Hard News: Inimical to the public good
242 Responses
First ←Older Page 1 … 6 7 8 9 10 Newer→ Last
-
My understanding of the argument made by Mark Kneebone above is that filesharing will (if the copyright enforcement powers sought by the industry aren't granted) undermine the economics of the recording industry and drive them out of business
And home taping is killing music....
I have a great deal of sympathy with Mark's position. He's right, the impact is severe, but it's also happily overstated by the industry as a whole. There are a multitude of reasons for the downturn in sales of recorded music and this is just one of them.
@Don....
absolutely agree with your last paragraph, and I can't help that feel that is simply the industry not learning anything from the Napster lesson, or the RIAA lawsuits, and doing it to themselves once again. -
My understanding (which comes from reading Simon Napier-Bell's book Black Vinyl White Powder) is that until the late 50s/early 60s a record company would buy the rights to a song. They would then recruit musicians to record a version of the song.
After the Beatles and others came on the scene, things changed to a situation where most groups wrote their own songs.
I don't have the book in front of me so might have this a bit wrong, but can look later.
-
My understanding (which comes from reading Simon Napier-Bell's book Black Vinyl White Powder) is that until the late 50s/early 60s a record company would buy the rights to a song
I'd take anything you read in Napier-Bell's books with a grain of something, as amusing as they are.
But you are misunderstanding the situation. Prior to advent of the writer / artist (and The Beatles get credit but that misses Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and a bunch more) publishers would push their songs at companies (they still do for the non-writing artists) and often an artist would be (very strongly) advised record a song that was owned by a publisher that was in the same group as the label, as a preference, but labels themselves didn't buy the publishing rights to songs as such as a rule. If the writer had no deal he might be signed to an an associated publisher as a condition of getting the song recorded, or if the artist was big enough then they would often insist on a cut of the publishing (Elvis is a good example..it was a condition of recording).
And music publsihers released albums, usually via their associated labels, of people doing their songs.
Music publishing is a fairly complex business, with a thousand variations on deals and there is a factor called Controlled Composition too in the US where the record company pays a higher publishing rate to a song allied to them than someone independent...something that is probably illegal in much of the world and absolutely unethical but still in contracts.
-
@che
and whoever the advisor is who created a link between 'music piracy' and "child pron"? you're an idiot who deserves to lose your job for misleading a member of the Government...
It's so ludicrous that I'm prepared to be convinced she came up with it all by her widdle self
-
frankly, if the current "push" business model that identifies and makes stars out of wankers like vanilla ice or britney spears dies, then the world would actually be a better place.
Too true. I still believe recorded music is better considered as an ad for live music. How many times have you heard someone say "they're not as good live" I used to hear it a lot back int the seventies and eighties and thought "yeah, because they have no talent and need the A&R man to make them sound good" then we got Milli Vanilli.
Yes Simon you're righteh????
The recording industry goes back to the 1890sBut the advent of the recording industry becoming a big money spinner did not happen until the sixties, previous to this, owning a record player was still a luxury and we just listened to the radio.
With more people owning the means to play recordings the industry took off and started playing the greedy corrupt games that they continue to play today. And now, they want to rip as much cash out of the "mug punters" before they have to give up the rotting corpse of the golden goose.
The fact is that the music recording/publishing industry has only been in existence for around fifty years, it is hardly an"established and respected" industry in the way we would refer to weavers and their attitude to the loom or the flying shuttle and they deserve nothing like the sympathy afforded to the Luddites -
Make it easy, make it cheap, and make it good, and we'll all flock to the screen, or the radio, or the rock show, in droves. Scare tactics like suing the pants off your biggest fans? That's the real anti-American road that should be less taken. How are we supposed to invest in innovators when they're not allowed to compete fairly against the big boys?
-
Hat tip to Vik Oliver for that Motley Fool link.
I was just coming over to post but my tag team mate got there first...
Another quote from a very quotable article:
It's hard to please Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) wasn't strict enough, and the No Electronic Theft Act (NET) too toothless, though together they turned millions of ordinary citizens into underground felons. The PRO-IP bill removes a few pesky requirements like filing a correct copyright claim, and now the court can impound your computer if you're under investigation for intellectual property issues.
mark kneebone, is this really the direction you want us to head in?
-
Make it easy, make it cheap, and make it good, and we'll all flock to the screen, or the radio, or the rock show, in droves.
And give everyone a pony!
Easy, cheap and good sounds a damn lot like quick, cheap, and good.
<quote>her widdle self</quote
What guts you have, to mock and slime someone who's no opportunity to reply. I'd be much more sympathetic to your arguments if you'd stop the ad homs about Tizard. They're kinda icky, I think.
