone UP as a result of those laws just like China's piracy rate is 80% despite the Great Firewall. No amount of common sense gets through to the copyright maximalists whatsoever.
But maybe this will. There IS one country in the world that has probably reduced their piracy rate to 0%, due to the fact that its citizens probably do not know what arts actually are, and that is North Korea. So maybe it is possible!
My point about nominalisations was just to highlight the human tendency to take such a predictable approach to arts and science markets - it is not really related to the requirements of obtaining copyright and patent protection on works.
And because this tendency is as predictable as it is, we come up with IP or laws that try to best reflect IP. How we can assume anyone can possibly be in a position to know where the balances lie, I do not know. Personally I think both its laws and philosophy are rooted in the same falsehood - the idea that you can "fence" away your nominalised property, as it might be put by advocates of John Locke, only by restricting copying even within private spheres. But, as I have to say, it is not the only way to fence your fruits. Crowdfunding (aka the pinnacle market of ticket-based admission) is going to demolish copyright with extreme cultural discrediting, and patents are really just an indirect form of taxation to fund scientific research (the profiting potentials of said research, which by definition cannot be known until the research is carried out, may not necessarily match the fruits of labour that was put into carrying out that research, meaning that a free-market perspective falls short here).
I don't know why I sometimes write a capital C for Copyright - must be force of habit.
And don't be worried about being rude - how rude you are when expressing your opinions is not a factor in my analysis. In fact, it is welcomed and encouraged where my area of inquiry comes from. And I know I probably could have expressed my points conciser, but I like to write and unashamedly get carried away (and once I've realised I've written a ton awful, I don't have it in me to toss it all out).
(I seem to have typed a ton of stuff... again. I apologise if my points are too long here).
I am glad that you mentioned that Libertarians are divided on intellectual property issues. Libertarians are rarely divided at all, which is all the more so why it ought to be pointed out to the most zealous Copyright maximalists - even the political branch that is most committed to property rights and consistent principles of small government cannot make up its mind about IP.
The best way to think about IP is this: it is what is called in Linguistics a "nominalisation" - meaning the description of an action as if it were a tangible thing. Or in other words, turning a verb into a noun. We do it all the time as Psychologically easy representations: things like "love", "anger", "happiness", "success" do not actually exist as things you can put in a wheelbarrow. They are actions, not tangible objects. Yet, we talk about them as if they are things we can touch with our hands. "My love for you", "anger can be power", "happiness is all you need", "my success is paramount", etc. It is natural for humans to do this, but realists would say that you cannot tangibly hold these things because they are actions and not objects.
From this it is all too easy to see why humans would apply the same thinking to intellectual creations. Even although a market lies with creativity, we prefer to transform that market into one of creatIONS as a response to the supposed idea of the "free-rider" problem: instantly copying something for yourself with little-to-no cost which took the original creator much labour and cost. But this free-rider problem would only really exist if ticket-based admission was for some reason forbidden to take place for, say, album development while being allowed for rock gigs. There is no reason why an artist cannot set up a ticket-admission-system to collect funds for his creative labour for a book, big-budget movie, TV series, software development, etc in the same way that musical teams, theatre performance teams or pantomime teams have done so for centuries.
Tickets, as you know, eliminate the free-rider problem because they are refundable upon a performance not going ahead, meaning that everyone keeps their share. And there will no doubt be ways of insuring these refunds in the same way that those publishers who rely on IP today are confident in investing in the labour knowing that they will have to take the fall if the projects flop halfway. There is also the possibility of insurance markets in these areas. "Good credit ratings" may indeed apply to those who can be trusted to deliver creative projects without fail. These are noteworthy parallels indeed.
This is how you talk about creativity as a verb, not a noun. Those who use ticket-based incentives to put on performances, whether it is Muse playing in massive stadiums or sport's teams doing likewise, are revolving around intellectual SERVICING, the verbal alternative to the tangible intellectual property, and with none of the human rights compromises.
