Yes, music and recordings thereof remain scarce, and there remains a good market for them.
What is no longer scarce are copies of recordings. Copyright is supposed to enforce scarcity (unnaturally), but its dam has broken thanks to the Internet and digital technology.
So, copies are no longer scarce and the only ones upset by this are publishers who had been relying on fans being able to make their own copies, having to buy them from authorised vendors.
Unfortunately, far too many people have been blinded into conflating the copy as the recording, and so assume that if copies are free that recordings must be free and musicians can no longer sell their recordings. This is complete bunkum. The only one unable to sell anything is the manufacturer of copies. The musician can still sell their music and recordings and their fans can still buy them. The fact that everyone can make their own copies for nothing makes no difference except to musicians who persist in believing they have to sell them to record labels in order that the musician gets a 1% royalty on sale of copies.
Musicians could sell their recordings directly to their fans - if they weren't so brainwashed, and the labels weren't so keen to prevent themselves being disintermediated.
Remember, although fans can make their own copies, they can't make the artist's music, nor can they record their studio performances. And you need music and a recording before you can make a free copy.
So tomorrow's musician no longer hires a record company to sell copies for them, instead they sell a recording directly to their fans. The market for copies has ended.
Mike, there's a vital omission when you say "a digital good once created is no longer scarce". It is rather "a digital work once created AND widely circulated is no longer scarce".
There is a gap between creation and circulation that the creator (including privy collaborators/confidants) can utilise to propose an exchange of their created, uncirculated work with the fans who want it widely circulated to them (via file-sharing).
For example, the artist can provide a sample, or low quality preview of their work, just as a programmer can provide a binary to demonstrate their source code prior to sale. Once sold, once released in exchange for money, the work circulates without constraint.
In the 17th century the global telecommunications infrastructure necessary to reach an audience of billions was rather lacking. One had to be a minstrel roaming from village to town, but one still survived. Alternatively, one had the fortune to be discovered by a sugar daddy (king, church, aristocrat, etc.) aka patron.
Hence the attraction in the 18-20th centuries of a monopoly on the reproduction/performance/sale of copies.
In the 21st century monopolies are not only ineffective, we don't need them (only those who've collected them say that). A musician can now set up shop on a website and have a an audience of a billion not-necessarily-wealthy patrons, or fans as we call them, without even leaving their armchair.
What's a little lacking are the facilities for artists to do financial exchanges with billions of fans. That's what I'm working on (ContingencyMarket.com).
Copyright is so called because it represents the suspension of the individual's natural right to copy - in order to grant this as a transferable privilege attached to 'original' works - for the ulterior benefit of the press (monopoly) and the state (against sedition).
So actually, both monkeys and humans are born with the natural right to copy each other. It's just that we're stupid enough to allow ourselves to be brainwashed into believing that copying each other is not only morally wrong but detrimental to mankind's progress.
Unlike humans, chimps aren't so stupid as to create laws that prevent them copying each other.
It wasn't until quite late in mankind's cultural and technological development (achieved through a process of continuous improvement aka copying) at the dawn of the industrial revolution, that some unprincipled legislators were given enough backhanders that they created the monopolies of copyright and patent (on the galling pretext they would advance mankind's progress).
And now all we can do is engage in this depressing doublespeak that copyright is of course most worthy, but in an inexhaustible number of cases, a complete fucking joke.
It is copyright that is making monkeys out of us all.
Actually, the labels are the ones who buy/produce/finance recordings. What they want you to buy are copies. Millions of copies that cost next to nothing to make or distribute.
The last thing the labels want a musician's fans to buy is the recording, because that then blows the other half of the label's raison d'etre out of the water (along with distribution of copies). When fans buy the artist's recording as well as promotign the artist, freely distributing copies of their work, the artist gets paid and the fans get the music.
The problem is not between the artists and their fans, but between the artist and their label, and the label and the artist's fans.
Yes, counterfeiting involves a falsehood, a clear wrong. Copying on the other hand, is completely natural and something people have done since they had brains and eyeballs.
Producing a replica and selling it is a replica is fine (if the purchaser is informed it is a replica).
