Posts by Robin Sheat
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And they steal your girlfriends
It's not stealing, it's...
..oh wait, never mind
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Another interesting article in the Wall Street Journal.
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really, I'm sure its not a problem, reznor's not in it for the money or anything, I can't see why he wouldn't drop it round at his expense
He does provide it at his expense already. If you download his albums (following the 'free download' link from the NIN website), and don't use torrents, he is paying for the bandwidth. He also says nice things like:
we encourage you to
remix it
share it with your friends,
post it on your blog,
play it on your podcast,
give it to strangers,
etc.Oh, I also saw you can get it at higher than CD quality, which is nice. I wish they'd put that into FLAC though, it'd stop the need for multi-GB downloading of those files. A friend and I have been talking about playing with making remixes, just for the fun of it.
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Some interesting links:
Forever Minus A Day? Some Theory And Empirics of Optimal Copyright
James Boyle: Deconstructing stupidity (much lighter than the previous one)
Lawrence Lessig's book (reminds me: must figure out who I lent my hardcopy of this to) -
I was going to download the NIN thing
Oh, I do suggest checking out the Ghosts series, even if you just start with the Ogg Vorbis version of the first disk or something. It's quite different than their standard stuff (no label pressures == more experimentation), and all instrumental.
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Sure can. eMusic has it, at least.
Yeah, I realised that it's probably somewhere like there after posting. I was thinking of their main site though.
I generally find torrents a soulless way to access music. I don't like the idea of being able to download an artist's entire career work without even engaging with the artist.
Well, the bulk of my music comes from emusic. I paid for the FLAC copies of NIN stuff, and as their site was overloaded at the time, hit TPB to actually download them. I rarely torrent music otherwise. Sometimes I'll grab a compilation it, and then check emusic for the artists whose stuff I like from it.
I have no issue with the idea of being able to do it, I just don't do it much myself :)
Probably second-most of my music (in the past couple of years, anyway) comes from physical CDs, often bought second-hand, from mail-order distributors in the US and UK, or at concerts and festivals.
I was going to download the NIN thing, with all the data, just so i could play with it and then I found out how fracking huge it was and thought "that's half my cap on a band I don't even listen to" so i didn't ;-)
Yes, it is a large amount of data. I haven't got all the extra bits, just the songs themselves, although I got them as FLAC because everything I have (even my MP3 player) can play it.
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I've also been a huge advocate of the Radiohead experiment on these pages.
I'm given to understand it was a marketing gimmick. You can no longer buy it as a download.
Try instead the Nine Inch Nails experiment, where it was actually released as creative commons, and uploaded to torrent sites by Reznor himself, along with doing things like this.
Or, on a smaller scale, Harvey Danger. To quote their site: "Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends."
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The evolution of of the concept of intellectual property (note the word property in the term) is evidence that it can and has evolved and can evolve further.
Intellectual property is an inaccurate and loaded term. Perhaps instead call them 'copyrights'. As in 'right to copy'. A right granted by society. We're not going to give you this right without maximising our return.
Sure it can evolve. Right now it's evolving at the direction of big companies with a lot of money. Do you think they have your interests at heart? I really don't think so.
the Elvis masters have just been pulled back into copyright in Europe I think, or are about to be, by the evolution of the EU copyright law which I understand is retrospective.
Retroactively taking from the public, at the behest of a music label? That doesn't seem wrong to you?
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And if there is any argument for retaining copyright it must be the album of trance remixes of Elvis which I heard everywhere in Hong Kong last week.....my god...
Sorry, it won't help there.
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my simple case is the elvis recordings. I think when those original recordings were made they became a piece of property and should maintain their value indefinitely
They don't. They never have. The song itself isn't property. The author (et al.) simply are given the right to monopolise reproduction and derivation for a while. In exchange, they get to make stuff out of other things that are public domain too. Where would poor old disney be if they had to pay royalties on every copy of Snow White that they sold. I mean, they didn't come up with the story.
You still haven't explained why you hate Project Gutenberg :)
or until they are left un attended at which time they become public domain.
I don't mind that, I just think it's not worth the tradeoff of indefinite copyrights.
Actually, you know what would happen if you allowed indefinite copyright? Companies would buy up copyrights from authors and their estates, and license it forever. Eventually nothing would come out of copyright, and 99% of culture would be under the thrall of these companies. But from the author's point of view, nothing has changed. They're still not getting money for them. But, worthy projects to archive and distribute public domain books, movies, etc. die. And everyone is poorer for it.
Why do you hate people? ;)