Although there was some to disagree with in Graham's essay, he had some interesting insight. The restaurant smells analogy is the least bad I've heard so far.
This response was flimsy.
> This is a flawed analogy. Cooking smells are a
> positive externality – they’re generated as a
> by-product of providing a service to paying patrons.
> But commercially released music is produced
> specifically for the purpose of being heard, and
> paid for (whether by the buyer, or by a royalty
> from a radio station).
So let's consider that you commercialised the sale of cooking smells. What would be the result? A bunch of providers would crop up dedicated to providing smells. They wouldn't bother with the food - they'd just sell the smells. And they'd talk about "smell innovation".
That's similar to the situation we have with commercial music venues. The government extends property rights to things that are both (1) not property and which (2) have a very different dynamic to property. And then dedicate operators set up to harvest that.
The people producing cooking smells wouldn't be restaurants producing food innovation. The restaurants themselves wouldn't have time to spend chasing after fiddly smell licensing arrangements, and paying up lawyers to go chasing after freeloaders. They're too busy running actual restaurants. Just as it is where the people producing music aren't themselves the music artists, and except for a tiny (although highly visible) fraction, music artists (even world class music artists) do not benefit from copyright protection.
The article goes on to claim that music costs money to produce - ludicrous. You can put a microphone under a jazz musician and then publish it on the internet and it's first class music. You can take a laptop into a symphone orchestra concert and record it. Recording and distributing things is so free of cost that the commercial music industry has to go out of its way to find mechanisms to shut down the people who do it, and to get the government to protect it.
I'm in the privacy of my room. Someone is broadcasting radio into my space. Why the hell shouldn't I flip some magnetic signals and bottle it, and give it to my friends if I want to? Or sell it? It's my damn room and media.
It significantly impedes our freedom. It makes us criminals in our own homes. And it doesn't delivery to the people whos interest it is justified by. It creates a sea of lobbyists who need to extend the policy further and further into our lives just so they can stay in the same place. It is indefensible, disgusting policy failure on a grand scale.
It's important to stress that intellectual property innovation occurs because people have a problem to solve. I wrote a franchise system for an events company because - surprise surprise - they had a franchise, and wanted software to better run it.
Mendellsohn wrote the Scottish symphony because he was inspired to do so. Orchestras perform works because people come to their concerts to experience the sound and atmosphere and variation, despite having high quality recordings at home. IBM funds linux because it wants an operating system capability for its servers.
However, the mamoth presence of things that leverage copyright in the market and in our lives distorts our perspective. Because of its legal advantages and the privilege it pushes focus away from artists, and leads to crazy circular logic of the sort shown in this article. You could simplify many of the points as, "The world is this way, therefore the world must be this way."
There was a time hundreds of years ago when the church had a monopoly on education. They would have tried to claim that without strong privilege, education would not happen. It's a lie.
IP law is holding us back, but you need to use your brain to see past the world we live in to the opportunities we're missing out of because of all these protected gangsters who dominate the channels.
Near the end I see bold text,
"What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations?"
You can charge for your creation. Steam has mechanisms for getting people to buy from them, and to make it difficult for people to run steam software they haven't paid for. Good for them.
But you shouldn't have the right to get the government to annoint business models for you, or to be your enforcer. Copyright and patents are not property, and they should be described that way or treated that way in law.
Would you have a problem with it if Steam started serving games without paying the developers? Also, when he talks about the cost of producing music, he isn't referring to the cost of setting up a microphone, which is miniscule. What he's talking about is the fact that it might take an artist over a month to create a two-and-a-half-minute song.
> What he's talking about is the fact that it might
> take an artist over a month to create a two-and-
> a-half-minute song.
I covered that music innovation happens without requiring us to relinquish our rights in my original post.
But let's expand, because I can raise Jade Ewen now.
The only musicians who benefit from copyright in a significant way are a few that get hand-picked as front-men by the gansters who run the music industry. These are the ones they can point to.
Consider Ms Ewen. Successful artist, national treasure who performed well in Eurovision for the UK, one of the handful of music artists from the billion around the world who probably makes something a sliver over minimum wage from leveraging copyright. Her record label (who make the real money) tell her to move her life to Los Angeles without telling her what she'll be doing there. http://www.eurovision.tv/page/news?id=4373&_t=jade_had_n...
Her company would have had a choice of twenty girls with excellent looks and high quality vocals when they decided to pick her as their next star. They have some brand invested in her, but they can replace her when they like. They already started the process when they pushed her into the sugarbabes.
She is cattle to them.
But she puts a smile on it in the end, because she has no options.
All those kids who sign on to those talent shows are. They have to sign away their rights to the sponsoring organisations just to get in.
I'm on the lookout for a news story to demonstrate a culture of mates agreements between studios and compliant "managers". It will reveal itself in time.
Copyright law creates structures suitable for a ganster class of copyright interests. It does not serve artists.
The claim in the article isn't that nobody would write and perform music without copyright, but that there would be less of it, and that it would be of lower quality. My claim is that labels, publishers, and music producers will exploit artists if copyright does not exist. I'm not trying to defend the business model of big music labels, so the example of Jade Ewen is neither here nor there. I'm defending the idea of limited intellectual property rights, because without them artists would be at an even greater disadvantage.
It's easier to see the problem in publishing or the game industry than in music, since musicians can make money from performances. Taking your example of Mendelssohn, he made his money from holding concerts and getting stipends from German monarchs. Authors and game designers can't hold performances, so the only way they can make money is by actually selling copies of their work, which requires intellectual property rights, or by hoping to attract a rich sponsor. If Amazon could sell books without having to give any royalties to the copyright holders, they would.
