>> It's also worth noting that the general level of morality and ethics in
society has declined, exacerbating this whole problem.
Throughout history, every generation has moaned that morality and ethics has
declined. It's not clear that it has, because I know of no way to measure
such a thing.
>> In a more moral society, record companies wouldn't charge extortionate
rates for CDs, and no one would think of depriving an artist or company of
profit by pirating a CD.
I seem to recall paying $12 for an LP back in the day. From that
perspective, a CD is certainly not overpriced.
Here's what I believe has happened. For years, the recording industry
pointed to the huge machines that produced records and talked about the
expenses of promoting records - thus justifying the price, while paying the
artist little.
When CD appeared, new equipment had to be purchased and it seemed reasonable
to pay about 16% more for what seemed to be superior quality (to most). It
just had to cost a huge amount of money to make those things, right?
Today, you can buy a CD-R burner for less than $30, and 100 discs for $11.
For the price of 3 music CDs, you can buy the equipment to burn 100 CDs.
That's 41 cents each - just 11 cents for the discs. Suddenly the consumer
feels he's been lied to. If I can make a CD for 11 cents, Sony must be
making a killing. I suspect the average guy has no problem "stealing" from
a company that he feels has lied to him all along. It doesn't make it
right, but I understand the feeling.
Here's the odd thing. When file sharing via Napster was rampant, CD sales
were at an all-time high. Once Napster what shut down, CD sales dropped. I
believe (as do many) that shared MP3s had the same effect as radio play and
helped the music get better exposure. If you really liked it, you would buy
a CD for yourself (better quality, plays in your CD player).
Did the industry shoot itself in the foot? I believe so. Now Sony pull
this DRM/Rootkit stuff.
AutoCAD became the dominant force in the CAD industry, in part, because they
were nearly the only one that did NOT have any copy protection. In version
2.15, they added a dongle. Sales plummeted. CEO/Founder John Walker was
angry about this - he believed for every copy sold, there were 10 copies
pirated. Wisely, they came out with version 2.17 - without the dongle.
Sales increased and pretty much have year after year (although growth slowed
when they added authorization codes in 2001).
Sorry for running on...
Ken Elliott
=====================
-----Original Message-----
From: slug@nks.net [mailto:slug@nks.net] On Behalf Of Paul M Foster
Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2005 3:16 AM
To: slug@nks.net
Subject: Re: [SLUG] Sony Part III
On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 05:04:52PM -0600, Levi Bard wrote:
> > What I am supporting is their right to protect their property. I
> > don't condone illegal activities to further ANY objective, but I
> > think that their objective is just. As for your comment regarding
> > Sony's "tenuous rights to somebody else's product", if the artist
> > wishes to have their music distributed by Sony, and they sign a
> > contract that gives Sony the rights to their music, who's fault is
> > that? Either negotiate a better contract, or find someone else to
> > distribute your music (or do it yourself). The fact is, they go
> > with Sony because Sony is huge and they can get a lot of exposure
> > (let me translate: $$$$$$$$). The artists are out to make
> a little
> > coin, too. Don't be so naive as to think they do not know what's going
on.
>From what I understand, there isn't that much money coming from record
companies from the sale of CDs. Musicians make money from touring.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong on this.
A similar situation apparently obtains in book publishing. Publishing
companies make a lot of money on your book, and you make a very little.
Artists have a bad trade-off to deal with. They can go with Bob's Records.
They get to keep their content as their own. They'll sell 1000 records, and
keep their day job at 7-11. Or they can go with Sony. Sony will try to own
their content outright. They'll sell 100000 records, but make a pittance
until they get a successful tour going. Like I said, a bad trade-off.
Here's the problem: greed. Sony doesn't make better CDs with better artists
than anyone else. They're not even vaguely interested in that.
In fact, they put out a lot of pure crap. No, for Sony and many other large
companies, it starts and ends with money. Period.
The problem is that many companies completely lack anything even vaguely
resembling a conscience. I'm not talking about donating to save the rain
forests. Companies that do that are salving their consciences because they
got rich and deep down don't believe they deserve it. I'm talking about a
mission statement like this:
"We make records. We share as much _profit_ with our artists as we can,
since they create the content. We don't put out crap from people who really
can't sing or play. Our purpose is not to make profit, though we intend to
do that as well, in order to stay in business. Our purpose is to put out
recordings which have beautiful music on them by talented artists."
I'm not decrying large companies. They make stuff we can't for cheaper than
we could. I'm just saying the real problem here is soulless companies.
> >
> > My point is this: there is a problem with pirating music. Sony
> > wants to stop this illegal behavior. I agree with their *reasoning*
> > behind wanting to stop it. A *solution* needs to be found. One
> > that allows Sony the rights to their property (without violating any
> > laws) and that does not infringe upon any rights of the law abiding
citizens of the world.