Finally, lay off the Luddites. I quite respect working class activism in the face of the noose.
Many of them died in an industrial struggle; people like I/S would call them martyrs -- if it hadn't been for the fact they contradicted the march of technology, apparently quite a few people's real hero.
-
I still believe recorded music is better considered as an ad for live music.
That was the attitude very strongly in australia where they have a strong established tour circuit and a tradition of hard gigging bands.
as a recording engineer/artist I see live and recoded as completely different. Live requires repetitive skills. recorded requires inspiration skills.
being able to repeat your pre written song infront of an audience is one set of skills for sure, and add to that the ability to take your music to a new level and entertain as well as regurgitate, its quite a skill set.Recording however is the ability to be many people at once. do 5 vocals, 15 guitars, push a drummer around etc etc.
if you see a record as an ad for live you do a discredit to a lot of very talented people and a separate artform.
-
But the advent of the recording industry becoming a big money spinner did not happen until the sixties, previous to this, owning a record player was still a luxury and we just listened to the radio.....
.......The fact is that the music recording/publishing industry has only been in existence for around fifty years,
Sorry but that's just incorrect. Perhaps in New Zealand but most certainly not in much of the rest of the world. Sales of recorded works in the US, Asia and Europe throughout the 20th century have been massive since the 1920s, and there was a correlation with the rise of the recording industry and the radio industry in that decade. White Christmas, as recorded by Bing Crosby was until Hey Jude, the biggest selling single of all time...in the mid 40s. It's still number 3 I think after Hey Jude and Live Aid.
People like Louis Jordan, Duke Ellington, Crosby, Sinatra, the early rockers, Louis Armstrong, just in America, sold vast numbers of records, many many millions, and the associated publishing industry (heard of folks like Foster, or the Gershwins or Berlin, or Ivor Novello) was too a multi million dollar industry, which, as I said earlier, goes back the the 18th century. There are very few companies operating worldwide with histories as long as many of the music publishers.
Payola, which you link to, is as old as that industry.
Most of the major record labels were publically listed entities going back to the pre-WW1 era, and Congress in the US thought enough of labels like Decca (now part of Universal) to insist that the UK parent gift it to the US management in return for Lend Lease.
-
mark kneebone, is this really the direction you want us to head in?
that's an interesting proposition. looking at a present situation and extrapolating where it might take you.
back when we were talking about drm and the wisdom of attacking it, I said it could be worse, they could get to you through cutting off your internet connection, its not like they don't know what the dude downloading 90 gig a month is 99.9% doing with his bandwidth. and look what they're trying to do now. I'd love to say I told you so... in fact I jut did :)
backing media creators into a corner and saying it'll all work out fine in hindsight wasn't the smartest position to take.
it was a sweet ride while it lasted but it was never going to go on forever without some kind of massive inconvenience or collapse
-
Keir Leslie:
What guts you have, to mock and slime someone who's no opportunity to reply. I'd be much more sympathetic to your arguments if you'd stop the ad homs about Tizard. They're kinda icky, I think.
Please forgive me if I'm missing some intended joke here, but how is it that Tizard has "no opportunity to reply" ?
-
Keir Leslie:
What guts you have, to mock and slime someone who's no opportunity to reply. I'd be much more sympathetic to your arguments if you'd stop the ad homs about Tizard. They're kinda icky, I think.
Please forgive me if I'm missing some intended joke here, but how is it that Tizard has "no opportunity to reply" ?
-
Because she isn't reading this. (OK, not always a true assumption, but as a rule, if someone isn't in the conversation, you should apply a higher bar.)
I've no objection to `Tizard's position on x is wrong', that's fair, because it's public policy discussion, and public policy discussions have different rules.
I do strongly object to the personal, childish `widdle self' `she screamed at us' attacks, because it's kind of pointless, very unsubstantiated, and 'cause I feel you should say that sort of thing to people's faces, not just talk crap on the internet.
Also, utterly unproductive.
-
not just talk crap on the internet.
to be fair keir I think that is the same mark harris who told a booker prize winner they should have chosen a better paying career and that her country owed her nothing for her contribution to it. kinda hard to take anything after that seriously. (zing)
I guess there is always redemption, although I think the widdle comment isn't a step in the right direction.
-
OK Keir, I get it.
Tizard's a public figure, who appears to be taking a disturbingly ill-informed and autocratic approach to shaping legislation that affects a lot of people who've taken the trouble to comment here. While I agree about the tone of "her widdle self", it seems pretty minor in the circumstances.