I have yet to hear why Copyright believers do not think the ticket system can apply to high-labour projects. Often, they try to put forward the argument of "retroactive incentives" - the right to gather funds for your work long after the work is done, which is an IP-based argument. To someone like me who sees things through a lens of intellectual servicing instead, the retroactive funds simply do not make sense.
If you sell a house for a good amount of money only to find that the person you sold it to has discovered a priceless artifact buried in the garden that is worth millions, you would not then be able to demand that the deal be reversed so that you can get your "fair share" of the value of this artifact. The deal was already done. And in the same way, it is hard to see why IP should forever be maximalised on the basis that an IP "could potentially make millions 20 or 30 years from now, even although the labour only costs hundreds right now." Nobody would ever be able to trade like this with physical property rights or service-trading rights. The buyer of that house simply would not buy if the discovery of such an artifact would mean he'd lose out on the house and artifact completely.
Intellectual servicing also means that markets are not destroyed as they would have been under IP. IP makes deviant markets bound by the "permission" of the original artists, therefore making the deviant's rights to his fruits of labour open to oppression. However with intellectual servicing, this line of thinking would not exist as both the original AND the deviant's fruits of labour would be protected. The fashion industry is a prime example of this, where both original and deviant services are respected and encouraged. And as a result, cultural evolution of markets thrive to much economic benefit. IP laws introduced in this area of fashion business would, as has been pointed out many times, destroy the existence of these thriving markets in a Communist-like manner.
If IP, particularly Copyright, is going to make the claim that this destruction is worth it because the free-rider problem is "unsolvable otherwise", it better be able to back up that claim. But it cannot. Copyright still cannot prevent people from free-riding, such as the person who watches preowned DVDs only to resell them for the price he bought it for, and listens to simply borrowed music, without giving the artists a penny (the only thing being deprived here is the ability of the two traders to watch the movie simultaneously, which let's be honest is very little to consider economically - and even THEN, two people can easily watch the same single DVD on a TV at once and follow every Copyright law in the book). Also, in a world where you can pirate any multimedia for free, people nonetheless still pay afterwards, which indicates a moral force that can exist without the need for Copyright's existence.
These two facts put the bold claims of Copyright to doubt. To say that Copyright can "control morality" in the way it wishes is a claim that is parallel to the Conservative impulse of creating "deterrence" to control morality, which has long been frowned upon - why should we revolve society around a train of thought that bases its moral decisions on the grounds that "it is the law"? If you met someone who said that "the only reason that I don't kill anybody is because there is a law against it", would you treat such a person with respect? Or what about "the only reason I don't kill anybody is because God tells me not to"? This is why all of your alarm bells must ring whenever somebody claims to you "the only reason you fund artists whenever you experience their creativity is because there is a law that says you must - without this law, you would be a dickhead who couldn't possibly know right from wrong".
The enforcement of Copyright is in this day and age is now probably more futile than the war on drugs, which is saying something (and probably more futile than the war on prostitution for god's sake... and that is pretty fucking futile... pardon the pun). Yet, all the evidence shows that creativity is booming much greater than ever before. Whenever file-sharers are told that every file-shared is somehow "one sale lost" for the artist, they quite rightfully laugh as they pay their debts accordingly.
This is because, as I keep pointing out, we have a tendency to fund the SERVICE of creativity, and not to bother wasting so much time about whether the copies of the intellectual property should each be funded. Occam's Razor is on my side here, and I can claim it confidently.
"I have a suggestion, sir, erm... I reckon everybody involved in creativity would benefit if the Copyright laws were life plus 69 years, not 70."
"How dare you. Don't you know that it is within a corpse's right to refuse his market and not come back to life to participate in it? If anything, he needs life plus afterlife. Evil copyright abolitionist terroromunist. You're fired."
As you can see I am not very confident about Maria Pallante's future after her giving very gentle criticism. We all saw what happened to Derek Khanna.
The plain fact that an unlawful download does not necessarily equate to a lost sale just goes to show that the true philosophy behind the market of creativity is intellectual servicing, not intellectual property.
People end up paying after they pirate because they are paying for the creativity, not the creation.
