Pirates losses in both Sweden and Somalia
April 18th, 2009
What impact will piracy have this century?
This has been a fortnight in which piracy has seen more news coverage than at any time since Blackbeard. Sadly, for all the romance of the name, piracy is no longer the wooden-legged, eye-patched, be-parroted world of Captain Hook and Long John Silver. In the 21st century, a ‘pirate’ will tend to belong to one of two distinct species: pirata mogadisciensis and pirata suionese (sometimes known as pirata cyberspacensis)
The former can be best identified by the rocket propelled grenade launchers and AK-47s that adorn the shoulders, an attraction to possessions of great worth, and are usually found on small boats off the Horn of Africa. The latter are a global phenomenon, inhabiting bedrooms in every part of the developed world, though their genesis is to be found in Sweden. They are identifiable only by the absence of DRM software on their music files, and thus blend easily into the general population.
What both these types of pirate have in common is that they have proved sufficiently irritating to the great powers that be to ellicit great newsworthy dramas about their means of living and operating. The US Navy Seals this week rescued a captain of a Maersk shipping liner who was being held hostage on a fuel-less lifeboat after his crew re-seized the ship from its attackers. There have been a number of hijackings - for purely monetary gain - off the coast of Somalia in the last few months, and this has become an added headache for the new American President.
What may seem like such an insubstantial foe by comparison to those faced in Iraq and Afghanistan is capable of demanding the attention of the President of the United States. Whether this threat subsides could have a significant impact on how Obama is judged as a first-term Commander-in-Chief: whilst some on the Right (Glenn Beck) were critical of the cautious approach (bringing in FBI hostage negotiators), Obama did win plaudits from Bill O’Reilly and others for his initial handling of the incident. They will not be so kind if this becomes a regular occurrence.
Then in Sweden yesterday the news that a court had found for the major music and motion picture companies in their suit against the operators of Pirate Bay. The four founders will refuse to pay the fine, and are appealing the year-long prison sentences handed down for facilitation of copyright infringement. Their website acts as a directory and conduit for copyrighted materials that are free to download, although the site does not host content itself.
I only use paid-for sites to download TV, Films and Music - not because I disagree with the Pirate Bay operators, but because I was never sure of the legality of their operation. What brought them to my attention was that they were one of three notable pirate organisations operating in Sweden - Pirate Bay (the BitTorrent tracker prosecuted this week), an NGO/thinktank called Piratbyran and a political party who run solely on the issue of intellectual property. My interest in the case is due to the electoral fortunes of that minor party in Sweden that has now spread to Germany, Austria, Poland, and Spain. The Piratparteit has contested the Swedish General election (they got 0.63%) but has had more success in lobbying the other Swedish parties around to its position. The Wikipedia page gives an indication of countries where this is spreading.
So why a PB article? Well partly because issues of maritime piracy and intellectual property start some great discussions (Martin Coxall and I had a short debate on filesharing with James Burdett and Louise Bagshawe - the Conservative PPC for Corby - yesterday on Twitter). The other reason is my interest in non-Tax-and-Spend issues, and how they shape voting behaviour. The strength of feeling about civil liberties, or sleaze, or technology regulation tend to be minority interests, but felt with extreme passion by those who do care about them.
Internet Piracy rulings could either criminalise hundreds of thousands of people in this country alone or put major corporations into severe financial difficulty, and regulatory attempts to keep up with technology (the new front in the war over Net Neutrality, or Burnham’s call for regulating blog content) are likely to intrude (for better or for worse) into people’s lives more visibly than marginal tinkering with taxation levels. What effect could that have - and what are the positions of the major parties on such issues? Barack Obama has a Chief Technology Officer in his administration - I’m not sure (off the top of my head) which Cabinet Minister is even responsible for teh interweb.
So - maritime hijacking off the coast of East Africa and it’s effect on US Presidential approval ratings, compared to technology regulation and the beginnings of an elected piracy lobby in Europe. If you can’t make a conversation out of that, you’re just not trying.
Morus
MessageSpace Advertising
first!
Which is the worst terminology — bots, BOTS, b0ts or B0TS? Tell me so I can be sure to use it.
The decision to jail the Pirate Bay people is very unfortunate. We are ruled by morons who are technologically illiterate. This idiocy is cross-party, though the Conservatives and Lib Dems seem to have slightly more clue.
Every 15 year old has an MP3 player full of “illegal” songs. Youtube is full of mashups. Yet Burnham decides that the “moral rights” of Elton John and Cliff Richards are more important. The “Barack-Roll” is judged illegal and has its sound disabled. Sony are fools.
This is a battle they cannot win because the technology is fundamentally against them. Yet they insist. What lunacy.
EDIT: read the comments on that video to see what young people think about copyright.
3 - Yes but there are other issues involved. The idea that I should produce something sell it to one person and then accept that that just gets utilised by others without a benefit to myself is odd. How we strike a modern balance on this is difficult. I don’t think that you can put the genie back in the bottle, but having said that if we take the concept of getting a benefit with no exchange of pecuniary or other consideration and universalise it then I think we will find ourselves with major difficulties.
Anonymous suggestions on Guido that Watson will be “banged to rights” in the Sunday Times tomorrow.
If you set up a website, and are stupid enough to call it “Pirate Bay” it’s hardly surprising if you get into trouble.
@4 (James Burdett)
The problem is rarely the musicians. Far more the record companies and trade associations.
Permissive copyright laws won’t stop people seeking careers making music or writing books or acting for a career. It hasn’t done for centuries.
The fact that lots of young people don’t approve of copyright because they don’t want to have to pay for anything does not mean that they are right and govts should just roll over for them.
From last Thread.
364. RodCrosby: It’s the Tories who are in trouble. The system is trying to make Tory majority governments a historical curiosity…
Yep, the road to Fascism and Totalitarianism is clearly defined.
Clearly, Labour are intent in making Britain a one party state.
by weathercock April 18th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
@8 (alex)
Declarative law is pointless.
Many sensible posters on the last thread were talking about how important it is to have a regime for implementation of laws instead of just good intentions on the statute books.
Suddenly, that should be waived because it is about musicians and record companies? I think not.
6 - True but copyright laws have been under pressure for a while now. At the end of the day with video recorders, tape recorders, CD-RW and the like there is more capacity to make an illegal copy of a film or music track. With the advent of highspeed internet and the capacity to store and utilise media in an electronic format adds to an issue that has been developing since the birth of the cassette. How we deal with it is a difficult one.
OT
Last ComRes/Indy poll was 40-28-18. Assuming we get a ComRes/IoS poll this evening my guess for headline figures would be something like 43-26-17.
7 - No but at the same time, this is about more than simply copyright. There is an aspect about it that is about whether we should be entitled to the benefit of something without offering a financial or other consideration in return
@8 (alex)
Incidentally, who should “pay” for the Barack-Roll I linked to?
Hugh Atkin? The viewers? Barack Obama? Ellen Degeneres? Sony?
4.”How we strike a modern balance on this is difficult.”
I agree with your comment James. But I do think that we have reached a fair balance now. I think that is reflected in the prices offered for legitimately downloading something which I cannot physical hold in my hands. And now that we have this fairer system easily available online, its harder for others to operate as they did before.
10/11 - I’m just musing. I do think that if the situation is accepted then there is potential for the entertainment industry to benefit if they hit upon the right business models. Return to making money out of live performances etc.
Yes, it’s worth remembering that when commercial VCRs first appeared the Hollywood studios tried to have them banned and it was doubtless the case with blank cassettes as well. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?
15 - True but it might be beneficial to tidy up the framework of the laws that surround this.
7 ‘The problem is rarely the musicians. Far more the record companies and trade associations.’
They’ve had their collective heads stuck in the sand for years; it was obvious that new downloading technologies would trash their business models. Why do the record companies refuse to slash the price of CDs, DVDs and MP3 downloads, which relative to production costs are massively overpriced. Surely there would be appreciable benefits in turnover as more consumers choose to buy a legitimate, quality product direct?
How can these guys be JAILED ?Fine them by all means but jailing them is just barbaric.
The copyright code of the last 60 odd years - since WW2 - has got to change with the event of websites like Wilkipedia, Google and the blogosphere in general.
How it will or should change, I hesitate to guess.
But I do know who I would like to ‘walk the plank’.
Not wishing to sound conspiratorial, but one long-term solution would of course be to require all computers sold in the UK to function only upon insertion of a valid ID card, thereby ending online anonymity forever. I agree it sounds crazy but don’t be so naive as to tell me no-one in authority has ever considered it.
I agree that the copyright laws need reform.
But if anything, what the internet tells us is that they need to be liberalized, not tightened.
Works should automatically fall into the public domain after, say, 10 years unless increasingly hefty renewal fees are paid.
The remixing of culture for noncommercial purposes should be explicitly legal.
‘Large-scale’ pirates (largely in the far-east) should be prosecuted heavily.
The teenager in his bedroom downloading the latest Britney nonsense should be left alone.
The BPI and RIAA and MPAA and BSA need to be very heavily regulated.
Artists should be encouraged (be it by law or social convention) to break free of record companies and administer their own content and commercial licensing.
20. URW April 18th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
A supposidly Libral and Progressive Scandanavian country as well!
22. That’s a disgusting thought!
22. It would be easy to get round that if you know what you are doing!
With apologies for posting from the previous thread -
391 URW, do you not think it hypocritical to accuse others of labelling those on the left BOTS, whilst yourself accusing those to the right of being ‘Tory Boys and Girls’?
19 - the problem with that, and I agree with what you are saying, but who controls the medium that they would use to distribute to the masses? A few friend who are profession writers but not mainstream rely on royalties and public lending rights, there appears to be a bit more control in the book world.
4. how does that work with most other items then. If I buy a car from Ford, when I sell it on later or give it away for that matter it is not necessary to give Ford any money. Same with food and any other item you care to mention , apart from writing , music , films and possibly a few other items. Its just a cartel, I find it hard to see why you have to pay for the same item multiple times, unless you are making money out of it.
Incidentally, I happen to believe that the electronics industry could easily subsidize an entirely Creative-Commons licensed massively expanded “am-pro” creative industry in terms of extra sales and products.
For example, I believe that Sony makes far more selling TVs and MP3 players than it does selling music.
Although this assertion is slightly more contentious than my earlier ones.
There is rumour on Guido that a poll will put Labour in third - is there anything else due except Com Res?
Sorry to go off-topic, but this is nice. Our hardworking MEPs get TWO pensions.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/17/brussels-mep-pension-taxpayer
Why do they only have two? Two pensions?? That’s barely enough to run a decent stable of antique cars. F*ck it, give them five pensions. Eight pensions. A hundred and forty pensions, three palaces, ninetyfive concubines and a solid gold ocean liner permanently moored off Bermuda.
Just as long as they don’t suffer.
A car can only be used by one person at once.
Something I would say before the thread gets further, is that twitter is a great place for short form debating. Having to crystallise a thought into 140 characters is a very interesting process. And the four-way debate yesterday that Morus mentions was quite surreal to start with but have to say was a fascinating process.
31. Why do people fall for this time and time again? Talk about believing what you want to hear.
31. Plato April 18th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Well that would fit with people like Alice Mahon turning their back on Labour.
36. And my point is proved.
27 EdP.Let’s not disrupt this thread but happy to warble away on the old thread.
You have a valid point but I would never label myself as a hypocrite.
On that note:Peter from Putney.Happy to warble away on the old thread.I have replied to you there.
33. Alex, I can get 6 or 7 at least in mine , and probably more in a real squeeze.
25 — Unfortunately, weathercock, democratic states sometimes produce disgusting legislation. Since we’re sort of on the subject of movies, I might also mention MP David Alton’s attempts, following the Jamie Bulger murder, to ban *ALL* consumer videocassettes with a rating higher than ‘PG’.
Take a quick look at the movies you’ve got on your shelf — ‘Schindler’s List’ or ‘Pulp Fiction’, maybe? Any popular, Oscar-winning films like ‘The Departed’ or ‘No Country for Old Men’?
Had the Alton amendment passed, you’d be breaking the law as surely as if you owned kiddie p0rn or snuff — and the terrifying thing is, it very nearly *WAS* passed!
37. Labour are in DEEP DEEP DEEP trouble!
So are the Liberal Democrats though!
By the way, the Itunes compromise is interesting (although I suspect it gives ReBrandedHorse convulsions).
Every copy of an song sold is entirely DRM free, but has its metadata marked with the information identifying the buyer.
38 Fair call URW. Happy to leave it, if you are.
29 - Yes but a resale car means that you are exchanging the car for a given agreed sum of money. Wheras in part if you give your mate a CD to copy then you will receive the CD back but those that are involved in the sale of the CD’s effectively lose one unit of sale.
31.”There is rumour on Guido that a poll will put Labour in third - is there anything else due except Com Res?”
Plato, there are always regular rumours on Guido’s threads about the numbers in polls due out, but they usually tend not to be very accurate either way. Better to stick with posters who have been a reliable source in the past.
27 More questions for URW:
I like the way your postings emphasise betting rather than politics. So I find it surprising (though delightfully quixotic) that you are endlessly defending tim as “bang on the money” (last thread).
Mike Smithson told us yesterday that tim had made 3000 posts (it seems like 30000), but I find it difficult to remember a single one of tim’s postings on betting or money. Almost of them — whether on Stewart Jackson or Damien Green or David Davis or Alice McMahon — seem to be smears.
Must be something to do with Tim’s views on Israel.
By the way, what happens to your DRM’d songs when you buy a new computer?
Or when the company decides that their business model is failing (this happened with one of Microsoft’s song services) and shuts down the verification server?
What happens when DRM requires a rootkit (like with Sony)?
47 I suspect that this is the truth of the matter.
On topic, I agree with everything people have said about the record industry not understanding the medium and it being a good idea to shorten copyright terms, make it work better for free culture etc etc.
But I’m having a hard time sympathizing with these Pirate Bay people. Does anyone seriously believe that they weren’t trying to help people rip off copyright owners? If you want to be able to plausibly claim that you’re just offering a sharing service and aren’t responsible for people sharing content they don’t have the rights to, don’t call yourselves “Pirate Bay”.
And I’m not sure that piracy really helps free culture develop. What we should be doing when organizations decide to be a pain in the bum about their copyrights is ignoring them. They don’t want us to download their stuff and share it? Fair enough, we’ll listen to someone else. They don’t want their stuff publicized for free on YouTube? Sure, we’ll listen to someone who does. Someone wants me to agree to some insane EULA to use their proprietary software? Up to them. I just won’t use their software. If people stopped trying to evade over-repressive copyright restrictions and just used freer stuff instead, we’d be a lot closer to killing off these dinosaurs than we are now.
On the possibility of a ComRes poll in tomorrow’s Indy, John Rentoul is blogging today, and he normally trails the poll on his blog.
32.Seant.
Indeed and they want a bail-out from the taxpayer because one of those pensions has a ‘black hole’ in it……..
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6108810.ece
My heart really bleeds for them (not)…..
Instead of a “cathedral” of chart dominated RIAA-enforced music business, I would rather have a “bazaar” of small artists and bands, all with dedicated followings, making their money largely from concerts, with the internet as an advertising medium. Dedicated fans ALWAYS buy CDs, t-shirts, etc. You make casual fans dedicated fans by exposing them to your music via the net.
Such diversification is is also far more resilient from an economic perspective.
EDIT: As a general principle, I feel that small businesses should be encouraged in favour of big businesses. Far better all round.
47. Indeed. URW is a maniacal Zionist. Anyone who has the temerity to question Israel’s methodical shredding of Palestinian children with white phosphorus is, apparently, deputy editor of Der Sturmer.
On other subjects he talks a little more sense, from time to time.
***BREAKING***
Poll rumour at Guido’s comment #100 - Labour third place with 20% behind LibDems on 21%. Tories 48%.
