Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Hell, many indies and label-free acts I know will be extremely pissed off if ACTA or any other restraint succeeds in wiping out the P2P networks, Hype Machine and blogs as these are crucial to their marketing and very existence.
I assume that acts that are happy for their works to be widely distributed, will continue to use the internet to put free versions of their work up. It will still be a very valuable tool for distributing music.
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But why are we doing this with the advent of digital when we've not done it prior?
Because to jump back several pages to one of my earlier posts, which I'll paraphrase: "if the change in technology is affecting the creative output of the country and the culture that we get..." then the rest of the discussion follows.
Yes, you're happy to leave that to the market, I'd much rather we try and figure out the answer to that question and then figure out a response.
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I call them incompatible based on consumers all having a fixed level of disposable income
Yes but that's nothing new. You couldn't ever scrape together enough money to support everyone to do everything, you have to make choices. If the government (say) was to step in and provide increased support for artists to maintain or increase cultural output, it would no doubt result in a mixed bag of new/experienced artists receiving the benefit. If that means that Neil Finn keeps on going in the new 'digital age', and Freddy Fudd Pucker (who sings one of my favourite songs) gets more money to get an album together, all good?
Why would you design a system that says "once enough people like you and you're almost earning the level of the dole with your music, we won't support you anymore?" It's not like NZ is overloaded with multi-millionaire writers and artists.
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I still think kleptomania is a better analogy than drug cheating.
I read on another thread that it can't be theft, nothing was actually taken, just copied ;)
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Gio, Paul, Peter, Kyle, Keir -- where do you all stand on this? What balance best serves the public good? How should we best move forward?
Umm... I'll try some general suggestions:
1. Limit copyright to something sensible, maybe 50 years from original publication. Difficult to see that happen globally, but pie in the sky.
2. Try and reward artists and their publishers that are willing to work without fear in the brave new world. Govt funders like the Film Commission, nz on air to reward people who put their stuff out there in new ways. If you get an album/single funded it has to be available on itunes, amplifier, youtube etc.
3. Copyright law has to be backed up in some way, and that's going to have to include internet use to break copyrights. It shouldn't target the internet connection though, it should be a civil fine. We should be sensible about it and not have to worry about the stupid stuff like having a video of your kid up on youtube dancing to Abba. It should target distribution over reception, particularly large-scale. -
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.
I don't think they're incompatible. Any good scheme would provide options for proven artists to continue to output their good work, but would also provide options for up-and-coming new artists to get their first book/album/movie out to the public. The production of quality outputs in a range of fields would be the desired goal.
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Oh dear, now Prof. Keith Sorrenson is claiming that Witi snaffled some of his work too.
A sticky situation just got stickier, methinks....at least allegedly.
For an earlier book too, the Matriarch. Which really puts any 'oops, accident, never do it again, promise' lines out of order. That's chopping block stuff that is.
Be interesting to learn more about that incident, see if it's similar.
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He told me would never go there because he'd heard the sound was bad (huh?) and that he had been a Dylan fan all his life but wouldn't go and see him "unless he was playing an acoustic set in small club".
Hate to see the ticket prices for that. 50 tickets, 2 grand each.
You came to a fork in the road then?
You. Out.
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Also, thinking about it, copyright as it is now, with authors and musicians as mere serfs of the gatekeepers, is a far worse evil than downloading. Forced to turn their work over to corporations, denied the right to utilise it on their own terms.
That's a bad generalisation. Creators aren't forced to turn over their work to corporations, they choose to do so. They might get screwed in the process.
There are options however, if they want to distribute their material themselves they can do so.
A little different from serfdom, which you get born into and don't have much choice over.
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Um, if copyright wasn't designed to protect scarcity, why would it need to be introduced when the cost of duplicating a book had dropped to a very low value? Your argument makes no sense!
The cost of writing the book and producing the first copy is what costs lots of time/money. Copyright doesn't protect a particular book, which would only cost a few bucks to print, it protects what is written within in.
Can you demonstrate that it's "piracy" (I hate that word, for the same reason Rich does), and not, say, consumers finding the offering underwhelming? Overpriced, afflicted with so much protection that it's inconvenient to use, and/or offering only a limited selection?
Whatever the reason for doing it, it's still 'piracy'. I fail to see what's wrong with the term anyway, it was used with illegally copied software for many years before music and film downloading became common. One of the major sites which facilitates the activity is called 'Pirate Bay' after all.
Peter, once again, I don't know what to do about movies. How many times must I repeat the same message before it gets through to you? I have said that I know the costs of production are vastly different to music. You haven't made a single point that I have not accepted as fact when it comes to music not being equivalent to movies. Not one.
On this basis, musicians should drastically increase their costs of production and then you'd be looking for a different solution for them than 'adapt or die'.