Unfortunate, but true.

Though I will (reluctantly) say Lady Gaga has had (albeit diminutive by comparison to the Beatles) some effect on fashion/some minor psychological effects...though it's a big package, and it's rammed down people's throat from every angle...modern Rap/Hip Hop too; there's plenty of other examples in other genres, but it's always more short-lived and diffuse. But that's just modernity in general, everything is more fragmented...I don't think we'll ever have a Beatles, or a David Bowie etc. again...

Basically, recorded music just isn't enough for most people these days; other than music-makers or similar associates. And even when it is, average people don't tend to be that fussy about it. Under 30s want a flashy video at the very least...or the full-on experience of a gig...

Exactly.

The point is even if we removed every extant piece of piracy off the net, and raided everyone's hard drives across the planet. Do you think record sales would suddenly skyrocket? Kids wouldn't just stick on some nobody bands their mates are in on Soundcloud, or watch (legitimately uploaded videos) on Youtube like Vevo, artist/indie label uploads etc...in a way, Billy's not that far off the mark, that money (for artists) will have to come via anything other than record sales.

OK, back-catalog purchases would return a good bit, but that's not going to help contemporary producers or artists all that much...

Again, when you're dealing with legislation, it's not about what it immediately appears to do/say...same goes for all legal documents. Aroundtheworld said the rest better than I can...

But, anyway I was just talking about the approach to piracy in general in that sentence...

Sure - but you are disagreeing based on the disinformation and pro-corporation propaganda of someone telling you what to think. I find it truly stunning how quickly people have agreed to surrender their Individual Rights to protect Corporate Interest.

If Google has all of your personal information (privacy), you still have it too, right?

The operative part of this conversation is that the protections that are being sought are those of Individuals FROM and AGAINST Illegal Corporate Exploitation.

Is Google the 1% or the 99%?
Am I, as an individual creator the 1% or the 99%?

So much for individual rights and personal liberty as long as corporations get to profit by illegal exploiting the work of artists, creators and musicians... nice...

I agree - but why should anyone acting illegally have a get out of jail free card. That just defers the responsibility.

same here... which is what "six strikes" will be. there are only really TWO major prosecutions for UPLOADING and those are Joel Tenenbaum and Jaime Thomas. BOTH of whom were found guilty by a Jury of Peers (not a judge) and BOTH had the opportunity to settle multiple times and avoid costly legal action. BOTH however, also prove, legally that their activity is in fact illegal and punishable under the law.

No, there is no paradox. How many actual copyright infringement lawsuits are there on a compositional level? Like next to none. A few high profile and very obvious cases - but out of the 70,000 album releases a year... maybe there's one or two every couple of years. You are arguing about something that in fact does not exist.

Now, if you take my EXACT recording and copy and redistribute it without my permission that is very different, and that's what we are talking about. Feel free to make your OWN recording if it's that easy to do, why do you need to illegally exploit mine?

Right. You're making my point. The does allow for covers. So you don't really have an argument. What it doesn't allow is you illegally profiting from Jeff Buckley's recording of those covers without his consent and compensating him. You're comparing apples to airplanes.

Again, why should anyone get a get our of jail free card. I agree with you that this is the way it's going to go, but again, let's see what happens when mom and dad start getting those warning letters and emails. That will be quiet the education don't you think?

I agree with what you're saying here; but I don't believe that's what SOPA is going to protect (immediately yes, but not in its greater implications) and, more importantly, at what cost...there's a lot of pro-corporation agenda on both sides.

On another note, I think this is a great video that everyone here (straddled between, or on either side of the fence) would find interesting:

Al Teller – Former head of CBS, Columbia, and MCA Records

I don't know why anyone is still talking about a dead bill. It doesn't exist and is not part of the current conversation.

Copyright is for the protection of the Individual FROM Corporate Exploitation. It's not more simple than that. If the internet companies can dramatically change copyright, it means that artists will no longer get paid for the placement of their music in TV shows, Commercials and Films.

Musicians would only ever be able to make money by live performance which turns back artists rights at least 100 years and you think that's some how "progress and innovation." Really? Seriously?

People should just be honest. They like getting stuff for free and they don't want the faucet of free turned off, God Forbid.

