what happens if SOPA passes?

Is there technology to prevent iatee double posts? Such a waste of resources.

all my posts deserve multiple readings tbh

hollywood and big music are probably all for this bill, no? they can go after asian and russian pirates via the government. if i'm reading wikipedia correctly...

I can't wait until the technology that allows me to steal free LED TVs from the store, then the manufacturers will just have to "adapt".

c'mon, this isn't that hard

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5295/5465725257_a74a1a206e.jpg

now asia THERE is where you see some bigtime theft. actual real theft and not virtual theft. for ever. for decades. probably billions of dollars worth. bootleg dvd mania. they didn't need the internet to do that.

I guess my question for people who are on the other side of this debate is 'what's the alternative to a macro-level tax / some sorta national spotifyish system?' $1 a song is as arbitrary as $15 a CD and has no relation to the costs of production or the demand for the music.

again I think it's better to think of what's happening to the music industry as on the first wave of what will happen to lots of people who work in the information economy.

Well I guess thats the tough part for me because I simply DON'T have a better solution, but I'd love for one that falls somewhere between a national tax and a system that takes money away from the content creators.

is that good? no. but I don't think the best way to ensure people get paid is through creating artificial scarcity.

xp to myself

labels could be trying to set up competitors to itunes. you can find ways to technologically brake piracy instead of getting the law on your side and hating apple (all the industry seems to be able to imagine doing)

the other route is to try to sell those things that people want to have that are unreproducible, and have download codes attached. all the merch and swag sort of becomes the 'album' in this model

I don't think those are long-term solutions

the question is, what do the artists want?

here's another one: music follows classical and jazz and becomes a niche thing supported by enthusiasts and a few gov't/ngo grant institutions and most other people quit giving a shit unless its on tv

the only solution for labels and artists are well-organized subscription services like itunes. a one-stop shop for people. itunes makes money, right? you have to corral people. left to their own devices, they'll just surf around and nab things where they can for free.

seems more realistic!

xp

yes, people will suddenly stop liking music. huh?

yeah, the whole "less and less people care about music because look at the numbers" argument is weird to me. billions of people will always listen to music and lots of it, whether or not it remains a billion dollar industry.

people suddenly stopped going to the movies 5x a week, things do change

how much did people love music before the radio era of the 30s? or the single era of the 50s or album era of the 60s? none of this has ever been about what is natural or about what people like

I mean, it's sorta like saying people don't care about news because newspapers are going out of business. (there might even be some truth in that, but) the real problem is a lack of serious BBC-equivalents here. there's no reason why the value of music or news should be directly reflected in their free market profits and in the internet age that truth is making itself more and more clear.

i think in general "time spent listening to stuff" and "time spent watching stuff" has been going up every year. it's not like the technology is just going to go away. if they had iPods in the 30's I'm sure they would have been huge!

labels could be trying to set up competitors to itunes.

Prior to iTunes, the labels tried this, and failed miserably (and somewhat hilariously), mainly due to the many restrictions on the files you downloaded -- couldn't burn them to a CD, proprietary file types, could only listen x number of days.

well, trying to approach your customer with an attitude beyond paranoia and hatred is a good start

people suddenly stopped going to the movies 5x a week, things do change

And movie theaters suddenly started showing commercials for 15 minutes before the movie starts.

mighta mattered 15 years ago

xp

music is a huge and inseperable part of daily life for most people on earth and always has been and always will be, more than football, more than video games, more than whatever form of entertainment is more lucrative than music at this particular point in history. the advent of recording music and different changes in culture and technology have big effects on HOW it's a part of their life but i don't feel like 10% or 30% of all people have in the past couple decades gone "eh, music, i've had my fill of that, not my thing."

now asia THERE is where you see some bigtime theft. actual real theft and not virtual theft. for ever. for decades. probably billions of dollars worth. bootleg dvd mania. they didn't need the internet to do that.

― scott seward, Tuesday, January 17, 2012 2:02 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

What makes this "real theft" vs "virtual theft"? They're not selling stolen DVDs, they're making unauthorized copies of DVDs. It might not be analogous to illegally downloading, but it's probably analogous to those russian mp3 sites that charge like $3/album for pirated music.

