UK Music Industry Calls For Truce With Technology 209
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."
Wow. How arrogant. (Score:2, Interesting)
They should try to find a truce with their customers, right?
No. They prefer to collude with governments, hardware manufacturers, media (when do churches come into play?). We, the customers?
Bah. Just gullets.
It's our fucking responsibility to fight that.
Sharkey (Score:4, Interesting)
I can never make up my mind about Sharkey. There are a few times when he comes off as someone genuinely interested in the wellbeing of British musicians, and there are other times when he comes off as an arrogant prick interested only in the global domination of the BPI. I know one thing for sure: he's not the type who can handle being wrong, and as long as he still stands he will fight for copyright, even if reason and evidence suggest that copyright is a bad thing for musicians and a bad thing for the British people.
In my opinion, his actions have been impulsive, shallow and unpredictable, and I hope he stays out of this debate -- even if he means well at heart. You know what they say about that road paved with good intentions...
76th Rule of Acquisition (Score:0, Interesting)
Every once in a while, declare peace. It confuses the hell out of your enemies.
Re:Your capitulation is insufficient (Score:5, Interesting)
Hilarious article
[referring to their 3-strikes law] 'This had helped restore the equilibrium between creativity and technology that had, said Sharkey, been out of kilter. It was but a single "stepping stone" toward the music industry's goal of having people "remunerated for their talent time, effort and ability".'
I'm pretty sure 'people' have been remunerated for their talent time, effort and ability before the internet existed, and continued to be up to the present day. I note they make no mention of how the music labels have in the past and continue to systematically rape their 'talent' in every possible way.
'Our future is now totally dependent, totally entwined, totally symbiotic'
Hmm, I'm not sure how exactly ISP's and/or the internet is in any respect dependent on any part of the music industry. If the music industry completely died tomorrow, the internet and ISP's would continue to function just as well if not be slightly faster. Now, the music industry executives coke and whore habits may live or die depending on how many people they can threaten with having their internet connection being disconnected.
Re:Your capitulation is insufficient (Score:5, Interesting)
There seems to be damned little effort to fix the problems.
This is true, but it is because most people don't care about copyright. The people who care about it primarily are content creators, and people who deal with that industry. Many more people are worried about whether Obama is a muslim than the subtleties of copyright.
Even people here on Slashdot, who rage about copyright, often only are aware of a small subset of the copyright law. You may be one of those people. There is a centuries long history of fighting over royalties between song-writers, performers, and publishers. They approach copyright from a point of view that benefits them, just as you approach it from a point of view that benefits yourself. But you aren't willing to put your money on the line in campaign contributions, or by starting a PAC. Those people are, which is why the legislation ends up being slanted towards them.
Meanwhile most people don't care as long as they are able to listen to music or watch movies or whatever. And that's why the system is how it is.
Re:Your capitulation is insufficient (Score:4, Interesting)
Anticopying laws in contrast haven't been around that long,
Since the 18th century.
and their net benefits to society aren't proven.
What would you consider proof? How would you go about proving or disproving it?
Personally I think the principle of copyright is a good one, but one that has gotten way out of control. About a decade (depending on the object) of protection should be enough.
Re:Sharkey (Score:4, Interesting)
In my opinion, his actions have been impulsive, shallow and unpredictable, and I hope he stays out of this debate -- even if he means well at heart. You know what they say about that road paved with good intentions...
Hmmm.... Good intentions, you say... Let's see TFA:
He appealed for "the ultimate solution", which was a music market place.
Market place... to me, it means: we sell it, you pay for it. Believe me, I don;t mind paying for it, I do mind however who are the sellers.
Market-place: is this the only reason music should be created? Is it the only way music should be distributed?
What about artists earning more from "live music" (touring - like it used to be before the copyright) and a bit less from selling "dead music"?
