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| Author |
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| 25 new of 183 responses total. |
brighn
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response 50 of 183:
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May 4 06:06 UTC 2000 |
#47 is presented as if intellectual property and tangible realities could be
separated, even in an ideal society. they can't.
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other
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response 51 of 183:
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May 4 06:11 UTC 2000 |
you lost me at "even in an ideal society." care to give reasons for your
assertion?
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brighn
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response 52 of 183:
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May 4 14:33 UTC 2000 |
It's not that difficult, other. Architectural drawings which result in
buildings are still *drawings*. When you look at a house and remark on the
creative shaping of the roof, are you remarking on the use of materials, or
on the creative process behind it? When you say you detest the shape of a Coke
bottle, is it because the curvature doesn't quite fit your hand, or is it
because the aesthetic of the curvature is askew? And if the former, isn't
that, again, an aesthetic as well as a functional issue?
Where is the line between creative and tangible drawn? On the blueprint table?
In the final structure? There's no clear point in the creative process where
one can say, "A moment ago, we had nothing but ideas. Now we have a concrete
object." Rather, tangibles evolve.
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happyboy
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response 53 of 183:
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May 6 17:59 UTC 2000 |
i wonder if their fanbase will shrink. <smirk>
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gelinas
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response 54 of 183:
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May 9 02:49 UTC 2000 |
Add to this, "An eighteen-year-old boy has got to eat." Thinking is fun, but
you can't do it on an empty stomach.
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aaron
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response 55 of 183:
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May 12 04:23 UTC 2000 |
re #52: When your creative process is placed in a fixed medium, do you not
have a concrete object?
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brighn
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response 56 of 183:
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May 12 14:37 UTC 2000 |
Ok. I'm a designer. I have an architect working for me. We're hired by a land
developer, and given carte blanche to build an office building. I design the
building, and describe what I want to my architect, because I can't draw for
shit. He draws exactly what I describe. We give it to the contractor. He
builds exactly what we drew. SOOOOOOO... the developer owns the concrete
object (the building), the architect developed the concrete evidence of the
creative process (the architectural plans), and the person who generated the
bulk of the creative process owns no actual proof of it. So the person who
did the actual thinking gets no protections and no return, and the people who
just did exactly what they were told possess the creative process itself? I
don't think that's very fair.
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aaron
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response 57 of 183:
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May 12 18:12 UTC 2000 |
Probably because you misunderstand the process, from the outset. Are you
arguing that your ideas are not reduced to a fixed medium, at any stage of
the process you describe?
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brighn
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response 58 of 183:
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May 12 19:11 UTC 2000 |
No, I've already said what I'm saying.
And I also resent you saying that *I* misunderstand the process, when you
clearly misunderstand me.
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other
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response 59 of 183:
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May 13 02:33 UTC 2000 |
Hmm. seems like i started a bonfire. pardon me while i walk away. ;)
(Note: I *did* specify that my input was not well thought out....)
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aaron
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response 60 of 183:
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May 14 05:39 UTC 2000 |
re #58: Your attempting to pick a fight is not helpful. If you failed
to explain yourself clearly, do try again. Until such time as
you do, I will continue to believe that the misunderstanding is
yours. Thanks.
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brighn
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response 61 of 183:
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May 15 13:26 UTC 2000 |
Um, Aaron, you're the one attempting to pick a fight.
But, all right, here's other's plan: IF you create something concrete, you
get money. If you create something non-concrete, you get kudos.
So I think of a cool building. In fact, that's what I do, I think of cool
buildings. My architect draws up the plans, a developed builds the building.
Everybody agrees that it's a really cool building. So the developper gets
money, the architect gets money, and I get to feed my children with praise.
Ok. So I learn to draw. I paint a picture of a really cool building. It sits
on my wall for ten years. Somewhere along the line, some developper thinks
it's a cool building, and hires an architect to design it in 3D. Now the
architect gets paid, the developper gets paid, but what about me? Do I get
paid, or not? On the one hand, I'd created something that was part of the
creation of a tangible product. On the other hand, I didn't mean for it to
be.
If I'm not paid for painting the painting, why should the architect get paid
for drawing a picture, though?
So we don't pay me for painting a picture, and we don't pay the architect for
drawing one. Why does the developper get paid, when in fact he didn't do
anything either? What he did was hire a foreman and give him the picture...
that's not concrete. Why pay the foreman? All he did was buy some materials
and tell some other guys to put them together. So the foreman doesn't get
money, the developper doesn't get money, and we're all living in the glow of
Creation.