If the internet was so innovated with new technology it wouldn't require old media to be profitable would it? If I lost my job to a million hobbyists giving away their music for free and no one wants to pay for mine as a result - that is in fact a sea change. But that's not what's happen. Many hobbyists can not give away their music, literally, they pay to have it distributed, they pay for various services, etc. What people want, is the music I produce and release that actually has value and as long as they can get it for free, illegally and without consequence they will. Just be honest about it.

You do remember that Wikipedia was absolute numbero uno, front and center against SOPA. hardly an unbiased source for analysis then.Regarding 'uncritical pawns', I don't remember that view being widespread, but again, you do remember that otherwise 'respected' leaders of the tech lobby, seen as experienced and 'honest' business people by the public at large, were stridently told the internet sky would fall in if SOPA went through.
The internet would 'be broken'.
I have otherwise rational friends who literally feared for their Facebook accounts.

So business shouldn't pay musicians when they use music to sell their products.
If music is unimportant why has Facebook signed a deal with Spotify, why has Apple put music players and music apps on all it's gadgets?

Perhaps the public doesn't want to pay for music, but those companies exploiting music to power their products should. No?

The referenced Wikipedia blog that I was discussing was just that: a blog. I don't think Wikipedia as an entity would claim to be neutral toward the subject SOPA. They aren't; they took a very clear position. That doesn't itself invalidate anything its representatives or supporters say.

I don't know how widespread that view was; it wasn't my experience, to be sure. Word of mouth chains will obscure the truth of most subject matters, and the opposition to SOPA was very much a word-of-mouth based movement, rather than one decreed from above. As I briefly discuss in this previous post, most of the big names in technology fields were either neutral toward or in favor of SOPA until public opinion gave them cause to change their stances (here's one notably direct example).

I agree with rack gear that there's little reason to continue to discuss SOPA. I am only posting on the matter to raise word against the rewriting of history (bonus unrelated recent rewrite reference) which both distorts the characterization of the movement against it and minimizes the negative technical and legal consequences of the bill.

Disingenuous.

Google: 'Sopa Breaks The Internet'.
It's a snowstorm of results stating that exact phrase.

SOPA [does|would] (pick tense at your leisure) break the deployment of the current/next generation of internet infrastructure. Here's a post of mine from last week directly addressing the accuracy of the phrase. Without any qualifiers, it is somewhat exaggerated claim, but it is not outrightly false.

However, what you are disputing -- for whatever reason -- is the relative prevalence of the framing of SOPA as breaking the internet versus the framing of the SOPA debate as a battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley (thus minimizing the widespread popular opposition). A search for "Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley" or "Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley SOPA" reveals a similar snowstorm of results. The worth of this exercise in comparison is left up to the reader. I don't see much value in this methodology, myself, not least because it is an unnecessary comparison; the claim that major news organizations framed the debate as a battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley is not incompatible or in competition with the claim that there were or were not also popular stirrings over whether SOPA would "break" the internet (and as mentioned mere sentences ago: it can be reasonably seen as doing so).


Edit to add: It occurs to me that you do not reside in the United States, and would likely then be unfamiliar with the manner in which the US news media framed the debate surrounding SOPA, and it may then be wise for you to excuse yourself from a subject on which you may be excusably ignorant.

lol! (the point of diminishing returns has long since left the building with this guy...)

so why are you blathering on for pages trying to disprove it then? it's a little schizo dude...

remove "big labels" from that phrase and you've understood everything.

kinda the pot calling the kettle black there flippy! but maybe you don't know you're a perky little tech industry cheerleader yet. most don't: that's the beauty of tech dogma--they sell their crimes against art and artists with words like "freedom" and "individual" and "evolution", while cleverly pointing their fingers at the big bad "labels"--greedy old dinosaurs who used to make you pay for music (god forbid!), that they've heroically liberated you from... and the cyber-millions lap it up. (how could they not?... the doctrine comes with so much awesome free stuff!!) from there on in it just works on autopilot...

so sorry to break it to you little soldier: tech has definitely won the bull**** battle--and you're one of the predictable millions "buying into it". they've successfully convinced a whole generation that the only people that have actually invested in music and artists (ahem... record labels) are the bad guys, and the people that have sucked all but the last drop of value out of music as both an art form and a commodity are the good guys.

thanks for the heads up, sounds interesting, i'll check it out.

it may be a good indicator, but i'm still hoping to get solid numbers one day without insane amounts of extrapolation etc. (that's probably a pipe dream though...)