I was going to say, about the only thing I can think of more prevalent on Earth than music is speech

which is exactly why it's so hard to price + make money off and will continue to be

yeah, just like phone companies has never found a way to profit off of peoples' desire to talk to each other

al I will let you ponder this for a while and come up w/ some reasons why they are different

how about you take that time to think about why it makes no sense to say that things that are hugely prevalent in daily life are difficult to profit off of

it is difficult to measure and capture the true economic value of things that are 1. available freely on some level and 2. are hugely prevalent. w/ music not only are those two things true, they are both increasingly true. what's wrong with that statement?

i think bottled water is the classic example people tend to use in this situation but there are about a dozen others if that doesn't fit the bill

"What makes this "real theft" vs "virtual theft"?"

oh yeah i just meant concrete objects like dvds and cds and non-concrete objects like mp3s. i don't consider mp3s real things.

i don't consider mp3s real things.

this is 99% of the problem facing the music industry right now

bottled water = paying $30 for a tshirt or picture book just to get the music attached

come on that totally works

the bottled water industry created a new need for 'water in bottles'. people consider 'water in bottles' to be something different from 'tap water not in bottles'. if the music industry wants to create a physical product w/ limited availablity and sell it as something 'different' from other music then yes, they can make bottled water money. you can argue this is already what the market looks like.

the bottled water industry created a new need for 'water in bottles'. people consider 'water in bottles' to be something different from 'tap water not in bottles'. if the music industry wants to create a physical product w/ limited availablity and sell it as something 'different' from other music then yes, they can make bottled water money. you can argue this is already what the market looks like.

― iatee, Tuesday, January 17, 2012 2:43 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

This argument seems self-justifying though. All this boils down to is, "people don't want to pay for mp3s because they can get the exact same thing for free" -- which is not really something anyone here is arguing with.

oh yeah i just meant concrete objects like dvds and cds and non-concrete objects like mp3s. i don't consider mp3s real things.

― scott seward, Tuesday, January 17, 2012 2:41 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yeah but the concrete objects themselves aren't being "stolen." The bootleggers are the ones making the objects.

seward is the one guy who DOES believe in unicorns but not mp3s

yeah, just like phone companies has never found a way to profit off of peoples' desire to talk to each other

at least until "the era of the MagicJack"

This argument seems self-justifying though. All this boils down to is, "people don't want to pay for mp3s because they can get the exact same thing for free" -- which is not really something anyone here is arguing with.

people shouldn't want to pay $1 for an mp3 because that's not the value of a song for yr average consumer in 2012. and that wouldn't be for most music, even in a world where straight piracy had been 100% cracked down on. the total quantity of music continues to increase and it costs less and less to distribute it. it's p much impossible to figure out 'the value of one song' in this situation, but we prob can have a debate on how much we value music as a society and how much we think should be made and how a gov't could best subsidize the industry.

i see a difference between making thousands of physical copies of stolen material, like a fake handbag or a dvd, and an MP3. i can't help it. maybe its just too soon. an MP3 is basically a new product. like a record was a hundred years ago. people have to get used to the idea that something is worth paying for.

when iTunes introduced the 99 cent song pricing point (like, what, 7 years ago?) it was looked at as a pretty good deal, especially since it was so impossible to buy most songs as a single serving apart from parent albums before that. a lot has changed about the perception of that price since then (and of course the price for some songs went up a bit), but i really think it's more about perception than anything inherent about the 'value' of that song/file or the strength of the dollar or whatever.

perception and value aren't different things!

the economics of pricing music have always been weird. I remember reading that all the goofy "subsections" in the tracklisting of In the Court of the Crimson King were done just to get more royalties as apparently you don't get much for writing "only 5 songs". iTunes and Amazon will still price an hour-long, 7-track album at $6.93 and a half-half, 10-track one at $9.90

i liked the allofmp3 system of just paying per megabyte

then again if you start charging for albums based on length then everything will be like the 90's R. Kelly era where every release is 78-79 minutes long.