That was my point... in the creation process for something as complex as a
building, there are many many people who do nothing but provide or modify
ideas, in one form or another. Yet without them there could be no tangible
product. If anybody involved in the creation of a tangible product gets money
for it, then that should include such absurdities as paying somebody YEARS
later because you liked something that was in their painting... if only people
involve didrectly in the creatiojn of the tangible object get paid, then who
would that be, and where do we draw the line?
..
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aaron
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response 62 of 183:
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May 16 03:27 UTC 2000 |
Did that make you feel better?
In any event, litigation is not going well for Napster. They were too late
in posting their rules relating to removal of copyright violators, which
may have moved them outside of the "safe harbor" protections in the law
governing on-line content providers. However, new products on the horizon
promise to do what Napster does and more -- creating a self-repairing
network of copyrighted goods, which can be downloaded through encrypted
connections. The stated goal of one of the developers is to put an end to
intellectual property as we know it.
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brighn
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response 63 of 183:
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May 16 14:06 UTC 2000 |
If there is no reward for creative thought, what will be the point of art per
se art? It will return to being the domain of the idle rich and bourgeois.
(If there is no monetary reward, that is.)
Praise is all well and good, but if making a pretty house gets you as much
as make an ugly one, then we might as well make ugly ones and cut out the
extra work.
It's sad.
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brighn
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response 64 of 183:
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May 16 14:12 UTC 2000 |
BTW, Aaron, you ask for a response, and accuse me of picking a fight. I give
a response, and your sole response is "Does that make you feel better?"
I reiterate: I'm not the one trying to pick a fight. No, it doesn't make me
feel better that apparently intelligent human beings think that ART is
distinguishable from PRODUCT and that ART should be free and artists should
pay their way on the glory of praise.
If you'd care to spell out YOUR interpretation of other's suggestion in a way
that doesn't make it sound like ars gratia artis leading to impoverished
geniuses, feel free. Until then, stop with the condescending barbs.
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gelinas
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response 65 of 183:
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May 17 03:42 UTC 2000 |
In your original scenario, Paul, you have to get paid, up front, by the
architect interpeting your speech into a drawing (or, alternatively, make a
contract describing how the proceeds from the collaboration will be shared).
Consider a concert. The singer sings and the audience listens. No record
(except memory) is made, so there is nothing to reproduce, nothing to sell
later. Alternatively, the singer first writes the song onto paper. The
song can then be sold innumberable times. If the performance is recorded
on a reproducible medium, then the performance can be sold, too.
The only way the performer can get paid for those copies of his performance
is if he *controls* the copies. (That's why we can't take tape machines
into concerts. It's also why cameras are banned from museums.)
Yes, Eric's idea can be made to work, but it won't be easy. At some point,
a creator is going to have to be recognised as capable of creation and then
supported (fed, clothed, housed) to be free to create. We have that, now.
What was that H Ford said about the worker with his feet up on the desk?
"He once made me a million dollars like that."
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brighn
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response 66 of 183:
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May 17 14:32 UTC 2000 |
#65> So what you're saying is, that because people are making illegal copies
of recorded music, then other's original suggestion is that musicians
shouldn't get paid for concerts (which was totally irrelevant to the original
thread)? In fact, what you're saying is that Other's plan suggests the ONLY
problem with the status quo is rock stars getting paid for concerts?
Paint me utterly confused.
Look, here's our current system: I do work, I get paid. If I don't like what
I'm getting paid for the work I'm doing, I ask for more, or I stop doing it.
Sometimes that work involves producing something tangible, sometimes it
doesn't. If I do something that's intangible, but creative, I control the
creativity behind the thought, as long as I can demonstrate that I did the
mental work involved.
Maybe the flaw, and where Other's plan runs askew, is in a misunderstanding
of what happens AFTER I do the creative work. I write a song. I sing a song.
I produce a song. I get paid for all of these tasks. Now, where copyright
and intellectual property comes in is, now that I've written the song, nobody
else can sing that song (legally) without giving me money.
Instead, I can see a system where I get paid for writing a song. If people
like how I sing it, then I get paid for that. If they make copies of me
singing it, then they give me money for each copy. (So far, that's what we
have now.) But if they want to sing the song themselves, they're welcome to
do so without paying me more (they have to pay me some initial fee for a copy
of the sheet music, perhaps).