The internet isn't US only. The Wikipedia campaign was global. And as such I was well aware of both the online and terrestrial campaign on both sides.
Whether 'hollywood versus silicon valley' would have muted the response to SOPA is debatable. Everyone I knew, and everything I read online was all about 'breaking the internet'. Effectively an end to the internet as we currently enjoy it, an end to freedom of speech. As it was claimed.
The people who instantiated this claim were overwhelmingly millionaire business people who's wealth stemmed from disseminating 'free information' (like Jimmy Wales).
To suggest anything otherwise is as I say, clearly disingenuous.

The Wikipedia blackout affected only the English Wikipedia site. Some sister sites displayed a banner in solidarity, but no other languages went black. I don't feel like anything you've added anything else -- to the extent that that your reply is comprehensible -- that is yet unaddressed by my previous post(s), so I will direct you back to it if you'd care for my response. As stated, and as unchallenged, it is reasonable to suggest that SOPA would "break the internet [security infrastructure]," though the phrase is most accurate with the appropriate qualifications.

Why do you put the words free information in quotes here? Relatedly, it might interest you to know that Wikipedia is, of course, not managed by a single individual, and that the blackout decision was openly debated by Wikipedians over the course of months to the point where consensus was achieved and a final decision was officially announced.

This will be my last post on this particular side-bar topic, but in the interest of balance to the misinformation, anyone interested can read:

RE: "Will break the internet"
you're right aroundtheworld, i'm not an expert. But you know who is? more than anyone here? the person who actually invented the DNS SEC technology that would supposedly be 'broken'.
Paul Vixie said:
Another experts' words on the matter noted network engineer Richard Bennett (who edits High Tech Forum, ect) Wrote More info for the interested:
Lobbyists 1, Internet 0: An Alternative Take on SOPA | PPC Associates Blog
Stop Online Piracy Act [Walkthrough] | Copyhype

For the record, i'll take the actual inventors' word over how his invention works, over anonymous forum posters, thankyouverymuch.

Right, but there was a massive hullabaloo globally on the day. Other websites chipping in with sympathetic action of their own, or blogging and commenting.
You also think only citizens of English speaking countries use Wikipedia in English?
Most of the news services ran the story in great detail and depth.



Because there is 'free information' and then there are artworks. I don't regard art works as free information.

Intellectual Property Attaché Act.

I saw it here:
Smith's IP-Protection Bill Tabbed 'Zombie' Reanimation of SOPA - 2012-07-11 21:44:26 | Multichannel News

... but you can probably find it at your preferred source of information.

Paul Vixie is very much against the filtering demanded by SOPA/PIPA on technical grounds (to say nothing of ideology); I don't know why you'd try to present him as supporting the technical plausibility of the measures.

Still, the paragraph immediately following your quoted selection from this article is an interesting one to jump off from:
To rephrase that, the DNS resolution must return as a failure in response to a manipulated DNS entry. A hijacked/hacked name server is effectively the same as a filtered name server for an end-user. There are two important points in response to this, so let's use a more recent Paul Vixie post to shed further light:
These quotes are only marginally representative of the entire post; the whole thing is worth reading if you're interested in the subject -- it's a good history of the how the varying forms of censorship methods in proposed legislation would be handled in a real web environment. The gist of his position is that in a DNSSEC regime, any kind of filtering will appear to user as a failure condition, and the redirections desired by legislation (and there are legitimate reasons to prefer redirections over failure responses, both as a matter of public policy and of technical coherency) are impossible under DNSSEC. Censorship can only appear to the end-user as a broken internet (to borrow a phrase), and can so be of only marginal deterrence.

The second important point can be seen with the assistance of a Paul Vixie interview:
His remarks toward commercial viability are of some importance here: the value of DNSSEC is closely related to how widely the protocol is adopted. If the obvious logical extension of failure responses in a DNSSEC implementation -- that is to say, a proxied or VPN'd alternate resolution path -- is outlawed (as it would have been under PIPA [the Senate's version of the House's SOPA]), then DNSSEC loses value (it can only fail to resolve a forbidden query, rather than detect manipulation and route around it), and the impetus for its adoption may be reduced, hindering the broad usage that is desired by anyone with a vested interest in network security (which is likely all of us: if you've ever used a credit card, or accessed your bank online, as two examples, then you should have an interest in network security!).

