In Canada, Bell was forced to resell their network to other companies, which in theory sounds great, but there are plenty of drawbacks. Most of those drawbacks come because it isn't just sharing the last mile, but sharing all of the network up tothe CO, at least.
Bell still controls the network, so traffic shaping and such shapes for all companies.
When you get service from a third party company, the wires and all are still bell, you are still connecting to bell equipment. When you have a failure, you have essentially an extra layer of "government" to deal with. You call your provider, they call bell, bell calls them, they call you, etc.
The process is unfair, because the cable companies have not been forced to do the same.
It has certainly lead to competition, but you trade a certain amount of cost savings, but you add potential headaches for service, etc.
It would be a much better system if the last mile was run by a seperate company that had no ties to any of the incumbent players, and they all had the same access and the same responsibilities. Nobody can afford this sort of solution, so it ends up as hell by half measures.
harrysan, you miss the key point in all of this: Musicians have always made the most money actually playing concerts or actually writing music. Just being a band putting out albums isn't the way to get rich.
However, if you are on a label, and you have label support, then you have the ability to get well known, which in turn puts butts in seats at your shows, which in turn puts money in your pocket.
The record labels also front the money to get things done. Not everyone loves how they do accounting and what they charge, but at the end of the day, they can take an unknown band from the middle of B-F nowhere, and get them known worldwide.
A band recording their own album which is available only online, running their own website and myspace page, and sticking videos on youtube might never get exposed to enough people to make a go of it.
So in theory, even if a band makes absolutely nothing off of their record deal, never makes a penny, they still can get huge benefits.
As for actual income, consider this: If overall income stays the same but 10 times as many people are sharing it, what do you think that does for average take home cash for band members? So far what seems to be happening is more beer money, less steak money. More people afford the beer, fewer people afford the steak.
You are doing the same thing Mike does, alternately playing with the meaning of scarce.
As I said before, technically, everything physical ever is scarce. Actually, even the internet is scarce, as there are limits.
However, there is the other (and more common) meaning for scarce, as in "hard to find". Like parking near where you want to go, it always seems scarce. Artificial scarcity of parking would be when the city comes and turns the 20 parking spaces where you are going into a no parking zone without reason. That creates a form of artificial scarcity.
What Mike did with the techdirt shirts, saying "get your order in by friday, we only make as many as are ordered" created an artificial scarcity for two reasons: the cutoff was artificial, he could run another batch off the next day and sell those, effectively rendering the scarce good you paid for much less scarce (thus the scarcity was artificially created). The other part is that the only true measure of scarcity in this would be the limit to the total number of t-shirts possible to be made ever.
So yes, as a physical good, it is "scarce", but as a "limited edition" it is also artificially scarce.
It is like those artists that sign and number a limited amount of reproductions of their paintings, or what have you. The machine that is doing the duplication could make as many more as they like (until they run out of stuff to print them on, the ink, or the machine dies), they limit the number of copies signed and numbered to artificially create a shortage in the marketplace, and drive up the price. People foolishly pay for this artificial limitation.
1) if you pay attention to the chinese media, the copyright thing is a very huge issue. It is being treated as an attack on culture and Chinese writers.
2) I don't think Google as a company felt that the copyright issue would become part of the game. Google didn't play nice, the copyright issue ended up in court, and the Chinese government was "officially angry" or something to that effect over the issue. You don't want them to be even unofficially angry.
3) We will see. The chinese government has no issue pulling domains out from under people, they do it on a regular basis.
4) Baidu is the winner in all of this, no matter what.
The chinese government can live without Google, that much is clear. Google on the other hand loses a huge market and access to it. This is not to their benefit at all.
Google has made claims about hacking and whatnot, but if they only noticed this sort of activity now, it's because they have been willfully blind in order to play nice. Their being "officially angry" over hacking shortly after the chinese government was "officially angry" over copyright is pretty telling.