The idea that copyright only benefits the select few in the music industry isn't true, either. Labels often get caught plagiarizing songs that were written by small artists and handing them to big-name artists that they have under contract. With copyright, the smaller artists have an uphill battle. Without copyright, they have no weapons whatsoever.
> The claim in the article isn't that nobody would
> write and perform music without copyright, but that
> there would be less of it, and that it would be of
> lower quality.
That's an arbitrary claim. There's no evidence of it. You can't produce evidence because we don't know what the opportunity cost of all this enforcement is.
> Authors and game designers
There's plenty of opportunities for them too. Read _Against Intellectual Monopoly_ by Boldrin/Levine from page 22. The section ends, "SO we can realistically conclude that if J K Rowling were forced to publish her book without the benefit of copyright, she might reasonably expect to sell the book to a publishiing house for several million dollars - or more. This is certainly quite a bit less money than she earns under the current copyright regime. But it seems likely, given her previous occupation as a part-time French teacher, that it would still give her adequate incentive to produce her great works of literature".
> so the only way they can make money is by
> actually selling copies of their work, which
> requires intellectual property rights
That's not correct, and the above chapter covers this too. Cliff's notes: where there is no IP, there's a rush when something is released to it into print and on the market. Creators can sell the rights to first release for a fortune. The US government made a fortune on the official 9-11 report by auctioning off first-access rights along these lines.
People can also make money by publishing something, and then getting a job teaching (or some other expert capacity) in the field.
> The idea that copyright only benefits the
> select few in the music industry isn't true,
> either. Labels often get caught plagiarizing songs
> that were written by small artists and handing them
> to big-name artists that they have under contract.
> With copyright, the smaller artists have an uphill
> battle. Without copyright, they have no weapons
> whatsoever.
All discussions about the merits of copyright need to consider the opportunity cost of copyright as well as the advantages.
Given the absolute absence of evidence, the default needs to be no copyright, because copyright intrudes on our freedom. To be enforced, it's necessary to reach further and further into the privacy of people's lives and homes, and that is incompatible with the spirit of live-and-let live that is the foundation of free society.
I've just thought of a new counterclaim to the idea that we need to find a way to protect certain kinds of jobs. What about dancers? I've seen people make all these claims about protecting musicians, but what about dancers? Dancers don't make much money, and copyright doesn't provide for them. Not that copyright protects musicians either - it doesn't - but that's the claim so let's role with it for the purpose of pointing out this new inconsistency. Should the state also then be required to invent new and arbitrary business systems so that dancers should be able to make a living?
Smells are currently being sold -- as advertisement for products held within stores (big box stores are known to pipe in smells of baked goods at the front etc...)
What if consumers don't pay for music? There have been many suggestions about how this will play out, but maybe it will be that Pepsi and McDonalds will decide the music that is best suited for selling their products. Brittany Spears will stick around for sure (love her), but I'm not sure where this leaves us.
This response was flimsy.
So let's consider that you commercialised the sale of cooking smells. What would be the result? A bunch of providers would crop up dedicated to providing smells. They wouldn't bother with the food - they'd just sell the smells. And they'd talk about "smell innovation".That's similar to the situation we have with commercial music venues. The government extends property rights to things that are both (1) not property and which (2) have a very different dynamic to property. And then dedicate operators set up to harvest that.
The people producing cooking smells wouldn't be restaurants producing food innovation. The restaurants themselves wouldn't have time to spend chasing after fiddly smell licensing arrangements, and paying up lawyers to go chasing after freeloaders. They're too busy running actual restaurants. Just as it is where the people producing music aren't themselves the music artists, and except for a tiny (although highly visible) fraction, music artists (even world class music artists) do not benefit from copyright protection.
The article goes on to claim that music costs money to produce - ludicrous. You can put a microphone under a jazz musician and then publish it on the internet and it's first class music. You can take a laptop into a symphone orchestra concert and record it. Recording and distributing things is so free of cost that the commercial music industry has to go out of its way to find mechanisms to shut down the people who do it, and to get the government to protect it.
I'm in the privacy of my room. Someone is broadcasting radio into my space. Why the hell shouldn't I flip some magnetic signals and bottle it, and give it to my friends if I want to? Or sell it? It's my damn room and media.
It significantly impedes our freedom. It makes us criminals in our own homes. And it doesn't delivery to the people whos interest it is justified by. It creates a sea of lobbyists who need to extend the policy further and further into our lives just so they can stay in the same place. It is indefensible, disgusting policy failure on a grand scale.
It's important to stress that intellectual property innovation occurs because people have a problem to solve. I wrote a franchise system for an events company because - surprise surprise - they had a franchise, and wanted software to better run it.
Mendellsohn wrote the Scottish symphony because he was inspired to do so. Orchestras perform works because people come to their concerts to experience the sound and atmosphere and variation, despite having high quality recordings at home. IBM funds linux because it wants an operating system capability for its servers.
However, the mamoth presence of things that leverage copyright in the market and in our lives distorts our perspective. Because of its legal advantages and the privilege it pushes focus away from artists, and leads to crazy circular logic of the sort shown in this article. You could simplify many of the points as, "The world is this way, therefore the world must be this way."
There was a time hundreds of years ago when the church had a monopoly on education. They would have tried to claim that without strong privilege, education would not happen. It's a lie.
IP law is holding us back, but you need to use your brain to see past the world we live in to the opportunities we're missing out of because of all these protected gangsters who dominate the channels.
Near the end I see bold text,
"What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations?"
You can charge for your creation. Steam has mechanisms for getting people to buy from them, and to make it difficult for people to run steam software they haven't paid for. Good for them.
But you shouldn't have the right to get the government to annoint business models for you, or to be your enforcer. Copyright and patents are not property, and they should be described that way or treated that way in law.