How does this distinction (not that I understand it; there are plenty of Free as in Freedom works of art) factor into the context of Jimmy Wales where you had used it?

did you even read your quote?


i'm done.

No, you weren't already done spreading your misinformation? I recommend that you reread my post which quite adequately addresses the context of that quote you highlight. Domain name disappearance is not the intent of filtering/censorship provisions; content insertion is.

Internet piracy is not the only issue. Although, "the issue of the general public believing they should have music for free, and if not they pirate," is a huge issue. There is also the issue of, "media fragmentation." This is the other, less publicized aspect, of the current woes of all things, "music industry."

You don't understand the difference between information freely shared over the web, and that shared without the creators consent?
You've never heard the very often repeated mantra "information wants to be free" with regard to unauthorized downloading?

i don't want to speak for chrisso, but it seems obvious his use of "free information" in this context is his way of citing an obvious truth about the way the tech industry abuses copyright and intellectual property, without hashing over the minutiae of the "counter arguments" again. (notice how i used quotes with "counter arguments" there? that's another example of the ironic use off quotation marks for you. )

the difference between what constitutes free information, and what constitutes infringement on an artist's intellectual property (which is a very clearly defined and universally acknowledged legal concept, worldwide), has been hashed out over and over again here.

if "information wants to be free" as the tech industry has been selling for all these years, then access to it should be free as well, no? what a beautiful, noble, altruistic concept: let's tell google to stop making billions in advertising revenue (um... selling information), tell ISPs to stop charging for internet access, and truly set information FREE... i'm all for it!

the day that happens, i promise you i'll sign my entire catalog over to creative commons, and crusade that every other artist i've ever known or worked with does the same.

You've been on my case since here:

CONTENDING my point that the 90s was a boom...

Then you got trigger happy on the emoticons, and now you're just talking ****...where have I ever advocated tech companies? I think Google and Apple are some of the most dangerous companies in the world right now (check out some of Eben Moglen's work if you're interested in finding out why).

The big labels started propping up a lot of crap towards the mid/end of the 90s and the whole thing was becoming LESS about the music...plenty of the more creative artists of that era were becoming disgruntled by their behaviour and some of them began to leave the majors...but you're obviously a crony, so all this will fall on deaf ears.

This video actually correlates some of what I said re 80s recession/90s boom...if you think you know more about the record industry than Al, knock yourself out.

The majors became corporate, now they're even more corporate; tech companies are even more corporate again. Corporatism is bad for the human race. Freedom of information isn't. If we can agree on this, maybe we can have a conversation; otherwise, I'm not interested in talking to you man...like I said, you're doing a good job. Laterz.

only because i care.

but seriously (i don't really), i got on your case because at first you seemed genuinely interested, but then you started regurgitating false statements i've been hearing like a broken record (pun intended) for years... i have little patience left for those arguments.

also, we happened to cross paths at a particularly bad moment (for you): i was invited to speak on this very subject at a TEDx conference last wknd; the numbers are still fresh in my mind, and so is my enthusiasm.

you got that part right brother.

it might surprise you to know that i've been involved in legal action against 2 different record labels on 2 different occasions. a lot of those guys are serious sharks--agreed. the difference between us it seems, is that i don't think there's anything inherently sinister or evil about disagreements over contracts or money: it happens in every business. music is no different in that respect.

yup. (as long of your definition of "free information" doesn't include the right to infringe on artists' copyrights/intellectual property. if it does, your definition of "free information" is not so great for the human race.)

ok, agreed. (as long as our definitions of free information are the same.)

not until you stop filibustering and ignoring hard data when it's presented, and stop spouting dogma that hinders the conversation.

ditto.

Now relate this concept and distinction to Jimmy Wales, if you would. I hope I've made it clear through this conversation that it's this relation I am prodding at: if you aren't backhandedly accusing Jimmy Wales of facilitating or profitting from "unauthorized downloads," then why are you invoking his name with this association?

The title is wrong. There is no money is selling recordings but there is still money in the music biz, its just generated from different sources.