h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It just seems so unnecessary.

Not least because by banning it they have effectivly made sure many, many more people will actually hunt down and watch the thing.

FB

http://legaltorrents.com for legally reusable music. Note that music (and pictures, games, videos, books and anything else at Legal Torrents) is available under a variety of licenses, some of which allow mixing and matching and some of which don't.

TRiG.

Also, may be worth looking at places like soundclick.com, where the music, put up by user's, is often licenced under creative commons, so as long as you acknowledge the source it could be used as you want...

THere is no provisions in UK copyright law for fair use apparently. Tis a US only thing.

FB

FB, the problem is that the record industry and the record companies aren't individuals, they're large bureaucracies. When they get something pulled from YouTube it's rarely a case of a CEO saying "Hey! that's our copyright! Get that off there!"; more usually it's the legal department, which will have been instructed to issue C&D's on any possible infringement, going through the motions.

Getting such large organisations to act in the way we'd expect individuals to act isn't really going to happen so the record industry constantly does stupid, self-defeating things like this in the name of protecting the rights of their artists who they've doubtless not even consulted.

Yeah I know, just frutrating all the same....

FB

I understand that there definitely *is* the concept of fair use (or 'fair dealing') in UK law. Of course, it's not necessarily exactly what 'fair use' is in American law, but it's there.

http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p27_work_of_others

...in fact, there would have to be. We could never have so many critics otherwise.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/oct/05/free-online-content-cory-doctorow

Quite an interesting article about this I thought.

FB

Unfortunately, that article is largely a handwave of concerns about objections to "free culture" and constant re-statement of things like "DRM is bad" or "three strikes is unfair" or "you can't stop piracy".

The only time the author touches on a solution that will mean artists still get paid he uses the old "ISP tax" argument. This is an idea whereby ISPs pay a lump sum which is "shared out" amongst artists (musicians, programmers, film makers) depending on how much filesharing of their stuff there is. The main problem is that it would add a huge cost to the monthly fee for ISP usage by households. The second is how the "royalties" are dished-out; are works which cost more to make entitled to more? Will royalties go down if filesharing increases overall or does the ISP "tax" increase? What's to stop ISPs opting-out and their users being disallowed access to the "official" filesharing option but using new pirate bays to obtain what they want? Basically, I see this system as unworkable and probably unfair - either costs will rise dramatically for internet users (good luck trying to sell that to people, especially pirates who are more than happy with the status quo) or artists will make a pittance from their work as the "lump sum" is spread ever thinner and thinner.

Another thought: the system is open to obvious exploitation. Pop singers could arrange for "leeching" whereby large numbers of dummy ISPs download their song leading to an increase in their "royalties". Pirates can already create such false ISPs to hide-behind when downloading so it wouldn't be difficult for the unscrupulous to arrange for, say, fifty downloads a day from faked ISPs on multiple computers.

I think though that is usually always the problem. It is easy to point out what is wrong with the status quo, much harder to constructively come up with a suggestion as to how things can change in a way that strikes a better balance between given people fair rights to use their content how they see fit and allow creatives to properly profit from their endeavor.

Shame that things like "Spotify" (a really good attempt to breach the gap) don't seem to be working in terms of paying creatives, as I had thought it was a really "goer".

FB

"I think though that is usually always the problem. It is easy to point out what is wrong with the status quo, much harder to constructively come up with a suggestion as to how things can change in a way that strikes a better balance between given people fair rights to use their content how they see fit and allow creatives to properly profit from their endeavor."

Very true. However, people in the main don't seem to be even trying; I hear the "we need a new system" quite a lot which is just a placeholder in lieu of any actual ideas.

Like I said, I've heard two serious options advocated to replace the current system of entertainment corporations and licenses. One is the "ISP Tax" which I don't think is workable for reasons I mentioned above and which I suspect would, even in the unlikely event of enforcing such a tax worldwide, give artists less than a living wage, even if they were quite successful (has anyone done the maths regarding what the lump sum would need to be, incidentally?). The other is the "remove the middlemen and sell stuff directly at a lower price" option which is the one I've come to gravitate towards. It has problems (even if something costs 50p that's still more than 0p which is what pirates have to pay) but personal experience suggests there's truth in the argument that as you lower prices you increase sales multiple-fold. And if we create a giant online market where artists sell directly (ie without needing record/software/film companies) then their payment might *increase* per copy sold which will encourage them...

>Shame that things like "Spotify" (a really good attempt to breach the gap) don't seem to be working in terms of paying creatives, as I had thought it was a really "goer".