If the main source of profit comes from distributing the music instead of "living" it, concerts become (already became) only "a channel of promotion for records" (along many others)... perhaps this is why I still enjoy better going to "jam sessions" - at least music just happens then-and-there - I'd hate to see them disappearing because a corporate dick thinks them as "a less efficient way of promoting a record".
Re:Your capitulation is insufficient (Score:5, Interesting)
there are a lot of benefits of copyright and patents.
Patents and copyrights are essentially taxation systems, and as with all such transfer systems there's some party benefiting and other parties paying the bill. Compared to other taxation systems, the efficiency grade of 5-20% is horrifically low; imagine if that percentage of funding for any other government scheme was all that actually went to the purpose (ie, the payoff/investment in the creators).
Outright having the state pay for the R&D or pay for music/writing/etc on a per-use base or similar would divert 5-20 times as much money towards the purpose at the same cost to the economy today. Or we could have the same level of production as we have today at a fifth to a twentieth of the cost.
That is fairly concisely summarized as an abject failure. And that doesn't even start to go into the really damaging parts of the system that create problems for derivative or combined works, which are the foundation of creativity. Imagine the number of works we wouldn't have today if Shakespeare or HC Andersen had had permanent copyright...
but it wasn't until patents made it profitable to invent things that people began applying them...
It's always profitable to invent improvements to your production. Saving money means more profit. Whether or not it's profitable to spin off a separate business around that improvement and/or publish it may vary.
But it's more likely that the spread of information is the main driver behind the accelerating pace of invention and creation; more inspiration, more access to necessary knowledge, more improvements by example, etc. Patents used to have a mitigating factor there, as they worked to disseminate knowledge in the previous century. Today, the chance that any invention for which there is an actual application would stay unknown and not get invented half a dozen more times for the duration of a patent is unlikely. Far below the chance that your average invention will be torpedoed by a half-dozen other patents that will prevent it from actually being monetized.
Personally I tend to advocate a system which removes the damaging aspects of copyrights and patents, ie, the exclusivity, and moving over the monetary incentives to something akin to a per-use automatic payout system/mandatory licensing scheme. Instead of getting the right to sue someone who uses your invention you'd get a check from the patent office if someone used your invention, and instead of getting screwed by the media corps you'd automatically get a set percentage of the revenue from anyone selling/profiting from the work. Such funds should further be managed within the government budget (so they can be audited and analysed for cost efficiency and tuned to maximize benefit (do people write more after they're getting $500k per year? or would a payout ceiling pushing the incentive further down the chain create more value for the economy?)) like any other tax/benefit scheme and not hidden away like the current ones are.
Re:Your capitulation is insufficient (Score:4, Interesting)
I am not sure if the situation back then, and the situation we have now work in the same way.
For one there were a lot fewer patents, so it was a lot easier to do something without running into one. These days there are enough that it's near impossible to figure out if you're infringing or not on something. That on its own creates a chilling effect, because you need a patent lawyer if you want to get into that business.
And even that is not new, as your paper mentions:
So there you go, even back then moving into an area where there were any patents was dangerous business, and having a patent yourself did you no good if you didn't have money for the lawyers.
I lack the time right now to read that paper fully, but scanning it a bit I see mentions of: lots and lots of litigation, people being forced to let go their patent due to not having money for lawyers (quoted above), patent trolling, the troll (Howe) making lots of money from the litigation though it wasn't he who solved the final problems (it was Singer), and he wasn't manufacturing anything, a patent pool and a resulting cartel, and I'm probably missing something because I've not read the entire thing.
Overall I don't see absolutely anything good in any of that. It's full of everything that's wrong with the entire patent system, and shows it's been wrong since pretty much from the start. An enormous amount of money goes into litigation, then a patent pool is created resulting in a cartel able to keep competitors out, none of which serves the original goal of encouraging innovation. Instead of being busy competing all those people spent enormous amounts of time and money on arguments, politics and lawyers, and created a system that could effectively stop further competition.
