nothing to see here said:
It's certainly a colorful metaphor. I'm not sure how apt it is.
It was the first metaphor that sprung to mind, and it seems *surprisingly* apt. If it's the art we want, why at the moment is 80%-ish of the money we plunk down on a copy of the art going to the copers, and only a small fraction going to the artists? The money isn't (largely) going to the artists, it isn't going to the individuals whose services we want. It's going to the individuals who organize and secure those services. This seems entirely backwards. I shouldn't be supporting an *industry* when I buy a CD -- I should be supporting the creator.
Does P2P filesharing challenge this model. Yes it does. Does it mitigate some of the more unjust feature of this model. Yes it does. Does P2P filesharing, in so doing, risk elminating the ability for the artist to make a living through their art altogether. Yes it does.
IMHO, these are all good things. Ug not standing to make a million Dino-Dollars from the buffallo he painted on the wall didn't stop him from doing it. There, ideally, should be a monetary incentive to produce art. But that incentive should come from the community, from the public, from the people who will recieve and interpret the art. Not from guys in suits who copy it. And I don't think that the incentive should be enough to be able to "live off of art." It should absolutely be something you want to do for it's own sake, not because you will survive off of it. Kinda like the RPG market right now...which is that way specifically because one major company gave up a large percentage of its product for free reproduction.
jgbrowning said:
I've never heard Drowing Pool. Why? Because I listen to radio on the internet to hear what I want to hear. Or I guess I could listen to one of the what, 500 channels on satilite radio. Sorry, Copyright isn't limiting creativity. It's making creativity econically viable in ways it had never been before because of the development of new media outlets (the internet).
Free music doesn't sound like it's copyright to me. It sounds specifically as if it is an exception to the copyright rules: you can take this product and distribute it for free over the airwaves. You don't have to pay to release it. Or if you do pay, you pay not by charging the listener, but by charging advertisors (which is also a huge part of this New Economy anyway).
Internet and satelite allow for musical options, but they are still forced into pigeonholes based on what the suits dictate as genres, because genres are easier to market than bands. You have the "classical" station, the "top 40" station, the "blues" station, the "oldies" station, the "rock" station, the "country" station, the "electronic" station, etc. These are all artificial categories; these categories do stymie creativity. Because if what I release as new music is not easily fit into one of these categories, it is rejected, and the reason is because of the suits. Because the way for their business of copying things to make money is to copy something that people will want a lot of copies of, and if it doesn't fit into a genre, if it breaks new ground, if it doesn't fit into an old pattern, the numbers say it is a gamble at best, and you don't run a business on gambles.
But the most significant and profound art is *always* a gamble. That doesn't mesh well at all with a business model.
Because of Copyright I have legal recourse to protect myself and secure my welfare. Without copyright I would have no legal recourse.
I've never myself made the claim that copyright is worthless evil grumble grumble, though I have pointed out why others think so (namely, that saying only certain people have the right to copy something is like saying only certain people have the right to have children). In fact, I said that I think the idea of copyright is probably a good way to encourage artists (I think that limited, temporary, creator-owned, and nonstransferrable copyright is a pretty solid way to do this). That doesn't mean that it's the only way. And it obviously isn't the right way anymore, with all that it has done to hurt those it was meant to protect. Perhaps the modern way of doing it is a perversion of the intentions of the old system, but it's important to address the issues as they exist today, rather than defend what exists today because it once had a good reason somewhere in the deep past.