Thus selling a perfect/digital copy of one of your legitimately obtained DVDs as a perfect/digital copy is wholly ethical, violates no-one's (natural) rights. It just infringes some corporation's commercial monopoly as granted to them in the 18th century (suspending the public's cultural liberty in the process).
What isn't fine is ripping a DVD to a low res MP4 file and pretending it's a perfect/digital copy of a DVD in order to deceive someone into paying more for it than they would otherwise.
Thus there's nothing wrong with copying a drug if the copy is as good as the original and sold as a good copy (it just infringes a patent). The wrong is in producing a grievously inferior copy and selling it as the original, e.g. soap powder as cocaine, or salt as aspirin.
The only natural barrier to copying is privacy. A state granted monopoly is an unnatural and unethical constraint on a natural act.
Clearly, people have had a natural right to protect their lives against violent attackers since homo became sapiens (you'll get there too one day). That right to life supersedes the right to copy, so does the natural right to privacy.
The right to copy was suspended in the 18th century - a fundamental injustice - to create the privilege of copyright (from 'right to copy').
So, I quite agree with you that taking other people's hard work against their will is nothing to do with anyone's right to liberty, indeed, it's a violation of other people's natural right to privacy. Such a natural exclusive right was even recognised by the US Constitution.
However, when you sell someone your work (or a copy thereof), when you give someone your work of your own free will, then it is theirs to do with as they will. In other words they are naturally at liberty to make copies or derivatives of what is now their private possession, and to give or sell their work in doing so to others. This cultural liberty is unnaturally suspended by the privilege of copyright.
Rewarding authors and their readers was an excuse made up to justify copyright's suspension of the public's cultural liberty.
It was actually all about consolidating the Stationers' guild's de facto monopolies and providing a proxy censor for the crown against sedition. ACTA is exactly the same.
The natural right to make copies dates back to copying cave paintings and is supposed to be protected by all enlightened and egalitarian societies.
So, from the perspective of natural law, copyright is illegal, a privilege and an injustice, and piracy (like liberating slaves) is an ethical assertion of fundamental rights.
The sad thing is, so many musicians believe you would become rich - and so should be arrested and thrown into jail the moment you try to sell a single copy.
Having the liberty to make and sell copies, isn't a license to print money. In fact that's the point of copyright: to suspend people's liberty to make copies so they're forced to pay the printer a monopoly inflated price for them. Without the monopoly, the price of copies falls to zero (it has anyway).
Thus enlightened artists emancipate their audiences to share or sell copies as the market permits. They are left with the business they've always been in: selling their music to those who want to buy it. It's just that buyer has changed from the record label to the fans. The fans don't need to buy copies any more, but they still want the music.
I should emphasise that a counterfeit is unethical because it intends to exploit its deception. A copy or imitation that is honest in intention is fine.
It's the attempt to maliciously impair someone's apprehension of the truth that's the wrong, not the act of imitation or reproduction.
It is a pity so many believe copyright infringement to be unethical, instead of merely disobedience of a commercial privilege that is fundamentally unethical in the first place.
A counterfeit is a copy that falsely purports to be the original work, or an authorised copy.
When you burn a CD to give to a friend (without the copyright holder's permission), you simply create an unauthorised copy. You don't create a counterfeit.
If however your friend downloads the album art, prints a liner, shrinkwraps the CD case for sale at a car boot sale, then they have created a counterfeit.
Counterfeits are ALWAYS unethical because they involve falsehood.
If you purchase (or are given) an authorised copy, then any copy you make is ALWAYS ethical because you have a natural right to copy (share and build upon) the objects in your legitimate possession and dispose of them at your liberty.
Unfortunately, that natural right to copy was suspended in the 18th century to create the privilege of copyright for the printing industry (Stationers' Guild). No doubt most of the public assumed it was about preventing plagiarism.
300 years later ACTA represents a similar attempt to confuse people into believing draconian legislation is needed to prevent counterfeiting, when instead it's about transforming the 18th century's monopoly of copying into the 21st century's control of internetworked communication.
From the privilege of excluding others from making copies, to the privilege of excluding others from communicating via the Internet.
And the plebs are supposed to think "Oh, yes, we must have a law to stamp out pirates and counterfeiters".
