It's all about money. If you just post yourself singing a song on YouTube, nobody cares. But the minute you create a YouTube channel and try to get some of YouTube's ad revenue, then someone will care!
All this whining about fixed costs comes in because of the corporatization of media companies. Back when the Scribner family ran Scribner's, for example, they could publish works by Hemenway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, and so on because they only had to make enough money to keep the family-run publishing business going. They didn't even have to make a profit as long as the family members could pay themselves a salary. After being purchased by Macmillan and then Simon & Shuster, which was then bought by CBS, the company is expected to bring in huge profits which then get swallowed up by its parent company to support their corporate overhead. (It has several layers of overhead to support.) That's why traditional publishers CAN'T price e-books below a certain amount.
The entire publishing business needs to be torn down and rebuilt, and companies like Amazon and Google can do it. Look at Amanda Hocking. She became a millionaire selling her own books through Amazon, B&N, etc. She keeps 70% of the selling price instead of getting the traditional 5%-10% royalty traditional publishers pay. The 65% the traditional writer gets screwed out of is paying for the fixed corporate overhead costs!
Wow! If the LOC does this scanning project, and the estimate that 75% of works were never renewed for copyright is correct, we could be looking at an avalanche of works entering the public domain from 1923-1963! That could help to make up for the fact that the public domain clock doesn't start running again until 2018!
Well, you don't want things to get too Democratic! After all, if you have a pure democracy, people could just vote themselves free healthcare, free education, free housing, free food, free transportation, and a weekly pension, and bankrupt the country much faster than Obama is doing! Government is already doling out huge amounts of wealth transfer "because people want more services."
The MPAA should not be so concerned about piracy. When you have 1 gbs Internet access you don't need cable anymore! Google becomes the new cable company. YouTube evolves into a video on demand service. Google goes out and make deals with to stream the cable networks either through an advertising or subscription model, and Google has the potential to put the cable companies out of business very quickly.
Unfortunately, they do care. A lot of people were pushing for Microsoft to make Windows 3.1 open source because what the heck is MS going to with a 15-year old operating system? Let people play around with it. Nope. Sorry. You might be able to do something really cool with it and we can't have that!
Universities just forward any fees onto the students, so they don't care. These days, colleges are more interested in real estate than education and screw the students.
Even though I agree that copyright laws are unfair, fair use never allows you to grab a copyrighted image to use for a published work. I don't understand the part about the image being part of a much larger work. Was this a few brushstrokes blown up from a larger piece of art? Or do you mean taking one picture out of 50? The brushstrokes might be fair use, but you can't just cop a picture from a book and use it without permission -- ever.
However, your friend might still be able to license the picture. Instead of contacting the publisher (whose policy is to say no), he should have contacted the Copyright Clearance Center (copyright.com) (whose policy is to say yes). The CCC would charge a small fee for its use and the burden of tracking down the current copyright owner (it may have reverted back to the artist), would be its job. Your friend should try that!
Well, when you take an indefensible stand you do tend to make things up to prove your point.
As for the members of The Band, who told them to retire? There's lots of things they could have been doing to make money, such as owning their own recording studios, mentoring young musicians and bands, producing other artists, writing new songs, and selling their stuff online.
Also, I hope they saved some of their money when they were making $200,000 a year. I make less than half of that and I manage to put away some money for retirement. Are rock 'n' rollers immune from having to save money for their retirement?
Just another attempt to make you believe you didn't "buy" a movie, you "leased" it instead. The government codified this for software with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and now the movie studios will probably add this into the next copyright revision to go after the used DVD business!
And where are the artists in all of this? Reminds me of the $1.62 royalty check Lady Gaga got from a million downloads from some European online store. Someone made a million euros from her music and it wasn't her!
My feelings exactly. Unless they own a piece of the show, why do they care how long the copyright period is? They're not going to get any royalties from the show, the producers will. In Hollywood, for example, you give up a lot of your future rights for high pay in the here and now! I don't see what the justification is for their letter!
If the government was really against cyber crime, they would close down the Nigerian scam operations and arrest the office towers full of hackers in Eastern Europe infecting computers with fake anti-virus malware. Oh, silly me. Apparently, the government is only concerned with things Microsoft, the RIAA and the MPAA are worried about!
The biggest problem in the publishing field, along with the recording industry and the movie industry, is simply the desire not to change the way things are done. A lot of the overhead costs that people are detailing here just simply aren't necessary. And because of that, you may see editors moving to start their own e-book imprint and running it out of their homes.
As some people have suggested, you don't need million-dollar a year offices in Manhattan. You don't need an army of secretaries and assistants. And you don't need executives making millions of dollars a year while the average writer gets a paltry $5000 advance and $1 per copy after the advance is paid. A handful of people could run a successful e-book publishing house and still offer much more favorable terms to their authors.
The record companies and movie studios should have put their files on Hotfiles and MegaUpload and then they would have profited from the revenue those sites were generating instead of fighting them.
Yes, there's a market for high-end audio, but how much of a market? Back in the '80s, cassette tape sales overtook LP sales despite the fact that high-speed duplicated tapes had terrible audio quality. Their big selling point was portability. Everybody had a boom box or a Walkman and people wanted what was more convenient. Today, MP3s are damn convenient!
I think the only way you could get people to switch to a higher audio format is to sell the songs for a LOWER price than standard quality. Everyone would go for the lower price and trade in their old hardware for newer hardware. If you try to charge a "premium" price, it will fail like SACD and DVD-A. (Remember half-speed mastering and virgin vinyl releases? Few people cared.)