Anyone?
I just read Nick’s article on the previous thread and appreciate his contribution. As he says, there’s 30% or so of the population that will vote Labour even in a Tory landslide scenario, and he made a good case for why they will do so: certain core issues near and dear to their hearts coupled with distrust of the Tories on those issues, which overcomes any disappointments with Labour. It makes sense, and is a view that doesn’t generally find clear expression here. Thanks Nick.
55 - Suspect it is rubbish.
55. Anonymous poll tips over at Guido’s have a deservedly bad rep. In Don we trust.
55 - read the Beano instead - more reliable than comments on that blog.
55. Oh dear. We hear these little crepitations from the intestines of Guido’s blog quite regularly. They soon disappear on the breeze.
55.Prodicus April 18th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Liberal Democrats at 21%
The invisible man will be lucky to get 11% nevermind 21%!!!!
55, I’d love it to be true BUT IT ISN’T.
1. Speed to market
The Movie business first need to wake up that this is a global market. People hear about the launch of a new film and want to see it. Waiting months until it is shown in the UK after USA makes no sense. Publicity and free marketing is global so why the delay? Early adopters then use the Net to watch it. Answer = launch films everywhere on same day or within a week.
2. Access to product
The product should move to one where the launch in cinemas is followed within a month buy a launch through ALL other media. DVDs to me a product with a limited life. So let the online downloads kill it and its carbon friendly. Month one = Cinema, Month two = online, Month 3 = Satellite, Month 4 = TV.
3. Meet the need
Some people want to download it. It costs pence to make it available in this way so do it for a reasonable price one month after launch. £1 a film tops.
4. Cashflow
Getting the cash in sooner would be a gain.
54- Speaking of Israel, they’ve apparently made detailed plans and preparations so as to be ready to destroy Iran’s nuclear program on even a few hours notice (well, I guess this doesn’t surprise me, but it’s still chilling to read about):
“The Israeli military is preparing itself to launch a massive aerial assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities within days of being given the go-ahead by its new government.
Among the steps taken to ready Israeli forces for what would be a risky raid requiring pinpoint aerial strikes are the acquisition of three Airborne Warning and Control (AWAC) aircraft and regional missions to simulate the attack.
Two nationwide civil defence drills will help to prepare the public for the retaliation that Israel could face.
“Israel wants to know that if its forces were given the green light they could strike at Iran in a matter of days, even hours. They are making preparations on every level for this eventuality. The message to Iran is that the threat is not just words,” one senior defence official told The Times.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6115903.ece
And I don’t believe for one moment that this is a bluff. If there’s any country on Earth that doesn’t mess around, it’s Israel. Get ready for some fireworks, folks.
54.SeanT.By definition I am not a Zionist but in the words of the late Steve Cohen (thanks,tim) I am ‘a non-zionist zionist’.
It is also true that I am often accused on the internet of being ‘mad’. Generally that accusation comes from people who previously licked my boots or currently acknowledge(as you just did)that sometimes I talk a little sense.
If people are going to make up polls they could at least tempt us by making them vaguely believable.
62. ReBranded Horse is Kevin Keegan and I claim my free 80s perm.
55 Guido might be on the money as regards McBridean things but posters on polls on his threads are not.
55. That’s also a particularly poor Guido’s-blog-poll-rumour: it is too far fetched to be remotely believable. The author should have gone for something dramatic but more credible, like… Lib Dems just two points behind Labour. Something like 43, 25, 23.
That would have got more people excited, as it is within the realms of possibility, but still jolly stimulating.
Personally I’m expecting little if any change. Maybe Labour down a point or two from the last ComRes.
I’m a science fiction fan (and I’m proud to be, I tell you! Proud!)
Couple of years back Baen published an SF book with a DVD included as a freebie. It contained an audio version of the book, screen readable complete versions of the previous books in the series (3 IIRC), games, posters and who knows what else.
Printed on it were the words “This disk may be copied and the copies given away free, but they must not be sold.”
They also offer free audio downloads on the Baen website.
According to them, it makes sound commercial sense.
They are one of the few small/medium publishing companies that are not in trouble. They get the zeitgeist.
In the late 70s I did draw a picture of Kevin Keegan, with felt-tip pens, as my entry to a Blue Peter competition. Didn’t win.
13, some kind of consideration in return is appropriate, but when the marginal cost of production is zero, the market price will also be zero. Copyright provides a monopoly, allowing an higher price, but monopolies are never popular.
However, it is possible for artists to get money by making their works freely available. It’s been done, in multiple ways. Musicians can still sell tickets to their concerts, and other physical goods. Cinemas can sell a much better social experience than watching a computer screen. Authors can work on an installment plan - £2000 to release the next chapter.
Thus, claims that legalised piracy would destroy the entire creative industry hold no water. There would be losers, but there would also be winners. Obviously the losers will shout louder, they’re currently the people with the money, but that means nothing. The potential winners include everyone who benefits from the free flow of information, which is practically everyone - a constituency far outweighing the media companies.
Basically, there are only two ways of stopping piracy. Either only permit government licensed erb-sites, with no user generated content, or allow the government to inspect every last byte flowing across the internet and block anything it deems necessary. It’s possible to combine these two approaches, but the result will still be draconian.
That is the potential cost which must be weighed against the livelihoods of artists and authors, and it is not negligible.
As far the real pirates, the first international laws declared them the common enemies of mankind, back in the days of the Roman Republic. Neither the problem nor the solution has changed much since then.
Craig Murray is on the attack again and Harman and co are the target wasting the taxpayers money on ‘Wimmin’s Issues’ in Ghana.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/04/ayesha_hazarika.html
64. I meant to post a link to this paper a few days ago, that article seems to be based partly upon it. It is well worth a look if Iran’s nuclear programme and Israel’s response interests you.
Study on a Possible Israeli Strike on Iran’s Nuclear Development Facilities
http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/090316_israelistrikeiran.pdf
The paradoxical thing about the URW/SeanT argument is that until URW turned up SeanT always used to have a claim to be the ‘mad’ one on pro-Jewish issues
Re Guido rumour.
It would bring a little smile at NickMP’s expense if on the day of him writing about a core Labour vote of 30% we get a poll with Labour in the 20’s.
My expectation is that the next polls will show Labour under 30%.
Interesting further revelations about the ballot box tampering scandal
http://www.labourhome.org/story/2009/4/18/44759/5764
Meanwhile, Harman bleats the following
“I think now is a time for us to be confident and for us to be determined,”
“Every day it is clearer that we have the answers to the big questions and the big future challenges. So we should be confident, in our record, in our values, in our leadership and in our team.”
Ms Harman went on to say that the party was “fortunate to be able to look to the leadership” of Mr Brown.
She added: “He is demonstrating conviction leadership.”
From
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/eating_out/winners_dinners/article6120511.ece
(the classification of that article as “Food and Drink” is very very bizarre).
For the record; Guido’s posters’ poll tips are usually complete and utter tosh. However, he did once get someone who got it exactly right; it was that poll last Autumn which had the Tories in the 50s. I still don’t know whether that was a particularly good guess, inside knowledge, or a bonkers prediction that turned out to be accurate.
64/74.Talking out of my arse here.
Previously in this series Israel retired Saddam’s nuclear strike aspirations and those of Syria without any great preamble,without thanks and amazingly without much protest.
I think that words are often a direct substitute for action and the sheer volume of words leads me to believe that Israeli plans to retire Iran’s capacity to launch nuclear weapons is not as advanced as some might think.
76. I am dubious about the voracity of the rumour. However, it would cause me considerable pleasure if it were true.
It was not long ago that Mr Palmer was sarcastically berating me for suggesting that it was plausible for the Conservatives to achieve a 30 point lead over Labour. Were this rumour true I would only be two points off that milestone…….
More seriously I’m of the same mind as you Labour will be somewhere below 30%
55, sounds fun but probably untrue. Not definitely untrue though, I recall a Guido tip for a poll result being right at least once.
ON topic this is a subject quite close to my heart right now - having released my (first) properly commercial book AND just bought my first ereader.
The coincidence of the two events has made me realise that authors could soon be facing what musicians and now film makers have endured. Severe loss of earnings. As people pirate their property: as people steal the digitised books and put them online.
And stealing is what it is.
I say this with some trepidation as until recently I cheerily downloaded songs for free. Hundreds of them. In other words I was a hypocrite.
But I think we are all hypocrites on this subject. You get people on here cheerily admitting that they never buy a newspaper, they get all their news online - then they moan that newspapers can’t afford to commission polls any more. Duh? Why do you think newspapers are going bust?
Same goes for movies. Most of us love Hollywood blockbusters, judging by the many discussions of Lord of the Rings we have enjoyed, but these huge movies are only paid for by the vast profits Hollywood makes. Profits which are being destroyed by piracy.
If net pirating is allowed to continue, in the end our cinemas will only show low budget movies, we’ll hear a lot fewer professional musicians - with a concomitant lowering of standards, the newsagents will stock just one or two newspapers - with all that entails, and, worst of all, Tom Knox won’t be able to go Bangkok to write his thrillers by the swimming pool, thrillers which I know you all love.
Now that would be tragic.
Hey guys, just seen a new poll, shows the tories on 99%. Should be out soon…
79 - Well if this turns out anything like accurate it would be phenomenally bad for Gordon. But it is more likely rubbish than not.
81. “I am dubious about the voracity of the rumour.”
Typo of the week ?
84 - Was that the special Ave it poll?
As such a result would be the worst ever polling result for Labour I’d have thought
- by now we’d have market movements. Have there been any ?
- that the result won’t just drizzle out as normal. That the Indie will put on a fire works display. Senior Journos touring the studios around 1900 ?
The figures also have others down 3 on 11 which in the current climate doesn’t quite feel right either.
87, only if it had a 1% margin of error.
77.That is quite shocking.
84. simon9999 April 18th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
If Dr Tony King was presented with a tory poll share on the night of the next general election of 99% he would say it was a dreadful night for the conservatives as they had failed to get Gordon Brown to vote for them…….
90, is it?
After the Glenrothes ‘victory’ I hope all Labour’s opponents are well aware of the possibility of a ’surprise’ win for Labour.
Gordon Brown = Arnold Judas Rimmer
80. That is true, and it may be that Israel are trying to persuade the US that they are serious and on the cusp of attacking in order to get the US to do the job. Hoping that if an attack becomes inevitable the US would rather do the job itself and have it done well, than leave it to Israel who will struggle to carry it out.
I think that Israel will surprise us all. The air strike is at the very limit of Israel’s capabilities, they surely know this and will look for a solution that has a higher probability of success.
SeanT, out of interest, do you mind telling us how much per copy are you getting, and how much is eaten by the publisher? Put differently, if we completely removed the publisher standing between your readers and you and distributed your books online at zero cost, how much would you have to somehow make per copy to keep you in the style to which you’re accustomed? (Assume the same number of readers.)
If Labour are prepared to stuff ballot boxes with postal votes in their own factional selection wars, they will unhesitatingly do so in the general election.
It’s just awful. Completely enervating because there is virtually nothing anyone can do to stop this fraud except in the few exceptions where it will be so blatant that they will get caught.
“Labourhome has learned that the E&T Ballot Box with the broken seal was in fact being stored in a cupboard at Labour’s Victoria Street HQ at the time.
Furthermore, the ballot papers inside were torn up.
With both an active, high-level, Georgia Gould campaign and an active Unite campaign led by Charlie Whelan, operating against Gould, it will be almost impossible to nail down a likely culprit for this vandalism.”
Shocking stuff. The General Secy of Labour is an ex-Unite employee.
The group with most to gain from stopping the election seem to be everyone except the Blairite candidate Gould.
No surprise if we get in retaliation some anti-Whelan leaks next?
83 - Would we see fewer professional musicians? Or would we just see a reversion of the music industry to that which existed pre-the digital revolution ie. massive influence on live performances? Maybe the record companies might revert to “Record” technology?
I can see how writers might feel that the future might threaten their income, but i will guess that you will be OK. Is it really that difficult to develop ebook technology to prevent sharing?
95 - I wonder if we will have to have election monitors…
77 - Interesting name crops up again,
“an active Unite campaign led by Charlie Whelan, operating against Gould”
http://www.labourhome.org/story/2009/4/18/44759/5764
98, we should have. We won’t though.
Eddie George has passed away, sky breaking news.
44. True, but still think that they can claim cash forever even if someone is only playing it on radio etc or making an odd copy for a pal is a con
Assuming we do get a poll, what time will the numbers emerge?
101 - A reminder of an era when we had faith in our financial institutions.
103. recent weekday ComRes have been embargoed until 2200 and then come out on the dot. One of the many reasons i don’t belive the guido rumours is that such a sensational result would surely be leaking all over by now.
92.MD, yes I think it is, because its now the third story running on Sky interactive. And like the smear scandal last week, those within the political bubble might all have thoughts on the subject, and may not be surprised, but what does it do to public perception of voting?
I am still annoyed about the Scottish election voting fiasco up here in 2007, and have grave misgivings about the missing electoral register from Glenrothes.
Watching the response of Downing Street to the smear scandal all week, I am struck by the lack of out of the box thinking within that bunker. Instead of learning from their mistakes, and doing something drastic as Frank Field suggested, the Brownite team seem to be treating this as yet another battle that can be won using their tried and tested methods of old. Its going to end in tears.
And the evolving story of this particular seat selection is looking more murky by the day, adding further damage to the government, and the Labour party.
97. You forget the inducement that mega wealth offers, in high-risk creative careers - like writing, or being a musician, or film directing, say.
Yes I know these guys should all be pure and noble artists, but the fact is everyone does it for the dosh as well. “Even Shakespeare wrote for money.”
The possibility of a vast payout at the end is what keeps many people slogging through the eternal apprenticeship, writing the fifteen screenplays that never get made, filling the bottom drawer with unpublished novels, playing the backrooms of pubs with an audience of drunks, waiting for the A&R man to show up.
The bitter truth is that few people will succeed in these highly competitive industries, so you NEED this inducement of potential riches to keep you going through the bad times.
Take the money away and you are left with pure artistic drive, and a lot of people might not bother. Shameful but true.
Standards would drop.
104, wasn’t so long ago. The Lib Dems may have a second chance to overtake Labour, as they had in 2008. If they have any real desire for power they’ve got to grasp the opportunity, and give Labour a kicking.
I can’t see it though. Clegg will probably continue occasionally asking good questions but also trying to hold the Tories to account at PMQs instead of battering Brown.
104 shame though that he didn’t resign over Gordon’s regulatory regime, might have stopped (might not have of course) the banking failures.
alex@97: Is it really that difficult to develop ebook technology to prevent sharing?
Yes, it’s impossible, both in theory and in practice. There’s a good explanation here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/sep/04/lightspeed
This is about movies, but books are even worse, because even if you had your (theoretically impossible) functioning DRM system for the downloaded text, there’s nothing to stop someone just retyping it all…
But in a lot of cases the author is probably getting so little money per copy that if they did things right they could probably make more money by:
a) a minority of honest people paying for the original version, with the author then getting a bigger cut
b) other value propositions - think personalized single-edition hand-written mini-stories sent to the buyer on a postcard, or the author’s exclusive guided Thai brothel tours etc etc etc.
This war against illegal music downloads is foolish and wrong, like the war on drugs in most cases prosecutions and trials such as that this week are much like the dope on the table raids police do to show the drug dealer’s who’s boss. Much like the lower levels cops in The Wire those nearer to the ground know that if you take down a Napster, L1meWire, All0fMp3, Pirate Bay there will be plenty of Sou15eeks, M1niovas and so on to replace the p2p networks not to mention the likes of M3gauplaod, sendsp@ce, m3diafire, rap1dshare, YouS3ndit and d1vshare as well as countless other file hosting sites that serve as equally frequent way to share music.
