Speaker: ACTA: Don't sell us down the river
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Cameron, for the CD, simply, on physical you are paying a fee for warehousing and the sales team that brings it to your shop..about $5 last time I looked, plus the mark up for the retailer..about 30% of the cost.
And, yes, paying for the license you've already purchased again. But then, you're doing the same thing when you buy a CD copy of something you already own on vinyl. Selling you something you already own has been a very lucrative cornerstone of the recorded sound industry for a long time and one of the key reasons the CD was such a profitable container throughout the eighties and nineties.
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"Adapt or die" is the shorthand for that
It's also shorthand for "Stop acting like profitability is a right that must be protected by law." But you're right, we should leave this one alone.
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Because, really, that is what this all comes down to: how do we decide if the use of technology is beneficial or negative? Against what yardstick do we measure?
Social benefit and protection of the rights and livelyhood of the artists must be paramount considerations surely. And to that extent, the monstruous profits of some of the existing publishers are not beneficial to either, and it may well be that the new environment will settle into something that works out better, and not just replace Times Warner with Apple wholesale.
The principle of the library is not a bad one: allowing as many people as possible to access works of literature, music and film at lttle or no cost, whilst compensating the authors of these works. Insofar as a digital library can reach a lot more people, it seems a very desirable outcome (and by the same token, I'm not against a certain degree of piracy if it means broadening access -I've certainly downloaded my (un)fair share). We're nowhere near close the 'how to look after the creators' part of the equation yet, in the arts as in journalism. The fact that for the moment things are going okay for musicians is not really a guarantee that it will keep on keeping on. And I am concerned about what happens when books come onstream.
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Social benefit and protection of the rights and livelyhood of the artists must be paramount considerations surely.
Established artists? New artists? Metallica and Britney above, say, Minuit (whose name I picked because I just saw a BDO advert)? If the internet is a democratising force, which I think most of us would agree it is, that includes some degree of democratisation of income. Are we trying to foster growth of the art, or preserve the status quo? Because those are fundamentally incompatible aims. There are only so many currency units available to spend on entertainment, and if people are exposed to more choices on which to spend that currency they will likely spread the love widely.
As Cameron said above, downloaders are frequently also CD purchasers, concert attendees, merchandise buyers. If Little Jenny has $15 to spend on music, and only knows of one band, it's pretty obvious who's getting the money. But what happens if she now knows of two bands and likes them equally? Even if she has $25, neither band can get an equal share that is not smaller than the sum she spent previously.
I completely agree with you that ensuring fair compensation for artists must be a primary goal. However, I would much rather that dozens of new artists were put in a position of being able to at least work part-time on their art, at the expense of uber-incomes for those at the very top, than that any suggested solution was approached with a fundamental aim of not rocking the money boat.I am concerned about what happens when books come onstream
I'm actually not, for reasons to which I've largely alluded before and which Islander has articulated previously. Books are special, something one consumes as much for the medium as for the content. For many people, replicating that experience is a non-negotiable part of moving from dead-tree to electronic. That is a few years away, and offers time for the publishing industry to work out how to deal with the hurdles.