Spotify is actually a kind-of dry-run for the "ISP tax" idea since it creates the "lump sum" from subscriptions and advertising and then pays it out according to online streaming of songs. The worlds' most popular artists are, apparently, making a pittance so I suspect that smaller artists can barely scrape-together enough to buy a creme egg to celebrate. Spotify charges, I think, £5 a month to subscribers and most users are unwilling to pay that (one of the reasons the company is in financial dire straits); given that the ISP tax is likely to be much more than that per month and is expected to give a fair price to the worlds musicians, programmers, writers and film-makers... well, you can understand my scepticism.

Well the successes of the iTunes store and the Android market show that there is clearly a big, and growing, market for "microcontent". I know that I routinely buy apps form the Android market that cost a couple of quid.

One thing I found intersting in the quoted article was when he said:-

" 97% of the artists signed to a major label before Napster earned $600 or less a year from it. And these were the lucky lotto winners, the tiny fraction of 1% who made it to a record deal."

Now I am not sure how accurate this is. But if it is true, or even nearly true then one thing it would demonstrate is that there might be a degree of "rose tinted spectacles" about how many artists were able to make decent livings form their recording contracts.

However the things is, certainly in the music industry, the technology to cut out the middle man has existed for some time. And it seems to me there is little evidence that talented muscicians are making loads of money directly from fans....

Now why is this, are music fans naturally greedy theives who will always when given an option take stuff for free. Or is there something else at play? I think the phoney war, the all or nothings black and white arguments don't help. And I also think the music industry is scoring a massive own goal comparing illegal downloading to stealing someones hand bag.

Problem is if a better balance isn't found then it will mean less music is made, and we all lose out then.

FB

>Now I am not sure how accurate this is. But if it is true, or even nearly true then one thing it would demonstrate is that there might be a degree of "rose tinted spectacles" about how many artists were able to make decent livings form their recording contracts.

I'd rather see some hard figures as well, to be honest. I hear contradictory things regarding the music business (and I've always wondered why, if the income from being signed is such a pittance, why anyone is even bothering in the first place or why relatively minor acts kept plugging away if they were making a wage you can't possibly live on - seriously, $600 a year is 3rd world poverty levels) but even assuming its true, it's irrelevant to the argument because it's not about the "music business" but about whether art should be free or not.

"However the things is, certainly in the music industry, the technology to cut out the middle man has existed for some time. And it seems to me there is little evidence that talented muscicians are making loads of money directly from fans...."

True. This is another problem - if they music industry is such a swizz and artists make nothing from it then why are new bands still keen to get signed when they could just write gig, scrimp and save, record an album and release it to iTunes independently?

"Now why is this, are music fans naturally greedy theives who will always when given an option take stuff for free."

I don't think it's about "music fans" really. If you give someone the option to get something free they generally take it and it's human nature, when called out on the moral issues of this, to grab onto any argument which says "actually, this is okay". There's a similarity with 4x4 drivers more likely to be climate change deniers: people don't want to deal with the idea that what they're doing is "wrong" so they'll propagate any argument which says that "conventional wisdom" is wrong or, even, that the opposite is true.

"Or is there something else at play? I think the phoney war, the all or nothings black and white arguments don't help. And I also think the music industry is scoring a massive own goal comparing illegal downloading to stealing someones hand bag."

Yeah, I never really had any sympathy with the music industry (regardless of whether 97% of their signings are living in poverty or not, they're still unnecessary middlemen) but piracy advocates use them as a decoy; sites like The Pirate Bay fileshare independent stuff as well: piracy is indiscriminate and that's never going to change.

What frustrates me is that a) current IP laws are a crock and desperately need changed and b) the internet is slowly destroying the old business model by which artists make money but hardly anyone is seriously trying to deal with either of these problems. Most organisations which claim to want to "reform" the IP laws are basically piracy advocates or apologists so it's impossible to get the authorities or most artists on-side and nobody has found a workable new model yet and, depressingly, very few seem to be actively trying.

"is often licenced under creative commons, so as long as you acknowledge the source it could be used as you want"

Not true. There are a lot of different CC licences. Some merely allow you to reproduce a work, with attribution. Others allow you to use a work as the basis of something else.

Wikipedia uses the GNU FDL, which is another free license which allows reuse and editing.

I read quite a bit about FOSS licensing, and there are interesting crossovers.

TRiG.

Another interesting take on this from Cory doctrove in the Grauniad

FB

This time with the link

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/nov/23/copyright-digital-rights-cory-doctorow

FB