ACTA is about transforming the Internet into a cartel owned theme park, where people must pay to enter, and are tolerated only so long as they consume what they're fed, and pay for it, again and again.
Instead of 'give it away and pray', how about considering it a promotional investment, and inviting pledges for the next one (a sequel), e.g. via Kickstarter.
That way no donations are involved, i.e. it's pure business.
Demonstrate your talent and then invite the resulting audience to commission your next performance. Rinse and repeat. Each performance is paid for by the audience from the previous one. So everyone ends up with movies they can freely share with their friends, and yet the movie maker is paid for their work.
I think http://Vodo.net is doing this sort of thing. No doubt many others are too.
Jamendo could be a useful source of license free music.
Also see The Patron's Jukebox for my suggestion of how the future will probably play out positively for those who set their music free, compared to those who erect paywalls around it.
I think you want 'Abuse' - two doors down on your right.
This is 'Argument'.
Those artists with large audiences will earn large amounts of money from those who WANT to pay them to produce their art.
No-one has an argument with that. What people argue about is whether an artist deserves to be paid to such an extent that people should be forced to pay them, whether through taxation or loss of liberty.
Copyright is an unethical privilege granted to publishers (to control the public), but it is not a right. It is the suspension of one: the natural right to copy was suspended from the public in the 18th century as the privilege of a publisher.
Many people confuse right with privilege (probably because the latter are referred to as 'legal' rights).
On the post: Ten Good Reasons To Buy
Re: Re: Re: Hard to find music-related scarcities
On the post: Ten Good Reasons To Buy
Re: Re: Hard to find music-related scarcities
What is no longer scarce are copies of recordings. Copyright is supposed to enforce scarcity (unnaturally), but its dam has broken thanks to the Internet and digital technology.
So, copies are no longer scarce and the only ones upset by this are publishers who had been relying on fans being able to make their own copies, having to buy them from authorised vendors.
Unfortunately, far too many people have been blinded into conflating the copy as the recording, and so assume that if copies are free that recordings must be free and musicians can no longer sell their recordings. This is complete bunkum. The only one unable to sell anything is the manufacturer of copies. The musician can still sell their music and recordings and their fans can still buy them. The fact that everyone can make their own copies for nothing makes no difference except to musicians who persist in believing they have to sell them to record labels in order that the musician gets a 1% royalty on sale of copies.
Musicians could sell their recordings directly to their fans - if they weren't so brainwashed, and the labels weren't so keen to prevent themselves being disintermediated.
Remember, although fans can make their own copies, they can't make the artist's music, nor can they record their studio performances. And you need music and a recording before you can make a free copy.
So tomorrow's musician no longer hires a record company to sell copies for them, instead they sell a recording directly to their fans. The market for copies has ended.
On the post: Ten Good Reasons To Buy
A gap between creation and proliferation
There is a gap between creation and circulation that the creator (including privy collaborators/confidants) can utilise to propose an exchange of their created, uncirculated work with the fans who want it widely circulated to them (via file-sharing).
For example, the artist can provide a sample, or low quality preview of their work, just as a programmer can provide a binary to demonstrate their source code prior to sale. Once sold, once released in exchange for money, the work circulates without constraint.
On the post: The Future Of Music Business Models (And Those Who Are Already There)
Re: Re: Re:
In the 17th century the global telecommunications infrastructure necessary to reach an audience of billions was rather lacking. One had to be a minstrel roaming from village to town, but one still survived. Alternatively, one had the fortune to be discovered by a sugar daddy (king, church, aristocrat, etc.) aka patron.
Hence the attraction in the 18-20th centuries of a monopoly on the reproduction/performance/sale of copies.
In the 21st century monopolies are not only ineffective, we don't need them (only those who've collected them say that). A musician can now set up shop on a website and have a an audience of a billion not-necessarily-wealthy patrons, or fans as we call them, without even leaving their armchair.
What's a little lacking are the facilities for artists to do financial exchanges with billions of fans. That's what I'm working on (ContingencyMarket.com).
On the post: If A Video Is Filmed By Chimps... Who Owns The Copyright?
Re: perhaps...