You mention libraries, and that is a good reason that I think authors will continue to get paid. After all, you can already consume nearly an unlimited quantity of books for effectively zero cost (I know, I know, rates etc), but people still buy their own copies. It's already technologically possible to allow limited lending of copies, trial versions and all the other stuff that one gets from dead tree libraries. What isn't possible, and likely will never be possible, is certainty that those things cannot be circumvented. However, provided that the restrictions aren't too onerous and it's more convenient to play the game than to break the rules, people will pay. All comes back to the convenience requirement for digital products. If the restrictions are so cumbersome that a product becomes inconvenient to use, the product will either not sell or it will sell but people will immediately take up whatever circumvention tools have been released. The closer to "perfect" a protection scheme gets, the more difficult it becomes to use. I've already mentioned Blu-Ray, which is unusable with Linux and other open source operating systems, and frequently won't even work with computers that have been sanctified by Redmond. If someone manages to crack the protection, Blu-Ray's annoyance factor says that demand for that crack will be enormous. The same applies to e-books. Make it easy to play nice, or expect that people will play dirty. Most people are fundamentally honest, especially those who are inclined to spend money on media. If it's easy for them to spend that money, they will, especially if they feel like they're getting good value. I speak of Amazon making the same mistakes with Kindle as the rest of big media have made in terms of the dedication to locking it up tighter than Fort Knox. It makes it hard for people to do the things they would do with a normal book, such as lending a copy, which is a lesson from the MPAA school of "customer satisfaction". Better to learn from the Apple school, where the copy protection was notional, just enough to distract casual users but not enough to stop anyone who wanted to make duplicates, and instead it was all about a reasonably-priced product with a good experience around it. -
See, I can say more than just "adapt or die" :D
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Cameron, for the CD, simply, on physical you are paying a fee for warehousing and the sales team that brings it to your shop..about $5 last time I looked, plus the mark up for the retailer..about 30% of the cost.
That still doesn't explain how a CD costs that much to buy again. I don't want (or need) to buy a second license. And I'm not even changing format!
I guess I'm trying to point out that media companies seem to want their cake & eat it as well.
(Well, not all... some smart ones are providing digital versions on the CD/DVDs. That's clever... control the experience the consumer gets, rather than leaving it up to some low quality cam they downloaded for playing on their laptop while they're on the plane.)
Which seems to be exactly what is going to happen in the US soon when the copyright grants start being revoked. I can see it now:
Big 4: but we own the copyright on the remasters!
artist: but we've revoked your grant to them!
Judge: I'm with the artists on this... BlueBeat ring any bells?Copyright Time Bomb Set to Disrupt Music, Publishing Industries
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Established artists? New artists? Metallica and Britney above, say, Minuit (whose name I picked because I just saw a BDO advert)? If the internet is a democratising force, which I think most of us would agree it is, that includes some degree of democratisation of income.
Anybody who is included in the exchange must be recognised. But that's of course immensely problematic of course. I'm talking principles here - because I think it's important to.
As for the book thing, my personal feeling of person who's generally wrong about these things is that it's going to explode in the next couple of years, tops. And a library is one thing - it has limited reach and each library shelves a limited number of titles as (very importantly) a limited number of copies of each. A global digital library of the kind that the Napster clones are for music or film is a whole nother thing.
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Anybody who is included in the exchange must be recognised. But that's of course immensely problematic of course. I'm talking principles here - because I think it's important to.
You appear to be, as I am, for what amounts to a fundamental reorganisation, opening it up right from the top to expose far more artists to the opportunity to make reasonable incomes from their work. This will, however, come at the expense of those who currently live lifestyles based around snorting cocaine from the armrests of the seats in their private jets.
As for the book thing, my personal feeling of person who's generally wrong about these things is that it's going to explode in the next couple of years, tops. And a library is one thing - it has limited reach and each library shelves a limited number of titles as (very importantly) a limited number of copies of each. A global digital library of the kind that the Napster clones are for music or film is a whole nother thing.
No, I wouldn't call you as wrong on that prediction. But to really take off with people who are disinclined to use technology, the devices need to become much, much more book-like. Open like a book, appearance of having pages, etc.
For the moment, there is no risk of a Napster for books because there is no unified e-book format. MP3 is universal, playable on any platform for which you can get a decoder. Likewise the common formats for ripped DVDs or digitised TV shows. E-book readers have no common format or operating system. That limits the portability of their proprietary media, in much the same way as you cannot play an iTunes file directly on any portable media player that isn't from Apple. The lack of a standard will limit the spread, unless one device takes off in the same way as the iPod dominates the MP3 player market.