There are shades of grey to this debate, like any, their is little in the way of sympathy for the massive record companies who sat back growing incredibly rich on CD re-issues of older material and re-issue, re-package, re-package for the best part of 20 years with minimal effort or spend on their parts. Likewise now they can’t sit back, do nothing and watch the zero’s roll in they can’t chuck $40m at the likes of R.E.M. (sold less and less with each album since the deal) Mariah Carey (bought her out of it) and Robbie Williams (Took the money and hasn’t done much since).
You hear the record companies bleating about the Radiohead ‘In Rainbows’ model as that’s only viable for bands with established fanbases which they build up via money the record companies have to stump up initially. A fair point, but which department are the cuts at EMI that Guy Hands is seeing over occurring? Mainly in A&R not PR. For the record Radiohead revealed during talks on what would become In Rainbows that EMI were contemplating doing a tie-in with Top Man for the album, a stunning lack of knowledge of the band’s fanbase.
On the other hand the figure that the 95% of all music downloaded is illegal strikes me as a strange one as there no-way that can be calculated. Even if it is to say that the record companies and artists are losing out on all of those downloads are a complete fallacy. I would assume that the majority of illegal songs are of the the odd one of two songs by teenagers. (Ironically the market that criminally ignored by the record companies in the 1990’s as the singles market was all but wiped out with an emphasis on pushing Now! collections to them instead or getting to buy whole albums at £15 a go when they are likely to only want to hear 3 or 4 songs.) This is one of the many reasons that iTunes is so successful, you can spend your £15 on 12 or so songs you want, not on a double CD with 6 songs you like or a whole album that you may not enjoy or on 5 CD singles. Another large proportion of illegal downloads are no doubt by students who don’t have the money to buy what they are downloading. If they did have the money, it wouldn’t go on music it would be going elsewhere. A recent study by a games company revealed that preventing 1000 downloads only created 1 extra sale. http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350 It’s ridiculous to assume that students all over the world would be out spending money they don’t have if they couldn’t get stuff for free. They’d shrug their shoulders eventually and decide that maybe they don’t need to hear every Frank Zappa album ever.
The music industry have recently been pushing ISP’s for policing what’s downloaded but how can they do that when it would be perfectly fine for one file to be distributed via a file hosting site and another isn’t. Watching iPlayer is perfectly legal and requires a lot of MB’s being transferred. It’s unworkable but the record companies should really be putting pressure on the file hosting sites to remove more piracy,they are quite hot on leaked stuff but not on stuff that is available to buy. It’s them and blogs that get the advert traffic from all this. (try Googling any album you can think of followed by .rar or .zip, you’ll probably find it within the first ten results, this is what the labels think they can stop.) It’s also worth remembering how much money BT, Virgin and so on take each year providing the technology to make all these downloads possible, who spends 1/2 as much on music each month as they do on Broadband in this country?
The problem with this is that users have been trying to drag the music industry into the 21st century for nearly ten years, they’ve consistently shot themselves in the foot and a whole generation of people think that music should be as free flowing as tap water. Music is everywhere, the hairdressers, the shops, adverts, call centres, iPods, free in newspapers on Sunday and they are surprised that people have stopped buying their over-priced product.
The one thing that has always struck me about all this is that if the average US citizen buys 1.4 albums a year and the report that has the ‘95% illegal’ figure in mentions “US broadband users spent an average of $12.50 on music in 2008, compared to $7.80 for UK broadband users, and a mere $0.60 for Spanish broadband users” there must be a lot of people spending nothing to cancel out even people like my parents who might buy 7 or 8 albums a year between them, let alone music fans like myself who think almost nothing of spending £50 a month on records / downloads.
If 7digital or whoever will allow me to d/load say 400MB of new records (call that 75 singles for the sake of argument or 6 full albums) and 100MB of older records (to counter older stuff being £3-5 now) for £25 a month I’ll take that. eMusic does have an equivalent facility but Will probably reduce the number of impulse purchases I make and I’ll end up spending the same over the year I’d say. They could also offer an option of d/loading an album for £4 and letting me purchase a CD copy it for an additional £2-3. It needs to noted that most albums not in the chart can be bought at Amazon or where ever for the same price as iTunes sells them, that’s not right that a physical product is deemed to have an infinitely copyable digital version.
7Digital are now hooked up with Spotify (like The Pirate Bay, Joost and Kaaza all based in Stockholm and with Skype coming from just across the water in Estonia, why aren’t we coming up with these things here?) and you can listen via stream with minimal advert interruption to a catalogue of nearly 8 million songs (or pay £10 to go ad-free.) with a direct link to buy from 7Digital. It’s outstanding and has probably increased my spending via 7Digital and actual record stores. What needs to happen next to prevent me from ever making an illegal download ever is if they charge £20 a month for premium users, allowed them to download via 7Digital a small number of albums / songs each month as well as repeating their U2 and Lady Sovereign exclusives of having them available to hear before release date.
I will happily admit that I’ve illegally downloaded about 30 records before release date this year, the ones I liked I continued to listen to on Spotify where available and the ones I really liked or didn’t hear before leaking (a practice, I many others are growing out of unless it’s something we’ve been waiting years for, there’s tremendous buzz over or one of your favourite acts.) I’ve bought 20 albums from 2009, 25 EP’s or singles from this year as well as at least 25 albums on vinyl or CD that are from previous years (many owned in another format), band t-shirts and other merch as well as going to at least a gig a week and buying music magazines. If I’m killing the music industry I’d like to see who’s keeping it afloat.
That said I don’t have time for people who sit at home and don’t pay a penny for any music ever, I have no time for that opinion, music isn’t made for free and you should contribute, just don’t try and brush millions of people doing it as committing theft. Stealing digital music isn’t the same as stealing someone else’s property. If millions of people are breaking law, the law needs looking at not the citizens.
It’s also Record Store Day today, get down to your local independent record store spend £50 or so and support them.
http://www.recordstoreday.com
106, annoyed? I admire your restraint. I’m livid.
As for thinking outside the box: they don’t even need to do that. But their habits are well-worn grooves that have become ruts deep enough to bury Brown and his cabal of scheisters.
@107 (seanT)
Standards are dropping and the blockbuster mentality is partially responsible.
You yourself have said how you deliberately eschewed literature for pop-fiction.
107 - I don’t dispute that. I’m just questioning whether the current model is necessary for the generation of riches. The best musicians have always made money. What developments (pre-internet) in music technology have done is allow poor ones to become rich as well.
83. But I think we are all hypocrites on this subject. You get people on here cheerily admitting that they never buy a newspaper, they get all their news online - then they moan that newspapers can’t afford to commission polls any more. Duh? Why do you think newspapers are going bust?
And unlike music and film companies newspapers are falling over themselves to give away their content for free while retaining the hope that something profitable will turn up. Looking at how successful that strategy is, it’s no wonder the film and music companies (publishers too) are wary about going down that road.
As for literature, music etc I suspect we will see more true amateurism, ie people doing it for the love rather than material gain. (There’s an honour and romance to that, for sure, but you show me a writer or musician who doesn’t on some level want to make shedloads of cash from doing it and I’ll show you a liar.)
But what’s really objectionable about piracy is not that it makes it harder for people in the creative industries to make money; it’s that it’s easier for people to make money in a parasitic manner at the expense of the people who do the creative work.
93- Thanks for the link to the study, which I could only glance at. Anyway, it concludes that an Israeli strike would be fraught with risk for Israel, and I’m sure they’ve come to the same conclusion. While I don’t doubt that Israel’s openness about their preparations is be partly out of a desire to pressure the U.S. and the rest of the world community to deal with Iran before they do, there’s also not much point in Israel playing coy on this one; they’ve done it before, so everyone is looking at them to do it again anyway. As to whether their openness tells us that they aren’t serious, I would note that in July 1990, Iraq was openly and brazenly deploying hundreds of thousands of troops along the Kuwaiti border, which most experts then dismissed as merely an effort to drive up oil prices through scare tactics. Similarly, I don’t see Israel as the kind of country that makes idle threats.
@111 (Mitchell Stirling)
A great post.
3rd G20 incident referred to IPCC. No details.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8005966.stm
110 - There is nothing knew in the possibility of individuals typing and disseminating books illegally. E-books do nothing to change that. So i can’t see that as a problem.
Is modern music really of a higher quality than that of the past?
From last thread -
398.What is indicative is how many posters subsequently talk about different priorities instead of those mentioned in Nick’s article.
Here you have those who are opposed to Nick’s points in principle (the non-labour core, from anti-EU tories to civil liberties lib dems etc. etc.) but also, and more importantly, those who either feel that enough has been done in this direction or whose priorities have changed over the last ten years.
This is where labour cannot compete and why it will lose, it has been successful enough to have lost those who are now satisfied and it has antagonised many into switching their priorities.
Above all, and this is what Nick tries to avoid, it is about the past, it is about Iraq/Civil Liberties/Sleaze/Crime and so on and so on.
A government has a past, it cannot deny it, it could disown it, it is eventually destroyed by it.
The real crime is that parties are allowed to stay in power until they have been exhausted and all they have left are the tactics of a McBride - smear, lie, threaten. Surely a system could be devised which does not reward a party that happens to be popular in the weeks surrounding an election.
106.The Skynews report I just saw on this story is not going to go down well in some parts of the Labour party methinks. I think that the way that it was reported is going to cause ructions in some quarters to be honest.
“The real crime is that parties are allowed to stay in power until they have been exhausted and all they have left are the tactics of a McBride - smear, lie, threaten. Surely a system could be devised which does not reward a party that happens to be popular in the weeks surrounding an election.”
Well you could have Parliament elected in fifths, once a year.
119: The difference is that if everyone is reading e-books rather than published books, disseminating a copy on a massive scale without getting caught is vastly easier. It would only take one person in the world to retype SeanT’s book and make a single, anonymous copy book which other people then copied themselves for the protection to be completely broken, and the chances of that person getting caught would be minimal. Compare that to the idea of printing a million copies and disseminating them… Or even people photocopying them one copy at a time…
But this is moot anyway, because like I say, copy protection doesn’t work in the first place, in theory or in practice.
122, it’s serious because of the way different groups will react.
Within Labour lots of people will be pissed at the thought of having their legitimate chances nobbled.
In other parties they’ll be hyperaware of the possibility of Labour trying likewise at the next election. The Tories and Lib Dems really should push for postal voting reform prior to the GE.
Any persons of the public watching will be disgusted with Labour. Even more.
Re: Erith. With only 279 members and 8 candidates, a 40% turnout means that it need only take as few as 40 votes to become an MP with a 10,000 majority!
The Present Labour MP should be ashamed to leave such a weak local party.
I think they’ll probably be alright though. After all people still buy books, even though most are available for free from public libraries (and from bookshops rather than buying cheaper online).
124 - Does that not already happen in places like China for physical books? I was led to believe that it is common for a popular western book to appear in shops / stalls, normally translated into Mandarin / Cantonese, and often before the English version has even been released into the shops.
Thus, I am only conclude that the people publishing these books must employ a team of people to translate and retype the text. Doing an e-book in the same manner would require exactly a similar approach.
Ironically, the whole Erith debacle was (deliberately) sabotaged, probably by the Brownites. A ballot box was broken and the postal ballots torn up. Impossible to cover up.
The Brownite/Whelan faction has been very anti-postal ballots, and have been allegedly planting the rumours that the Blairite/Gould faction have been harvesting dodgy postal votes.
126. Erith is Labour Madness - what on earth a 22 year old can bring to a seat like that as an MP I do not know! Her potential selection is not on ability but nepotism!
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/money/article2383325.ece
Nevermind looking at the Sun article about Petrol Prices, Labour will be lucky to hold Erith - Remember VAT will go up at least 2.5% at some time before the next election.
If the global economy does recover in the second half of the year - this could well lead to a second shock to the economy!
Piracy (of the electronic kind) is a marvellous thing. It redresses the balance between the cultural commons and copyright before the tyranny of the current copyright regime was entrenched by corrupt vast American business interests.
It restores the very ideal of art *as art*, of patronage, and the common law ideal of fair dealing.
And perhaps least importantly unless you’re a publisher or record company exec, It’s probably the only route that those industries have of avoiding irrelevance through disintermediation by the Internet.
It’s particularly puzzling to me when publishers behave in an erratically self-destructive way of criminalizing and harassing their own customers.
I suspect our resident author would confirm that the greatest threat to an author is not piracy, but obscurity. Piracy is a sure route out of obscurity for an up-and-coming author.
@124:
DRM has never worked and will never work. It’s nothing more than an expression of big content’s luddism and paranoia at losing control to the creative commons.
Tough titties, as my old Nana used to say.
Making money from content was always the Holy Grail but the flexibility/inherent openness of the internet has made this difficult. Google has a successful model as an advertising platform but there are few that have managed to get subscription or commercial revenues. iTunes succeeded but regulation and commercial pressures have taken away its DRM so increasing risk of piracy.
Struck me today as regards Susan Boyle. In a week since her appearance on BGT the combined viewings of her song on YouTube exceed 40 million. Not sure what revenues have been paid to the copyright holders of either the song or the TV program if any. Millions of people are willing to vote for her at 50p or a £1 a time over the phone but would they have spent 10p to watch her on YouTube, even 1p?
You expect to pay for phone calls but once you’ve paid for your broadband line everything ( perhaps except quality porn) is expected to be free. Not sure that can continue for either in the long term. At some point content will be subscription based, phone calls included in the rental.
While I don’t really like pirate file-sharing (its anarchist flavour doesn’t suit my Swiss-nurtured sense of an orderly universe), it does have the feel of pirate radio in the 60s (The Boat That Rocked and all that) - something which is going to become legal in one way or another soon.
Catching up with other comments on the last thread.
- David Herdson: my understanding is that the EU is collectively signed up to the ECHR, Britain is also directly signed up, and the Conservatives don’t propose to do anything about either of those thing. The effect of the HRA is to make it easier to bring an ECHR claim, since you can go to the County Court instead of having to go to Strasbourg. Getting rid of it won’t deter the likes of Abu Qutada and other high-profile, well-financed people, but it may put off Joe Bloggs who wants to bring a case against his local council.
Introducing a British Rights Act will, however, mean we are signed up to two separate rights codes, and people will be able to take legal action under either. If one can buy shares in a human right legal practice like Matrix, it’s a hot tip.
- It’s a fair comment that my piece reflects the Guardianista core vote most, since it’s where my roots are and also the dominant part of the Labour vote in my marginal constituency (it’s no coincidence that lots of them vote LibDem at council level). However, the working-class Labour core vote is not, as some have suggested, largely made up of unemployed people on benefit (they tend not to vote at all) or public service workers (who as a recent poll showed are slightly less likely to vote Labour than average). A significant number are people working in the private sector who feel they need Labour governments to stop their employers running roughshod over them; another important group are pensioners whose main income is the national pension (who have done well from the fuel allowance, bus pass and Pension Credit).
- Several comments argue that charity begins at home since there’s poverty here too. These things are relative. Poverty in Britain is juggling debts, buying cheap food, being unable to get on the property ladder and having to drive a clapped-out car. Poverty in The Gambia is being dead at 30. Fortunately, tackling both is not mutually exclusive, and I disagree with montyheath and others who think they should be, or that the only proper concern of British governments is people in Britain. Frank Booth is right that this isn’t a general core vote issue, but it would be decisive on its own for part of our core vote.
- Other comments debate the record up to now, which I left out as it’s backward-looking (which the electorate, on the whole, are not), needs to discuss both successes and failures, and would need a similar-sized article of its own. I’ll write one if Morus wants to issue the challenge.
- Thanks again to everyone except ken and the entertaingly outraged montyheath for expressing disagreement without getting personal about it.
