what happens if SOPA passes?

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

Well yeah, lets just ignore those pesky realities.

that strategy's worked pretty well for the music business

i think the idea itself is corrupt as hell. just to have an email account and surf the web, my mom has to pay a tax that gets directed to the bronfman family, just because napster exists?

re: the "Canadian solution", the tax gets distributed according to who has the most sales. This sucks. Every blank disc you buy, you are subsidising Nickelback.
Most sales does not necessarily equal most pirated. Also, fuck you Canadian government for charging artists who buy blank media in order to duplicate and distribute their OWN music.

she has to pay taxes for lots of other things that don't benefit her goole. including some art programs.

lol Nickelback's continued existence now makes sense

my mom has gone to see every federally funded art object within 750 miles of her doorstep

I don't nec. think it should be levied on internet users but I do think that ultimately national funding for art is prob gonna be the long-long-term answer to 'how do we pay artists' / 'are there benefits to having a large art economy that don't get reflected w/ free market pricing'

i think the idea itself is corrupt as hell. just to have an email account and surf the web, my mom has to pay a tax that gets directed to the bronfman family, just because napster exists?

yes, and I have to fund my local school's music program even though I don't have kids. I mean I get this is what everybody is going to say, but the amount of people who actually just use the internet to surf the web and get email is getting pretty low isn't it? Even my grandma is obsessed with YouTube these days.

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

"Sorry we went out of business and lost all your stuff forever when our servers shut down, sucks to be you!"

yeah I'm more concerned about my apt burning down than amazon servers suddenly disappearing

everytime someone downloads an album the government should charge nickelback a dollar.

Even my grandma is obsessed with YouTube these days.

Yes but watching a couple YouTube videos a week is not at all similar to your 10,000 album downloader.

re: the "Canadian solution", the tax gets distributed according to who has the most sales. This sucks. Every blank disc you buy, you are subsidising Nickelback.
Most sales does not necessarily equal most pirated. Also, fuck you Canadian government for charging artists who buy blank media in order to duplicate and distribute their OWN music.

but the alternative to this is...the artists with the most sales make the most money??

seems like there's an obvious difference between paying the local district for someone else's schooling and paying license holders (or supposedly fairly-distributing agencies thereof) for someone else's presumed piracy

That's what you get for living in those urban tenements you love so much xxxxp

xxp pardon me if I'm misunderstading this but isn't SOPA kind of suggesting otherwise?

yes, the first model is worse and has led to generations of shitty school systems xp

well ok, but so what? one is a funding mechanism for a public good, the other is organized restitution for a crime being committed, by someone, somewhere...

our business is way off, must be all those downloaders!!! i've never seen numbers that are convincing about this, or even definitive.

music should be a public good and should be funded as one!

jesus even i don't agree with that.

i liked it better when it was a corrupt market run by the mob tbf.