And as far as I am concerned, this moral imperative can exist without Copyright. I don't need Copyright law to tell me that there is a moral imperative to fund the creativity that I experience. To tell me otherwise is insulting. It's basically saying "without Copyright, you wouldn't know right from wrong". Well, as Christopher Hitchens used to say: "Please do not talk to me in that tone of voice."
The intellectual servicing philosophy needs to, and will, triumph over its inferior opposite.
On the post: When You Sign Away Your Copyright To A Publisher, What If They Hold You Hostage Over It?
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I would say there are big differences between copyright and selling tickets: copyright necessarily compromises other freedoms, while selling tickets does not. Not to mention that you can still steal from artists when you are following copyright law, while selling tickets makes it impossible to steal and not break laws. A band can choose not to go ahead with the gig if they do not sell enough tickets at a venue, which is the "all-or-nothing" model as described by Kickstarter. A band can therefore hold the free-riders accountable: if not enough people pay, the free-riders cannot gain anything. This is a vital insight that gets overlooked. Crowdfunding has a greater chance of making pirates pay for content than copyright law does.
And do not underestimate this form for big budget stuff: I promise you that within the next ten years you will see the big companies using crowdfunding as their primary means of gaining incentives, and it will become THE model for artists. It will not be Netflix nor Spotify. If someone like Justin Bieber announced on his Facebook and Twitter feeds to his hopeless cult followers that he will be gaining funding for his next album through enough Kickstarter/IndieGoGo funds, I promise you he will make millions within days.
And as for this issue of buying "finished products" over funding creativity as a service, I should mention that one of my criticisms of crowdfunding websites is that they seem to not want to keep funding campaigns open after the deadline has passed, and after the artist has successfully gathered initial funds. I am not sure why the sites do this, as they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from pledges put after deadlines (5% of each pledge).
I claim that this is one of the best things they can do because it will culturally affirm that the more money people put in, the higher quality work will come out. It will also mean the chance to hold money until the consumer gains more information about the project as it progresses. As the project moves forward and as more progress is displayed on the page, the more people will be willing to fund after the deadline in order to boost the quality to a standard they want. This is backed up by the proliferation of "stretch goals" that you are seeing on crowdfunding websites - if the artists get more money, they'll make more stuff. Accountability forced upon the market, in other words.
In fact, the "stretch goals" are more or less the "limited access" that you are asking for.
On the post: When You Sign Away Your Copyright To A Publisher, What If They Hold You Hostage Over It?
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This assumes two things: first, that a world without copyright would mean that artists could not charge anything, which is what I refute with treating the property as a service via crowdfunding and accountability of free-riders; second, which is far more important, that it is somehow not possible to steal from the artists while following every copyright law in the book... when it is.
If a retailer were to sell a DVD to a person who walks into his shop, he would have no problem. But he may have a problem with twenty people of the same crowd walking in at the same time demanding to buy a single DVD for them all to watch. The copyright advocate must say that it should be perfectly legal for all twenty of them to watch that single DVD, either simultaneously or taking it in turns by passing the DVD between them. In any case, the artist loses out on nineteen sales. Copyright is ultimately a utopia in this sense - free-riders can still work around the system and still follow all the rules.
"But we'd raise the initial prices to compensate for that" is often the rebuttal here, but you still do not solve this problem, you only displace it further. A rise in prices would encourage more DVD swapping and reselling - or a slowdown of sales as a result of the free-riders waiting for either the original or resale price to drop. Indeed, you only need to buy, watch and then resell whenever you want to experience the creativity again. If you believe in the way that IP can be stolen from a party by people within their own private spheres, which is what is meant by unauthorised copying, you have to see the comparison.
Isn't that retailer entitled to sell twenty copies instead of one? If so, why so?
Another conundrum is the following: if a retailer were to buy CDs at £10 each from the artist, then go on to resell them at £20 each because the artist was not aware of the potential market, is the retailer taking part in fair capitalism or committing IP theft? There is no way to know. But of course, at this point copyright advocates will cherry-pick physical property rights at just this moment when it suits them, saying that the profit making is justified here.