As for Alice Mahon, she’s perfectly entitled to join or leave any party she wants. I’ve often thought that MPs don’t defect more than they do not because they think their parties are wonderful (since some in all parties quite obviously don’t; it’d be fair to say that Alice was never exactly a fan of the Government) but because of working loyalties to other MPs and local campaigners. Once they leave Parliament, these constraints largely fall away, even though I can’t see myself ever changing party. I don’t think she’s part of a large trend, but I’ve no problem with her doing whatever she likes.
Oh, and the next poll? I think it’ll show us temporarily under 30% too. It ain’t been a great week for us.
“Standards are dropping and the blockbuster mentality is partially responsible. You yourself have said how you deliberately eschewed literature for pop-fiction. wibbler”
I was aware I was cueing up this retort when I wrote my comment! My answer is this: I wrote the Genesis Secret for money, of course. It’s unlikely I’d have gone near the genre without the promise of riches (which have, to my delight, accrued).
Now I’ll be the first to admit this book ain’t Anna Karenina. But then again, how many books are? What I aimed to do is write a cracking thriller which would entertain thousands, with some thought provoking ideas underneath. And it turns out, in the eyes of plenty of people, that this is what I did.
Some on here may think the book is shite, I’m sure plenty of readers out there think the book is shite, but the fact is it has proved by far my most popular book, with lots of people loving it.
Go and look on amazon at the customer reviews. They’re not all written by my mum, I promise. Well one is, but hey. She gave me one star and said I was a deviant. Only kidding.
What I’m trying to say is: this book, which lots of people really enjoy, would not have been written without the promise of untold wealth. So without the royalties and foreign rights that made me write the book, lots of people wouldn’t have had that enjoyment.
A world without Tom Knox is perhaps not hell-on-earth, but you see my point. Most art isn’t great undying art created by starving and idealistic puritans; it’s the not-great-art-that-is-still-really-fun that we would lose if piracy wins. I reckon.
“110 - There is nothing knew in the possibility of individuals typing and disseminating books illegally. E-books do nothing to change that. So i can’t see that as a problem.
by alex April 18th, 2009 at 3:12 pm”
You are surely not serious.
134. …and the winner for understatment of the week award is Nick Palmer
It ain’t been a great week for us.
FPT:
I haven’t looked upthread, but I now hope all the bots that smeared Morus’s integrity last week have now had the good grace to apologise:
NPMP: it’s probably a bit late for me to wade into the debate, but I thank you for writing this. You make your case clearly and forthrightly and without descending into personal abuse.
If only the dignity you comport yourself with was as widespread in the bunker, maybe Labour wouldn’t be in the mess they’re in.
(Also, I’m surprised you didn’t mention the other Big Reason why some people will always vote Labour: the Blessed Margaret.)
135 - Sean, I didn’t mean to say that it wasn’t a problem. I meant to say that as it is not a new problem, it isn’t inevitable that it will kill the industry, since it hasn’t (in its old fashioned guise) in the past.
@133:
The Internet has made old business models irrelevant.
Rather than adapting to emerging technological and market realities with new business models, the record industry tries a three-prong attack: (a) try to break the Internet with DRM, (b) a mass campaign of brainwashing (YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A CAR), and (c) an active process of harassing and criminalizing their own customers.
Now, unless you’re a dipshit record company exec, it should be painfully obvious why this isn’t a great strategy.
Blairites vs Brownite internal elections, all down to postal votes.
It would seem that the Blairite candidate Stephanie Booth (step mum of Cherie) received only 22 votes Vs the 35 her opponent Susan Press received on the night in the Calder Valley selection.
However …… there were then the postal votes and 73 went for Stephanie Booth and she won 95 to 52.
From Alice Mahon
http://tinyurl.com/ctay3m
@135 (SeanT)
“Not-great-art-which-is-still-really-fun” is maybe a fantastic description of most of Youtube, or fanfic blogs, or most online serials…
And the market for high-volume high-thrills stuff will never ever go away. The people who succeed will always be well rewarded. This is also the market which will get most pirated. I am frankly not that bothered.
I fully realize that you have a vested interest which means you feel differently!
I wonder if there was any resistance historically from writers/authors to the establishment of public libraries?
131. Martin, that is fatuous Utopian nonsense on a pogo stick.
Imagine you were a struggling author, you wrote a brilliant book over five years, and then you published it and it immediately got ripped off and sold on the internet and millions of people downloaded it so you only made £5000 from a few hardback sales. That would be a salary of… £1000 a year.
I think you’d be pretty hacked off, despite the fame. And you might not bother next time. So we all lose.
Alice Mahon’s comments all over the telly and papers will strike a chord with many wavering Labourites I expect.
Thanks for the previous article, Nick. Though I am one of the people who believed Labour will end up polling below 30% at the next general election, it will not be by much and it is good to know why there are millions who will even vote for Gordon Brown to stay as PM.
@142:
Big Content *always* tries to get new technologies outlawed.
Jack Valenti, former chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America told a congressional committee that “the home video recorder is to movies as the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone.”
Like all pigopolist shills, he was a f*cking idiot.
Not actually expecting the 48:20:21 poll but just for laughs that comes out as 468:113:40 a majority of 286.
140 - Small number of cases made public, but are we seeing the possibility of large numbers of Labour constituency campaigns terminally destroyed by splits in local parties?
143 - Do you seriously think novelists are threatened by the internet, Sean?
I, due to my job, probably spend longer on the computer and internet than most people even on here. Even I can’t envisage ever readinga novel on the screen. Books are for the plane, airport, train, bath or bed.
Even when I edited books, I printed things off to work on paper. I don’t when in the newsroom but my eyes need a rest every so often. I like to read for many hours at a time, something much easier with a nice book.
Waterstones was packed earlier too.
It seems that the sleaze and corruption stories against Labour are gathering pace - the revelations about the tampered ballot box, if true, are explosive - it goes to the heart of the deomcratic tradition and comes on the back of the Calder Valley scandal and the Glenrothes irregularity - it suggests Labour cannot be trusted with democracy. The G20 situation and the arrest of Damian Green and subsequent snooping into Shami Chakrabti, but mostly the beating of the innocent on the streets of London suggest Labour cannot be trusted to run the police. The McBride affair and the history of rancour within the project suggest Labour cannot be trusted to tell the truth. Jacqui Smith’s travails suggest they cannot be trusted with accountability, their betrayal over the referendum and the Post Office suggest they cannot be trusted full stop.
Momentum seems to be gaining and I am afraid Nick’s best efforts pale in insignificance against this backdrop.
Things are moving fast, the end is unclear.
142. I have a vague feeling there was. Indeed isn’t this why the Public Lending Right act was brought in? By Labour and Tories together?
It means authors get 4p per book borrowed. Can add up to a nifty sum.
The Blairites seem to indulge in more postal voting shenanigans than the Brownites.
Or maybe they just get caught more.
148 - David, he’s talking about e-books, not the internet.
150 - you learn something new every day. Is that not open to abuse for the most determined author?
139. This is another problem, while the movie industry isn’t perfect once the technology for torrenting much larger files and YouTube came along the deals with YouTube and services like iPlayer came so much more quicker than the music industries reaction five years previously, it’s the attitude of trying to keep music off the internet in that 1999/2000 period that the record companies are paying for now and they only have themselves to blame.
@143:
No, it’s not utopian. It’s exactly what we have now. Big Content still seem to hope that if they bribe enough Congressmen and European Commissioners, the DRM will suddenly become mathematically possible and the Internet will one day go away like waking up from a bad dream.
I think they overestimate their chances.
Now, aside from your couple of fatally flawed assumptions (every pirated copy = a lost sale, that people who download also do not and will not buy, that people are basically dishonest, and the money is the prime motivating factor behind great art), you’re essentially saying that the thing that makes the current copyright regime so brilliant is that it allows people like you to get rich off writing stuff you freely admit has little or no merit whatsoever.
Also, have a quiet word with Neil Gaiman, an author considerably more rich and famous than you. He has a wonderful story of how piracy made him rich and famous.
If only this were to be correct
Rumour of an amazing Poll in the Independent on Sunday.
Labour in third place!!!
Tories 48%
Labour 20%
LD’s 21%
146: So wrong that a similar level of vote shares leads to nearly 3 times as many MPs….
148. Yes, I do. In ten years I reckon authors will be facing many of the same problems as musicians and film people now - maybe not quite as bad, as “books do furnish a room” - but definitely pretty serious.
The reason is the ereader and the Kindle (we had this debate on here a few days back, so I won’t rehash). I just bought a Sony Reader. Basically they are amazing, and much easier to read than a puter screen. They are desirable objects.
They are a definite threat - and an opportunity too, of course.
OK I’m off to buy some mango.
Things like spotify must be the way forward. Streamed music, huge database, funded by small adverts. All it needs for a smilar version for TV and movies is better speeds.
157 although were that epoch-making result to happen, UNS would fly out of the window and imo the Lib Dems would pick up swathes of Labour seats due to massive anti-government voting.
@158:
The only thing that’s stopping me buying an eReader is that they’re crippled by DRM.
We should not be encourgaing eBooks if eBooks are *less flexible* than their dead-trees counterparts.
I’d encourage people to think of how they discovered their favourite author. Would that be possible in a world of DRM-infected eBooks and DRM-crippled eReaders?
Could the Govt not set up a national ebook library?
156 - Herbert, are you being a proper loon with this? Or is this genuine?
If the Conservatives get a majority of 286 I’m going to buy a disused Nuclear Bunker and lock my self way with a 24 hour I/V drip of Old Rosie Cider. A pre set message will be posted on here in the year 2035 with the location. A recovery team can remove my pickled body just as the new Prime Minister Georgia Gould enters Downing Street.
83. What you say may be true for movies, but it isn’t the case for music or books. The cost to produce an album is massively smaller than the profits gets from it, so even if revenues dropped by 95% it would still financially viable. Besides, most (good) musicians are motivated by things other than money: either the art itself, or a desire to be renowned.
There is also the assumption in all this talk that people buy less because they pirate. I’m not convinced this is the case. There is a small minority of hardcore pirates who download everything they ever listen to, and obviously they will no longer be buying. But back when Napster was at its peak, most of my friends downloaded a lot of music to repeatedly listen to and get into new bands. If you heard four or five songs from an album and you liked them, you would then buy the album. Now, most of those friends of mine find it both a hassle and a risk to download music. They refrain from doing it, end up not listening to as much new music, spending their time on other hobbies and simply buying less music.
Nadine Dorries blog - Tangled webs….
155. F*ck you very much, Martin Coxall! lol.
I certainly do NOT admit my new book has “little or no merit” - as I said it is an exercise in genre: but so is a lot of poetry. Criticizing a thriller for being formulaic is like criticising a sonnet for having fourteen lines.
I believe my thriller is f*cking excellent, as a thriller, and the 22 global sales prove it, likewise my three weeks at number 1 etc etc. You are free to think it absolute tedious tosh as plenty of other people do (but please buy a copy and find out for sure?)
I also think if you were a truly creative person, rather than some lazy pizza-scoffing geek who sat around wishing he was creative, you might feel differently….
134 “- Thanks again to everyone except ken and the entertaingly outraged montyheath for expressing disagreement without getting personal about it”
See the classy thing to do would have been not to name names, instead you went to the trouble of attacking posters because they had the temerity to disagree with you in a way you don’t like.
As for the rest of your response I am afraid it is not acceptable to say forget the past 12 years, I will need another thread for that, you told us of your 5 half finished projects, and that was the best you could do on your record. I will say again the best predictor of future performance is past performance and this is why you don’t want to talk about your record of failure.
@167:
The point I’m trying to make is that you cite money as being a primary factor for its having been written. If that were to go away, nothing of value would be lost.
All great art comes from the inner drive to create that all humans share: the sordid coin taints and corrupts that drive beyond all recognition.
Would you still be a writer if you could write whatever you wanted, devoid of financial concerns? What would it be? Not, I suspect, The Genesis Secret.
I know you and I have somewhat different feelings about Dan Brown. But, FFS, DAN BROWN EMBODIES EVERYTHING THAT IS FOUL, DEPRAVED AND CORRUPT IN THE CURRENT COPYRIGHT REGIME.
Make it stop.
164 - In 1924 the Conservatives gained a majority of 208, and in 1931 they effectively won a majority over 300. So in the right cicumstances huge majorities are possible, also it should be noted that the only party to breach 50% in an election was the Conservatives in 1931. They came within a little of repeating the feat in 1955.
166. ChristinaD - Oh dear I get the feeling the whole ‘House Of Cards’ may well be about to collapse…….
I disagree with Martin Coxall. I think Dan Brown and seanT fill a valuable niche.
The fact that their genre is most popular means their genre will be most pirated.
My point is that if rates of return diminish with popularity then that is not an intrinsically bad thing.
EDIT: A similar but different issue: I don’t begrudge Elton John or Cliff Richards their success. I do find their whining about their copyright ending in some countries after 50 years completely ludicrous.
170, harder with the Lib Dems though.
Anyway, the next election is exciting not just because it should see Brown ousted from power, but also because it’s very hard to say what will happen. Anything from a Hung Parliament to a Tory majority of 300 could happen. Sticking with my 50-70 Tory majority though.
171, at least in House of Cards the evil PM was intelligent and competent.
@172:
Actually, I do too. I’m just provoking SeanT because I don’t often get the chance to argue with him because we usually agree. Shhh. Don’t tell him.
@172:
Yes, I agree. 50 years is a ridiculously long time for state-enforced monopolies.
Copyright should probably last no longer than 20 years.
169 - “the sordid coin taints and corrupts that drive beyond all recognition.”
Rubbish, every major artist has sought or had patronage. Why? Because you cannot create jack if your in a pine box at the bottom of a six foot hole in the ground. Every composer had patronage, or sold their wares, or created to order. It didn’t stop Mozart, Haydn, Da Vinci, Shakespeare didn’t write plays because he could he wrote them so he had something to put on at the theatre so he could drink mead and eat bread.
From LabourHome Who has been the greatest Labour Leader over the last 30 years? James Callaghan 16 votes - 10 % Michael Foot 35 votes - 23 % Neil Kinnock 15 votes - 9 % John Smith 24 votes - 15 % Tony Blair 58 votes - 38 % Gordon Brown 4 votes - 2 % Looks like curtains for Gord
If thats not 10,000 nails in Browns coffin, nothing is.
You see, I know that people say the blogosphere is overrun by nasty torys and lefties, but when one of the largest labour websites does a poll, and only 4 (thats 4 people!) vote for the current leader out of 150 odd…well, enough said.
134 - NPMP - “Other comments debate the record up to now, which I left out as it’s backward-looking (which the electorate, on the whole, are not).”
Really? Why then the gratuitous reference to a 21 year old “Tory disgrace”.
You people just can’t help it, can you?
@176:
Patronage I approve of. Patronage is what we had *before* the current top-heavy copyright regime, remember?
Whilst Big Content would rather pretend otherwise, it turns out people did create art before copyright law existed. Who knew?
173 - Not really hte Liberals were pretty big still in the 20’s and 30’s.
169. All great art comes from the inner drive to create that all humans share: the sordid coin taints and corrupts that drive beyond all recognition.
The Sistine Chapel ceiling was painted pro bono because Pope Julius was such a great guy was it?
Of course not. It was done for the money.
There are plenty of artists and writers who didn’t do it for the money (Austen and Keats for example; I’m pretty sure they would have wanted their efforts to be duly acknowledged, however, and would not have been pleased to think that their efforts were making someone else rich).
But plenty of others did it for money, kudos or to improve their chances of getting laid. Or because they wanted an excuse to avoid getting a proper job, to get up at noon and spend their spare time boozing and taking drugs.