Twenty years ago, as an aspiring MP, Tizard called Marcus Lush's Sunday night Campus Radio talkback on BFM. The discussion was about NZ's decision to buy into the ANZAC frigate deal, and caller opinion was running heavily against. While Tizard claimed that she was not calling simply to support her father as defence minister, she effectively did just that.
Now that she's a minister perhaps Tizard should perhaps be cut some slack on account of having more on her metaphorical plate these days, but she'd go a long way towards earning my respect if she - or even a ministerial minder - took the opportunity to weigh in here on this discussion. It'd certainly dispel the growing impression that she has little savvy about a medium that she's responsible for regulating. As I'd rather not risk being labelled as making ad hominem criticisms I'll refrain from stating why it is that she doesn't.
-
having met tizard I think she's is minister who is earnestly working hard to represent her job description.
having said that there is definitely an element of "out of her depth"-ness in dealing with her arts role, lt alone applying that to technology as she has had to do with this bill.
but you could probably say that about many of the commenters on this list.
I think Tizard is doing her best to represent creatives but that she's definitely having a hard time sorting it all out, as represented by the "guilty without trial" aspect of the bill.
That could easily be fixed.there seems to be an element of the "sky is falling" here, instead of offering good clean advice on making a solution to a definite problem.
-
i'm very far from anyone involved in briefing the minister or involved in the minister's office on this one, but i'm probably not wrong in assuming that she's working under advice.
and that advice might well be *bad* on some points, especially the child pron aspects russell mentioned in the original post.
-
its also worth remembering that although tizard is mentioning music as a key target the people that will be triggering the large download alerts will be people movie and tv addicts.
90 gig monthly downloads aren't music people. you could probably have every song ever made in a few months with that download figure.
The people who will benefit from choking the internet are movie people. a 5 meg song 3 times a day isn't going to trigger any alerts. that's just normal usage, a couple of you tube vids.
They're going to have to get into tracking sites to get serious on music piracy and maybe that's where the child pron thing comes in. Isn't that how they were catching pron trafficers? finding the sites they visited and tracking their activity. -
will be people who are movie and tv download addicts.
-
You know who's good? Kanye West.
He's been working the hype sites and MP3 blogs in a really interesting way by posting works-in-progress from his new album on his blog and letting them circulate.
People didn't like 'Love Lockdown', so he reworked it a couple of times. Now, he's posted an unmastered version of another tune, Heartless:
You got a new friend
Well, I got homies
But in the end it's just so lonelyAwww ...
Can't wait for the dub mix.
In the meantime, there are remixes galore of 'Love Lockdown' and the official version is a hit single. Nice.
-
Has it occurred to people that reasoning isn't working in the Great Copyright Debate?
Submissions, pointing out fallacies, inconsistencies and that the copyright act effectively gives judiciary powers to private entities are by and large ignored together with common sense.
Why then be pussies and continue trying to reason with the unreasonable? That strategy has been shown not to work.
Isn't it time for militancy on the issue? If Tizard wants to criminalise her electorate then they should not vote for her. That's the same as handing the organisations Tizard is seeking to empower with a cricket bat that they then can procede to beat you to a pulp with.
Likewise, if the music and movie industries want to hurt us, let's hurt them back. Organised one-day boycotts of purchased and rented music, DVDs and cinema films would sting.
Sure, music and films are some of life's great pleasures, but they're not necessary. We're not hooked on them like smack or meth addicts. We can do without them, for as long as it takes.
Trust me, there's no other way those in power and faceless media corporations will hear you.
-
if the music and movie industries want to hurt us, let's hurt them back. Organised one-day boycotts of purchased and rented music, DVDs and cinema films would sting.
or you could just download and pirate their wares in a mass media free for all, no wait, that's already happening.
hahaha boycott on purchases :) the only people who are still buying anything are those who don't know how to use the internet and they won't be reading this discussion.
you can turn your argument around and view it from the other side and say since consumers won't be reasonable with respecting copyright its pointless trying to reason with them so its time for militancy on the issue. no more mister nice guy. no wait, that's happening now too.
people are welcome to not consume media if they want, the problem is they want and they want irrespective of law, until it is enforced. humans are silly like that ometimes.
-
Actually, looking at the XKCD cartoon... we should probably boycott purchased music for safety's sake, so as not to become criminals due to arbitrary "permitted usage" changes.
-
@juha
The problem with that approach is it doesn't hurt the ones you want to get the message across - it only hurts the retailers. The faceless media companies who push for this type of legislation are well insulated from this sort of thing, whereas the record stores and cinema outlets have very thin margins and shallow pockets.I agree that reason isn't working, though
Post your response…
This topic is closed.