Taxes on hard drives
petro
petro at bounty.org
Sun Feb 18 20:57:39 PST 2001
>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
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