On the post: If A Video Is Filmed By Chimps... Who Owns The Copyright?
Re: Re: Re:
So actually, both monkeys and humans are born with the natural right to copy each other. It's just that we're stupid enough to allow ourselves to be brainwashed into believing that copying each other is not only morally wrong but detrimental to mankind's progress.
On the post: If A Video Is Filmed By Chimps... Who Owns The Copyright?
Re: Re: Chimps aren't so stupid
On the post: If A Video Is Filmed By Chimps... Who Owns The Copyright?
Chimps aren't so stupid
It wasn't until quite late in mankind's cultural and technological development (achieved through a process of continuous improvement aka copying) at the dawn of the industrial revolution, that some unprincipled legislators were given enough backhanders that they created the monopolies of copyright and patent (on the galling pretext they would advance mankind's progress).
And now all we can do is engage in this depressing doublespeak that copyright is of course most worthy, but in an inexhaustible number of cases, a complete fucking joke.
It is copyright that is making monkeys out of us all.
Abolish it.
On the post: Still Some In The Music Business Who Believe The Impossible: Blur Manager Says 'Piracy' Can Be Stopped
Re: Re: Re:
The last thing the labels want a musician's fans to buy is the recording, because that then blows the other half of the label's raison d'etre out of the water (along with distribution of copies). When fans buy the artist's recording as well as promotign the artist, freely distributing copies of their work, the artist gets paid and the fans get the music.
The problem is not between the artists and their fans, but between the artist and their label, and the label and the artist's fans.
Cut out the middleman, start a revolution.
On the post: Explaining The Copyright Bubble... And Why Big Corporations Want To Keep ACTA Secret
Re: ACTA as a reframing issue
Producing a replica and selling it is a replica is fine (if the purchaser is informed it is a replica).
Thus selling a perfect/digital copy of one of your legitimately obtained DVDs as a perfect/digital copy is wholly ethical, violates no-one's (natural) rights. It just infringes some corporation's commercial monopoly as granted to them in the 18th century (suspending the public's cultural liberty in the process).
What isn't fine is ripping a DVD to a low res MP4 file and pretending it's a perfect/digital copy of a DVD in order to deceive someone into paying more for it than they would otherwise.
Thus there's nothing wrong with copying a drug if the copy is as good as the original and sold as a good copy (it just infringes a patent). The wrong is in producing a grievously inferior copy and selling it as the original, e.g. soap powder as cocaine, or salt as aspirin.
The only natural barrier to copying is privacy. A state granted monopoly is an unnatural and unethical constraint on a natural act.
On the post: If Movie Piracy Is Really A Problem, It's Hollywood's Fault
Re: Re: Re: I'm done...
Clearly, people have had a natural right to protect their lives against violent attackers since homo became sapiens (you'll get there too one day). That right to life supersedes the right to copy, so does the natural right to privacy.
The right to copy was suspended in the 18th century - a fundamental injustice - to create the privilege of copyright (from 'right to copy').
So, I quite agree with you that taking other people's hard work against their will is nothing to do with anyone's right to liberty, indeed, it's a violation of other people's natural right to privacy. Such a natural exclusive right was even recognised by the US Constitution.
However, when you sell someone your work (or a copy thereof), when you give someone your work of your own free will, then it is theirs to do with as they will. In other words they are naturally at liberty to make copies or derivatives of what is now their private possession, and to give or sell their work in doing so to others. This cultural liberty is unnaturally suspended by the privilege of copyright.
On the post: If Movie Piracy Is Really A Problem, It's Hollywood's Fault
Re:
'Might is right' is the strategy adopted by multinational corporations in their litigious persecution of individuals sharing the music they like.
You should read Wikipedia some time, if you aren't too offended by its neutralisation of copyright's constraint on the sharing of mankind's knowledge.
On the post: If Movie Piracy Is Really A Problem, It's Hollywood's Fault
Re: I'm done...
It was actually all about consolidating the Stationers' guild's de facto monopolies and providing a proxy censor for the crown against sedition. ACTA is exactly the same.
The natural right to make copies dates back to copying cave paintings and is supposed to be protected by all enlightened and egalitarian societies.