Rather than competing to see who can come up with the "best" (read most limited and restrictive) format, it would be better if publishers got in behind an effort to come up with a format that will allow people to share a "book" with friends, allow libraries to loan "books", and deal with issues of pagination and font sizing. Right now there is time for such a project to be successful, because the market has not reached a point where any particular customer expectation has arrived. People will be pissed if they cannot share e-books in the same way as they share real ones, and it'll be a sad, sad day if libraries cannot lend e-books for a limited time in the manner that they operate at present. These are not hard hurdles to cover, in fact they're already solved problems, provided that the publishers can accept that they will fail, in the same way that the music and movie industries have failed, if they insist on trying to achieve perfect security before they will offer these products. -
oi oi roll on page 10
not that I'm counting -
Oh, and Gio, to your Fat Tony comment, I'll raise you a Ray Kroc and say "The customer is always right." Which appears to be something that has been forgotten in the corporate skyscraper dwellings of big media.
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No, I wouldn't call you as wrong on that prediction. But to really take off with people who are disinclined to use technology, the devices need to become much, much more book-like. Open like a book, appearance of having pages, etc.
I really don't see why. The Kindle does a pretty good job of replicating the appearance of a book page already, who cares that pages scroll on the one display instead of you having to turn them? It's a very intuitive system. And a ton of people who are not generally early adopters - such as the aged - will appreciate some of the advantages, such as being able to increase the legibility at will.
As for the format thing, all that they need to do is to be able to import from formats like PDF. That's the game changer.
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And the ugly elephant in the room, widely ignored, is that unit sales of music are actually up in the digital era, not down as we are repeatedly told. Album sales, and hence dollar value have dropped dramatically.
As people's perceptions of the price of content falls towards zero, it becomes harder to make money from it.
Pirates/thieves may be buying, but they are simultaneously pushing relentlessly at people's understanding of the price of music. Ultimately, even if the price of producing music becomes zero, as the cost of buying music also approaches zero producers will have to sell an infinite amount of it. And that is simply not possible.
I actually think that having a price on music is a good thing. People value things more when they have paid for them.
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I wish people would stop treating pro-copyright/anti-filestealing advocates as idiots. We understand your arguments, we just don't agree with them.
The way Lily Allen was treated for saying that filestealing hurts new artists was just awful.
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I'll raise you a Ray Kroc and say "The customer is always right." Which appears to be something that has been forgotten in the corporate skyscraper dwellings of big media.
Sometime around the mid-90s the shareholder supplanted the customer. It was nice while it lasted.
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The way Lily Allen was treated for saying that filestealing hurts new artists was just awful.
Word. The worst part of it was the obvious sexism: that she was a silly little girl speaking out of turn.
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I wish people would stop treating pro-copyright/anti-filestealing advocates as idiots. We understand your arguments, we just don't agree with them.
And, conversely, we would really appreciate not being viewed as thieving toe-rags who want to see artists starving in the gutter. Because that's the tone that comes across from that side of the debate.
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In fact I think you'll find it's just because you started throwing around binaries such as adapt or die and downloading is not theft. As I've said many times (here and on the copyright thread) I probably agree with you in a pragmatic sense a lot more than with the 'other side'.
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Pirates/thieves may be buying
At which point the pejorative terms cease to apply because they are now paying customers.
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Gio, when one side is calling the other thieves, it's a bit rich for them to then want to claim the moral high ground. Especially since the entire picture is so murky.
Use of pejorative labels isn't helpful, from either side. Yes, fine, I'm rather sneery about big media, but I try and keep it more seemly than calling them craven money-grubbers, which is roughly at par with calling downloaders thieves.
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All the more so when being called a thief implies criminal behaviour, which downloading is not, whereas being cravenly money-hungry is merely ethically dubious when one complains about how those evil downloaders are hurting the artists.
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Matthew, if I take something that does not belong to me without the permission of the person who owns it, that is theft. In moral, legal, and in common usage.
We can argue all day whether that theft is actually harming the artists, but that doesn't change it.
