The best system would be to let the artist decide whether or not to give the content away. Unknowns would give away their content for publicity purposes. Once they became popular, they would start charging. This would create a continuous flow of talent from the bottom to the top, and be better both musically and financially for everyone.

“I don’t support any artist whatsoever even if I really love their work.” Wow! Well then guess what? You should stop consuming the work! If you don’t want to buy it, don’t use it.

Whether or not artists are independent, they deserve to be paid for their work. The reality is that it’s certainly not easy for artists to remain independent, as the costs of funding their own projects are extremely prohibitive (especially if someone like you won’t pay for it even if you like it). But even artists on labels today are often struggling financially. Beyond your handful of MTV celebs, the vast majority of working musicians, whether or not they’re on a label, don’t make a huge profit. I’m an independent musician, with friends who are both on and not on labels. The ones on labels have better distribution, but are struggling just as much.

I get that people feel like the labels are screwing people, and for a long time that was true, but 99 cents (or even less with some online retailers) is not too much to ask for a song that even for a small, unsigned indie like myself, may have cost a couple of thousand dollars to record.

Maybe you don’t download any independent music, and think all label artists are rich, so you simply don’t care. However, you need to realize that with most recordings or films, the retail price reflects not only the physical cost of manufacturing, but the paychecks of every person involved with making the record or movie.

Here are a few of the people you screw every time you steal (and downloading illegally is stealing) a song or movie:

-The recording engineer
-The mastering engineer
-All the side player musicians who are not the name artist but who make their living playing on other people’s records
-The graphic designer who put together the artwork

For film:
-The non-name actors and extras who do not make big money but pay their bills this way
-Costume designers
-Set designers
-Gaffers
-Grips
-Production assistants
-Film editors
-Sound editors
and scores of other people.

These are ordinary people who make modest salaries but don’t make anything at all when people stop making records or movies because no one is buying them. Sure–those folks get paid up front, but there’s less and less work for them.

Yes–there’s a lot of corporate crap that gets churned out, but there’s also a lot of great art. You yourself said you enjoy a lot of what you download. Problem is, when you download it instead of paying for it, there’s that much less work for designers, editors, engineers, and thousands of people whose skills and hard work make the works you enjoy downloading possible. When the industry loses money, there are less jobs for all of us.

No one’s asking you to pay for crap. But if you enjoy something, you should pay for it. It’s only fair. You simply do not have the moral high ground here. A 99 cent download is NOT the equivalent of a $30 local bus ticket, so let’s put that poorly thought-out analogy to bed.

I’m not terribly keen myself on the invasion of privacy involved in the current plan, but clearly people who produce creative work need to be protected from people who feel morally justified in downloading work without paying. Downloading and making copies is different from say, lending a friend a book or a CD to listen to. It’s once you’re offering something for download–thereby allowing huge numbers of people to make copies, that you’ve crossed the line into distributing. Heck, I don’t even think it’s a big deal to make a copy of something for a friend or two. But when you put something on a P2P network where hundreds of people can get it without paying, that’s a huge problem, because the lost revenue becomes significant. Personally, I think the best solution at the moment is to go after P2P networks. Most of you will balk at that as well, but frankly, copyright owners have to stand up for ourselves somehow because our entire livelihood is at stake, and while some sharing among friends is caring, never paying for anything and putting other people’s work online for download is not caring. It’s telling the very artists whose work you enjoy and all of the other people who make their living in the music and film industries to go f*ck themselves. And that’s not very nice of you.

What are you talking about? Why will an alternative distribution method (ie. p2p) improve artistic content. If you’re saying that artists will produce better content without copyright and or large companies doing distribution I call bullshit because this can and does happen now – except this kind of art isn’t popular. For the vast majority of popular art in the music and movie areas there is a large corporate behind it. If you don’t like it fair enough but that fact is that millions of people who are just as intelligent as you or I do consume it. They wouldn’t if they didn’t like it.

Do you believe that artistic works have improved since the advent of p2p – because I consistently see people saying the reason they don’t want to pay for music and movies is because they are low quality horseshit. This isn’t my view, I just download because I can and I prefer to save money and have the immediacy of having it sooner than otherwise – I enjoy much of what I download.

There’s a tendency for many over-zealous people that post here to crap on about the “poor artists” being “controlled” by the “corporate fatcats” – which is horseshit. As I posted before, artists are not stupid and the vast majority who produce music and movies aspire to be signed by major labels because there are large tangible benefits to them including large amounts of money not available otherwise and promotion – this isn’t me being a mouthpiece for the MPAA or anyone else, it’s what happens in reality.

I trust you noticed that in this and other posts I have stated that I haven’t purchased anyhting for years that I can download and I download everything I can that I want: music, movies, books, comics. I don’t support any artist whatsoever even if I really love their work.

However I don’t blatantly ignore reality of what happens in the real world and I don’t pretend that a small number of artists that don’t wish to be represented by major labels means jackshit in terms of the majority of artists.

The laws mentioned means, among other things, that pretty much everyones communications through the net will be logged and stored. Have you got anything you don’t want to share with the world? Tough luck. It will be there to be found.

It will also endow private companies with rights to act pretty much as a police against suspected downloaders. It can be abused, it has been abused, and it will be abused.

It has moved far beyond piracy, Piratpartiet is fighting against what looks ever more like a 1984-ish sociaty. We call it Bodströmsamhället after a politician that pushes for these changes.

So yes, it is very much a civil rights movement.

@everyone
?So you propose 0 plus nothing.?

When companies do something wrong, there is no need to compensate for anything when it is necessary for them to stop. There is no need to compensate either. Let those companies figure out for themselves what they should do to make money. Why should anyone else be responsible for how they make money?

Roze

If need be, yeah. Why? Because the fuckin’ lobbyists couldn’t be content with the original, genuinely “limited” term of 14 years in most jurisdictions. If you don’t get this, like I said, then you’re an idiot, and you deserve to be fleeced by these corporate vermin.

And yes, unfortunate that many of the indie “labels” are even worse than the majors, but the problem there is that copyright law exists, and provides for “works for hire”. Most “label”-based releases — whether “indie” or major, are classified as “works for hire”. Thus, the “artists” you IP-defending types are always bleating about are, contractually, little different than Wal-Mart greeters or some guy employed by Walgreens.

That’s the problem: the viewpoint that says that “content creators” can/should be somebody other than who holds the “rights” to distribution. Not to mention the ever longer copyright terms. Life plus 70? Like I said, fuck you.

A passive income-stream for corporate CEO’s vs. the public domain? Public domain every time.

Now stop reflexively defending corporate lobbies, and actually think for a few seconds.

I’m pretty sure “Reasoned Mind” used to go by “Sam I Am” — same kind of nonsequitur, RIAA spew interspersed with Net-speak (so he can sound “with it”).

Go ahead, keep defending the RIAA idiots. Then when they succeed in “owning” everything cultural in perpetuity, gutting the Internet, destroying any remaining “right to privacy”, and banning personal recording devices, we’ll see how nice of a world it becomes.

All that, just to defend the monopoly power of a few already-wealthy corporate megaliths.

If you actually sign with a label — ANY label — you’re fucked.

But at least you’re being consistent…

Roze