So, from the perspective of natural law, copyright is illegal, a privilege and an injustice, and piracy (like liberating slaves) is an ethical assertion of fundamental rights.
On the post: Lily Allen: It's Ok To Sell My Counterfeit CDs, Just Don't Give My Music For Free
Re: Sweet! I'll never work a day again.
Having the liberty to make and sell copies, isn't a license to print money. In fact that's the point of copyright: to suspend people's liberty to make copies so they're forced to pay the printer a monopoly inflated price for them. Without the monopoly, the price of copies falls to zero (it has anyway).
Thus enlightened artists emancipate their audiences to share or sell copies as the market permits. They are left with the business they've always been in: selling their music to those who want to buy it. It's just that buyer has changed from the record label to the fans. The fans don't need to buy copies any more, but they still want the music.
On the post: Lily Allen: It's Ok To Sell My Counterfeit CDs, Just Don't Give My Music For Free
Re: 'Counterfeit' does not mean unauthorised copy
It's the attempt to maliciously impair someone's apprehension of the truth that's the wrong, not the act of imitation or reproduction.
It is a pity so many believe copyright infringement to be unethical, instead of merely disobedience of a commercial privilege that is fundamentally unethical in the first place.
On the post: Lily Allen: It's Ok To Sell My Counterfeit CDs, Just Don't Give My Music For Free
'Counterfeit' does not mean unauthorised copy
When you burn a CD to give to a friend (without the copyright holder's permission), you simply create an unauthorised copy. You don't create a counterfeit.
If however your friend downloads the album art, prints a liner, shrinkwraps the CD case for sale at a car boot sale, then they have created a counterfeit.
Counterfeits are ALWAYS unethical because they involve falsehood.
If you purchase (or are given) an authorised copy, then any copy you make is ALWAYS ethical because you have a natural right to copy (share and build upon) the objects in your legitimate possession and dispose of them at your liberty.
Unfortunately, that natural right to copy was suspended in the 18th century to create the privilege of copyright for the printing industry (Stationers' Guild). No doubt most of the public assumed it was about preventing plagiarism.
300 years later ACTA represents a similar attempt to confuse people into believing draconian legislation is needed to prevent counterfeiting, when instead it's about transforming the 18th century's monopoly of copying into the 21st century's control of internetworked communication.
From the privilege of excluding others from making copies, to the privilege of excluding others from communicating via the Internet.
And the plebs are supposed to think "Oh, yes, we must have a law to stamp out pirates and counterfeiters".
ACTA is about transforming the Internet into a cartel owned theme park, where people must pay to enter, and are tolerated only so long as they consume what they're fed, and pay for it, again and again.
On the post: Nasty Old People, Give It Away And Pray And Releasing Movies For File Sharing
Get this one free. Buy the next one.
That way no donations are involved, i.e. it's pure business.
Demonstrate your talent and then invite the resulting audience to commission your next performance. Rinse and repeat. Each performance is paid for by the audience from the previous one. So everyone ends up with movies they can freely share with their friends, and yet the movie maker is paid for their work.
I think http://Vodo.net is doing this sort of thing. No doubt many others are too.
On the post: Massively Increasing Music Licensing Fees For Clubs Down Under Massively Backfires
Jamendo
Also see The Patron's Jukebox for my suggestion of how the future will probably play out positively for those who set their music free, compared to those who erect paywalls around it.
On the post: If You Want To Make Money As A Musician You Need To Be A Musical Entrepreneur
Re: Hey Nina
This is 'Argument'.
Those artists with large audiences will earn large amounts of money from those who WANT to pay them to produce their art.
No-one has an argument with that. What people argue about is whether an artist deserves to be paid to such an extent that people should be forced to pay them, whether through taxation or loss of liberty.
On the post: If You Want To Make Money As A Musician You Need To Be A Musical Entrepreneur
Re: Re: Re: I agree
Copyright is an unethical privilege granted to publishers (to control the public), but it is not a right. It is the suspension of one: the natural right to copy was suspended from the public in the 18th century as the privilege of a publisher.
Many people confuse right with privilege (probably because the latter are referred to as 'legal' rights).
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