what happens if SOPA passes?

maybe next I'll play the lottery, clearly the world is temporarily bending to my will

I always liked Canada's solution of accepting that piracy will occur but just charging an extra tax on CD-Rs and CD burners that goes to the industry.

that's what they do in the US too

i mean i totally agree with the "industry should have done something in 2000 instead of just pretending the internet would go away" comments.

the thing that struck me about sites like oink is that cost aside they were so much easier and better than any legal alternative. I mean I was one of those guys who would pay $30-40 to import discs or buy OOP stuff on eBay (of which the industry sees not one dime) and the whole time I was just thinking "I would definitely pay for this service if I could!" Look at what Nintendo has done with the "virtual console", now they're making tons of money with no effort by just screwing over the resellers, which is the way it ought to be.

i was talking to a guy recently who produced a Japanese band and was learning about the whole music/entertainment industry over there and how generally just the whole idea of music piracy never caught on over there that much and people are happy to pay for music just like they always have, makes me feel like things like Napster kind of sensationalizing the whole phenomenon and getting people excited about the act of 'stealing' music is really how we got where we are and really could've gone down much differently

The whole "if only the music industry had figured out a way to charge me money for digital files earlier I wouldn't want them for free" argument strikes me as JUST A BIT po faced.

there should just be one private tracker w/ all the music in the world

i'm not saying THAT per se, hurting, just that cultural attitudes and the sequence of certain events contributed to the current situation much more than just "once music could be free people only wanted it for free, end of story"

I dont think the attitude shifted so much toward "I want everything to be free" as it did "I want everything to be available".

I mean, mp3s don't really have any value on their own so the whole issue gets complex. For example, I think it's fair to say that a person who gets three new albums in a month should pay $10 a piece for them, but if someone downloads a thousand albums every month it's not really fair to say that they owe $10,000 monthly or that he's getting $10k worth of "value" from those mp3s.

it has never mattered how much 'value' someone actually gets out of ownership of an object. that's not how our society works.

So if I decide I want to eat a thousand loaves of bread per month instead of two or three, I should only have to pay for three because I'm more efficient at getting "value" out of my bread?

I mean horrible analogy aside, I don't think consuming anything in bulk means you shouldn't have to pay per unit. Sure, economies of scale to buy things in bulk but music doesn't work that way unless you are going to download four thousand copies of the same Max B mixtape.

I mean, mp3s don't really have any value on their own so the whole issue gets complex. For example, I think it's fair to say that a person who gets three new albums in a month should pay $10 a piece for them, but if someone downloads a thousand albums every month it's not really fair to say that they owe $10,000 monthly or that he's getting $10k worth of "value" from those mp3s.

― frogbs, Tuesday, January 17, 2012 11:44 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

why on earth would you think this was fair to say

i've seen some right-on/cynical commentary putting the backlash against SOPA in the context of the non-backlash against the PATRIOT re-up, detention bills, etc.

lolcats have a bigger constituency that 'terrorists' i guess...

So if I decide I want to eat a thousand loaves of bread per month instead of two or three, I should only have to pay for three because I'm more efficient at getting "value" out of my bread?

its a totally different situation because someone still has to make the bread. you don't have to make copies of an album. the analogies to physical materials don't work on the same level. would an artist prefer to have someone buy one song for $5 but not buy anything else, or an entire album for $10?

why on earth would you think this was fair to say

what do you mean?

of course the price-per-unit of almost anything drops when a consumer gets that item in larger quantities. that has little to do with how or how much they use it, though, or how much effort it takes to produce the item.

do you think mp3s are like unicorns, with no actual physical existence or something

they are!

when you publish Frogbsonomics, I'm going to buy every copy (for the price of five copies) and light them all on fire

you don't have to make copies of an album.

but you did a few years ago! until perfect cd copying and then perfect digital replication and storage hit dirt-cheap consumer levels. but the costs to produce/market/promote the product are still budgeted for a hard-copy world. that's the whole problem.