Most people here forget that when you turn copyright off to make "X" possible, it also has the same effect on "Y" and "Z". Much of the RtB stuff in the end is defeated when the band or artist's brand cannot be properly defended from misuse.
Can you imagine the business selling bootleg CDs in the third world when it is no longer bootleg? All the T-shirt sellers outside of concerts LEGALLY selling knock off shirts? What happens when the venues themselves catch on, and ban the sales of t-shirts in the venue by the band's sellers, and do it themselves instead? No license fees, just print them up and off you go.
Wait! What is that I hear? The sounds of people trying to clamber back onto the copyright bandwagon? It can't be!
Sadly, it also means that even the ones making money likely won't make anywhere near as much, even if the total money in the system remains the same.
Live music isn't cheap for a club to offer. The club has to be big enough to support it (30 or 40 seats doesn't make a gig financially viable for a band, unless they are getting more thatn $20 a head). Ratio of stage space to "retail" space is off, making the cost of operating the club too high. (slightly different if your version of live music is someone on a stool alone, but still an issue).
Clubs owners aren't lovers of the art, generally, they are lovers of the buck. It is amazing how many "alt rock" clubs are owned by the proverbial crotchety old men. It's a business, not art.
At some point, unless there is enough live concert space for all these lower end acts to play at, the actual amount of live music money will stagnate. they won't be pulling in 20,000 fans a night, obviously, most of them won't pull past whatever the club normally gets for any band, so they have to play smaller places. There are only so many small places per town / city /etc
Live music comes and goes, for the most part clubs drop live music because it is expensive and the quality is too variable, and people respond better to things like DJs, Karaoke, or similar types of entertainment. Just look around your city and see what is going on. A few live music venues, plenty more dance clubs, etc.
Now, if there is no internationally loved dance music (because music goes regional) that might all change.
The implications of change are bigger than the change projected, which makes one wonder if there is in fact any real change coming.
Notice what I said about DJ earwax "based on this video". I don't know or really care what all else he does, this one truly blows, making hannah montana sound like really deep meaningful music. That is so sad.
As for Warhol, like much of "pop art" the pop part is taking something that is popular and riffing on it. For me, it isn't really art of the ages, as much as "art of an age". You can pretty much have a single photoshop filter do the same thing, and I don't consider that filter to be an artist. Basically, the first time he did it that was cool, after that it was "more of the same".
It would be truly interesting to know what rights (if any) he had for each image used, or if in fact he created them freehand from scratch.
How much of that is for the licensing of samples as opposed to entire songs? Don't twist the facts.
There is no breakout on this issue, commercial licensing of all sorts is lumped together. While the consumer side of music in the UK is at the same levels as 6-8years ago, licensing is up dramatically. My point is that if you get rid of copyright to allow sampling, you effectively also do the same for other commercial uses, such as jingles, movie music, etc. It isn't a buffet where you choose "a" and not "b", they are tied together.
It's the reason why the "lottttts of t-shirts" deal also falls away, because if you are tossing most of the copyright provisions out the window, duplicating the t-shirt is also easily done. So whatever premium is gotten for an "exclusive" product is lost because nothing is enforcably exclusive.
It's the old "careful what you wish for" thing. You have to consider all that would be effected by the types of changes to allow sampling, covering songs without permission, etc.
More artists will have a fighting chance. The process of artists getting noticed will become more evolutionary: good artists will float to the top by their own merits, while not-so-good artists will need to consider a change of career.
While I am sure some of this will happen, I suspect that music will end up being a much more local and regional thing, and much less of a worldwide thing. It will be exceedingly difficult for a band or artist to get enough worldwide recognition.
The record label style business is a 20 x 20 swimming pool 8 feet deep. The DiY music business is a pool 200x200, but it's only a few inches deep. Lots more people will get wet feet, but it will almost be impossible to really swim.
Physical goods *are* naturally scarce (there's a non-trivial cost of production)
When Mike discusses scarcities, he sort of muddies the waters and doesn't exactly explain it all. Basically, yes, anything physical is scarce only because we can't produce infinite numbers.