The patent pool isn't a positive outcome of the whole ordeal, it's a perversion and sign that things reached a breaking point. It's more or less a sign of people agreeing "this isn't going anywhere, so let's stop caring about each other's patents", except lots of money had to be spent there, and now they form a large entity that can exclude further competition.
I'll read it in more detail later, but so far I fail to see anything there that convinces me that patents are a good thing.
Re:Your capitulation is insufficient (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe he's wrong, but it's an argument that needs to be addressed. I would love to hear your arguments.
He's wrong. The "Steam engine" of 1000 years ago was a curiosity, unable to perform useful work. It wasn't for lack of patents, it was for lack of materials and knowledge.
The 17th century (when patents existed) saw some very limited use of steam power but hardly an industrial revolution. Steam power in the late 17th century was quite dangerous since the boilers weren't up to containing the pressure. It wasn't until the 18th century that steam power was finally usefully harnessed. Note that Newcomen (the inventor of the first really useful steam engine) had to contend with the issue of patent infringement as well, even though the holder of those patents had made only incremental improvements to a decades older unpatented design.
It still took until the late 18th century to advance to engines capable of significant power output and even approaching anything we might call efficiency. It wasn't until then that they did anything but pump water.
It looks like even there patents didn't really help much and also did some harm.
There may be some value to IP, but not without a great deal of reform. That reform in the U.S. would almost certainly have to include complete dissolution of the patent office and creation of a new one.
Screwed... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you look at what the content industry is doing in places like china and russia, they get legitimate music (like the service nokia recently launched) much cheaper than its available in the west, plus its drm free...
Similarly, cinemas are much more pleasant places to be in asia, not the dirty smelly overpriced places you get in europe... And they get DVDs released a lot earlier than other places.
Why is this? because piracy is rampant in these places and its forcing the industry to try and compete, in the west the level of competition is kept artificially low because the content industry has the government in their pocket, and so we get an inferior service at a much higher price.
Re:Your capitulation is insufficient (Score:3, Interesting)
I would have said more parasitic than symbiotic, actually ...
Re:Your capitulation is insufficient (Score:4, Interesting)
Who knows. All I know is that I'm sick of the so called music business churning out the same recycled rubbish measured in its merit by the amount of TV exposure time the so called talent has been able to achieve (See the X-Factor entertainment business). The whole business model depends on the business being able to pay for marketing and exclude the opposition, the price of music is the price of that marketing and the talents don't get much of it and do get disposed off after a couple of years. This has been going on for nearly twenty years now and hardly anything has changed. Personally I would like to see the music business completely bankrupted overnight so that something new could come along and replace it. I lived through the UK Punk era and think it high time we saw something similar to sweep away the tedious complacent rubbish that passes for popular music these days. (Oh of course there are always amazing musicians struggling to make fantastic music but a good two thirds of what makes it, is recycled rubbish).
Re:Your capitulation is insufficient (Score:1, Interesting)
You know what happens when you abuse people politically for 20 or 30 years?
They begin demanding anarchy.
The exact degree to which you are unreasonable, overbearing, unjustifiably greedy they will be, too. There is no "reasonable" here any more; that was cast aside 10 years ago with the last bullshit bill they passed. We've been trying to repeal it for the last 10 years without success, and we all know the next unreasonable bill and the one after that is going to stay because the system is corrupt. The only way is to throw the whole damn system out; advertise copyright not as a concept, but as the system we have now and academically, it has been for the majority of the time the concept has been around. Copyright IS the system we have now, it IS bullshit, and it must be abolished.
You can try to be reasonable, you can try to be logical but in the end you have to ask yourself what do you want more; an unending slew of bullshit laws that end in you paying, no matter what, to utter specific words in specific tones and the halt of technological progress for the benefit of the few, or an anarchy where everyone's free, the big businesses are bankrupt and the government isn't there anymore; the potential for real progress again.
We move forward neither in anarchy nor oligarchy, but in one there's a chance to evolve, in the other we constantly devolve until the world falls apart and we end up in anarchy anyway; why halt the inevitable? Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.