And to your other points: it is perfectly possible to create a form of crowdfunding without the internet. As long as we can communicate with each other, we can keep ourselves updated on how the project is going, as well as collecting refundable pledges. So do not mistake me as somebody who is only advocating crowdfunding because of the internet. I would be advocating it whether the internet existed or not. Ticket-based admission has been around for hundreds of years.
And on the contrary, I think I defend "intellectual property", i.e. the Lockean sense of Life, Liberty and Property, much stronger than copyright advocates do. As you know, the "intellectual property" of derivative artists gets stamped on and in some cases the very existence of their Life, Liberty and Property is denied. The euphemism that is often to describe this behaviour is "you must make your own works and not use works that do not belong to you". A complete and utter refusal to acknowledge the rights of artists to fruits of labour, in other words. Try demanding the shutting down of deviantArt on this basis, and see how far you get. Or indeed, insist that Disney should not have retold certain stories. Or even further, stop the swapping of fan fiction. Or even more, insist that all remixes, anime music videos, etc should be forbidden.
The rebuttal to this is usually "but if everyone makes derivative works from originals, there would be no investment in originals and the derivative artists would lose out, too." Not with crowdfunding. Here, BOTH these markets can exist (why is it that nobody is willing to trust the free market to do the right thing when it actually CAN, for a change?).
On the post: When You Sign Away Your Copyright To A Publisher, What If They Hold You Hostage Over It?
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On the post: When You Sign Away Your Copyright To A Publisher, What If They Hold You Hostage Over It?
Re:
In free market theory, if an alternative label in this case were to offer a better deal to an artist, the artist would take that deal instead, meaning that the other labels would likewise have to offer those kind of deals in order to stay competitive. The end result is supposedly economic value that best reflects what everybody thinks they are worth.
But with copyright, you can never really be sure this is the case. It is perfectly possible for all artists across the world to unite together and insist to ALL labels that they will never give them their copyrights (instead, negotiating profits separately). Surely, with something as powerful as copyright, an artist would want to hold onto it, right? Therefore free market theory must say that the best reflected value is that artists retain all copyrights, right? But it is not like this. Labels can and do insist that their word is final when it comes to snatching up the copyrights of hard-working artists, and the free market cannot correct it.
Why do labels do it? Because they can. Because they are able to. Because it is merely possible for them to do it. This is why copyright is so poisonous: it creates a buck of power that's existence was never necessary, and for those of us who think that the separation of powers is a real thing, we have to be skeptical about bringing in certain unnecessary powers of our own choosing. According to copyright, the only way artists can make any living at all is to pass on this buck of power, their "natural" rights, to the middlemen - in this case the broadcasters - and the middlemen do this because, as I need to stress again, they can. The artists get locked out of their own "property", supposedly in their own best interests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_Control
The above gives you a brief summary of what I am on about. This quote sums it up:
Bernie [Rhodes] had a meeting in The Ship in Soho after the Anarchy Tour. He said he wanted complete control...I came out of the club with Paul [Simonon] collapsing on the pavement in hysterics at those words.
Complete Control. It is no wonder that The Clash named their famous anti-label song with this title. I really do not think the criticism of "well, you should have known that the labels would take total control over your band when you signed away your copyrights to them" is valid, since those making this criticism have no way of explaining how the artists can stand up for themselves.
Labels wield this unwelcome sword because they have many vulnerable, desperate and/or naive artists to exploit. This is disgraceful. The ability to strip an artist of his deserved natural rights would be impossible if copyright did not exist to begin with. Those natural rights can be defended so much more eloquently: we have crowdfunding, which quite rightfully treats creative arts as services, which is what they ultimately are. The labels are terrified of crowdfunding for this reason: they will never be able to strip an artist of his rights in the same way if artists can turn to crowdfunding instead of copyright.
This is an exaggeration, but I am going to say it anyway (the person I'm about to reference was a much, much greater emancipator): crowdfunding (the peak of ticket-based admission economics) is to copyright as what Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was to religious creationism: an Occam's Razor explanation that explains so much while using as few constants as possible. Everything claimed by advocates of John Locke, primarily "life, liberty and property", can be defended with tickets/crowdfunding. They surely have to appreciate that no private liberties need to be sacrificed in order to enforce a futile "fence", and that free-riders can be held to account through the simple fact that if they free-ride too much, what they hope to gain won't be as high a standard as they wanted.