However, what Mike is really pushing is artificial scarcities, limited time, limited quantities, "autographed" or whatever. It is the creation of artificial scarcities that won't hold water in the long run, because any market of good over priced because of artificial scarcity will be quickly lowered in price down as other companies come in to satify the market (and remove the artificial scarcity).
The profits on these artificially scarce good is high by the laws of supply and demand, but once the supply ramps up, the price drops quickly close to the cost of production. They may not be exactly the same product, but for most people (see Mike's discussion of knock off clothes above) it doesn't appear that the public minds.
Remember, we are talking about tossing copyright and such out the window, so today's scarce t-shirt is tomorrow's knockoff without restriction.
you seem to be arguing that T-shirts should be produced on a "one shirt for every potential fan" basis, which would require not only a massive cash outlay for production, but also do nothing to make the music more valuable.
The t-shirts don't make the music valuable, it's the other way around. Music has value but no retail price, the t-shirts have little value but a higher retail price, mostly because of artificial scarcities.
Remove that artificial barrier, and suddenly $10 t-shirts are, well, $10, not $50 "official merchandise".
It's one of the legs of the _old_ business model that Mike is talking about. If they change their business model to something better, they won't need to depend on it any more.
In the end, the "new" business models are still dependent on copyright and image rights, otherwise the universe will be flooded out with cheap band gear, effectively limiting the abilty of bands to sell "lottttts of t-shirts" and so on. Heck, licensing is 25% of the UK business, and that would dry up overnight.
You have to think past the end of your (virtual) nose, to realize that the models put forth depend on artificial scarcities (limited edition crap) as much as real scarcities (concert tickets). Even in concert tickets, the scarcities are often artificial, putting the act in a smaller room to assure a higher price per ticket sell out, rather than playing the biggest room possibly to reach the most fans. Mike can explain how that works with his usual Econ 101 drone.
Look at the video Mike posted. Whoever made it is obviously very capable of writing his own music, but _chose_ to use samples from all over the place as an artistic statement (a collage of sorts). That work would not have been possible if your rigid logic were followed, because for a small-time artist (possibly working out of his bedroom) seeking explicit permission for all those songs is nigh impossible.
I looked at the video. It's proof that auto-tune and drum machines are now cheap, and that you can create a horrible waste of 4 minutes if you work really hard at it. The world would likely be a better place without that waste of bandwidth. It is just the worst parts of pop, the worst tools of pop, overused to the point of stupid.
Yet this is a totally unique work, as the video shows. It doesn't matter the took, he took a live image and applied his "art" to it. It is neither a remix nor a "sample", as he created both the original image and the resulting art work.
We should not let these stupid legalities impede on artists' creativity. It's bad for artists, and MORE IMPORTANTLY it's bad for everybody else who won't be able to enjoy their art.
These stupid legalities are what the real artists use to protect their work and make a living, so they can afford to continue to be artists all their life. DJ Earwax or whatever his name is will just as likely be back flipping burgers or selling used cars in a few years based on this video, as it shows little artistic talent but plenty of knowing how to make a sample and run an auto-tune. There is little there new, if anything it is perhaps the best example of why there should be no fair use (or fair abuse) or other's works without permission.
On the post: Does Network Neutrality Make Economic Sense?
Bell still controls the network, so traffic shaping and such shapes for all companies.
When you get service from a third party company, the wires and all are still bell, you are still connecting to bell equipment. When you have a failure, you have essentially an extra layer of "government" to deal with. You call your provider, they call bell, bell calls them, they call you, etc.
The process is unfair, because the cable companies have not been forced to do the same.
It has certainly lead to competition, but you trade a certain amount of cost savings, but you add potential headaches for service, etc.
It would be a much better system if the last mile was run by a seperate company that had no ties to any of the incumbent players, and they all had the same access and the same responsibilities. Nobody can afford this sort of solution, so it ends up as hell by half measures.
