Taxes on hard drives

[petro]

>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.

	It's rather obvious from the nested >s that you didn't write it.

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

	Napster isn't a "market force", they produce no revenue, they 
make no money. Yet.

>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.)

	I disagree with none of that, except that if an employee 
deliberately leaks a "Trade Secret" that they were bound by contract 
to keep, then the businesses bitch is with that employee.

>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.

	Wave a fist (even a small fist) of money in front of an 
Artist, and for the most part whatever brains they had in the first 
place disappear.

	Artists (musicians, writers, whatever) *sell* the rights to 
their work. It's their choice. Music labels then take the risk of 
packaging and distributing that music. Their choice.

	The "High" prices one pays for a CD make it possible for 
there to be a *lot* more artists work to be distributed (ok, it's 
often the "500 channels of shit on TV") since the profits from one 
artist will offset losses from a few others.
-- 
You can never go hunting
With just a flintlock and a hound
You won't go home with a bunting
If you blow a hundred rounds -- Tom Waits, Just the Right Bullets