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Re: New Alanis
JB wrote:
> I probably won't be buying the Alanis album as I figure she's "set for life"
So... it's okay to steal, as long as it's from the rich?
I'm not being accusatory, I'm just trying to understand the ethics here. I
mean, if there is such a thing as intellectual property (and you may not feel
there is; that's debatable), then isn't the act of taking it without
compensation wrong, regardless of the financial status of the artist?
> An artist on a major label only sees 1 or 2 bucks out of the 18.99 list price
> for a CD!
Definitely agreed. It's a scandal. All that money goes for advertising, music
videos, management, and all sorts of other parasites who have nothing to do
with the *music*. (On the other hand, sound engineers should get paid ;-)) I
haven't watched MTV in over ten years; why should I have to pay to support
making music videos I'm never going to watch? And then the artists don't end
up even owning their own songs. That's why I prefer to buy records directly
from the artist if at all possible.
However, to get back to the ethics question, it's a question of the contract,
isn't it? My friend Jim (who's a great musician: see http://www.bigego.com or
http://www.mp3.com/bigego) told me that overall, his sales go up when he offers
free music on the web, because more people buy his stuff who wouldn't have
otherwise than the number of people who would potentially steal his stuff and
not buy it. However, the key difference I think is that it's *his* choice to
make the offer. I'm not *entitled* to go take it without his permission.
On the other hand, I'm a firm believer in open source and information anarchy,
so I find myself from time to time in something of an ethical quandry. My
feeling is that one should be compensated for the act of putting together the
information, i.e., for the work involved, but then once it's "out there", it
should be part of the open bitstream. Someone once told me that copyright law
was originally intended just to make sure that someone better poised to
distribute it doesn't rip off your idea and take it places you can't go. It
was only supposed to last a short time, and then your ideas would be available
to all to build on, for the overall strengthening of society. It's morphed
into the feeling that if you have an idea, you're entitled to get paid for it
every time it's used, in perpetuity. But all ideas are built on and recycle
other ideas: it's hypocritcal and useless to try to restrict information flow.
However, that is the way the law is right now, which does consider copying
music to be theft. Hmmm...
On the third hand, I think colorizing old movies or appropriating images of
dead actors to sell your own products is abhorrant, or at least tasteless,
which would seem to contradict my support of information anarchy. :-)
Just a bundle of contradictions...
--
Don Smith Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/
"just because you're fighting evil doesn't make you good" - Rabbi Dobrusin
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