“Or because they wanted an excuse to avoid getting a proper job, to get up at noon and spend their spare time boozing and taking drugs.”
by bill d April 18th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
SeanT.You could sue.
@181:
Once again we now see how great works existed before we had our current copyright regime.
This is essential to understanding why copyright is somewhere between largely and entirely superfluous.
167 Your point is true enough about most religious art and music, but I’m quite sure much, possibly most, secular art and music, would never have been reduced if the artist or writer did not expect to be remunerated for his work.
For me, the argument is quite straightforward. People should be entitled to sell or lease their own property, and that includes intellectual property. And it is entirely appropriate for the State to enforce property rights.
179:How would that work in the mordern world though. Emough people giving Dan Brown a fiver and he’ll write another book just for them? I suppose it could, sign up online, pay a set amount of cash, and he’ll provide you with pulp-trash novels as he writes them.
Artists having instant return (or at least in their early lifetime) for their work is quite a modern invention, isn’t it?
Fairly inflamitory stuff from Nadine on her blog. she has sounded a little unhinged on some of her media appearances of late. perhaps not unhinged ? just in the know ?
180, yes but I can’t see Labour and the Lib Dems getting few enough seats to permit the Tories a 300 seat majority.
@184:
It’s this sense of entitlement that I despise. ‘Expecting to be remunerated’ covers all manner of evil. We go to work, and if our employer stops paying us, we stop working.
That’s not how it works with creatives, however, who expect a steady supply of money no matter how shit their work, and whilst they’re not actually working.
Copyright is like an overweening welfare system for egotistical artists.
When you go for a shit, do you collect royalties for your plumber?
@187:
No, I think Nadine is probably a little unhinged.
@184 (Sean Fear)
Completely disingenuous.
What is “intellectual property”.
Do you mean copyright? Patents? Trademarks?
They are all very different, and the issues surrounding their use and misuse on the internet are very different.
For example, do you believe that the internet causes “dilution” of trademarks which means that applicability within narrow sectors is no longer feasible?
Or do you believe that software should be patentable? Despite existing copyright law covering almost all abuses - and the subsequent creation of Frankenstein “patent troll” companies?
The catch-all term “intellectual property” is a complete distraction.
Polly goes for ducking the issue of smeargate in her piece for the guardian…not a great suprise.
190.Martin, I don’t always agree with Nadine’s views, but that is unfair.
189, I hesitate to enter this debate as I’m a would-be writer (book nearly finished incidentally) but that’s absolutely not my view. If you make a product and it sells you get money. Surely that’s a sound principle?
So if my book gets published and everyone on pb.com buys it (which you will, or I’ll fire you into space from some sort of giant artillery gun) I should make money from that. If it sells more I should make more, if it sells less I should make less.
@191:
The term intellectual property does cover a vast range of unrelated ideas, but they’re all covered by a key flawed concept, the notion that you can ‘own’ an idea, and that ideas behave exactly like bricks or pigs or houses or jelly.
184. Can’t agree that it’s the job of the State to enforce copyright.
Somebody want to enforce it? Sue in a civil court, at least that way they get some cash in damages. Locking someone up for a couple of years isn’t going to put blue tablets on seanT’s bedside table, is it?
No way.
It should be none of their business.
@194:
I repeat my question. When you go for a shit, do you send your plumber a royalty cheque?
If not, why not?
@196:
Um, the judiciary is a branch of the state. Even the civil courts. Sorry to break the bad news.
190. Thank You. I put myself on trial for thought crimes. Was I just being sexist? Was the mental picture i was developing of Gordon finding his bunny boiled simply millennia of socially constructed patriarchy ?
But if you as a Tory suggest she’s a bit loony then that OK.
Thank You Martin. You are like an internet Pope selling an indulgance for my Guardian reader gender guilt.
197, because I paid him for the work done before. If I wanted him to do the plumbing for a second bathroom I’d pay him a second time.
169 People don’t all want “great art” - rude drawings, scribbles, cartoons, The Green Lady, Beryl Cook, garden gnomes, Wilbur Smith etc etc.
At heart its right that we pay people for their products whether whittled from wood or clever ideas. I think that the French have lost the principle trying to grant heirs and estates control in perpetuity (or so it seems) but the principle is right. It does require a bit of flexibility though - the eagerness of the copyright lawyers to shut & close down anything novel also restrains ideas and inventiveness.
A public library with payments to authors is a good model, just need to work through how to apply it.
188 - Why not? A 300+ majority implies 475+ seats for the Conservatives as the Parliament will have 650 seats. So that would leave 175 for all the others. Under the current electoral system it is always possible it just requires the votes to stack up in the right way.
MartinC: “169. Would you still be a writer if you could write whatever you wanted, devoid of financial concerns? What would it be? Not, I suspect, The Genesis Secret.”
Again, wrong - though to be fair, I didn’t know you were wrong myself until recently.
I started writing the Genesis Secret as a pure exercise in making money - I admit it. I was actually about to go bankrupt, due to unpaid tax, and my agent said “write a thriller!”. So I did.
But as I wrote it, I realised I was having fun: my only objective was to write a book that was as entertaining as possible. I may or may not have succeeded (I believe the global sales and number 1s prove I have - for some at least) but the feeling was definitely liberating.
It was the most enjoyable to write of all my books, in a way.
And it turns out I also enjoy the mass market. Being read by many thousands of people is a buzz. I wrote literary fiction before, and got some great reviews (”brilliant”, “perfect”) along with the bad ones - but the books were read by about three people. Dispiriting.
This one will be sold in 22 countries and read by lotsa folk. Inspiring!
So yes I might write the Genesis Secret, as well as other kinds of books, even if I was a billionaire. But I’m not a billionaire, and I needed the incentive of riches to get me into the genre in the first place.
I think Van Gogh has a lot to answer for. He started the whole naffing starving artist meme.
Nadine Dorries is being increasingly silly with her media strategy.
Guido insinuates all the time, but then he usually backs it up. Dorries is just thriving on the TV appearances.
And Guido lives in the gutter. Dorries is an MP. She shouldn’t throw around pseudo-accusations.
202, theoretically possible yes, but I can’t see it happening at all. I can see a big Tory majority but not that large.
@200:
Right, and you should get paid for writing your book. Once your book is finished your work is done and the money ends, just like with your plumber.
However, you as an author, have a state-enforced benefit ‘royalties’ that you get after you’ve finished your work. You’re not actually doing anything, just sitting around at home wanking.
But whilst Joe Plumber is starving to death, your splashing out on low-grade cocaine from your royalty cheques.
How is that not a benefit?
195. But that’s not what intellectual property is at all. You don’t own an idea. (Any freelance journalist who’s pitched ideas to editors who then appropriate them could tell you that).
What you own is the particular form you devise to express that idea - be it words or music. And if it makes money, you make money. There’s no entitlement to get money if no one is willing to pay.
What piracy does, I repeat, is allow people to make money from someone else’s creative efforts. It’s worth remembering we have a copyright law because Hogarth, and others, objected to the fact that people were doing precisely this with their prints. That we have other technologies to rip off people’s works doesn’t make it any more defensible.
197 No, because I’ve paid him for his services. If I understand you correctly, you think an artist should just do his work for the love of it, and share it with everyone for free, which is unreasonable IMO.
194 - yes but the problem is that you only do the work once. But you expect to be paid thousands of times for it.
206, no. I get paid for my book being bought. If I write a book and no-one wants it, then like the plumber with no customers I shouldn’t make any money.
seanT I have just started to read your latest book - bought from Amazon.
@208:
No, they can get paid for it too, as we’ve established, by seeking patronage.
People got paid to create before there was copyright.
206 There is, morally speaking, no difference between getting a one-off fee, and royalties, for your work.
185, been done. The fantasy writer, Lawrence Watt-Evans, has sold a couple of books in pretty much that way - each chapter was published online for free, but fans had to collectively pay a set amount before the next chapter would be released. The ones who donated the most got physical copies. He said he got as much money that way as his usual advance.
Not all authors can work that way, but we also need to consider just how draconian the measure required to eliminate piracy are.
@210:
You pay your plumber when he does your plumbing. No money accrues to him once his work finishes.
Why should it not be the same way for you? What makes you so much better than a plumber that you’re entitled to this special state benefit, ‘royalties’ that most schmucks can’t claim?
206 - But you are basically trying to say that you should peel an apple in the way you peel a banana. Writing a book and publishing it is a completely different category of industry than hiring a plumber for a one off task.
Royalties are an attempt to ascertain the value of a work, after it has been produced.
209 What’s the distinction, morally, between getting paid a one-off fee for writing a book, or getting paid a royalty? If there were no royalties, then authors would simply be paid higher fees.
209, I expect to get paid when my work is bought, like a knitter selling socks.
As for it being ‘done once’, I’ve spent more hours than I care to mention working on this. The probability is I’ll not get an agent, let alone a publisher (a problem exacerbated by the recession and the fact that the fantasy genre is swamped thanks to JK Overrated). If I do I don’t think it’s outrageous that I might actually make more money if it’s popular and less if it isn’t.
you have to re look at everything that has happened in a new light these days - the Glenrothes result ?
@213:
That’s just nonsense. And as a thoughtful Conservative, I’m somewhat surprised to hear you say that.
There’s a huge moral difference, because royalties require the creation of copyright, a state-enforced monopoly, and a mechanism for punishing those that dare to share in their cultural heritage against the wishes of that monopoly.
And that’s before we consider the vast transgression against the creative commons that copyright has become.
Copyright is inherently immoral. Patronage is inherently moral.
215, I don’t think I’m better than a plumber. Stop being horrid.
The plumber gets money when his work sells. The writer gets money when his book sells. It’s fine.
220, I think most here were suspicious of Glenrothes the moment the register went walkies.
Not sure if this was mentioned earlier but Eddie George has sadly passed away.
R.I.P.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8005965.stm
@219:
I know what you *expect*, but I’m asking you why you expect that. What makes you special, compared to us plebs, so that you accrue royalties and we do not?
215 - You pay the plumber in that way because it is quantifiable in that way. How do you quanitify something that has an indefinite income potential?
But Martin, if you read your own purchased copy of a book ten times or watch a DVD a dozen times, you don’t expect to have to pay again.
But when you use a “public” loo, you pay a small fee.
BTW - libraries aren’t “free”, they’re paid for.
I’ve emailed John Rentoul and theres not going to be a poll in the IoS this week.
225 - without copyright, it would not have indefinite income potential.
224, because a good is being sold which I had a hand in creating (theoretically, anyway). I don’t see what’s wrong with that. If a shop sells something you don’t harangue them for having the audacity to try and make some money.
The average author makes £10,000 a year [and no, can't give you a source offhand], I’m not expecting, even if it gets published, to make millions.
Meh. I should leave it to bestselling sean to reply to this.
@222:
NO!
A plumber gets paid when he does his work. You accrue a state benefit *after* you’ve done your work.
I’m asking *why* there is this artificial distinction between a plumber and writer.
I’m not surprised if you don’t know the answer, but it’s difficult to have a serious discussion about the evils of copyright unless people fully grasp the distinction.
I don’t for a second think there should be no money in paying artists.
I do think that trying to work out how to subvert the internet is an exercise in futility.
There has always been money in art.
Vested interests will whine when their own pet way of making money becomes less viable due to technology.
Others (like CDBaby) will embrace the technology and make new businesses from it.
I think copyright is a valuable idea. I don’t support scrapping it. I think it should be heavily liberalized to have any sensible chance of being applicable in the internet world.
I think trademark law is broadly correct. I am against attempts to allow big companies to use the “dilution” argument to shut down similar named products in different markets.
Patent law is completely broken. We need to outlaw patent trolls by ensuring patents belong to inventors not to the companies where they happen to be employed; employ more real scientists and engineers in the Patent Office instead of lawyers; have sunset clauses (use it or lose it) on patents; get rid of software patents altogether; break the perverse economic incentives for the Patent Office to grant patents without scrutiny. That is just for starters.
Don’t know if this has been mentioned, but flicking through the Times today and small passage on one of the pages, (paraphrasing)
Report into the death of Morgan Tsvangirai wife says may not have been an accident after all. It says the driver of the lorry was swapped at the last minute….
@229:
But you have a shit on the toilet your plumber had a hand in creating, yet the state doesn’t allow him to accrue royalties. Why?
221 Copyright has simply grown out of the law of contract. If I write a book, or a song, then I can either sell it, for a fee, or lease it, in return for royalties. There is nothing at all unreasonable about that. My book or my song certainly shouldn’t be regarded as common property.
I’m on the Martin Coxall wing of this debate. I don’t understand how you can begin to call yourself an artist if you would prefer that fewer people experienced your work in return for slightly more money.
I’ll pose the same question to SeanT that I posed to Louise Bagshawe - do you honestly oppose friends lending each other books that they like?
Authors, bands, poets can only benefit from becoming widely-known - the people receiving art for free were not going to pay for what they do not know, but they might become paying customers if they like it (attending gigs, buying the folio society copy whatever).
Making your consumers do the marketing and distribution of your work in return for enjoying free samples at the beginning is a brilliant model. The losers are the record/publishing/movie companies, and I don’t understand why artists are defending them.
Imagine Mike Smithson, starting PB.com, had charged a £3 per month subscription to read the site (£5 to comment). Would it have been anywhere near as successful? It’s not made him a rich man, but it pays significantly more than it would have done because it was free to enjoy, engaged consumers and made them advocates for his work, and over time is monetised. There’s no reason why music, writing and painting shouldn’t be the same.
When an artist sells a painting that painting has indefinite income potential. But the artist doesn’t get royalties when it is sold on (he says, hopefully…)
@234:
I don’t think that creative works should be regarded as any kind of ‘property’ at all, since it neither behaves like property, nor can it be made to do so without unacceptable violations of basic liberty.
If Copyright were to return to being nothing more than implicit contract, I would be very happy with that.
233 - There is a difference Martin. A book will go on being sold, reprinted. If you deny the initial creative influence behind that to partake. Then the book could make millions, the author will get a lump sum on completion that may not represent the value of that which he has created. Wheras if he is permitted ot partake of the ongoing income streams of his creativity then his reward for that creativity is in relation to that which the market is placing upon it.
234 - Are you not conflating two issues here?
1) A contract between author and publisher which says that the author gets royalties from every book sold by that publisher
2) The law of copyright which says that the publisher is the only organisation legally allowed to distribute the books.
It is the latter which makes the former a viable arrangement, not the former which requires the state to implement the latter.
235, although I see nothing wrong with the system as it is, I am intrigued and interested in more innovative approaches.
Where do people here stand on self-publishing? I mean, using some sort of website and specifying what paper/cover etc you want, and then selling the book yourself?
I’d prefer to go down the traditional route, but I’m not averse to more unorthodox methods.
I wouldn’t go as far as Martin Coxall.
But the fact is you can’t stop piracy without basically banning the internet.
That may be a bitter pill to swallow for budding seanTs (and existing ones). Too bad.
It is particularly galling when copyright laws actually INTERFERE with artistic creation. See the BarackRoll link in my post at 3 for a great example.
I have been a long time PirateBay user and will continue to use them or their peers for several reasons; none of which seem to have been addressed elsewhere. Firstly, I use PirateBay to sample music, films etc. Generally, if I like it, I will then buy a ‘hard copy’ as I have lost too many hard disks to rely on them. SeanT - how many more people might buy your book/album if they could read a few downloaded chapters first? (Then deduct all the people that bought your book but would not have if …). However, where I live I can’t buy your book/film etc so I download it. I might buy a legit version but only if it has no DRM - if I buy a DVD or paperback version I am free to lend it on … why restrict the digital version. Finally, DRM free material from PirateBay means an end to the stupid system of remembering whether some song ‘belongs’ to my laptop; desktop; IPod or IPhone. I bought it - I want to play it anywhere on anything without silly limitations.
