Pirated Music and Intellectual Property

[Deviljho]

DRM encourages piracy, piracy encourages DRM. It's an ouroboros situation.

[buzzingrobot]

What sort of society do we want to live in?

Opinions differ.

So....

Efforts to determine what is right or wrong by reference to what people want are always doomed to fail because people never agree about what they want.

Inevitably, this state of affairs leads to people who imagine they actually know "The Truth" trying to impose their will on everyone else. That's my definition of Evil.

Meanwhile, "art" and the market have little to do with each other. It's wrong to imagine that "artists" don't want to make money. Lack of ability to finance one's creative efforts is typically the greatest impediment to the creation of "art", whatever that is.

[|{urse]

DRM encourages piracy, piracy encourages DRM. It's an ouroboros situation.

Or it's the perfect paradigm to perpetuate a (profitable) litigious free for all. These lawyers know exactly what they are doing, we all know what a mix-tape is and it's never been a 'bad' or 'harmful' thing.. sharing music with friends.. that's how artists reach their audience and the industry encouraged it just to turn on their customers.

I think that so long as you aren't mass distributing other peoples works without consent to the public at large for a fee, there should be no fine for bootlegging a movie, cd etc.. here in my town (Coolsville, I'm the Mayor) we still call cheap or inferior things "bootleg" and we buy the better quality one if we like something we saw but no-one here is a "Pirate" and we already spend inordinate amounts of money on first run films, t-shirts, concerts and popcorn.

[fontis]

Philosophically, we must base or facts on an assumption at some point in the reasoning. For me, this self evident truth is that people are endowed by virtue of their existence with self ownership. I own my thoughts, my body, and by extension my labors. By further extension I own the results of my labors. I am further able to negotiate an exchange of my property or labor with others for mutually beneficial results. It gets a bit more involved when it comes to the origination of materials, but let us stick to this premiss.

Interesting.
Does this mean that every factory worker who has ever produced any piece of material owns that property?
Do I own the cars I build at the factory? They are after all fruits of MY labor.
Also, arguing against this you could claim that I may have crafted it, but the underlying bits were not mine to begin with (the metal, or in the pie argument, the sugar etc). But this would assume that the ownership of the material belonged to someone else. And who gave that person the right to superseed my right to own said property?(metal, etc)

In the end, it's true. Nobody owns anything, everyone owns everything. At least, philosophically speaking.

[buzzingrobot]

Does this mean that every factory worker who has ever produced any piece of material owns that property?

No. The factory worker agrees to produce something for an employer in exchange for payment. The employee transfers (sells) his rights to the things he makes in much the same way an author transfers certain of his rights to a book to a publisher in exchange for publication, marketing, distribution, and, perhaps, an advance.

Obviously, in many businesses, the transfer of rights from employees to employers is formally acknowledged. In others, it is not. It's specious, though, to argue that a guy who makes shoes in a shoe factory owns the shoes he makes.

[fontis]

No. The factory worker agrees to produce something for an employer in exchange for payment. The employee transfers (sells) his rights to the things he makes in much the same way an author transfers certain of his rights to a book to a publisher in exchange for publication, marketing, distribution, and, perhaps, an advance.

Obviously, in many businesses, the transfer of rights from employees to employers is formally acknowledged. In others, it is not. It's specious, though, to argue that a guy who makes shoes in a shoe factory owns the shoes he makes.

Why?
The factory worker has as much claim to the things he creates (if not more) than the owner of the factory because the factory worker is essentially crafting it (creating something from 'nothing'). Essentially it's a hustling deal, because the employer pays the employee to create something (this much I can agree with) - however the rights to said created object can never be transferred from the employee to the employer because that would imply that the employee is the owner of the materials used to create said object - or even the object itself (which can't happen since arguing that the fruits of one labor is owned by oneself through the extension of one's own crafted creations).

And since it's wrong to assume that anyone has any claims to anything in the universe except to ones own body etc, you can't claim it reasonable at all.
The definition of ownership outside oneself is simply absurd and unnatural in its essence. That's why arguing FOR it always becomes such a weird thing, and it's essentially impossible to speak of rights of such manners because the arguments will be arbitrarily based on false assumptions multiple times in an attempt to justify the argument.

[malakbal]

Musicians should promote their own music, rather than allowing record companies to do it for them. Or at least hire their own team to do so, this would ensure they get a much bigger cut of the dosh than they are getting now!

Record companies are in it to make good money, not good music!

[PJs Ronin]

No matter which side you fall on, pirate and be damned or more power to the artist, I fear the end result will be the same. I see artists who produce a 'unitary thing', like a sculpture, painting or ceramic will continue to be able to set an agreed price before their work is handed to someone else. But for artists engaged in music or film the future is a lot more bleak. The old paradigms of royalties/fees continuing for a piece of work (music/film) that has been physically placed into the public domain (even with 'ownership' still attached) are ending as technology rolls forward with increasing strength and adaptability. I make no comment as to whether this is a good or bad thing, it is simply something that is approaching with all the inevitability of the ocean's tide.

[Paqman]

My question is, why should music be free?

I don't think anyone with half a brain is seriously suggesting that there's no value in music. The issue is that the nature of digital downloads means the economics aren't the same as producing a tangible commodity like a disc. So should we be paying per unit, or are other models such as subscription-based all-you-can-eat services (similar to the way we pay for TV) more appropriate?

[Paqman]

Record companies are in it to make good money, not good music!

I suspect if you talked to a record company exec they'd refute the idea that the two are mutually exclusive. What gives the impression is that music designed for broad appeal is lucrative, but often formulaic. Just like anything subject to taste really (films, clothing, interior furnishings, etc, etc).