Plus, derivative artists will obtain THEIR rights to life, liberty and property that has been blocked by copyright for so long. They have fruits of labour worth defending, in my opinion. And they don't get nearly enough recognition. Lockeans, take note.
So in this case, I have to side with the artists who find it hard to compete with the labels who wield the power to say "We can take copyrights to works we never worked on, because we hold the gates to the communication channels and noone can challenge our ability to do this. What are you going to do about it? You want a living, don't you? Then give us your rights!" Artists do not have to put up with it. Which is why copyright needs to be abolished. Why is the process of giving copyrights to a label called "selling the rights to" the record, anyway? Hasn't it occurred to anybody how disgusting that tone of voice is? The very idea that I could "sell" rights to anybody, anywhere, anytime, ever...
On the post: When You Sign Away Your Copyright To A Publisher, What If They Hold You Hostage Over It?
On the post: Broadcast Treaty Is Baaaaaack: Plan To Create Yet Another Copyright-Like Right For Hollywood
Re:
They said, "Fly to Amsterdam", the people laughed but the press went mad
Someone's really smart
Complete control, that's a laugh
On the last tour my mates couldn't get in
I'd open up the back door but they'd get run out again
And at every hotel we was met by the law, come for the party, come to make sure
Have we done something wrong?
Complete control, even over this song
You’re my guitar hero
They said we'd be artistically free when we signed that bit of paper
They meant let's make a lotsa money and worry about it later
I'll never understand
Complete control, lemme see your other hand
I don’t trust you, so why should you trust me?
All over the news spread fast
They’re dirty, they're filthy, they ain't gonna last
This is Joe Public (Control) speaking
I'm controlled in the body (We always hate control), controlled in the mind
This is the top rockers (Control)
With your zone in the price you whore, comes to me (C, O, N, control)
Total, see you all in control
Total (Parent, control), see you all in control
We’ve got the rock ‘n’ roll ?????????? (C, O, N, control)
That means you
I kick it, I fight it, I gotta get up at it (C, O, N, control)
I gotta kick it
:)
On the post: Broadcast Treaty Is Baaaaaack: Plan To Create Yet Another Copyright-Like Right For Hollywood
Copyright is an enemy to everybody's fruits of labour.
I shall obtain my incentives for my services through IndieGoGo and Kickstarter, then use a CC Licence and/or give irrevocable permission for everybody to copy my work however they like (I would still have authorship/plagiarism/defamation protection: these are concepts that have nothing to do with copyright but, unfortunately, they cannot be enforced separately and require copyright law for such enforcement, which makes me hate copyright law even more).
The only way I can trust that my work will stay in the public domain, and that my rights are protected, is if there is no copyright law to begin with. And not only that, but the fruits of labour of derivative artists will be protected, too.
Just remember: every time your fruits of labour is blocked by copyright, your rights to life, liberty and property get compromised. We, the orginal AND deviant artists, have crowdfunding. Both these groups can exist without the utopia that is copyright.
Copyright destroys the rights of a derivative artist to his life, liberty and property. Never forget it.
On the post: Exploring Fair Use And Fair Dealing Around The Globe
We seem to have no problem with saying that nobody can possibly be good enough to police free expression without falling into corruption. But yet, we ARE good enough to know when it is fair to use and expand on subjective artistic works? Somehow when it comes to copyright, the slippery slope of corruption doesn't apply?
And of course, you see many copyright maximalists agreeing with this point, but then turn around and say that there should therefore be NO Fair Use whatsoever. And why shouldn't they? Either intellectual property is up for infringement or it isn't. Fair Use to them is the equivalent of breaking into a bank safe and only stealing a penny at most - which is still, at the end of the day, a form of theft. Well, at least the maximalists are being consistent.
