Verily I say unto thee, that The Ghost In The Machine spake thusly:
> In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Homer <usenet@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote on Tue, 06
> May 2008 23:53:08 +0100 <m347f5-vjr.ln1@xxxxxxxxxx>:
>> Verily I say unto thee, that The Ghost In The Machine spake thusly:
>>> In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Homer <usenet@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote on
>>> Tue, 06 May 2008 21:30:18 +0100 <rnr6f5-5in.ln1@xxxxxxxxxx>:
>> One /pays/ artists for what they /do/ (work), not for what they
>> /know/.
>
> I do not pay these artists directly.
Well that is precisely the problem, isn't it. Copyrights rarely benefit
the actual /artists/ ... they exist to serve the greedy purposes of the
publishers, who are after all the ones who hold such copyrights, often
to the extreme detriment of the artists. Heck, Prince actually had to
change his /name/ for a while, for that very reason. Read what Courtney
Love, George Michael and other artists think about the greedy record
companies they were enslaved to.
But then we seem to be moving rapidly into a new paradigm in the music
industry, where artists /are/ remunerated directly by the fans. We're
all familiar with the Radiohead case by now, but there are an increasing
number of others following their lead. Nine Inch Nails have even taken
this concept to its ultimate conclusion, by not only making the Music
free, but also Free (licensed under the "cc by sa"), and then officially
distributing that music by (shock horror) *BitTorrent*. Worse still, the
fans (users) then take that music (source) and remix (rebuild) it to
their own tastes (specifications), and then redistribute that modified
music (packages) on NIN's hosted remix site (repository).
Good grief ... this can only lead to dancing (quite literally).
And yet they *still get paid*. Well that just *can't* be right, can it?
I'm not guessing either, since I happen to be one of their fans who paid
them for the music I "stole" off BitTorrent.
According to Intellectual Monopolists like Sweaty the Impaler, people
only get paid if the money is extorted from customers locked in to
products by monopoly and Intellectual Property legislation. This is
absolutely necessary because we are all dangerous; hippie; commie;
criminal terrorists, who will stop at nothing to steal the meagre crust
of stale bread from Sweaty's solid gold dinner plate ... allegedly.
My heart bleeds for him.
But then to people like Sweaty, "payment" does not mean subsistence, it
means "greed" by domination, and therefore the only way to ensure
"payment" is with an iron-clad fist.
>> That's not paying people for their work, it's paying them because
>> they claim ownership of the *memory* of an original event.
>> Facsimiles can not be property, in any sense other than material
>> costs, and therefore those who distribute facsimiles should neither
>> be able to claim exclusivity, nor charge more than material costs.
>
> I'll have to think about it. In an ideal world the above would
> indeed be true, except for one small caveat, which is indeed small
> with digital media: duplication costs. (Something has to power the
> DVD burner.)
I count overheads as material costs. IOW all costs other than those
levied under the pretext of Intellectual Property. There's a report out
there (somewhere) that suggests the material cost of a CD/DVD in only a
few pence. The rest you pay for the "privilege" of being allowed to
violate the sanctum of some media mogul's precious "IP" portfolio (box
of harvested souls).
But then the real issue is not quantitative, it's about so-called "IP"
itself, and whether or not such a thing should even be recognised as
legitimate. It's about what I am legally entitled to do with such
"content", versus what I *should* be entitled to do, such as ripping and
conversion, for example. Heck, in DMCA country it's illegal to even
/watch/ a DVD under Linux, despite the fact that you've legitimately
bought that DVD. It's sick.
> In practice, I suspect that we pay the amount that we pay because we
> think the facsimile is worth the amount we pay for it, and *that* is
> because the moguls either have set expectations, or have set up
> conditions where one has a set of expectations
That's the basis for all commercial activity. Prices are set according
to what consumers are prepared to pay, not by any inherent value. IMHO
that's yet another injustice that needs to be addressed. During the last
two world wars, it was not uncommon for profiteers to be shot for
treason, and yet the "Land of the (nothing for) Free" celebrates this
exploitation as the foundation of its society, and has succeeded in
poisoning the rest of the world with its sick indoctrination.
> Linux and distros such as Ubuntu are free in price, but not free in
> cost; there's a small download charge because that's the nature of
> one's ISP contract. (Most people can ignore this cost.)
Again, this is (essentially) material costs, or in the case of
commercial distros, service costs. I'd have to check whether this still
applies to Microvell, since for all I know SuSE may well be just another
version of Windows now, with Geeko the Gecko staring forlornly into
oblivion from the Desktop.
>> We live in a society that supports the idea that knowledge can be
>> owned and controlled,
>
> To some extent, it can be -- does anyone really know precisely how to
> assemble a "Fat Man"-type atom bomb,
[...]
>> One's private thoughts are another matter,
>
> I could wax pedantic here and envision a heaume that sits over the
> head, but that verges on science fiction.
Well I am talking in terms of publication. There is that which is known
privately, and that which is known publicly. I don't expect private
thoughts to be public property, but the "content" of generally available
/published/ works are not secrets. Releasing something into the wild,
then attempting to claim exclusive ownership and control of that entity
is simply wrong, like releasing a tiger in the jungle - but controlling
it with a cerebral implant. It's a perversion of nature. That is the
essence of copyrights; patents; trademarks and DRM.
>> but once knowledge becomes public it /should/ be treated as the
>> property of public domain.
>
> I'm inclined to agree, with a few caveats (how "public" is public?).
> Of course, in an ideal world we'd respect the original progenitor of
> the information -- though things quickly get iffy if someone takes
> the information and chops it up, incorporating the resulting pieces
> into some work of his own.
That is why I support the GPL over the BSD license. I believe in proper
attribution, but I also believe that Freedom only works if it is
protected against malicious exploitation, and is allowed to *remain*
Free. Anything else is just a farce.
>> Attempting to enforce exclusivity on it is a gross perversion of
>> creativity, mutating art into a /cattle market/; an artist into a
>> sacrificial cow; and those who purportedly "help" artists into
>> cynical harvesters of souls, who sit on their fat behinds, pushing
>> a "copy" button that duplicates those souls for profit.
>
> And milks the rest of us for suckers.
And brands those who won't play along with their exploitation, as
"criminals".
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| 'When it comes to knowledge, "ownership" just doesn't make sense'
| ~ Cory Doctorow, The Guardian. http://tinyurl.com/22bgx8
`----
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.23.8-63.fc8
04:00:07 up 138 days, 35 min, 6 users, load average: 0.10, 0.19, 0.16
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