>
What you're seeing is a result of two things. First, the fact that
technology has made it easy to copy content. Xerox machines, I'm sure,
produced a backlash when they came out-- oh, no one will buy books any more,
because they can just copy them. Turns out it's pretty time-consuming and
ultimately costs more than just buying the book. But now, you can rip a CD
in a matter of minutes. You can pick and choose the songs you want to listen
to, instead of sitting through crappy album cuts to get to the good ones.
The technology permits (maybe even
encourages) some types of crime.
But the second factor is a backlash against record companies. The companies
are (rightfully) perceived as criminal. In addition, they have become so
addicted to the status quo, they resist all temptation to change their
distribution model to fit the changing tastes of consumers.
(This is changing slowly.)
> I understand what you're saying, but this is a fundamental flaw
> inherent in the entire concept of intellectual property. You cannot
> own an idea, nor control its distribution. For a while our current
> system worked by controlling the media on which ideas could be
> distributed, but now our technology has advanced to the point where
> there quite literally is no medium of distribution, unless you count
> electrons. (Or photons.) This is not a flaw in our technological
> system, but rather in the concept of ownable intellectual property in
> general.
There _is_ a medium, but it's shrunk in importance. Paper books (medium) are
expensive. Hard disk space (medium) is not.
But there is no flaw in the concept of ownable intellectual property.
Inventions like White-Out and Post-Its are examples of this. The Beatles'
White Album is an example of this.
No, ideas, particularly scientific ones, cannot be owned. Think DNA. But
source code isn't an idea. It's an expression of an idea. That's why it's
copyrightable (a novel is an expression of a story idea), but not really
patentable (not _really_).
Moreover, to come up with something like a workable light bulb took years of
research and millions of dollars. That's something worth protecting. And not
everyone could afford that kind of time and that kind of money to do it.
Software's different. Any halfwit with a copy of Visual BASIC can write a
program. It's like everyone has their own little light bulb laboratory now.
You can't pretend to use patents adequately in a world like that. Too many
people work on the same thing every day and use the same methods. The patent
paradigm simply doesn't fit.
Two hundred years ago, no one had any question that IP existed and was worth
protecting. Now many people don't believe that. But back then, record
companies didn't sell CDs with one decent song on them for more than the
cost of a cassette, which costs far more to actually produce but has the
same content on it. The loss of the idea of intellectual property has been
fed by companies who seek to extort consumers with it.
If Thomas Edison had charged a hundred dollars per light bulb (extortion),
we might still be reading by candlelight. Because you just couldn't make
your own light bulbs. But now with computers, the consumer has the power to
bypass extortionate record companies. And out goes the idea of owned
intellectual property.
Jobs had a very bright idea when he convinced record companies to allow
downloadable single songs, sold for a pittance.
> There is no way to prevent the flow of information if you cannot
> control the medium, and as technology advances, our media will become
> more and more uncontrollable. Individuals and businesses who deal in
> intellectual property, if they want to continue doing so profitably,
> should be seriously evaluating their present and future business
> models at this point and looking at what they can do to offer services
> related to their current products.
>
> Believe it or not, the open source movement is doing this right. It
> recognizes that the salable value of a piece of software is not the
> executable nor the source code. People who don't understand this
> always say, "How are you going to make any money if you give your code
> away?" That's like saying, "How are you going to make any money
> running a restaurant if you let people in the door for free?"
I don't think the Open Source movement does this very well at all. The Open
Source movement is strewn with the carcasses of companies who haven't done
this right. And few are the ones who do.
The problem is that people in the Open Source movement aren't doing it for
profit. They're doing it to advance the art. Or improve mankind. Or whatever
their particular higher purpose is. (Or they just like to hack
;-) It's generally a labor of love, like all good science. But if the code
is the product, and you're making it freely available because you weren't in
it for the money in the first place, then you can't build a business around
that as a product. So you shift a bit and make the product "services". But
that means you've got a lot of marketing to do, because you have to convince
people that they need the service and that it's worth paying for. That's
hard to do, when you can buy computers for $300, download the software for
free, and mostly it "just runs". Big companies will spring for this, because
their thinking about such things is pretty twisted anyway. But it's a tough
market, as the carcasses of Open Source companies will attest.
It's also worth noting that the general level of morality and ethics in
society has declined, exacerbating this whole problem. In a more moral
society, record companies wouldn't charge extortionate rates for CDs, and no
one would think of depriving an artist or company of profit by pirating a
CD.
Is it just me, or is all this getting too political? ;-}
Paul
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