On the post: Successful Self-Published Ebook Authors Sells Print & Movie Rights For $1 Million, But Keeps Digital Rights To Himself
It is the mere existence of the unnecessary gates that cause gatekeeperism, which in this case is the ability to hold onto not just a monopoly but THOUSANDS of monopolies, because each separate copyrighted work has monopolistic traits at least (you often hear how it is not a true monopoly because intellectual property is not physical - this is often claimed by those who cherry-pick when IP should and should not be treated as physical property whenever it suits them, creating a sense of unfalsifiability around copyright as a whole).
Why should it be possible for an organisation to hold the keys to someone else's gate anyway? How is it possible for an artist to be locked out of the rights to his own works in a world that claims this is in his best interests? Either the works "belong" to the artists or they do not. How can companies get away with taking what is apparently an inalienable right from artists? Quite simply: because they can. Because there is a buck of power that shouldn't be existing in the first place - and it is being passed around out of the hands of the artists and high up towards those who are in the best position to make the best of monopolies.
Intellectual property in the philosophical sense of "life, liberty and property" may indeed exist, but it definitely does not in the physical sense - because the philosophical meaning of property has two types: goods and services. Creativity is a service, and should be treated as such. Treating creativity as goods instead of services is ultimately dangerous to the artists - no other service that I know of is objectified in this way.
Treat creativity as services, and the rights of artists cannot possibly be trespassed on as much as they are now.
On the post: ReDigi Loses: You Can't Resell Your MP3s (Unless You Sell Your Whole Hard Drive)
On the post: Arrested Development Documentary Has To Hit Up Kickstarter Because Fox Claims Copyright On Set Photos
I love how Fox steals from Arrested Development, then claim they are the thieves.
I wish copyright lobbyists would just get it over with already and put out all the scare stories about how crowdfunding is a threat to creators, a scam magnet etc and therefore it should be illegal.
All in the name of "fighting for the rights of artists to be funded", no doubt. Yep, fund an artist on Kickstarter and help him make a living, and you are participating in stealing.
On the post: The Arab Street Responds To Fear Of Memes By Producing Tons Of Meme Videos
Re: Memes become traditions
It also explains why certain religions are more prominent in certain areas around the globe: simply being around a religious culture will make you more prone to taking on the ideas yourself, and is especially true when it comes to childhood indoctrination.
Memes and cultures are intertwined, and it is undoubtedly true that the internet is manifesting cultures of its own with its own memes due to the ease of putting together a video with a cheap camera, internet connection and CTRL C+V on a keyboard.
But yet, all this CTRL-Ving has to be resisted and oppressed according to copyright believers. This is hysterically delusional.
On the post: The Arab Street Responds To Fear Of Memes By Producing Tons Of Meme Videos
Copyright: more important than revolutions?
Similar to how they would have censored the pirated copies of Animal Farm and 1984 that were circulating among those being oppressed by the Soviet Union in the name of, get this, "fighting the communist-pirate agenda". Either it is "communist", "terrorist", or just plain "thief". The one with the most interchangeable but contradictory insults is usually the one who is wrong.
We all know that SOPA and PIPA would have resembled the Soviet Union's methods of oppression as well as the Great Firewall of China's. They are in no fucking position to be saying they are "against communists". And we all know the piracy rate would have gone UP as a result of those laws just like China's piracy rate is 80% despite the Great Firewall. No amount of common sense gets through to the copyright maximalists whatsoever.
But maybe this will. There IS one country in the world that has probably reduced their piracy rate to 0%, due to the fact that its citizens probably do not know what arts actually are, and that is North Korea. So maybe it is possible!
On the post: Jim Harper's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
Re: Re: Verbs, not nouns.
My point about nominalisations was just to highlight the human tendency to take such a predictable approach to arts and science markets - it is not really related to the requirements of obtaining copyright and patent protection on works.