also, electronic files ARE a copy of the album

the fact that it's effortless to copy and doesn't take up room on a bookshelf doesn't mean that you haven't made a copy and it isn't taking up actual space on your hard drive

well finding 3 megabyes of storage space is not that expensive in 2012

bytes

of course the price-per-unit of almost anything drops when a consumer gets that item in larger quantities. that has little to do with how or how much they use it, though, or how much effort it takes to produce the item.

it does when the item is essentially free for the seller! when you sell a loaf of bread, you no longer have the loaf of bread. you cannot sell it any longer. that's why I don't think the economics should work the same, or why the public views it the same way. I think most people rationalize piracy with "I wouldn't have bought that anyway, so nobody gets hurt" which is a much more "valid" rationalization than any other kind of stealing

do you think mp3s are like unicorns, with no actual physical existence or something

pretty much

the correct analogy here is photocopying a textbook btw

when you publish Frogbsonomics, I'm going to buy every copy (for the price of five copies) and light them all on fire

you can't buy "every" copy because I'm talking about infinitely replicable nonphysical objects!

haha the textbook market is even more fucked up than the music one

yes, I know!

the news business is a good analogy. it's almost exactly the same problem i think.

yeah I agree w/ that

sadly, you don't have millions of kids staring longingly at CSPAN going "someday I'm gonna write a paper about this $$$$$$$"

The physical cost of CDs and their packaging was always a relatively small part of the overall cost of bringing a record to market.

when you publish Frogbsonomics, I'm going to buy every copy (for the price of five copies) and light them all on fire

you can't buy "every" copy because I'm talking about infinitely replicable nonphysical objects!

― frogbs, Tuesday, January 17, 2012 1:07 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ok then i'll pee on your kindle, does that work

And it's also not where most of the value was, obviously. People didn't pay for the shiny plastic discs with pretty pictures, they payed for the music.

it's basically the problem of finding a way to price + get people to pay for information when distribution costs for information are trending towards zero and the total quantity of information is higher than ever.

The physical cost of CDs and their packaging was always a relatively small part of the overall cost of bringing a record to market.

distribution is a pretty big cost too. going from plant to large distributor to small distrubutor to record store to consumer involves markups at each level, which isnt really necessary anymore

Also there's the whole argument that the production costs of music are going down too, which is sort of true. But most people still want expensively-produced, expensively mass-marketed music, contrary to what some guy recording into a firepod in his underwear might want to believe.

dude should really take the firepod out of his underwear

it doesn't matter what people want if the market can't support it in the long-term. there's no inherent human need for expensively-produced music.

Oh so what happens if SOPA passes? People will continue to nick stuff off the internet. If that fails, they'll carve new grooves into the internet and share through those. If that fails, they'll set up local gatherings and swap hard drives. I have soooo much more to say on this btw.

― Autumn Almanac (Schlafsack), Thursday, January 12, 2012 10:23 PM (5 days ago)

I asked this on another thread, but any guesses as to how many bytes the entire Impulse and Blue Note catalogues would take up?

You can buy 1 Terabyte USB drives now. Storage is getting cheaper every day....

man i really hope this legislation and its attendant debate die off or take a very different shape very soon just because i don't want to see "Sh1pley Gohard" at the top of new answers for the next 6 months

And it's also not where most of the value was, obviously. People didn't pay for the shiny plastic discs with pretty pictures, they payed for the music.

― extremely lewd and incredibly crass (Hurting 2), Tuesday, January 17, 2012 12:10 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i know what you mean but in a literal sense this is backwards

it's basically the problem of finding a way to price + get people to pay for information when distribution costs for information are trending towards zero and the total quantity of information is higher than ever.

exactly, which is why I think taxing the internet itself is probably a more sensible way to go.

you're pretty good at taxing ilx, maybe they can put you in charge of the rest of the internet too

You can buy 1 Terabyte USB drives now. Storage is getting cheaper every day....

right, plus we're headed toward a future where things are based on "cloud" technology and storage is essentially infinite.

haha daaamn

xp

everyone who uses the internet pays a tax? levied by whom? and given to the government? who disburses it to... content producers/copyright holders? ASCAP? man, what could go wrong?

assuming all those entities weren't corrupt as hell, it could work