On the post: How Many Questionable Assumptions Can You Layer On Top Of Each Other To Estimate Bogus 'Losses' From Unauthorized iPhone App Downloads?
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: How Many Questionable Assumptions Can You Layer On Top Of Each Other To Estimate Bogus 'Losses' From Unauthorized iPhone App Downloads?
Re:
On the post: Jaron Lanier Gets Old And Crotchety; Maybe He Should Kick Those Kids Off His Virtual Reality Lawn
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Common Fallacy
However, if you are on a label, and you have label support, then you have the ability to get well known, which in turn puts butts in seats at your shows, which in turn puts money in your pocket.
The record labels also front the money to get things done. Not everyone loves how they do accounting and what they charge, but at the end of the day, they can take an unknown band from the middle of B-F nowhere, and get them known worldwide.
A band recording their own album which is available only online, running their own website and myspace page, and sticking videos on youtube might never get exposed to enough people to make a go of it.
So in theory, even if a band makes absolutely nothing off of their record deal, never makes a penny, they still can get huge benefits.
As for actual income, consider this: If overall income stays the same but 10 times as many people are sharing it, what do you think that does for average take home cash for band members? So far what seems to be happening is more beer money, less steak money. More people afford the beer, fewer people afford the steak.
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On the post: Jaron Lanier Gets Old And Crotchety; Maybe He Should Kick Those Kids Off His Virtual Reality Lawn
Re: Re: Re: Re:
As I said before, technically, everything physical ever is scarce. Actually, even the internet is scarce, as there are limits.
However, there is the other (and more common) meaning for scarce, as in "hard to find". Like parking near where you want to go, it always seems scarce. Artificial scarcity of parking would be when the city comes and turns the 20 parking spaces where you are going into a no parking zone without reason. That creates a form of artificial scarcity.
What Mike did with the techdirt shirts, saying "get your order in by friday, we only make as many as are ordered" created an artificial scarcity for two reasons: the cutoff was artificial, he could run another batch off the next day and sell those, effectively rendering the scarce good you paid for much less scarce (thus the scarcity was artificially created). The other part is that the only true measure of scarcity in this would be the limit to the total number of t-shirts possible to be made ever.
So yes, as a physical good, it is "scarce", but as a "limited edition" it is also artificially scarce.
It is like those artists that sign and number a limited amount of reproductions of their paintings, or what have you. The machine that is doing the duplication could make as many more as they like (until they run out of stuff to print them on, the ink, or the machine dies), they limit the number of copies signed and numbered to artificially create a shortage in the marketplace, and drive up the price. People foolishly pay for this artificial limitation.
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On the post: Google Considers Leaving China If China Will Not Allow Uncensored Search
Re: Weak entry this time.
2) I don't think Google as a company felt that the copyright issue would become part of the game. Google didn't play nice, the copyright issue ended up in court, and the Chinese government was "officially angry" or something to that effect over the issue. You don't want them to be even unofficially angry.
3) We will see. The chinese government has no issue pulling domains out from under people, they do it on a regular basis.
4) Baidu is the winner in all of this, no matter what.
The chinese government can live without Google, that much is clear. Google on the other hand loses a huge market and access to it. This is not to their benefit at all.
Google has made claims about hacking and whatnot, but if they only noticed this sort of activity now, it's because they have been willfully blind in order to play nice. Their being "officially angry" over hacking shortly after the chinese government was "officially angry" over copyright is pretty telling.
On the post: Connect With Fans + Reason To Buy; The Contest
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Can you imagine the business selling bootleg CDs in the third world when it is no longer bootleg? All the T-shirt sellers outside of concerts LEGALLY selling knock off shirts? What happens when the venues themselves catch on, and ban the sales of t-shirts in the venue by the band's sellers, and do it themselves instead? No license fees, just print them up and off you go.