And because this tendency is as predictable as it is, we come up with IP or laws that try to best reflect IP. How we can assume anyone can possibly be in a position to know where the balances lie, I do not know. Personally I think both its laws and philosophy are rooted in the same falsehood - the idea that you can "fence" away your nominalised property, as it might be put by advocates of John Locke, only by restricting copying even within private spheres. But, as I have to say, it is not the only way to fence your fruits. Crowdfunding (aka the pinnacle market of ticket-based admission) is going to demolish copyright with extreme cultural discrediting, and patents are really just an indirect form of taxation to fund scientific research (the profiting potentials of said research, which by definition cannot be known until the research is carried out, may not necessarily match the fruits of labour that was put into carrying out that research, meaning that a free-market perspective falls short here).
I don't know why I sometimes write a capital C for Copyright - must be force of habit.
And don't be worried about being rude - how rude you are when expressing your opinions is not a factor in my analysis. In fact, it is welcomed and encouraged where my area of inquiry comes from. And I know I probably could have expressed my points conciser, but I like to write and unashamedly get carried away (and once I've realised I've written a ton awful, I don't have it in me to toss it all out).
On the post: Blowhard UK MP Says Ban Twitter Because Grandstanding Is Fun
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=IAAi9CG7WW0
On the post: Jim Harper's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
Verbs, not nouns.
I am glad that you mentioned that Libertarians are divided on intellectual property issues. Libertarians are rarely divided at all, which is all the more so why it ought to be pointed out to the most zealous Copyright maximalists - even the political branch that is most committed to property rights and consistent principles of small government cannot make up its mind about IP.
The best way to think about IP is this: it is what is called in Linguistics a "nominalisation" - meaning the description of an action as if it were a tangible thing. Or in other words, turning a verb into a noun. We do it all the time as Psychologically easy representations: things like "love", "anger", "happiness", "success" do not actually exist as things you can put in a wheelbarrow. They are actions, not tangible objects. Yet, we talk about them as if they are things we can touch with our hands. "My love for you", "anger can be power", "happiness is all you need", "my success is paramount", etc. It is natural for humans to do this, but realists would say that you cannot tangibly hold these things because they are actions and not objects.
From this it is all too easy to see why humans would apply the same thinking to intellectual creations. Even although a market lies with creativity, we prefer to transform that market into one of creatIONS as a response to the supposed idea of the "free-rider" problem: instantly copying something for yourself with little-to-no cost which took the original creator much labour and cost. But this free-rider problem would only really exist if ticket-based admission was for some reason forbidden to take place for, say, album development while being allowed for rock gigs. There is no reason why an artist cannot set up a ticket-admission-system to collect funds for his creative labour for a book, big-budget movie, TV series, software development, etc in the same way that musical teams, theatre performance teams or pantomime teams have done so for centuries.
Tickets, as you know, eliminate the free-rider problem because they are refundable upon a performance not going ahead, meaning that everyone keeps their share. And there will no doubt be ways of insuring these refunds in the same way that those publishers who rely on IP today are confident in investing in the labour knowing that they will have to take the fall if the projects flop halfway. There is also the possibility of insurance markets in these areas. "Good credit ratings" may indeed apply to those who can be trusted to deliver creative projects without fail. These are noteworthy parallels indeed.
This is how you talk about creativity as a verb, not a noun. Those who use ticket-based incentives to put on performances, whether it is Muse playing in massive stadiums or sport's teams doing likewise, are revolving around intellectual SERVICING, the verbal alternative to the tangible intellectual property, and with none of the human rights compromises.
I have yet to hear why Copyright believers do not think the ticket system can apply to high-labour projects. Often, they try to put forward the argument of "retroactive incentives" - the right to gather funds for your work long after the work is done, which is an IP-based argument. To someone like me who sees things through a lens of intellectual servicing instead, the retroactive funds simply do not make sense.
If you sell a house for a good amount of money only to find that the person you sold it to has discovered a priceless artifact buried in the garden that is worth millions, you would not then be able to demand that the deal be reversed so that you can get your "fair share" of the value of this artifact. The deal was already done. And in the same way, it is hard to see why IP should forever be maximalised on the basis that an IP "could potentially make millions 20 or 30 years from now, even although the labour only costs hundreds right now." Nobody would ever be able to trade like this with physical property rights or service-trading rights. The buyer of that house simply would not buy if the discovery of such an artifact would mean he'd lose out on the house and artifact completely.
