Letters to the Editor
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I think it's great
Songwriters and musicians work hard, and they deserve to get paid. The $9250 each of these artists will receive can help put their kids through college, or pay the rent for a while, or help them create more great art,....
What? The money will go to the record companies? The part that doesn't go to the RIAA, that is?
Then what the fuck is everyone yelling about stealing from artists for?
Someone in the near future is going to be teaching case studies about how stupid it is for an intellectual property company to go to war with it's content providers and it's consumers at the same time. Likely a guy who lost his job when Capitol went under. Meanwhile, there is hope. EMI is distributing DRM-free music through Amazon, so at least someone is beginning to get it. And more and more artists are realizing that they don't need a record deal anymore. Much cheaper, even free alternatives, are available and becoming more viable every day. Radiohead is just the beginning.
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eMail your ill gotten songs back to the RIAA
I do this all the time. A few hundred GB of stolen material I've found, I just return to them.
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An...
An entire bloated and diseased industry rides on the backs of the 'artists' that it enslaves.
To quote Jimmy Buffett's 'Overkill':
Out in Hollywood, the paper money rolls
They feed their egos, instead of their souls
A million here, a million there, a mindless corporate dance
Get paid for f'ing off, in the south of France
They don't do the shows, but they act like the stars
They fly around in G4's and suck on big cigars
It ain't about the talent, it ain't about the skill
It's all about the silly stupid horseshit deal
The 'music industry' is a parasite feeding off of the artists and their fans. Like most of corporate america, the smell of money and exercise of raw, nekud power is at the root.
Insurance companies are the same way, nothing but worthless hungry parasites feeding off of the health care industry...
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Ok but 'artists' make at best 3 cents on the dollar
And out of that 3 cents they generally have to pay their own production costs in the form of 'give back' money. So whatever the distribution scheme, 'artists' aren't being paid. The record company is being paid.
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At least one artist encourages theft:
Trent Reznor, appalled at his rapacious and greedy label, encouraged fans to steal music:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4207495a28.html
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Is there a "library defense"?
had_enough wrote, "People simply should not be able to have music for free."
But this is not true. Libraries will lend you CDs for free. Why isn't the RIAA suing libraries?
And what is a library, legally, anyway? It turns out (as best this amateur can figure out) it's not particularly well defined.
So can I claim to be running a library when I upload stuff peer-to-peer?
When they come after me, that's the defense I'm going to use.
Incidentally, I am a published author who is both selling a book (a textbook for grad students in a certain technical field) through a regular publisher, AND giving away a prepubliation draft for free on the net. Dozens of people have downloaded the free draft, and then gone directly to amazon AND BOUGHT THE BOOK. (I know because amazon pays me when this happens.)
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@Mellowtron ( Mellotron? )
It's ironic that you posted Dylan lyrics as a metaphor addressing this issue. Bob Dylan went to Washington to testify before Congress as an advocate for the Copyright Extension Act of 1998.
( from life plus 50 to life plus 70 )
I've lost all respect for Dylan as anything other then a good songwriter. He's greedy and un-principled.
Snark: And his singing is intentional punishment to his fans for liking his songs.
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@David Sugarman
David Sugarman may get annoying and obnoxious at times, but other times he's right on the money, IMO. This is such a time.
David, please don't go over the top on Greenwald's blog, your banishment would impoverish the dialog.
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It's Evolution, Baby
Evolve or die. Record labels aren't evolving, and I'm not sure they know how to. To some extent, their poor business practices (and I specifically mean the unfair contracts with the artists) have come back to haunt them.
To a different, and far larger, extent: the medium has changed.
Let me try this metaphor: music is like water. You can use it for free or via indirect payment in many, many places (drinking fountains = free, tap water = radio = indirect payments). And some companies sell the water. But really what they sell is the packaging. The LP. The CD. Once upon a time, the packaging was essential. It no longer is.
So to whom is the actual product valuable? The artist, who with the increase of recording technology and accompanying diminished cost, is increasingly able to finance their own artistic creations. This used to be the record labels job. No longer. What else did record labels do? Desktop design has made the packaging accessible. Distribution (i.e. record stores) has almost entirely disappeared and the internet has become the medium of distribution.
All that remains is promotion: getting your music heard and your face seen. There have been, and I'm sure still are, many independent publicists and radio promotors who could happily be hired by anyone for a fee (or percentage of the artists revenue, or whatever agreeement they wish to come to). For artists to whom live performance of music matters, this model can work just fine. In this sense, my recorded music is like a business card: it is a promotional tool to entice you to attend my performance. And if I periodically assemble, say ten, of my songs into a package, some, likely enough, of my fans will pay for said package - and pay me directly in person or via internet. Copywrite matters remarkably little since the purpose of the copywritten work is very much to encourage your support of my art in different ways.
All this is fine.
A challenge still exists for:
a) Artists who are strictly studio creations (which can be Brittany Spears or the Beatles post 1966.)
b) Artists who do not wish to devote their lives to contstant touring and/or who no longer are able to do so, but wish to provide for themselves or their families.
Copywright matters much more in those two circumstances. If record labels aren't to be these artists revenue streams, what can take their place.
While I generally deplore the use of music in adverstising, I do see that the revenue stream makes a difference to the copywrite holder. Only I don't see how more people possessing copies of the song, now to be associated with whomever the sponsor might be, hurts anyone.
Television and movie soundtracks provide another source. Perhaps the copywrite matters here. iTunes has certainly proven that people are willing to pay for digital downloads.
And this is where some new thinking about music and copywrite is needed, or perhaps new kinds of art. In the meantime, lawsuits are but odious fingers in the breaking (broken) damn.
I'm sure there are more answers too . .
AlterEthan
who used to work for an independent record label, and has written songs and worked as a performing musician