Bottom line - massive user demand; virtually uncontrollable supply; strong economic incentives - War on Drugs anyone?
@238:
You’re just begging the question there.
The creative work only has that value because the system is already in place to assign an artificial monetary value to it.
Whether the book sells one copy or one billion copies, the moment Mr Author signs off on his final proof, that’s his work done.
Why then *should* he receive money for work he’s not actually doing?
233. Because the act of you taking a shit does not make you any money. (Unless you work in a branch of the Japanese adult entertainment industry).
Whereas the act of you cutting and pasting someone else’s words and then flogging them on the online equivalent of a market barrow does make you money. Which is why the person who produced the words has a different set of legal protections that the dump facilitator.
@241:
I’m not sure I’d go as far as me either. But we have a few false-consciousness corporate media regressives who have been unable to overcome their corporate programming in our midst, so I’m having to take the extreme abolitionist view for pedagogical purposes.
You are, essentially, spot on. The current copyright regime and the Internet are basically incompatible. The Internet is not going away. Therefore copyright must change.
QED.
238 - there are plenty of products which get sold on after the initial transaction between creator and buyer. In almost all instances the creator and buyer come to an agreement about the value of that product, and it is the buyer who bears the risk and reward of that value being wrong. And this argument doesn’t actually just apply to products being sold on.
seanT I undersstand the worry about loss of potential revenue but is it legitimate revenue.
If I buy a paperback I can sell it on second hand. Why not an electronic copy?
Surely the bit that should be illegal is passing it on to a mass audience each of whom get their own copy.
Unless this little puzzle is sorted electronic books may be strangled at birth and that would be a pity.
By the way the iPhone is still more flexible as a reader in my view. Sony and Amazon’s version is bulky and the latter has connection issues. I await the new Apple offering later this year which might sink both of those.
@243:
I’m not sure I understand the argument. The act of taking a shit doesn’t make me any money. The act of somebody else printing a book doesn’t generate me any money either, because it’s being done by somebody else.
So that still doesn’t explain the different treatment of the plumber and the author.
246 - Since most people only read books once, is there any material difference between someone passing on a second hand copy of a book to a friend, and someone passing on an ebook, whilst retaining the original?
247 - Ultimately you cannot make a facsimile of the plumbers work.
I must say Martin Coxall, I don’t think the plumbing analogy is the best one.
Music and books (and certainly painting) aren’t really at risk from the internet. They will survive. Some piracy will go on. Lots of remixing will go on. So be it.
Christ!! I agree with Martin and amazingly Morus. There is no real excuse for royalties just a better negotiated contract.
227. Thats a bit of a bugger. I wonder if the Budget on Tuesday is going to mean stuff is being held back ?
251 - It’s a topsy-turvy thread all right!
I agree - creating the conditions in which illegal copies of your work have a viable market is one of the facets that should be factored into good pricing. File sharing is symptomatic of the failures of the creative market to match demand to supply.
@249:
Right, this is the key difference. That a plumber created a concrete object, where as an author, musician, film-maker create something intangible.
Now, the idea behind Copyright was to pretend that (a) people don’t want to share, and (b) such works couldn’t be infinitely copied at zero cost, and to criminalize those who would dare to share in their cultural heritage.
And it worked fine for hundreds of years.
And then some pesky bearded geeky Americans came along and invented the Internet.
Oops.
254 - Yes but if you get rid of a system of copyright you might as well do away with the concept of plagiarism.
Martin, do you believe in scrapping the patent law? Cause that’s basically the same, no?
By your thinking a pharmacist who discovers a tablet that cures hangovers or an inventor of the self-unbuttoning denim hotpant should get a one-off fee - perhaps £20? - then his or her invention can be ripped off by everyone, probably huge corporations, who will make millions from marketing it properly.
Have I got that right? It’s plainly idiotic. A lot of the best things in the world have been created by people who worked long horrible lonely hours - in the hopes of making millions.
Take away the millions - no hangover cure.
However I agree that the artistic world needs to reach an accommodation with the internet. That’s just the truth. And they need to do it soon.
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, once described by National Review as the most anti-Bush member of the Washington press corps, has a funny but insightful article about why the left in America strangely can’t stop being so angry even after having won everything there is to win:
“It made sense for [the left] to be angry when George W. Bush was in the White House. But now, even under Obama, the anger on the left is, if anything, more personal and vitriolic than on the right.
…
“A reader from Rockville described it as a “sore winner” phenomenon. “People get used to being angry and when things change, they don’t. So they find stuff to be mad about.” Another said that some on the left “feel obligated to stay in the fight” because of the harsh treatment of Obama by the right.
But many focused on a frustration on the left caused by Obama’s centrism — his opposition to prosecuting those involved with torture, for example. “I am angry because the whole Republican party has not been rounded up and thrown into a black site,” one wrote. A reader in Evanston, Ill., took a similar view, that true believers on the left don’t want “b.s. rhetoric about looking forward.” Okay, but why wouldn’t this be directed at Obama? Readers explained that some of it is. But, “if we yell obscenities at Obama,” replied a reader in Dunnellon, Fla., “we get a visit from the Secret Service. Yelling them at you is worry-free.”"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/17/AR2009041702639.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
247. It’s about whether when you make a profit from printing a book you share the profits with the author. Or whether you make a profit and refuse to give any to the author.
253. So basically if people in the creative industries thought more like accountants everything would be grand? That’s probably true but I can see a flaw in that premise.
256, that’s true.
@253:
The key challenge is for the failing creative industries to stop thinking of unauthorized copying as a problem/crime and to start thinking of them as a marketing opportunity.
Will it happen? Maybe, once their senior management is cleared out the current crop of pre-Internet pigopolists, and replaced by those that understand the Internet and people’s desire to share.
@256 (seanT)
“Should” has been the biggest letdown of this government. Didn’t you read Nick Palmer MP’s laughable wishlist on the previous thread?
How do you actually propose to put the internet genie back into its bottle?
EDIT: Patent law and copyright law are fundamentally different. Patents cover ideas about physical objects. Copyright covers unphysical objects. Conflating the two is unhelpful.
@256:
Software and business method patents should not exist. Indeed they do not exist in Europe, despite several valiant rearguard efforts from IBM to but the European Commission.
The US patent system is in complete disarray, and the damage it’s doing to American competitiveness is possibly huge. It’s become very clear to me that the USPTO needs root-and-branch reform.
However, as I say, we don’t have that problem here because we don’t allow software or business method patents.
252. It’s on Wednesday.
258 - No it’s not. In a world without royalties, authors would be paid more up front, because a percentage of the estimated profits would be built into the initial fee. And the publisher would bear the risks and reward of future sales.
Does anyone want to guess the number of people that have died unnecessarily of AIDS in Africa because of US patent law?
Have a guess.
134 Nick Palmer - we signed up to the ECHR in 1951 as a founding member of the Council of Europe. Although a lot of people seem to think the ECHR and the European Court of Human Rights are EU institutions, they are separate (although they have shared the same flag and anthem since the 1980s).
I think many (including me) believe that our courts have gold plated the ECHR. I don’t know whether or not that is true but, if it is, repealing the HRA could stop some of the more ridiculous decisions. However, I’m sure the European Court is just as capable of ridiculous decisions as our own judges.
It was actually human rights that was partly responsible for me being a strong Conservative supporter. When I was at school, my classmates included supporters of all the main political parties. We were all concerned about human rights (as idealistic teenagers tend to be) but it became apparent that the Labour supporters were somewhat one-eyed about it. Any excesses by a right wing regime would be condemned relentlessly, but similar excesses by a left wing regime would be excused or ignored - the dissidents were all clearly terrorists and/or the abuses were made up by the right wing press. My Conservative supporting friends, however, condemned abuses regardless of the politics of the regime. I am not saying the Conservative’s record is perfect - it definitely isn’t. But this was a significant influence on me, along with what seemed to me to be the excessive power of the unions at the time.
One of the strongest Labour supporters at my school was in the year above me - a guy called Peter Mandelson. Anyone know what happened to him?
265, is the answer Stop Being Horrid?
I’m stressed now. If my heart explodes, I’ll be sure to use my enormous pool of blood to blame you.
Writers haven’t killed Africans with AIDS!
@267:
I wasn’t having a go at you, I was having a go at SeanT.
If he’s going to argue in favour of patents on pharmaceuticals, I just want him to make a best guess (in body count) as to who loses out in our current IP regime.
235. Morus. No, I don’t oppose people lending my books to friends. In a way this is illogical but the fact is one copy can only be leant to one person at a time. The damage to my copyright is limited here.
Illegally downloading an ebook and filesharing it with millions of others is a different kettle of carp. It could potentially destroy publishing. One day you may go in a bookshop and see maybe sixteen titles. Cause so many publishers will have gone bust.
You may think I am being hyperbolic. Right? But I predict something similarly horrible will happen to newspapers - in the next five years. We could see the disappearance of three of four major papers very soon. Cause of the Net. That may make people like you think twice.
Your comparison with a blog is invalid. If Mike Smithson had taken three years constructing this blog in lonely and austere silence, then fair enough. But he didn’t.
Much as I love pb.com, it’s not Madame Bovary.
Although not obvious, and not perfect, there is an interesting parallel in this argument with sports rights on television. When Sporting bodies sell rights they have a basic choice between maximising their income on non-terrestrial (even pay-per-view) channels or gaining lower income, but greater coverage on terrestrial channels.
With the possible exception of Association Football, the long run interests of sports are best served (IMO) by ensuring as wide exposure as possible.
The solution to internet piracy is to embrace it and see it as an opportunity to reach a far wider audience than under existing business models. The initial book being the product which captures the audience who can be exploited for profits from other areas.
Did ConservativeHome pay the requisite royalties when they made this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B0FEhSCMsE
Why don’t Labour get their heavies in the BPI to crack down on Iain Dale, who is currently showing dozens of “illegal” music videos on his blog?
I am sure I can dig up Labour transgressions too.
The point is that current law is simply out of touch and absurd. Even the political classes ignore it completely.
168. Voreas. I dont mind. I loathe NickP’s government and his politics. I dont mind that he knows it. He should be aware that I loathe it because of what they promised and the way in which they have failed. I’m actually something of a centrist in my attitudes - I happen to believe in balancing equality with efficiency and I think that the lack of social justice in this country impairs it’s long term growth. The utter incompetence and loathesome attitude of its leadership condemns Labour to the eighth circle of Dante’s Hell, in Bolgia 5 for false politicians and Bolgia 10 for perjurers.
@269:
Yes, some businesses will go bust if they fail to adapt to market realities. New businesses will spring up to take their place, ones who understand and work with the Internet. I believe that’s how business is supposed to work.
Possibly interesting market: which national daily will bite the dust first? I reckon the Indie can only have a couple of years left on smug life support.
“Patent law and copyright law are fundamentally different.”
Disagree. They both seek to protect lonely creators, and to recompense them for their unique intellectual talents and endeavours - in a ruthless marketplace. That’s close enough for me.
256- Correct. The whole point of patent/copyright/trademark law is to encourage innovation and creativity. The fact that the creators of inventions and ideas thereby share in the wealth emanating from their works should be seen as a salutary side effect of the system and not necessarily its purpose.
One need only look at the track record of communism to see how poorly science and culture develop when the profit motive is removed from the equation.
@274:
“lonely creators”? Ha.
80% of the world’s patents are owned by four American companies.
Funny-tragic thing about the collection of electoral fraud going on inside ZNL at the moment is the average member won’t be sure if it’s Mandy’s Uruks or McStalin’s goblins.
If it’s at all possible, Tories / LDs really ought to try and do something about postal voting before the next general election as it should finally be dawning on them how truly anti-democratic all these ex marxists are.
269 - It isn’t logical IMO to say that ebook piracy will destroy bookshops. If bookshops are destroyed it is because people will prefer ebooks to the printed work, whether out of personal preference for the technology or because ebooks are cheaper (which they will be). Ie it is the ebook which would destroy bookshops, not the piracy of them.
273. The Indie must be the prime candidate. I give it two years, like you. I met that Steve Richards at a do the other day, and he was very pessimistic.
And when you no longer have the Indie’s Com Res polls to obsess over, so pleasurably, you may miss it!
@275 (Stars and Stripes)
Science thrived in communist Russia (although whether this was because of or in spite of communism is debatable). The Russian model of “intellectual enclaves” has been responsible for tremendous scientific advances.
I agree that culture was suppressed. That was less to do with the lack of profit motive, and more to do with the outright thuggery towards Bulgakov, Solzenitzen and their ilk.
@275:
You’re speaking from an Americo-centric perspective. In the US, the whole point of patent/copyright/trademark law is to encourage innovation and creativity, because it says so in the constitution.
That’s not how IP developed in the UK, where it has grew out of draconian laws intended to be used by monarchs and politicians to grant monopolies in certain markets to curry favour with powerful friends.
Be wary of generalising the US experience to Europe.
@281:
Oh, and not trademark law either. The point of trademark law is consumer protection, which is a noble enough aim.
269 - But that’s the parallel case Sean - newspapers are dying out, and should do, because the idea that content is something that cannot be copied or shared but only produced by ‘experts’ and then distributed at huge cost and markup is a crap business model.
Remove the barriers to being a content producer (blogger, musician, filmmaker), allow the cheapest and least-restained dissemination of works, and the successful will flourish because people will pay for their entertainment when they become fans.
Charging exorbitant rates for creative content by an unknown is not just bad business - it’s cutting off your nose to spite your face. Rather than be read by millions, 10% of whom pay you’re suggesting it would be better to have 1% of the readership who all pay.
Unlike bloggers, musicians, photographers, novellists like yourself are still reliant on a Big Content Distributor - that will change as eBooks become more popular, and self-publishing becomes as possible as blogging.
There will always be a market for high-end gifts - folio books, DVD commemorative boxsets, Vinyl records, Broadsheet newspapers, concerts - but I look forward to the daily consumer market in news, music, literature, opinion, photography being free-to-access content, with artists competing in a freer market for celebrity and peripheral payment, without companies taking most of their deserved profits.
I don’t understand why the comparison with blog is invalid. Mike hs spent 5 years producing 1000 words a day with regularity. In terms of the quantity of content, and the quality when compared to its genre, I don’t see why it is different. Is it that artists traditionally invest in the work, and only then have an estimation of its value by trying to sell it? Not so for the musician who writes a new song every week, and tests them at live gigs monthly. I think the comparison holds.
Copyright is an area of great interest to me (as I’ve mentioned occasionally), as I assist a couple of public domain music labels with original copies of recordings.
Firstly, regarding my main focus of theatre/live performance; there isn’t a massive problem here as bootlegging does not equal the actual experience. There are many people taping concerts, shows and so on live and this has gone on ever since the technology has been there. It annoys artists but essentially it does not bite into their income.
As an archivist of theatre recordings myself I also have an interest in these non commercial recordings. They go back to the Ziegfeld Follies of 1934 which was recorded onto discs live in the theatre, we can also hear Ethel Merman performing live in the original production of Gypsy, listen to one night flops that were never otherwise recorded and so on. Before portable tape recorders there was a notable actress who used to lug a reel to reel recorder into the theatre in a bag to record shows, never challenged. Before video there were also theatre/concert goers who would take in hand held cameras and the results, as with audio, now reside in important collections as the only filmed record of things such as Gene Kelly in his breakout role in Pal Joey on Broadway in 1940. Of course there are numerous audio and video recordings of Wicked, Cats or whatever, and, given the small size of modern video cameras, these things are becoming virtually impossible to police. I see little point in enforcing laws regarding such tapings, especially as the technology will soon make it impossible to do this without any risk of being seen.