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All the more so when being called a thief implies criminal behaviour, which downloading is not
I disagree with you there.
People are taking the files for free because they would rather not pay for them.
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I really don't see why. The Kindle does a pretty good job of replicating the appearance of a book page already, who cares that pages scroll on the one display instead of you having to turn them? It's a very intuitive system. And a ton of people who are not generally early adopters - such as the aged - will appreciate some of the advantages, such as being able to increase the legibility at will.
I'll take your word for what Kindle has going for it. It's hard to tell from pictures on a 2D screen. If you're right about how much it will appease purists, however, then I definitely won't try and call you as wrong on how long it's going to take before these devices start to really take off.
As for the format thing, all that they need to do is to be able to import from formats like PDF. That's the game changer.
It's not the import that's the issue. It's getting the e-books from the proprietary format into something that can be easily distributed. That will happen, regardless of how much Amazon tries to lock down the Kindle and other players try and lock down their respective devices.
Protecting digital works is a losing battle. Blu-Ray holds the record for resisting attacks, as far as I know, and at some point it will succumb to the collective onslaught that is aimed at breaking its encryption. All the time and money spent on developing better locks would be far better invested in the user experience. A good experience at a reasonable price will do far more to encourage people to spend their money with you than any amount of expensive protective engineering. -
As people's perceptions of the price of content falls towards zero, it becomes harder to make money from it.
Yes, but clearly that's not happening. People are buying music but buying it very different ways..the data is quite clear on that. They simply are not buying albums, nor is there any clear evidence, apart from the fact the the industry organisations say so, that they are stealing albums instead of buying them in the sort of quantities that we are told are destroying the industry or killing the careers of the hundreds of thousands of new acts who seem to be happily releasing music hourly.
Unit sales, and this is absolutely crucial, have risen several years running, which means that the mainstream has more or less reverted to the buying patterns of the 1900s-1970 when they bought songs they like rather than the album. The mainstream market was never happy with albums per se..hence the massive success of the TV advertised compilation album, which filled the hole of getting the tunes you saw on the TV or heard on the radio without having to buy the bloody album.
And returns from copyright performance (not to be confused with live performance just to clarify) have also grown hugely in recent years, although not in the US, where most of the noise over piracy comes from, because of their aberration in the remuneration system which allows radio to play music without paying for the right, as they do in more royalty advanced nations.
The way Lily Allen was treated for saying that filestealing hurts new artists was just awful.
But her arguments also didn't fly when you looked at them. Many of her assertions simply were untrue, and, Paul, you don't get a pass on that because of age or sex. And many of the most virulent critics of her blog were the same up and coming musicians who she was allegedly defending who railed against, not just her naivety, but her hypocrisy. There's much to disagree with in that clip but the sentiment swept across the industry at a grass roots level, not just pro-copyright/anti-filestealing advocates but more than a few musicians pissed of at the dishonesty of someone who'd built a career pretending to be the indie underdog on MySpace whilst all the time being very much funded and signed by EMI.
I actually think that having a price on music is a good thing.
Agreed, and mostly, people are still paying for the music they want, just not in the same way, and without the added fluff which was what allowed the labels, major and minor, to make the sorts of profits they were making pre-Napster.
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Matthew, if I take something that does not belong to me without the permission of the person who owns it, that is theft. In moral, legal, and in common usage.
In a legal sense, Matthew is correct.
Morally? We all make our accommodations with copyright. You know those Hard News Fridays where people post their favourite (generally unofficial) clips from YouTube? That's an absolute orgy of "theft". Yet it doesn't really make sense to think of it that way, even though the legal issues are essentially the same as they are with downloading a song.
But I'm not sure there's anything to be gained from going over the "theft/not theft" argument yet again.
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Simon, I am not asking for any pass; I merely observed that much of the criticism of Allen had sexist overtones. The simple fact of the matter is that she is entitled to her royalties, which she is denied by people stealing her music.
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