Taxes on hard drives

[Ken Brown]

petro wrote:
> 
> >On Thu, 15 Feb 2001, Ken Brown wrote:
> >>You guys just need to get back to the big city :-)
> >
> >not true.  in fact, i would argue that the difficulty of finding
> >good music is widespread throughout the states.
> >i attribute this to the clueless, braindead fools who are governed
> >by the radio...and we all know the stupidity of the people who
> >control the radio stations.
> 
>         So what you are complaining about is market forces?

Actually I think that was Alan who wrote that, not me. 

But I imagine he is complaining against the copyright system acting
against market forces (like Napster).

Personally, I rather like copyright laws for the most part. Far less
pernicious than patents (which were OK when they were for inventions,
went downhill when they started patenting algorithms & now that drug
companies are trying to patent chance discoveries it's turned into a
total mess)  and trade secrets  (which shouldn't be the business of the
law at all. A secret is a secret until it's out, then it isn't. If one
of your employees lets your secrets out, well you should have paid them
enough to make them want to keep them.) 

Something odd seems to have happened to copyright in the music business
though. Copyright law usually acts to protect the originator of a work
(at least it does over here), for example authors license print
publishers to distribute or sell what they write, but they don't usually
permanently lose rights over their own work. For reasons I cannot claim
to fully understand,  music publishers tend to buy the whole copyright
of a work, the originators signing away their entire future interest in
it. I suspect it has something to do with the relative weight of lawyers
on each side. Or maybe authors are just more savvy than musicians as far
as small print is concerned.

Ken Brown (5000 Kms downwind of Bermuda)