Copyright is Out of Sight

[Namekuseijin]

Originally Posted by HamsterRage

Clearly, you're not a programmer.

oh, I am. Your typical grease monkey, enterprise IT droid here. Not by choice, just facing the reality of a commoditized industry where you don't really quite write systems anymore, just assemble them. Or maintain legacy code. No creativity nor glamour involved. Which incidently is why so many programmers will do it for free in their spare time on open-source projects where they have more freedom to pursue their leisure at programming...

And while there's lots of software that was driven by one person's vision, I don't see any reason why "art" has to be a solo thing anyways.

simply try to merge together a bunch of conflicting views on how plot, style and characters should develop and you'll soon realize some kind of open-source art is not quite bearable, quickly derailing into entire mess of too heavy-handed bureaucratic committee...

That's a joke, right? Lots of art is "useful" to many people, even if only to derive enjoyment for a period of time.

the fact that you need to quote the term when applied to art speaks by itself. Art does not make you coffee, does not provide you shelter, does nothing useful to you. Crying or laughing at times is desirable, but not useful.

And who's to say that all artists need to be full time artists? Surely some of those freeware programs floating around on the net took just as much time and effort to create as a novel, and they were done in the authors' free time.

sure, one day in utopia land will be all fat served by little hovering robots while enjoying talking and sharing lame little bad poetry with our chubby facebook friends just next to us.

Until that marvelous period for a useless mankind doesn't come up, though, I'll be glad to make a living making less talented people happy in exchange for their money.

Anyways, the thought that anyone actually practices all day long at the age of 5 because they expect to make a fortune selling CD's a couple of decades later is generally laughable.

It's not expecting to become a millionaire, but to be able to get sustain from his art.

The problem with our times is low standards. We expect everything to be free because it all looks cheap enough, since we eat bad junk food while listening to bad played noise and reading some bad blog post...

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

Go ask a virtuoso pianist who's been training all day long ever since he was 5 to master his art if he's willing to give performances for free to a bunch of whining crackheads. Will they give him shelter or food? How can someone expect to commit to that kind of excellence in a given art if you're supposed to do it for free for everyone's else enjoyment?

I think that anybody committing to that kind of training and having money as an important or even necessary motivation is insane.

[Enkidu of Abydos]

Originally Posted by Mortis

I'm Canadian and I doubt there are many Canadians that actually follow the speed limits, so by your reasoning Canada might as well repel the speeding laws?

Well if the speed limit was raised maybe more people would honor it and drive slower at average. It worked in Holland (or maybe some Scandinavian country, I'm not sure).
Here in Croatia speed limits ONLY serve taxation purposes. When I see a speed limit traffic sign if I'm not doing at least double the speed it says I figure I'm too slow and push the gas pedal down. If you're actually going under the speed limit you should go to a car mechanic and get your car fixed because you're disrupting traffic and are dangerous to other drivers. I've even occasionaly broken the speed limit (for cars) on my bicycle.

[Enkidu of Abydos]

Originally Posted by tompe

I think that anybody committing to that kind of training and having money as an important or even necessary motivation is insane.

People don't train from the age of 5 for money, they do it because they love it.
Mozart wasn't a capitalist earning money, he was a musician.

[Enkidu of Abydos]

Originally Posted by HamsterRage

I'm not sure that the OP was particularly well expressed, but I think the basic idea has some merit.

As far as I can see copyright is dead. There's a graph floating around the Net now that shows how the music industry sales have plummeted over the past few years. To me, it looks like file sharing is going to reduce that industry, as an industry, down to nothing in about 5 years.

It seems to me that once a sizable proportion of a society starts to ignore a law, then that law no longer reflects the shared values and morality of that society. From what I've seen, copyright has pretty much been rejected by society - certainly at least as far as music is concerned, and I can't see how books are going to be any different.

Looking back, it appears that the only thing that copyright ever stopped was corporate entities poaching other publisher's IP. It never was a factor for individuals because copying has always been expensive and/or resulted in a drop in quality with the copy. As soon as individuals had the ability to cheaply make copies and distribute them without any loss of loss of quality, they started doing it, by the millions. And the copyright laws don't seem to have any influence on their behaviour at all.

So I'll agree with the OP that copyright has always been an illusion. Is that a good thing? I don't know, but I don't see any point in fighting reality. Copyright won't work, because lots and lots of people don't want it.

The real question, as far as I can see, is how we create a system that fosters creators to create new, high quality content in the absence of copyright protection.

One of the best posts I've seen in this thread.
Though you're wrong in stating piracy has killed the music industry. If there is a decline it's due to the recession and maybe a general longterm trend of turning to new kinds of entertainment.
If anything piracy helped the music industry by increasing sales to free mass marketing via file sharing.

[Enkidu of Abydos]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

A more robust version of facebook's like system, where pressing like deducts a portion of monies from an account and also adjusts the liked works ranking somehow.

Pressing like will also have to adjust the readers ranking, readers will be able to like other readers, all reading will be tracked. referrer tracking with monetary compensation might help.

That's not a bad idea.

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by Enkidu of Abydos

That's not a bad idea.

lol, and I expect it is in the prototyping stages at various companies.

Authors are going to have to upload their works to the new marketplace, where nothing is ever bought or sold. Everything simply exists in a constant state of flux, of worth. Money in its purest form, the representation of itself.


@Namekuseijin Seriously? Still harping about the meaningless of my memoir? You haven't answered as to whether or not you've read it beyond the free sample. Twelve people have bought it at last count, as always if you'd like a copy send me a PM.