Wait! What is that I hear? The sounds of people trying to clamber back onto the copyright bandwagon? It can't be!
On the post: World Fair Use Day Wrapup
Re: What We Reap
On the post: Jaron Lanier Gets Old And Crotchety; Maybe He Should Kick Those Kids Off His Virtual Reality Lawn
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Common Fallacy
Exactly.
Sadly, it also means that even the ones making money likely won't make anywhere near as much, even if the total money in the system remains the same.
Live music isn't cheap for a club to offer. The club has to be big enough to support it (30 or 40 seats doesn't make a gig financially viable for a band, unless they are getting more thatn $20 a head). Ratio of stage space to "retail" space is off, making the cost of operating the club too high. (slightly different if your version of live music is someone on a stool alone, but still an issue).
Clubs owners aren't lovers of the art, generally, they are lovers of the buck. It is amazing how many "alt rock" clubs are owned by the proverbial crotchety old men. It's a business, not art.
At some point, unless there is enough live concert space for all these lower end acts to play at, the actual amount of live music money will stagnate. they won't be pulling in 20,000 fans a night, obviously, most of them won't pull past whatever the club normally gets for any band, so they have to play smaller places. There are only so many small places per town / city /etc
Live music comes and goes, for the most part clubs drop live music because it is expensive and the quality is too variable, and people respond better to things like DJs, Karaoke, or similar types of entertainment. Just look around your city and see what is going on. A few live music venues, plenty more dance clubs, etc.
Now, if there is no internationally loved dance music (because music goes regional) that might all change.
The implications of change are bigger than the change projected, which makes one wonder if there is in fact any real change coming.
On the post: If Banning The Internet For Sex Offenders Is Unfair, Is Banning The Internet For Copyright Infringers Fair?
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Plus him and Darcy were really nice to sit and have dinner with :)
On the post: World Fair Use Day Wrapup
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Notice what I said about DJ earwax "based on this video". I don't know or really care what all else he does, this one truly blows, making hannah montana sound like really deep meaningful music. That is so sad.
As for Warhol, like much of "pop art" the pop part is taking something that is popular and riffing on it. For me, it isn't really art of the ages, as much as "art of an age". You can pretty much have a single photoshop filter do the same thing, and I don't consider that filter to be an artist. Basically, the first time he did it that was cool, after that it was "more of the same".
It would be truly interesting to know what rights (if any) he had for each image used, or if in fact he created them freehand from scratch.
How much of that is for the licensing of samples as opposed to entire songs? Don't twist the facts.
There is no breakout on this issue, commercial licensing of all sorts is lumped together. While the consumer side of music in the UK is at the same levels as 6-8years ago, licensing is up dramatically. My point is that if you get rid of copyright to allow sampling, you effectively also do the same for other commercial uses, such as jingles, movie music, etc. It isn't a buffet where you choose "a" and not "b", they are tied together.
It's the reason why the "lottttts of t-shirts" deal also falls away, because if you are tossing most of the copyright provisions out the window, duplicating the t-shirt is also easily done. So whatever premium is gotten for an "exclusive" product is lost because nothing is enforcably exclusive.
It's the old "careful what you wish for" thing. You have to consider all that would be effected by the types of changes to allow sampling, covering songs without permission, etc.
On the post: Jaron Lanier Gets Old And Crotchety; Maybe He Should Kick Those Kids Off His Virtual Reality Lawn
Re: Re: Re: Common Fallacy
While I am sure some of this will happen, I suspect that music will end up being a much more local and regional thing, and much less of a worldwide thing. It will be exceedingly difficult for a band or artist to get enough worldwide recognition.
The record label style business is a 20 x 20 swimming pool 8 feet deep. The DiY music business is a pool 200x200, but it's only a few inches deep. Lots more people will get wet feet, but it will almost be impossible to really swim.
On the post: If Banning The Internet For Sex Offenders Is Unfair, Is Banning The Internet For Copyright Infringers Fair?
