UK Music Industry Calls For Truce With Technology 209
Posted
by
samzenpus
from the can't-we-all-just-get-along dept.
from the can't-we-all-just-get-along dept.
Stoobalou writes "The British music industry has called for a truce with the technology firms with whom it has till now fought a bitter battle over rights, royalties and file sharing. Feargal Sharkey, CEO of lobby group UK Music, told a conference in London this week that it was time for the music and technology industries to set aside their differences and strive instead toward a common goal: nothing less than the total global domination of British music."
Re:Your capitulation is insufficient (Score:4, Informative)
Nothing less than to abolish copyright will do. Copyrights and patents prevent progress in the sciences and the useful arts. They were an experiment that utterly failed.
I'd love to hear your evidence of this, because as far as I can tell, there are a lot of benefits of copyright and patents. Certainly the number of inventions and works of art has increased since they were introduced, and certainly they have induced authors and artists to produce more (Winston Churchill, for example), and they have certainly rewarded the creators for the works, and they have made things like the GPL possible. This guy [huffingtonpost.com] makes a strong argument that the patent system helped drive invention forward: for example, the steam engine was invented over a thousand years ago, but it wasn't until patents made it profitable to invent things that people began applying them to application they could think of. Maybe he's wrong, but it's an argument that needs to be addressed. I would love to hear your arguments.
Certainly there are abuses, like the one-click patent, and artist abuses by record companies, and the term for copyrights is probably too long, but these are things that can be fixed, they don't require an entire revocation of the system.
Re:Your capitulation is insufficient (Score:3, Informative)
I hate to break it to you, but... (Score:5, Informative)
...UK Music are not the UK music industry. Sharkey is a lobbyist with a bunch of artists on his side, but he doesn't speak for any of the publishers/labels.
I mean it's a refreshing opinion, but it doesn't represent any grand outbreak of common sense.
Re:Your capitulation is insufficient (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Your capitulation is insufficient (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, totally agree. This makes me wonder if the Music industry has finally realised we are the ones holding all of the cards, not vice versa.
No, what this is is that the music industry have basically pushed for and got ridiculous laws that unfairly give all the power to them, and now they're playing the "hey let's stop fighting" card in the hopes that people will make the same assumption as you, that we've somehow "won" and stop fighting. They'd be more than happy with the current status quo, massively biased in their favour as it is.
Re:Your capitulation is insufficient (Score:3, Informative)
Since someone will no doubt reply asking for a citation, here is an article which describes in some detail how patents on early steam engines delayed the industrial revolution in Britain until after they had expired [mises.org].
Replying to you not from disagreement but as an opportunity to bring up another source with a bit of a different point of view.
Others have suggested that the very existence of patents is what allowed artisans to start making money on ideas instead of property (which was owned by the aristocrats). Patents, in this scenario, actually allowed for the Industrial Revolution to happen. The history of how the concepts of patents and the legal language around them is interesting indeed and even in the early years had characters who also tried to abuse the system.
Personally, I believe they are necessary to reward inventors. Many of the problems are related to how you define an invention, not patents on their own (IMHO). Of course, nothing is without problems, but for constructed "things" patents work quite well and seam a good balanced of time of ownership with publication for the common good.
Sorry no link, but "The Most Powerful Idea in the World" by William Rosen discusses how patents are one of many parts that enabled the Industrial Revolution as he also explores the history of the steam engine.
Re:Your capitulation is insufficient (Score:2, Informative)
I think you misunderstand. A copyright belongs to the artist, to be used however they wish. If artists are having trouble with their labels, it is between them and the label, no-one else. They don't need pirates telling them what is best for them, or stripping of their copyrights over some nanny-state paternalistic bullcrap. If they don't want to be signed, they won't sign. Conversely, if they are signed, it means they wanted to be signed (or perhaps are indifferent either way). Maybe the figures floating around the internet don't tell us the whole story? A lot of people want the labels to fail, so a misinformation campaign wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
I think the misunderstanding might be yours.
Often once the artist (who is neither an experienced contract lawyer nor someone who has access to, or the money to pay for such expertise), has signed an extremely one-sided contract with the record company (that has both the access and the money) a copyright no longer belongs to the artist. In a lot of cases, neither does control over their artistic careers.
The record company's spin when it comes to online "piracy" is that it is threatening the livelihoods of the artists, whereas it is in fact far more likely that the artists themselves could survive perfectly well in the Internet age, but that the future for the companies is far less certain.
Couple this spin with the fact that the artists' livelihoods are far more under threat from the record companies themselves http://www.gerryhemingway.com/piracy.html [gerryhemingway.com], and you will begin to see why people get quite so angry when the record companies insult our intelligence with this sort of BS.
the steam engine (Score:3, Informative)
brilliant choice,
You do realise that due to a patent on highly inefficiency low pressure condensing steam engine, a guy who had a much better more efficient one (possibly high pressure I can't remember) the world was stuck with crappy steam engines.
Also Stevenson's rocket benefited from quite a number of inventions that weren't copyrighted (for instance tubes running through the firebox as part of the boiler)
Mathematics has done really well, despite not having patent and computer software would benefit from no parents, so why should other more abstract things be much different?