simple. because culture is free.

See, I think you have intellectual property mixed up with the latest fashion to hit the Gap.

Let me ask you this--why is it ok for you to dl a song of a dead band/musician but it isn't ok for you to walk into a museum and take a painting off the way of a dead artist for your own collection?

because the great painters didnt make prints.

Yeah but "culture is free". I mean, if its free who cares who yr cutting down in the process. right?

If I were a musician and everyone had my music and I received no compensation, I would be sad and poor. Then I'd have to go on tour forever to see some money, and alienate my family then go through a miserable divorce.

There's substantial difference between us lot constantly endeavoring to make culture free and that of culture actually being free. Which it isn't.

who would i be cutting down? its not like im wishing for anyones death, and i dont hold off on purchases hoping that the creator will die. im not saying anything totally revolutionary here. culture already goes into the public domain after a certain amount of time under copyright, no matter who made it or what form they made it in. im just saying that it needs to be sped up.



all types of creations (whether its protected by copyright or patent) ends up (eventually) in the public domain, meaning that its free, which is where i base my culture is free statement from. public domain is important and benefits all, an example of this being generic drugs.

who the fuck uses limewire anymore

i take the "anymore" back

It was serviceable for Mac users until Nicotine came along.

I create things for a living. Copyright helps pay my bills. Perhaps you would feel differently if we decided that whatever tasks you perform at your profession were suddenly "used up" and we didn't have to compensate you anymore.

US Copyright is for the life of the creator, plus 70 years. I'm not in favor of it being any longer than that, and I might be able to bend down to life + fifty years, maybe. But to make it unreasonably shorter is a mistake. If I create something fantastic and endearing to people, why should I not be able to assert control over my work? Fair use is always available for legitimate uses, but I don't think that all the unauthorized Calvin Pissing stickers are good for Bill Watterson or other creatives.

ok, lets take the average life span in the western world. thats a little bit more than 70 years. is 70 years not enough? do you need 140 years (avg lifespan + copyright expiry date) copyright? i said before that almost all the money that will ever be made on a piece of work is made while the creator was alive, but hell, i can go in an even smaller time frame than that. it is incredibly rare for any money to be made on a music recording even 15 years after it was produced, or even available in stores. go and take a look through a local record stores racks for albums they carry that were released 15-20 years ago. then, contemplate just how many albums total were released that year. the percentage is tiny.

That doesn't really explain why we shouldn't continue to compensate those people, but moreso why you don't want to pay for it. Let's say the new Owen Wilson movie wants to use Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", a recording from 36 years ago. Does Neil not deserve to get paid for a work being incorporated into a new use, simply because you think it's not worth anything anymore, or that's he's made enough money according to your standard?

What if it were a song that wasn't even a blip on the radar in 1970, but ends up making a long forgotten songwriter a nice retirement package in 2006?

yes, he should be compensated, because neil young is still alive.

Fu- You don't deserve to be ripped off

Does anyone think that if a cd is sold back to a store twice and the store recoups $6-9.99 per resale that the artist and label is somehow getting ripped off?

Consumers beat the market and the music industry was too stupid and shortsighted to embrace the new format before people figured out how to stop paying for music.

No more than GM is getting ripped off when you trade in your car and they resell it. Used goods are different than new goods, plus you aren't impacting the copy of the work, you're reselling the original. Also, it's not a very efficient way to make money.

I'm not even a hardcore anti-filesharing person, and I agree that the record companies completely dropped the ball then pissed everyone off by suing them. That doesn't mean that anyone should get whatever they want for free, or in the name of "free culture", because copyrights do protect lots of people and lots of different forms of expression.

as i said before, after the death of the creator their works should be public domain because:
1)the right to make money from works they created is the creators alone
2)all the money that could be made in the huge majority of cases will be made in the years immediately proceeding the release of the material, making the copyright pointless
3)copyright law protects works far too long
you seem to think that i dont like paying for peoples creations. however, im not against making money. im against the millions of pointless copyrights that damage the public interest and make culture into a black market (dj's can attest to this).



then if the creator is alive, they get compensated. the odds of this happening are incredibly minuscule. for every nick drake, there are thousands of soft machines.

