Posts by Matthew Poole
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
See, I can say more than just "adapt or die" :D
-
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. -
"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.
-
Gio, so we've found the ground on which we should not tread. Can we now go back to that which I proposed last night, of how do we define net good vs net bad outcomes? 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?
-
For most people it's a pain in the arse to have to fire up Limewire and hunt for a song that you can easily nab for one click on for iTunes.
Not to mention that with legal download services you are quite certain what you're getting. No risk of getting rick-rolled when you think you've just downloaded Britney's latest masterpiece, for example.
-
Erm. Didn't iTunes make a profit of over 500 million US dollars a year or two back?
I think that's revenue, not profit, but still a very respectable figure.
It's actually quite hard to get real figures about ITMS's turnover and profitability, but Wikipedia is suggesting that the 8-billion download figure was passed in September. That's probably over $8b in lifetime revenue, accounting for the multi-tier pricing structure that's been in place for the last little while. Not bad going for something that's selling things that, apparently, nobody wants.
-
It is not, nobody is saying it is.
It looks like Paul is. ACTA and s92A certainly said that it is, and they're supported by big media. So there is definitely at least some part of society that thinks that it's a perfectly proportionate response.
But we've GOT TO move on from the idea that we can assume only one of two positions, and refuse to allow that the technologies that mediate the circulation of creative works have very complex repercussions that need to be seriously debated.
Hey, I proposed just such a debate. You got started, then immediately flipped into "downloaders are t3h evil" mode and we never recovered. If you can phrase your response to my question such that it doesn't assume that the internet is anything other than neutral, I'm quite happy to go back to the debate. I'm not going to let it lie when people imply that there is no paying market for downloads, though.
Saying that there isn't a problem, not even in principle, because copyright is an outdated idea and besides downloading ain't theft, and those big evil corporations should shut up and die, really is just as depressingly stupid as the opposite stance.
Let's try this: I'll not rise to the bait if you don't throw it out there. OK? If you actually think that I don't agree there's a problem, you haven't paid very much attention. Where we disagree is how much of a problem, and how best to deal with it.
I think the historic approach to copyright is insufficient for the modern environment, but all we're getting are band-aid solutions at the behest of very vested interests. I'm not a copyright abolitionist, which I tried very hard to make clear in "that other thread". In fact, I got so fucked off with robbery arguing points as though I was one that I stopped reading it entirely.
Do I think big media should STFU and die quietly? If it will allow us to actually have a meaningful debate about where to go with technology, yes. Should the debate, IMO, be entirely exclusive of any assumption that big media (as opposed to the creators currently trapped in the system) has a right to have existing profit levels maintained? Yes, absolutely. -
Gio, ignoring the significant difference in time and effort involved between digitising a song from a CD (way back when, it used to be roughly a 1:1.5 time factor to rip and then convert from CD to MP3. Now it's more like 1:0.25) to digitising an entire book from a dead-tree original - which says that your scenario is pretty far out in the realms of hypothetical - if your customers have given you clear signals that they want a digital product and you are saying "Nope, no way, not going to happen", you kinda have it coming. It's not legal, or ethical, but you cannot say that you weren't warned.
-
Apparently, it is a fundamental human right to have broadband
It is a fundamental human right to communicate and transact. The internet has become the medium for both of these activities, and you should have to have done something really bad before the state could countenance depriving you of such. It's like taking away someone's telephone because they made prank (not obscene, just prank) phone calls.
If someone is conducting commercial copyright infringement using the internet (yeah, good luck with that on what passes for broadband here), then by all means terminate the connection. But that is also a criminal offence, and is being done for monetary gain. Not at all the same thing as downloading movies or music for personal use, and not the same as making a mash-up to upload to YouTube. You do understand that mash-ups are infringement, right? And that as proposed you could lose your internet connection for uploading a couple? How is that in any way a proportionate response?
-
Meanwhile, the legitimate owners of the media which is being stolen must change to accommodate the thieves.
If they hadn't fucked about and fucked about when faced with a glaringly-obvious change in patterns of consumption, they might have stood a chance of being able to keep downloading at moderate levels. Some people will never pay, no matter what. Most others just want things that meet the criteria I have laid out previously. The music industry refused, point blank, to offer product that consumers wanted. There was demand, but the supply only came through illicit channels. Once people found that they could get what the wanted, easily and at a very good price-point, it was going to be very difficult for the music industry to get them back. That any have come back speaks to the success of iTunes and eMusic.
Your position is that it is perfectly acceptable for an entire industry to refuse to supply legitimate, legal products for which their customers are screaming at the top of their collective voice, and then complain when the customers find a way to get what they want. I call it authoring one's own misfortune, and find it very hard to muster any sympathy for anyone that knows what their customers want but isn't prepared to deliver except absolutely on their own terms. It's called a commercial relationship, and supposedly relationships are about giving and taking roughly equally.