If I were the theatre, gig promoter or whatever I would see the only way round this as to create an extra new level of royalty payment which allow for a more professionally produced alternative, a one camera shot of a play, a CD pressed from a gig sound desk. In this way, any potential taper could get a better alternative and the artists would get something back for it.
Secondly, you have media which are, in themselves, the primary source – film, TV, radio, music recorded in a studio and so on – and here is there is a much bigger problem.
TV and radio is approaching this well by making watch/listen again, i-player like solutions available and widespread. People can record TV/radio programmes at home so it is on unconvincing ground telling people not to share those freely available recordings via file sharing. They have provided a good response I think though and one which, with its advertising and other income, goes a long way to offsetting concerns over viewers timeshifting (ITV has a greater problem, if its advertisers feel that they are being cut out via dissemination of torrents of TV programmes then their income plummets, they need to be more aggressive with regards to the above solution).
There is also exploitation of much TV/radio via CD (occasionally), itunes, DVD, bluray etc. but to compete there needs to be something added to make it better than an off air recording, screen resolution, extras and so on. Sales seem to suggest that this works, the artists also benefitting as they are paid once and then subsequently on further exploitation. Of course there is then the problem of copying a non-off air original but see later for that.
Moving into the most contentious area you are left with initial releases of films (before they reach television) and studio recorded music. Bootlegs of films exists via people in the cinema pointing a camera at the screen but they have negligible commercial impact. People record things off the radio and that has been going on for decades with little effect on overall sales. Both are because of the quality issues of these copies.
Copying technology is at such an advanced state, however, that CD (or mp3, and yes I know it’s compressed heavily) and DVD can be copied perfectly with no degradation (bluray copies will be next). Hiking prices to compensate would just increase this and any attempts at copy protection prove to be soon worthless.
Itunes and similar mp3 systems are very profitable for record companies (no distribution costs, printing, pressing etc) and provide a good model. The companies need to finally admit that they cannot stop such copying however and start to provide a more customer oriented service. DVDs released within a few weeks of cinema release would ameliorate the prevalence of screeners/audience recordings.
In essence though they cannot win this battle, so they need to change the business model or continue wasting money on their continuing efforts to provide copy controls (usually broken by someone with few resources and no money in pretty quick time). Their top heavy costs as regards artists might need to be looked at for a start.
Media giants, both film and music (often both in one) are slow moving, unwieldy behemoths, having bought each other out at an increasing rate. They need to become as swift footed as the independent, as understanding of their product’s ephemerality as TV and radio has become. They can’t use their power when they are not feared anymore and to see them do so is pitiful, copying technology has gone too far for anyone to be afraid, just as was the case with home taping in the seventies. Pity those few who have paid their price on behalf of the millions that they cannot reach, a more pernicious use of their power is difficult to find.
Finally onto the product’s subsequent use; there is an effect on future exploitation (for all these media) and how it saleable the product is, as if copies are already in circulation then fewer are seen as viable for reissue (and this will cut into income for both company and artist). Again, creativity as regards their exploitation and a realisation of the ephemerality of this need to be understood.
As such, increasing the length of copyright is as bone headed as believing that copying prevention technology cannot be broken. If a film, recording and so on is not reissued by that company within, say twenty years, then that should be allowed to fall into the public domain. What happens is that much material is currently lying forgotten and, sometimes, allowed to disappear. There are all sorts of side issues such as grand rights but I don’t want to go on any longer….at least someone might read this in the archives at some point even if nobody gets this far now!
In conclusion, there needs to be a realisation that such works can be controlled for a shorter time, that their exploitation relies on fleet footed innovation not on power and that there exists a very important role for the public in preserving rare material, our cultural heritage, which might otherwise disappear. Technology is our friend in this not an enemy (of course there’s also the issue of digital recordings becoming unreadable but that’s another story….)
What happened to my paragraphs!?!
Morus, could you delete that so I can post a paragraphed version?
I said it would all end in tears once we went digital….
Personally, I’d go back to vinyl. And books being written out, long-hand, by monks.
264. In the real world I think it’s unlikely publishers would be so very much more generous with their advances because of the possibility they won’t have to pay royalties in future.
I’ve contributed to books and journals for a flat fee. The point is, that sales and profits for these things are relatively predictable: as such I took the going rate and signed over the copyright.
I’ve also written more creative stuff which is much less predictable. As it happens the advance publishers pay factors in likely profits and rewards. I don’t think “but it might sell millions” would have helped bump up the advance all that much. Most books are loss leaders. But in the unlikely event of it flying off the shelves the publisher will get more money anyway, and I’ll get my cut too. (Mutual benefit rather than creative servitude).
I know some of you are constructing elaborate arguments to explain why this shouldn’t be the case, but it just seems fairer this way.
You know all those sorry tales from the early days of rock ‘n’ roll in which some naive or desperate songwriter sells the rights to their songs for $50 only for said songs later go on to make millions and millions for someone else? It sounds very much as if you think this a desirable state of affairs.
275. Very good point.
The selfless artist is a myth. If you take away the profit motive, you need to incentivise artists another way. But how? Giving them all Orders of Lenin didn’t really work, did it?
Imagine novels sponsored by the Labour government. Ugh!
Newspapers are dying out because they can’t provide that which the Internet does so well: communication.
Content is not king.
The newspapers that will survive will be those that have created thriving online communities. They will sublime into being fully electronic entities, and we’ll applaud and welcome them to the late 21st Century.
Much as I don’t want to denigrate the excellent work of OGH, Morus, DC and our guest contribs, their articles are *not* why I come here.
I come here for the discussion that is occasionally about them.
On thread, in my own industry I agree that software patents are an absurdity and should be abolished.
Martin Coxall says they do not exist in Europe. I’m afraid that isn’t entirely true. An invention which makes a non-obvious “technical contribution” or solves a “technical problem” in a non-obvious way is patentable in Europe even if that technical problem is solved by running a computer program. And there are other ways of getting round the restriction. Fundamentally, if I invent something which isn’t just a piece of software but where the software is a vital component, the patent protects the software.
I am firmly of the view that copyright gives us all the protection we need for software.
280- Science didn’t thrive in the Soviet Union, to use such a broad brush. Military science thrived at the point of a gun and with the infusion of a huge percentage of the country’s resources. Other technologies stagnated. Meanwhile, in the U.S., not only did military technology flourish but so did all other forms of technology. Why? The profit motive.
281- Well, good luck finding a vibrant and diverse mass of folks who seek to provide the world with better products, ideas and innovations when there will be no hope of a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
I will resurrect my reference yesterday to the demise of the big bands and orchestras and the complete disappearance of the talent that once filled such institutions. Why are the musicians/arrangers/conductors of old not matched by any in existence today? No profit.
Does that mean that people don’t still love to produce such music? No, but they can’t indulge in such endeavors in the same manner or attain the same heights when they can’t support themselves with it.
@285:
Can’t you edit it? I’d hate to have to tl;dr you.
Evening all.
The basic laws of economics have not changed. If you create something, can you sell it to enough people for enough money to make it “worth your while”, for individual definitions of “worth”?
Pre-Internet, it was “worth” recording an album if you could sell 1 million copies, and the record company and the artist were very happy (and rich). It was worth writing a book for comparative volumes of sales.
The Internet has reduced the cost of distribution (and unit production) to almost zero, which creates the “long tail” effect. This means that it is “worth” someone time to create something if maybe only 10 people buy it because the per unit costs are so low. It also makes piracy easier.
The answer therefore lies somewhere along the spectrum of some people paying, and some not, which is of course where we always were, but perhaps slightly further along the scale.
In more concrete terms, I bought a copy of the Genesis Secret. I did not try and download the manuscript, steal it from a bookshop, or borrow it from someone. Lots and lots of other people have done likewise. As long as enough people do that so that Sean and his publisher continue to think it “worth their while” to write again, I don’t see a major problem. He may not make as much money as he would if every single person who ever read the book paid full whack, but he made a LOT more money than if he had never written it.
277 - the conspiracy theory on LabourHome is that there wasn’t electoral fraud, but one side sabotaged the ballot box to cause the contest to be re-run without postal votes (which benefited their opponents).
Reminds me of “referendums” at university, which were required to change Union policy. If it was ruled that either side had unfairly influenced the result (deliberately or otherwise) then the decision would revert to the Union Executive, regardless of the probable outcome of said referendum. So whenever the Executive was in favour of a change of policy/status quo, but the student body was opposed, all they had to do was to create some “incident” undermining the integrity of the ballot!
Used to happen all the time with various referendums involving abortion.
Re newspapers going bust. Apart from the Indie, the Express is also on borrowed time, ditto its stablemate the Star. The only ones I’d say I really safe are: The Sun, The Mail, The FT and The Times.
Of course, if we did end up with a media divided entirely between a very few oligarchic titles and thousands of atomised new media sources then the public (most of whom have no interest in blogs, let us remind ourselves) might not necessarily be the winners.
uk paul - I’ll do the paragraphs.
@291 (Stars and Stripes)
Yes, I am sure the contributions of Landau or Ginzburg or Abrikosov or Gelfand or Schwarz were military. Please!
I am not arguing that it couldn’t have been better - or that communism didn’t have terrible negative effects on large swathes of the scientific community.
I am just saying that there has been a genuine Russian intellectual movement which was vibrant despite communism.
@290:
That’s not strictly true. That was the wording the European Patent Office tried to get through the European Parliament in the Software Patents directive, but the EP killed the directive off, after a heavy lobbying effort by digital rights enthusiasts like my good self.
Now, the EPA has granted patents on the above terms, but without the directive, these patents have no actual legal effect within the EU, and you’d have to rely on each member state’s local laws to litigate, which is prohibitively expensive and thus impractical.
To date, nobody has ever prosecuted a lawsuit based on a software-like patent issued by the EPA.
On the ballot boxes, the Speccie have a blog piece
The fact that even with Labour still in government this contest has become so fractious suggests that after a heavy defeat Labour’s internal discipline might come close to total collapse.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/3547826/what-a-broken-ballot-box-tells-us-about-the-labour-partys-future.thtml
But this comment is entertaining
Interesting. The new labour heriditary aristo’s up against the hairy arse proles. What has it come to? This is like a surreal re-enactment society doing the French Revolution in a bedsit they all live in. Bring on the tricoteuse and tumbrils.
There’s a nice history here of the Pigopolists’ several failed attempts to bully, cajole and bribe the EU into allowing software patents in Europe.
http://eupat.ffii.org/log/intro/
And they would have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for us pesky kids.
I agree with the several remarks re the clodhopping stupidity of old media.
e.g. I was appalled to discover, when I bought my Sony Reader, that most ebooks are MORE expensive than the paper equivalent. WTF? How can you possibly justify that? How much does it cost to produce an ebook, once you’ve digitised the contents? 3p?
Yet you’re trying to sell it for… £15?
It’s insulting. It’s like the publishers are scared of the technology and don’t want it to become too popular. Indeed I am sure that psychology is at work.
Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. An open invitation to illegal downloaders.
Thanks, it’s because I was using Word’s annoying ‘Normal’ style which is anything but….
I know it’s long but I didn’t want to serialise it and disrupt the flow.
It’s currently post 286 in case people didn’t realise they were scrolling past a masterpiece.
FPT “• reducing both absolute and relative child poverty”
Dan Hannan (go on tim, you know you want to) has a blog piece with the stunningly obvious reason this Labour government will never achieve it
If you pay people to be poor, you’ll never run out of poor people
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/daniel_hannan/blog/2009/04/18/if_you_pay_people_to_be_poor_youll_never_run_out_of_poor_people
290 - I actually disagree with you there Martin.
I think Content *is* King, and that what we are seeing is the breaking of the link between good content and an expensive centralised means of distribution.
It used to be that there were gatekeepers (publishing houses, record companies, newspapers) who had a monopoly on content released into the market because cost of distribution was so high that it was a barrier to entry for most artists/content producers.
Now that that barrier is falling, and there are alternate distribution channels other than the Big Companies, the success of a product is becoming more and more contingent on whether the content meets a need, with the added edge that freely distributed content has an advantage in appealing to consumers.
That revolution has occurred in music (mySpace and Pirate Bay), it’s occurred in photography with Flickr, in journalism with blogs, and is beginning to happen in film with YouTube. It hasn’t yet happened in books - in that market, content is still wedded to an archaic distribution channel. When that link is also broken, you’ll see a better market.
I also disagree with your PB point. Barely a tenth of our readers come into the comments, and probably only 2 or 3% actually comment themselves. Most come daily to read Mike’s thoughts. Because the distribution is freer, the content can afford to be better tailored to the market, rather than the editorial decision of who writes that the newspapers still use. They are forced to be generalists by their business model, whereas PB can afford to tailor to a specialist audience. the interactivity with readers makes for better writing and an evolution of content, but content is still king.
Interesting thread, and thanks and welcome to Peter Harrison for his comment.
I’m familiar with a different arm of the copyright issue - computer games. Any worthwhile game is ripped within days of its appearance and this has been true for 20 years (my Sinclair Spectrum game in the 80s turned up on the pirate lists - I wasn’t sure whether to feel annoyed or flattered). Game designers respond by adding value to the hard copy (maps, player aids, game-related mementos) and, more importantly, offering add-ons to owners of verifiable copies.
There’s no very obvious equivalent for music and books - if you’ve got the text of Tom Know’s book, you probably don’t especially want a hologram of SeanT indulging in his favourite pastime (what? Oh, writing for pb.com, of course) to go with it.
On the other hand, whereas a decent computer game costs £20+, a music track costs a matter of pence from the legal sites, so I’d think that people who insist on getting them free are doing it partly to save the hassle of subbing to the official sites and partly just for the enjoyment of getting free stuff with a tinge of danger. It seems doubtful if this audience would be hugely commercially lucrative if the internet didn’t exist.
An underlying problem, though, is that culture and especially music are getting globalised, so artists are competing with millions of rivals. The likelihood of many of them being able to sustain a living without subsidy is small, so an increasing number may get by with a semi-professional life of internet sales only plus their regular jobs - perhaps with some labels specialising in publishing online music and never producing a single physical product. (Has that already happened?)
@285 (ukpaul)
Thanks, that comment was an excellent summary (and I read it first time round without the paragraph breaks!)
239 No, I don’t think so. Think of a piece of real property. I can sell it outright, and get a capital sum, or lease it, in return for an annual income. That is a matter for negotiation between me and the purchaser.
If I lease the Property, the State then protects my property rights (no one else can come along and demand the income) and it protects the tenant (no one else can come along and occupy the Property in his place). I don’t regard that as being some unfair exercise of monopoly power. Mostly, these rights were established by common law, but are now codified in the form of statutes.
It seems to me that that is entirely analogous to the position of an author who receives an annual payment in return for licencing someone else to publish his work. All that Copyright law is doing is to prevent a third party from trespassing on the author’s and publisher’s property.
If no statutes relating to Copyright had ever been brought in, then the Common Law would have developed a remedy along the lines of the tort of trespass.
302 - Ebooks and ebook readers are expensive because they are a new technology and they are skimming what they can get off the technology enthusiasts who are price insensitive with new technologies. Basic managing of a product lifecycle. Compare with how expensive mobile phones and mobile phone calls were when first introduced.
The next step will be for ebook readers to come down in price, and then the ebooks will eventually come down as well. Probably there will be attempts to make the price of ebooks variable with the type of ereader they are compatible with.
posts disappearing, will try this: S*mali, p*rates, Ob*ma, Ir*n hostage crisis, C*rter, methinks.
169.I know you and I have somewhat different feelings about Dan Brown. But, FFS, DAN BROWN EMBODIES EVERYTHING THAT IS FOUL, DEPRAVED AND CORRUPT IN THE CURRENT COPYRIGHT REGIME.
That’s rubbish Martin. Every artist, writer, composer or other creative person has a right to have his/her work protected by copyright.