The bottom line is most people can't hear the difference, and with cheap electronics frequencies over 10k are just so much distortion anyway. In a lot of situations, low-fi sounds better than hi-fi.
Well, some people have commented that the FBI will never put someone in jail who copied a book, but that may not be true in the future. There was a Wall Street Journal article recently that said about half the "crimes" the Justice Department prosecuted in the last 10 years were of people who broke a regulation that many of them didn't even know existed. The article spotlighted a maintenance guy who was convicted of a felony and has found it difficult to get work because of it all because he pumped out a flooded basement and broke an EPA regulation.
The Feds love to convict people, and they love to go after easy cases, especially those folks who can't afford the expense of a federal trial. Real criminals are too difficult to catch.
So if you're caught copying a book, you might very well be facing 5 years in jail and a $250,000 fine!
On the post: How Can You Tell If Uploading Your Cover Song To YouTube Is Infringing? You Can't
Money
On the post: Nobody Cares About The Fixed Costs Of Your Book, Movie, Whatever
Scribner's
The entire publishing business needs to be torn down and rebuilt, and companies like Amazon and Google can do it. Look at Amanda Hocking. She became a millionaire selling her own books through Amazon, B&N, etc. She keeps 70% of the selling price instead of getting the traditional 5%-10% royalty traditional publishers pay. The 65% the traditional writer gets screwed out of is paying for the fixed corporate overhead costs!
On the post: Copyright Office Seeks Help In Fixing The Culture-Stifling Copyright Records Problem
Wow!
On the post: NY Times Notices That The Pirate Party May Be Changing Politics
Not too Democratic
On the post: Google's Fiber Makes MPAA Skittish. Why Does Hollywood See All Technology In Terms Of Piracy?
Cable is the target
On the post: After Four Years Feds Finally Get Around To Prosecuting Ten Mod Chip Sellers
Re: Re:
On the post: Did One-Sided Legal Advice Lead To The Terrible Copyright Deal For Canadian Universities?
Forward it on
On the post: The Chilling Effects Of Copyfraud: Blocking A Researcher From Fair Use... And Scaring Him Into Staying Quiet About It
Not Fair Use
However, your friend might still be able to license the picture. Instead of contacting the publisher (whose policy is to say no), he should have contacted the Copyright Clearance Center (copyright.com) (whose policy is to say yes). The CCC would charge a small fee for its use and the burden of tracking down the current copyright owner (it may have reverted back to the artist), would be its job. Your friend should try that!
On the post: How Rumblefish Ended Up Claiming Copyright On A Song Uploaded By The Band Who Actually Held The Copyright
Lost Money
On the post: The Band's Ex-Manager Accuses Reddit Of Profiting From Piracy In Debate With Co-Founder
Make Things Up
As for the members of The Band, who told them to retire? There's lots of things they could have been doing to make money, such as owning their own recording studios, mentoring young musicians and bands, producing other artists, writing new songs, and selling their stuff online.
Also, I hope they saved some of their money when they were making $200,000 a year. I make less than half of that and I manage to put away some money for retirement. Are rock 'n' rollers immune from having to save money for their retirement?
On the post: Blizzard Sues Starcraft II Cheat Creators Under Dubious Copyright Theory
Dictate Copyright
On the post: Is Selling Your Ultraviolet Code Copyright Infringement?
Buy? No, Lease a movie!
On the post: Are New Streaming Royalty Rates A Way To Backdoor DRM Into Copyright Law?
Artists?
On the post: Are New Streaming Royalty Rates A Way To Backdoor DRM Into Copyright Law?
Re: Re:
On the post: German Scriptwriters Attack 'Greens, Pirates, Left-wingers And Internet Community' For Daring To Have Different Views On Copyright
Re:
On the post: Guess What? Most Cybercrime 'Losses' Are Massively Exaggerated As Well
Cyber Crime
On the post: If Publishers Can't Cover Their Costs With $10 Ebooks, Then They Deserve To Go Out Of Business
Legacy
As some people have suggested, you don't need million-dollar a year offices in Manhattan. You don't need an army of secretaries and assistants. And you don't need executives making millions of dollars a year while the average writer gets a paltry $5000 advance and $1 per copy after the advance is paid. A handful of people could run a successful e-book publishing house and still offer much more favorable terms to their authors.
On the post: Report Shows MPAA 'Experts' Seriously Misrepresented The Uses Of Hotfile
If You Can't Fight Them, Join Them!
On the post: Is There Any Merit To Neil Young's Plan To Improve The Quality Of Digital Music?
Cassette Tapes
I think the only way you could get people to switch to a higher audio format is to sell the songs for a LOWER price than standard quality. Everyone would go for the lower price and trade in their old hardware for newer hardware. If you try to charge a "premium" price, it will fail like SACD and DVD-A. (Remember half-speed mastering and virgin vinyl releases? Few people cared.)
The bottom line is most people can't hear the difference, and with cheap electronics frequencies over 10k are just so much distortion anyway. In a lot of situations, low-fi sounds better than hi-fi.
On the post: Why Do Publishers Treat Customers As Crooks With Scolding Copyright Notices?
Federal prosecution
The Feds love to convict people, and they love to go after easy cases, especially those folks who can't afford the expense of a federal trial. Real criminals are too difficult to catch.
So if you're caught copying a book, you might very well be facing 5 years in jail and a $250,000 fine!
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