But this scenario doesn't address the Napster issue, either. Perhaps instead
of paying a musician a percentage of sales (ditto an author, or anyone else),
we should be paying them a lump sum up front... so, regardless of ticket
sales, or book sales, or what have you, the creative artist gets a set amount.
Actually, I think that's a better system, and it's one that's been used in
the past. Metallica gets paid $1,000,000 for recording "Load." Now, the record
company wants to sell copies of it. It's up to the record company to make sure
it makes enough profit to justify giving Metallica $1,000,000, and unless
Metallica wants to sing those songs in different ways, they're done getting
money for *that recording* of *those songs*. I really don't think that MP3
and "free music" will ever stop people from buying recorded music... after
all, home taping has existed for decades, and while that's had an effect on
sales, there's still a sizeable demographic (including me) who'd rather have
the convenience of buying the album without having to worry about errors in
copying, download times, finding all the tracks, etc. etc.
My point: Other's plan of stripping an artist's financial affiliation with
anything intangible is ludicrous. Instead, we might want to reconsider how
it is that we pay our artists. Right now, for any NON-creative work, we pay
a lump sum for the task, not ongoing dividends. I think we should do the same
for creative tasks.
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krj
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response 67 of 183:
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May 17 15:18 UTC 2000 |
I was out of town last week and am quite behind on the fast-moving news.
There are three or four news stories on the Napster case I will try
to summarize in the next day or so.
Aaron in resp:62 :: On the developers who are working to develop a network
to put an end to intellectual property as we know it: I wonder, would
we / society want to see this entire effort as a crime?
I have occasionally said over the last decade or so that we are moving
into the post-copyright era. However, is it possible that society is
willing to mount a War in defense of copyright, similar to the War waged
against low-level drug users? There's a ZDnet story today, picked up by
mp3.com, in which "a senior figure within the music industry... who
requested anonymity" predicts that someone will go to jail "within the
next four months" for downloading illegal MP3 files.
The anonymous source "believes" says that the RIAA is pressuring the
legal system to make an example of somebody.
This really just restates what I wrote earlier about the No Electronic
Theft Act: it's targeted specifically at low-level pirates such as Napster
users, and the only question now is whether society is ready to start
prosecuting middle-class kids in quantities sufficient to act as a
deterrent.
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gelinas
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response 68 of 183:
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May 17 16:42 UTC 2000 |
The problem I see with "one lump sum and your done" is that the payer of
the lump sum can continue to profit into eternity from the work purchased
with that lump sum: the profit from each album sold goes to the payer.
The current system is that the person recorded gets a portion of the
proceeds from each sale (and so does the songwriter, who may not be the
same as the singer). So a really popular singer gets lots of money,
while a really unpopular singer gets little money. Under a lump-sum
scheme, both will get the same amount, so why bother trying to be popular?
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aaron
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response 69 of 183:
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May 17 16:47 UTC 2000 |
re #64: Does that make you feel better?
re #66: Even if you "pass the buck" from the musician to the recording
company (or to BMI and ASCAP), somebody continues to own the
recording, and needs to collect royalties to make its efforts
worthwhile.
re #67: The funny thing is, if I utilize the "safe harbor" provisions of
the law, I can develop programs that can be "misused" to avoid
copyright law and royalties. If I declare that my intent is to
destroy intellectual property as we know it, I might have a hard
time availing myself of the "safe harbor" provisions. But some of
these programs seem to be on a Usenet model -- where there is no
central storage, or Napster-like server you can point to, but
instead files are distributed across many systems. If the producer
of the software intends to just write and release the program, with
the sole reward being a loss of profits to record companies, there
isn't much that can be done (other than scrambling for the next
technological fix).
It is quite possible that the criminal prosecution of a person
who downloads MP3 files will be attempted. It probably will be
a blatant violation of the law, such that it doesn't look
too sympathetic, and end up backfiring on the industry. But it
won't stop MP3 trading, any more than Kevin Mitnick's conviction
ended cracking. What it will do is advance the alternative
software, which hides the source, file type, and recipient through
encryption.
For the first few years of the internet, searches for sex-related
sites were by far the most common. For the past year, sex is down
to #3, behind MP3-related searches. This isn't going to go away.
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mcnally
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response 70 of 183:
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May 17 17:23 UTC 2000 |
(although there is a growing tendency to treat "the Internet" and
"the World-Wide Web" as the same thing, I'm disappointed to see
a long-time user like Aaron [who almost certainly knows better]
make a statement like "for the first few years of the internet.."