[HamsterRage]

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

sure, one day in utopia land will be all fat served by little hovering robots while enjoying talking and sharing lame little bad poetry with our chubby facebook friends just next to us.

You know. I'm really find this constant mocking via Utopia reference somewhat tedious and more than a little offensive. The implication, of course, is that the poster being mocked is some pudding headed dreamer incapable of dealing with reality.

But I think you've got it backwards. "Utopia Land" is closer to being some place where people magically all agree on the intrinsic value to society of having full time, professional artists able to sustain themselves through their art alone, and where no one copies their works without express permission and payment to the artist and their agents.

Sorry, but that ship has already sailed. Copyright, at least as far as it applies to individuals and electronic media, is a dead idea. The only practical thing to do is to figure out how to deal with that. Ranting about how "wrong" it is won't achieve anything.

[Namekuseijin]

Originally Posted by tompe

I think that anybody committing to that kind of training and having money as an important or even necessary motivation is insane.

sure it's a motivation. They train all day long, what time they have for other jobs? If they take other jobs, how they are supposed to be a concert-grade pianist? Not unlike professional athletes, BTW...

Certainly no one is expecting to be a multimillion dollar rock star out of piano concerts in such lousy BS-consuming era, but is it wrong to expect to at least be able to pay your bills from performance or recordings?

[HamsterRage]

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

sure it's a motivation. They train all day long, what time they have for other jobs? If they take other jobs, how they are supposed to be a concert-grade pianist? Not unlike professional athletes, BTW...

Certainly no one is expecting to be a multimillion dollar rock star out of piano concerts in such lousy BS-consuming era, but is it wrong to expect to at least be able to pay your bills from performance or recordings?

What kind of job does a 5 year old have?

Can you explain how copyright issues would affect someone's ability to pay their bills from performance? I would have thought that the main issue facing most virtuoso pianists in obscurity, something that file sharing would actually help to correct.

[Namekuseijin]

Originally Posted by HamsterRage

What kind of job does a 5 year old have?

seemingly, playing piano all day long to eventually fulfill their parents' quest for glory.

Can you explain how copyright issues would affect someone's ability to pay their bills from performance? I would have thought that the main issue facing most virtuoso pianists in obscurity, something that file sharing would actually help to correct.

this is where the analogy ends.

Reminding the analogy was to bring to light the efforts one has to go to master high art/craft and that one should certainly be paid for it. It applies to copyrighted works that depend not on performance but took every bit as much effort and pains in the making but are prone to easy and cheap copying like as if the work costs nothing.

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

Reminding the analogy was to bring to light the efforts one has to go to master high art/craft and that one should certainly be paid for it. It applies to copyrighted works that depend not on performance but took every bit as much effort and pains in the making but are prone to easy and cheap copying like as if the work costs nothing.

Yes, useful effort should be given useful reward, this is not what we are attempting to discuss here. Given the tone of the OP I do not think we are even discussing the merits, supposed or otherwise of copyright.

Might I submit to you the plight of future virtuosos, who might not be able to afford the work of virtuosos past because of copyright? And therefore might not be able to become as virtuous as they could have, had we not NOW implemented a new version of copyright?

[pietrocrazy]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

Yes, useful effort should be given useful reward, this is not what we are attempting to discuss here. Given the tone of the OP I do not think we are even discussing the merits, supposed or otherwise of copyright.

Might I submit to you the plight of future virtuosos, who might not be able to afford the work of virtuosos past because of copyright? And therefore might not be able to become as virtuous as they could have, had we not NOW implemented a new version of copyright?

You are right, of course. There are certainly negative effects of copyright, there is no getting around that. It's one thing for me to pay (and subsequently complain about) the price of an ebook, but the truth is that I can afford it. There are many people in the world who simply can't. You can't expect a medical school in a developing countries to train physicians with public domain medical textbooks, nor can you expect each student to spend $400/semester on textbooks like an American student. Publishers do make efforts to work around this in the textbook industry (international editions of textbooks are often up to 50% cheaper), but it is still not enough and textbook piracy is rampant in many places and has been since long before ebooks (I read a book by a South Korean author who attributed part of Korea's meteoric rise from developing to developed to widespread book piracy in the 70s and 80s). And piracy will of course only get worse as computers, ebooks, ebook readers, and the internet become more widespread.

On the one hand, of course textbook writers and publishers should be paid for their work. But on the other, high prices clearly have a very detrimental effect in poverty-stricken countries as they prevent people from having access to necessary materials. Personally, I believe that book piracy in poor countries helps far more than it hurts, but I'm not sure content-producers feel the same way. In any case, there's no clear or easy answer to this problem.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

sure it's a motivation. They train all day long, what time they have for other jobs? If they take other jobs, how they are supposed to be a concert-grade pianist? Not unlike professional athletes, BTW...

Certainly no one is expecting to be a multimillion dollar rock star out of piano concerts in such lousy BS-consuming era, but is it wrong to expect to at least be able to pay your bills from performance or recordings?

That does not sound like a motivation. Just a necessary requirement to be able to train. And says nothing about giving free concerts.

[wyndslash]

Well, I'm from a developing country. Currently we have a 'buy back' book program where students sell their texts to others who need them for that term. Our professors also don't really encourage us to keep on buying textbooks because not only are they obscenely expensive, but apart from updated examples and switching around of chapters, the content is essentially the same! And new editions are usually more expensive. Some students photocopy the whole text.