Re: Re:
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Re: Re:
When Mike discusses scarcities, he sort of muddies the waters and doesn't exactly explain it all. Basically, yes, anything physical is scarce only because we can't produce infinite numbers.
However, what Mike is really pushing is artificial scarcities, limited time, limited quantities, "autographed" or whatever. It is the creation of artificial scarcities that won't hold water in the long run, because any market of good over priced because of artificial scarcity will be quickly lowered in price down as other companies come in to satify the market (and remove the artificial scarcity).
The profits on these artificially scarce good is high by the laws of supply and demand, but once the supply ramps up, the price drops quickly close to the cost of production. They may not be exactly the same product, but for most people (see Mike's discussion of knock off clothes above) it doesn't appear that the public minds.
Remember, we are talking about tossing copyright and such out the window, so today's scarce t-shirt is tomorrow's knockoff without restriction.
you seem to be arguing that T-shirts should be produced on a "one shirt for every potential fan" basis, which would require not only a massive cash outlay for production, but also do nothing to make the music more valuable.
The t-shirts don't make the music valuable, it's the other way around. Music has value but no retail price, the t-shirts have little value but a higher retail price, mostly because of artificial scarcities.
Remove that artificial barrier, and suddenly $10 t-shirts are, well, $10, not $50 "official merchandise".
Can you say "unsupportable business model"?
On the post: If Banning The Internet For Sex Offenders Is Unfair, Is Banning The Internet For Copyright Infringers Fair?
On the post: Well Respected VC Firm Comes Out In Favor Of Independent Invention Defense Against Patent Infringement Lawsuits
Their goal seems a little self serving.
On the post: Jaron Lanier Gets Old And Crotchety; Maybe He Should Kick Those Kids Off His Virtual Reality Lawn
Re: Re: *bang!*
On the post: World Fair Use Day Wrapup
Re: Re:
In the end, the "new" business models are still dependent on copyright and image rights, otherwise the universe will be flooded out with cheap band gear, effectively limiting the abilty of bands to sell "lottttts of t-shirts" and so on. Heck, licensing is 25% of the UK business, and that would dry up overnight.
You have to think past the end of your (virtual) nose, to realize that the models put forth depend on artificial scarcities (limited edition crap) as much as real scarcities (concert tickets). Even in concert tickets, the scarcities are often artificial, putting the act in a smaller room to assure a higher price per ticket sell out, rather than playing the biggest room possibly to reach the most fans. Mike can explain how that works with his usual Econ 101 drone.
Look at the video Mike posted. Whoever made it is obviously very capable of writing his own music, but _chose_ to use samples from all over the place as an artistic statement (a collage of sorts). That work would not have been possible if your rigid logic were followed, because for a small-time artist (possibly working out of his bedroom) seeking explicit permission for all those songs is nigh impossible.
I looked at the video. It's proof that auto-tune and drum machines are now cheap, and that you can create a horrible waste of 4 minutes if you work really hard at it. The world would likely be a better place without that waste of bandwidth. It is just the worst parts of pop, the worst tools of pop, overused to the point of stupid.
Remember that some of the most iconic artistic works of the 20th century are by "samplers and re-mixers": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oqUd8utr14
Yet this is a totally unique work, as the video shows. It doesn't matter the took, he took a live image and applied his "art" to it. It is neither a remix nor a "sample", as he created both the original image and the resulting art work.
We should not let these stupid legalities impede on artists' creativity. It's bad for artists, and MORE IMPORTANTLY it's bad for everybody else who won't be able to enjoy their art.
These stupid legalities are what the real artists use to protect their work and make a living, so they can afford to continue to be artists all their life. DJ Earwax or whatever his name is will just as likely be back flipping burgers or selling used cars in a few years based on this video, as it shows little artistic talent but plenty of knowing how to make a sample and run an auto-tune. There is little there new, if anything it is perhaps the best example of why there should be no fair use (or fair abuse) or other's works without permission.
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