For the first *many* years of "the internet" there were no
functional net-wide search tools..)
As usual, the Onion is right on top of things this week, with the
following article lampooning Napster/MP3 hysteria:
http://www.theonion.com/onion3618/kid_rock_starves.html
Consider it mandatory reading before continuing this discussion..
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raven
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response 71 of 183:
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May 17 18:22 UTC 2000 |
I read somewhere that 70% of college students are using Napster. I f this
is true that's a hell of a lot of college kids to throw in jail unless
we blatently want to violet the bill of rights equal protection clause
and just prsecute a few people as "examples."
I think a lump sum is exactly the wrong way to go. The beuty of mp3 is
disintermediation. I think the best way to deal with this is for artists
to sell their mp3 directly on the internet. One of my favorite singers
Kristen Hersh is selling some of her songs only on her web site see:
http://www.throwingmusic.com/TM2000/main.html
Some bands such as phish encourage their fans to tape at concerts, this
seems like a good compramise to me encouraging fans to exchange concert
mp3s via say Napster and selling the studio mps directly. This way the
artist actually makes more money by cutting out the parasitic middlemen.
As for what to do about piracy that is a tough one. I don't think a war
on Napster, Gnutella, freenet, is going to be any more effective than
prohibtion or the war on drugs both failures IMO. It seems to me the best
aproach is educating people that there is no free lunch and working towards
furthur disintermediation. Ofcourse this would piss off the record companies
and the few artists making millions, but frankly I have little sympathy for
either group as there are so many talented muscians barely surviving, maybe
this would even out the distributiohn of incomes in the music biz a bit.
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orinoco
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response 72 of 183:
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May 17 18:28 UTC 2000 |
(While I admit I haven't read the assigned homework yet,.....) What I'm
wondering at the moment is, why is the problem with pirated music so much
worse than the problem with pirated software? After all, software generally
costs more than music, is a "useful" item rather than a luxury, and the
information you need to crack a piece of software is easier to transmit --
often just a short password. Was there a similar software pirating kafuffle
that I'm just too young to remember, or is there some reason that music
pirating is having a bigger deal made of it?
(And what's the #2 net search? I mean, really, between sex and music, what
else is left, right?)
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raven
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response 73 of 183:
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May 17 18:38 UTC 2000 |
There was a bigger anit pirating of software stink in the 80s. Some software
companies went so far as distributing a dongle which was a piece of hardware
that you had to plug in to use the software. This was so unpopular that
eventually the software companies back off and just barked without biting.
The only reason I can think of that the music is different is their is more
choice out there. i think some software companies figured out that if
people pirated say Microsoft Word that it helped establish it as a standard
so in the long run it may helped their sales. There is no analgous situation
in music so I guess the record companies feel they have nothing to lose and
a lot to gain by trying to put the clamp down as hard as possible on mp3.
IMO it's not going to work with distributed networks like Gnutella. I think
some other economic model will need to be developed (see my response 71)
and that some pirating will be inevitable in the digtal age unless we want
a staliesque police state decrypting and tracking every single packet on
the internet.
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brighn
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response 74 of 183:
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May 17 19:40 UTC 2000 |
First off, I think some of you are misreading my lump sum example.
To the person who asked about whether Metallica and, say, Kilgore Trout's Jug
Band would receive the same amount, clearly not. Metallica would
contractualize a lump sum. That's like asking if an entry level secretary and
a secretary with 25 years of experience would garner the same salary.
Take actors. Harrison Ford can pretty much name his salary; if David Schwimmer
wanted to make an action thriller, though, I doubt he could (while, in
contrast, David Schimmer et al *did* name their price recently to continue
making "Friends"). This is true under a royalties system, too -- Metallica
can insist on a higher percentage of profits, etc., than Kilgore Trout's Jug
Band, who should just be happy having a record contract, given that the sold
500 units last year.
Next, the artists can currently get in the mix, as it were, because people
who use Napster ARE stealing from them. I have no sympathy for record labels,
but there are starving musicians out there (not Lars and co., but hey). Under
a royalty system, every time somebody makes a copy of a copy, that's money
that they (potentially) lost. If they get a lump sum, go home, go make more
music, then they're not getting stolen from.
At any rate, Aaron, stop with the condescension and answer the fucking
question. Please illustrate how Metallica gets $1 for writing a song, under
other's system. Then explain how Napster isn't ripping Metallica off, again
under other's system. Or shut the fuck up.
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