Intellectual servicing also means that markets are not destroyed as they would have been under IP. IP makes deviant markets bound by the "permission" of the original artists, therefore making the deviant's rights to his fruits of labour open to oppression. However with intellectual servicing, this line of thinking would not exist as both the original AND the deviant's fruits of labour would be protected. The fashion industry is a prime example of this, where both original and deviant services are respected and encouraged. And as a result, cultural evolution of markets thrive to much economic benefit. IP laws introduced in this area of fashion business would, as has been pointed out many times, destroy the existence of these thriving markets in a Communist-like manner.
If IP, particularly Copyright, is going to make the claim that this destruction is worth it because the free-rider problem is "unsolvable otherwise", it better be able to back up that claim. But it cannot. Copyright still cannot prevent people from free-riding, such as the person who watches preowned DVDs only to resell them for the price he bought it for, and listens to simply borrowed music, without giving the artists a penny (the only thing being deprived here is the ability of the two traders to watch the movie simultaneously, which let's be honest is very little to consider economically - and even THEN, two people can easily watch the same single DVD on a TV at once and follow every Copyright law in the book). Also, in a world where you can pirate any multimedia for free, people nonetheless still pay afterwards, which indicates a moral force that can exist without the need for Copyright's existence.
These two facts put the bold claims of Copyright to doubt. To say that Copyright can "control morality" in the way it wishes is a claim that is parallel to the Conservative impulse of creating "deterrence" to control morality, which has long been frowned upon - why should we revolve society around a train of thought that bases its moral decisions on the grounds that "it is the law"? If you met someone who said that "the only reason that I don't kill anybody is because there is a law against it", would you treat such a person with respect? Or what about "the only reason I don't kill anybody is because God tells me not to"? This is why all of your alarm bells must ring whenever somebody claims to you "the only reason you fund artists whenever you experience their creativity is because there is a law that says you must - without this law, you would be a dickhead who couldn't possibly know right from wrong".
The enforcement of Copyright is in this day and age is now probably more futile than the war on drugs, which is saying something (and probably more futile than the war on prostitution for god's sake... and that is pretty fucking futile... pardon the pun). Yet, all the evidence shows that creativity is booming much greater than ever before. Whenever file-sharers are told that every file-shared is somehow "one sale lost" for the artist, they quite rightfully laugh as they pay their debts accordingly.
This is because, as I keep pointing out, we have a tendency to fund the SERVICE of creativity, and not to bother wasting so much time about whether the copies of the intellectual property should each be funded. Occam's Razor is on my side here, and I can claim it confidently.
On the post: IsoHunt Still Guilty Of Contributory Infringement
Opponents who posted above. I would like to ask a question:
I am curious because I am a skeptic and advocator of scientific inquiry.
On the post: Motion Picture Association: The Cloud Is A Threat To Us And The Best Response Is Censorship
Because, as it is so often said, more access restrictions means more piracy - and in China's case, 80% of the whole world's.
On the post: Register Of Copyright Suggests That Personal Downloading Should Not Be Seen As 'Piracy'
"How dare you. Don't you know that it is within a corpse's right to refuse his market and not come back to life to participate in it? If anything, he needs life plus afterlife. Evil copyright abolitionist terroromunist. You're fired."
As you can see I am not very confident about Maria Pallante's future after her giving very gentle criticism. We all saw what happened to Derek Khanna.
On the post: Super Meat Boy Developer To EA: DRM Hurts Your Bottom Line More Than Piracy Does
People end up paying after they pirate because they are paying for the creativity, not the creation.
And as far as I am concerned, this moral imperative can exist without Copyright. I don't need Copyright law to tell me that there is a moral imperative to fund the creativity that I experience. To tell me otherwise is insulting. It's basically saying "without Copyright, you wouldn't know right from wrong". Well, as Christopher Hitchens used to say: "Please do not talk to me in that tone of voice."
The intellectual servicing philosophy needs to, and will, triumph over its inferior opposite.
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