I think that a major issue here is the noton of potential damages. Lets say that I d/l "Stadium Arcadium" for lack of a better example. This makes me one of millions now to own it and likely one of thousands to download it. At this point, my fiscal liability should be limited to the retail cost of the CD (or less, since its a substandard copy, likely, without artwork and case and disc). Should I take to sharing it openly, unless you can prove that i transferred it to someone other than the RIAA agent who busts me, there should be no liability. Just having something in the public domain (i.e. my hard drive) does not automatically mean that Ive shared (or will share) any of it. You cant go to jail for thinking about robbing a bank, just like the potential of sharing cannot be gauged. This is similar to malpractice law. If I make a mistake, but no one is injured, then I cant be sued for malpractice, simple as that.

With that said, if you are sharing files online with multiple unknown sources, you open yourself up considerably, and I think everyone knows that.

I have some interesting thoughts about torrents though. Many 'shared' torrents are actually from multiple users. I may grab 10 MB from 10 different users to compile one album, none of which indivually are necessarily copyright protected. If you just get some data from me with the label 'Stadium Arcadium', is that really a copyright infringement? What if, by itself, it doesnt even have a song that can be reproduced? I suppose providing the data could be as important as facilitating the transfer, but the setup (client, tracker, website) would be at least as culpable. Also, when you consider that many of these torrents/files are encoded by a third-party program, how much of that is still the property of the artist and how much is public domain (since LAME, etc. are public domain).

Essentially, its a lot murkier when you talk about sharing/downloading 30 packets of 0's and 1's that have been modified from the original and individually have no relationship with the original. One reason why I think BT will be very difficult to corral.

That's because you say dumb shit like "culture is free".

please read the thread. all ive said in on this subject has been explained, and i would hope you can be more eloquent than to use profanity to dissect my arguments.

[quote="Northern Soul] and i would hope you can be more eloquent than to use profanity to dissect my arguments.

[/quote]

Yes, shame on you!

Not that I'm a lawyer, but I can agree with this.

Even this is a false assumption. Every aspect of keeping culture preserved, available, and visible for future and current generations takes time and does in fact cost money. Therefore, it is not free, and therefore there are other people besides the sole creator of said work who are investing their resources in keeping these works out there for you. Records lables aren't just useless middle management, and if it weren't for them, we would never have know about most of this music to begin with. Do they have the right to make money off of the work of dead artists? Yes. It helps keep their doors open and allows them to invest in new artists. Are there abuses of this? Of course. But the plain fact exists that you probably wouldn't be able to find any of this if it wasn't paid for somehow, not once, but continually to keep it preserved and in current formats. Not everything just exists in the digital ether. It was recorded onto physical media which has to be stored somewhere, often has to be remastered to be represented more effectively on new formats, etc. Everything costs money, but we want to have it all without paying for it.

Also, what part of your ass did you pull that "1000 Soft Machines" for every "one Nick Drake"? There aren't that many older bands that didn't experience much success during their active tenure that get to reap the benefits later. It's about as likely as artists gaining wide recognition after their death. I mean, really, how would you come up with such a "statistic"?

you make the assumption that there is no money to be made in the public domain. if there was in fact no money in it, there would be nowhere you could go to hear the works of chopin, bach or any other classical music that is now in the public domain, or watch shakespeare. there would be no books you could read by homer, plato, or any other greek philosopher. public domain means that works are free from royalties, not necessarily that any performance, live or recorded, is free from any charge.


major labels have about (iirc) a 10% success rate, meaning that any group or artist that is signed to a record or developmental deal ends up actually succeeding in making a career out of recordings, where those who dont succeed may make one or two albums, or even none at all. given that the major record labels all around the world sign hundreds of acts each year, and given a 10% success rate, i think im well within my reach in saying that there are thousands of bands who will never make any money from their copyrights.

No, I don't make that assumption, and the classical comparison doesn't hold. Those are composers, and their work survives through the continual performances of their compostions. Also, you're the one who said you wouldn't buy albums by any deceased artist which implies that you don't feel there's anyone who deserves any money from your purchase since the artist that created it is dead. Royalties, as you know, usually acount for a very small percentage of the price you pay.



This meaning wasn't clear in your original post, but of course I would agree that many artists will never make anything from royalties. But so what? How is this adversely affecting the marketplace? I still don't get the point of your statement that "for every Nick Drake there are a thousand Soft Machines". Are you implying that living artists that struggle to make money from their recordings are disproportionately losing their share in the market to dead artists that can't even reap the benefits of their sales? I just don't understand the point of your statement or how it reinforces any of the arguments you're trying to make.

Also, family estates that get royalties from a deceased artist's work are often the ones responsible for caring for and managing said work. You're suggesting they shouldn't get any money at all from the sale of that work?