Just because some authors sell in millions and otners only in hundreds or thousands is no bar to such protection.
As SeanT says money and fame or both are usually the motive for the creative jiuces to start flowing.
I said yesterday that I have been reading “The Genisis Secret” and now that I’m up to page 103 - it really drags - I still find it below par to the fantasy that I’m used to reading. (Sean may call it a thriller but in reality it’s pure fantasy).
@305:
Well, we’ll have to take a different view on this, but I maintain that PBC’s main value lies in its comments, even for those that don’t yet post here.
I’m an instinctual below-the-line sort of guy. Maybe I’m unusual, but I don’t think so.
“An underlying problem, though, is that culture and especially music are getting globalised”
Which reminds me of a point which I missed -
Region coding.
Stupid, stupid, stupid…
That’s all.
289 - SeanT, there are ways to make a profit, even while giving your work away for free. I gave one example of an author doing just that in my post above - all it requires is a little imagination, which authors shouldn’t be short of.
Thus, the argument that authors won’t write anything without a profit is as irrelevant as it is true. We’re not proposing abolishing profit.
You might also like to consider just what would be needed to stamp out piracy, and how easily those stringent measures could be abused by a power-mad government - since such governments are near-inevitability.
@306 (Nick Palmer MP)
I am sure you are familiar with the problems that orphan works create in the computer games industry. There are hundreds of games for, say, the Amstrads or Spectrums, forgotten by their creators, loved by maybe a few hundred people.
Why (on both practical and moral grounds) is it illegal for fans to recreate them using emulators and the like?
@306: Ah! Are you “Their Finest Hour” Nicholas Palmer? That was a fabulous game that I paid good paper-round money for in about ‘86/’87.
@306:
The DRM that some of the more hateful publishers, like EA, put on their games is such that often the easiest way to play the game with a minimum of hassle is to download a torrent.
It’s extraordinary that the self-destructive instincts are so deeply ingrained that publishers will insist on measures that deeply inconvenience and irritate their own customers, and yet those with a pirated copy, uncrippled by DRM, have no such irritations or inconveniences.
It’s enormously controversial because it’s so obviously bloody stupid. See: Bioshock or Spore for examples of huge DRM clusterf*cks on games.
@305 (Morus)
Out of interest, how do you know that only 10% of readers read the comments?
306 - Online only music labels are already a reality.
I don’t see the problem in your final paragraph. It used to be that there were (let’s say) 10,000 bands who wanted to be rock stars. In the 50s, maybe 10 bands were given a shot by record companies and one or two made a living out of it.
Now, all 10,000 can distribute their music for free and build a following on MySpace. Success is dictated by music fans (consumers) rather than the company, and perhaps 500 can make a semi-pro living out of it, but only 1 will ever get the sort of fame that the 5 got by being chosen by a record label in the 50s.
Free distribution takes away the insentive to create art? Firstly I don’t believe it - millions of people, myself included, have produced plenty of creative work without the expectation of making any money off it. The fact that the odds of being (modestly) successful (both money and fame) are much greater now is a good thing. No more gatekeepers means more people at the party - and that’s a good thing for the creative world.
298- We’re speaking generally here, right? That is, I don’t deny that not *all* innovation in the Soviet Union was military. Don’t try to put those words in my mouth. But, come on, let’s see the forest for the trees here. The Soviet Union ended up light years behind not only the U.S., but the free and democratic West in general, in terms of a wide range of technologies and cultural developments. In the end, they were even eclipsed in military technology, the one field they prized and favored above all else. As they say, follow the money.
@315:
Yes, we need an Abandonware Act. When I am SABDFL, it will be on my list of priorities.
306. NickP. For music, the equivalent is the live concert. Concerts used to be loss leaders for the albums, now they are very lucrative. Record labels now sign contracts giving them a slice of this income. I can’t think of an area that has grown more profitable for authors though.
First 15 minutes of R4 5 pm News on subject of Labour travails - Alice Mahon, who really hit home with a remark something like “David and Samantha Cameron still suffering from the loss of their son, who could think of using smears in those circumstances” which I think, while not fitting the facts (looks like Red Rag was cancelled or put on hold around that time) will have hit listeners hard, plus Erith & Calder Valley & more on Smeargate.
@322:
Yes, music shared online should now be considered marketing for tours and concerts.
311. Just as long as you bought it, not borrowed, blagged, or illegally downloaded it, I don’t mind if you LOATHE it!
I would however dispute the accusation of “pure fantasy”. Gobekli Tepe exists. But caveat emptor, natch…
309. Interesting - hadn’t thought of it that way. Ta.
306. NickP - I have the same feeling when my journalism is ripped off on the Net (as increasingly happens to all hacks) - I don’t know whether to be flattered or angry.
I wrote a piece recently for the Daily Mail, on Gobekli and my new book - a piece which went totally viral. Google “Gobekli” and “Eden” and you get 70,000 hits, most of them in some way related to my article.
Lots of people just cut and pasted the entire piece, including my photos - just stole the whole thing. Some online journalists went so far as to take the whole article, take my photos, then put their name at the top.
!
That was the bit that angered me. Momentarily.
My anger would have been a lot more serious if it had been a novel that was being ripped off. That wouldn’t be flattering, that would just be crap.
OK I’m off to watch 24 on DVD. I bought it legally. From amazon and everything.
305 - Morus, I obviously don’t know how you compile the stats, but my impression is that Pb.com is going through a period where it is a bit confused about its purpose. Increasingly i think it is run for the benefit of its commenters rather than its readers of its main article.
My impression is that the expansion of the editorial team has inevitably resulted in the threads increasingly falling into the category of “thought provokers” to encourage discussion, rather than “pearls of wisdom” from above. When Mike was sole editor one could come to the site and read the threads to gain the benefit of his wisdom. These days it is perfectly feasible for someone to turn up on Monday and read a thread making a case for a Labour General Election victory, and on the Tuesday read a thread arguing the complete opposite.
And these days Mike is open in saying that he sometimes produces contentious arguments more to provoke debate than as genuine expressions of his opinion. This lack of consistent editorial opinion will inevitably reduce the influence of the site on those who only come here for the main article.
As a result i would argue that increasingly, and perhaps almost uniquely among leading political blogs, the value of pb.com is as much in its comments section as it is in its main articles. In fact it is not at all uncommon for Mike to take comments he reads and use them as a basis for a main article.
312 - Oh I agree - the comments are what makes the site extraordinary, and what I find valuable about it. I’m just saying that only a small proportion of our readers recognise that.
318 - Something of a guesstimate - when we have voodoo polls on the thread the number of votes recently has outstripped the number of commenters (not comments) on a thread by about 8 to 1.
Let’s say we get about 1600 comments a day from about 1000 people per day. Let’s say there are five lurkers who read the comments for every one person who actually comments. That’s still only 6,000 people in total, which I’d guess is about 1 in ten.
I don’t know the figures for certain, but I’d guess only a minority of our readership actually spend time in the comments - most will read PB.com like they read every other blog on their daily list.
316 - Wikipedia says yes!
This issue also ties in to Civil Liberties and police heavy-handedness.
In 2007 the site tv-links.co.uk was closed down by a police raid, under the encouragement of the Federation Against Copyright Theft.
It was not clear what laws the raid was made under, or what the charges were at the time, yet servers were confiscated and the service closed down.
When I checked recently charges had still not been laid.
Details here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_Against_Copyright_Theft
As I see it, three are four points:
1 - The whole copyright issue as discussed.
2 - The implementation of sanctions without a process of trial.
3 - The ability ad circumstances under which outside organisations can encourage police action where no apparent justification exists.
4 - The possibility of “links” becoming outlawed. As a separate point here, legal firms have forced media sites to remove links by claiming that linking to allegedly defamatory material is itself an act of defamation.
Serious questions.
Matt
@327:
To a certain extent, even if a majority never read the comments, the community that has grown up here sets the tone for the place, and we have a feedback effect: the articles nourish the community, and the community nourishes future articles.
It could be (glibly) argued that in the Brave New World of the Blogosphere, content and communication have merged into one glorious gestalt.
325. I wouldn’t think of robbing you of your rightful commission SeanT.
Gobekli Tepe may exist, but so does Mars.
319. Morus. We are still scratching in the dirt for a new model. The old model required a label to spend lots on many bands and to make money off the few that were successful.
The music business is moving towards this model - the cost of reproduction and distribution is very low so each song goes for little. The most popular bands make money off the little added extras (official tours, t-shirts etc) and a little off the music. The old style record labels can no longer make massive profits off a few bands to subsidise their efforts to find another big hit, but this is inevitable given the new distribution model.
Movies are also migrating to a new model - faster cycle times - the period it’s available to rent only is tiny, and the DVD is often advertised as soon as the film is out. I’m sure that they will adjust.
The pirates in the caribbean were a short lived phenomenon, some became legit, others died, the rules changed. It’s going to happen here too.
326 - I agree with almost all of that. The value of PB.com is in the discussion on the threads - that is what drives the site. I was merely pointing out that though we all agree that is the true value, and you are completely right about the influence of the comments on what is made into a main thread, it would be a mistaken view to think that the majority of the readers actually come down here.
I think there is a separation - the weekdays are almost always Mike, and focus more on the markets, on polls, on movements and narrative. They are thought-provoking but with a clear editorial ‘pearl of wisdom’ (”Mike Smithson thinks”). Double Carpet, David Herdson and I only write on the weekends, where you get fewer ‘politicos at their desks checking the blogs’ and the site is predominantly the preserve of real blogosphere addicts and our regulars. For that market, Mike wanted to have longer, discussion-provoking pieces - DC’s International threads, my Saturday Slant, covering the week at a slower pace than the relentless 24-hour news cycle of the weekdays.
I think (hope) this builds towards a site which does both things - maintains the best discussion anywhere in the blogosphere, but also allows PB.com to be ‘influential’ as a blog based on Mike’s weekday editorials. But you are right to note the tension between those aims.
Is PB.com written for the blogosphere commuters or for the locals in the comments? And which should it be written for? Can it do both?
Meta-Jesus is crying…
I have a comment that has been inexplicably moderated….
334 - Nothing in the moderation box, James.
Morus, from a betting perspective, it’s often the weekends that have the Woo-hoo!! poll action….
….and I think when Brown bottled the election….
….and the commentariat go on the Sundays….
so it’s plenty busy of a weekend.
But 1500 ++ posts a day is getting rather time consuming!
335 - Hmm. I typed a comment posted and it just disappeared. I must have a glitch grr.
333 - Hi Morus, can you explain the reference in your last line?
@338:
It’s a Daily Kos thing, ISTR. When discussion becomes too meta, then Meta-Jesus starts to cry.
336 - MM just do what I do, pick up where you join in, and if you have missed something you’ve missed it. If you are at a party and you are circulating you don’t worry what you might have missed when you move in on a group of people.
340 - Quite. If there’s a topic which particularly interests you it doesn’t harm to pose a question if it’s already been discussed. If it has then you can go back and reread.
338 - The term ‘Meta Jesus’ is a Daily Kos-ism, from this diary by ‘Hunter’ berating the Daily Kos community for talking too much about Daily Kos itself.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/8/3/14435/77578
From the standard “[insert bad thing here] makes baby Jesus cry” (originally the Flanders kids in the Simpsons), talking to much about Kos on Kos (meta-discussion) was said to make meta-Jesus cry.
This meta concept as evolved so you sometimes get ‘Meta diaries’ which aim to replicate Daily Kos diaries entirely independent of content
See http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/7/25/03646/9549
For the record, by invoking Meta Jesus, I was rebuking my own post, rather than saying we shouldn’t discuss this!
@329 (Matt Wardman)
I find the increasingly shrill warnings from the Federation Against Copyright Theft highly offputting. Same for the obnoxious TV licensing ads. Why am I forced to watch an anti-piracy ad whenever I watch a DVD?
It stems from the same mentality which drives jobsworth traffic wardens. Or police officers who don’t tackle serious crime but find trivial offences to meet their arrest targets.
Mike Smithson, what about a thread covering the main groups in the Labour party and what is likely to happen in a post GE defeat?
1. The Brownite/Unite group
2. The Blairites
3. The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy
323. “Alice Mahon, who really hit home with a remark something like “David and Samantha Cameron still suffering from the loss of their son, who could think of using smears in those circumstances”
My view on Smeargate:
– main impact would be internal party warfare.
– very significant medium term.
– short term polling significance possibly very low
The big exception to that being if the version of Smeargate Alice Mahon cites becomes the standard view out among that chunk of the 30% who don’t generally pay much attention. If that happens then it’s 10p tax time but with no obvious way out.
299 Martin Coxall - Yes, computer software is excluded to the extent that an application relates to a computer program “as such”. Case law is patchy as most cases relating to software patents get settled out of court, usually with some kind of cross licensing deal. And the US is a far better place to sue for breach of software patent than the EU (Texas is best, I believe).
I don’t think we can say the software patents granted by the EPA have no legal effect until such time as this has been tested in court. My company’s IP lawyer is of the view that these patents should be regarded as effective until proven otherwise. A number of official bodies seem to take the same view.
On the fundamental, however, I think we agree. Having spent large sums of money developing a piece of software, others shouldn’t be able to rip me off by copying it. However, if they want to develop their own software to do the same thing, that is up to them. Software patents are at best a waste of time, at worst they hinder innovation. Apple’s recent application for multitouch patents would be a disaster if granted (for those not familiar with this, Apple are trying to patent the gestures used to drive the iPhone user interface).
POGWAOESI:
http://www.labourhome.org/poll/1239977328_nrsyRBAM
329 - Good post.
344 - Those drive me crazy. Copyright theft is a misnomer.
“You wouldn’t steal a handbag…” - of course not, because it would deprive some poor woman of her handbag and the event would traumatise her and cause much inconvenience and cost. Copying an album I would never buy without the artist knowing about it does precisely no damage to that artist whatsoever.
Instinctively, I think most people realise those ads are fatuous too.
I do wonder how thick Big Content thinks we all are sometimes.
TB is on the Mirror’s case…
http://bit.ly/rNDnl
348 So - five people think Gordon rocks.
Five.
I guess it would have been six, but McBride had to walk the plank.
We are governed by Billy No-mates. What happened to all that patronage?
349- By that logic, then, if you saw the same old lady drop stone dead from a heart attack in the street, and there wasn’t another living soul around to see you, would you then have no problem grabbing said handbag?
350 - For the record, I hadn’t heard the term ‘Big Content’ before this week, but I love it.
Is there no industry that can’t be made sinister by putting the word ‘Big’ in front of it?
‘Big Tobacco’, ‘Big Pharma’, ‘Big Oil’ were easy. I’m looking forward to the campaigns against ‘Big Ice Cream’, ‘Big Seafood’ and ‘Big Aromatherapy’
@347:
I should rephrase that carefully. Without the Software Patents directive, EPO-issued software patents have no EU-wide enforceability, and therefore fall back on the vagaries of member states’ patent law. And since prosecuting a patent in 27 sovereign nations is a practical impossibility, nobody to date has done it.
@354:
Big Ice Cream doesn’t sound sinister at all. Actually even “Sinister Ice Cream” doesn’t sound sinister. It just sounds self-deprecating and cuddly.
353 - But i’m still depriving her (or her heirs) of the handbag.
Those ads claim that if I could secretly create a magical copy of that handbag in my bedroom that I have effectively robbed her. That’s just not the case. Theft is wrong because it means taking something that belongs to someone else, and deprives them of ownership.
Whereas “Ethical Ice Cream” sounds a bit yucky….
@355 (Martin Coxall)
There have been heavy rumours of Big Software going round getting major rich users of Little Software (users like Big Finance) to pay “royalties” for the promise not to sue in future. More in America than in Europe, but here too.
Thus, even though there haven’t been court cases, the murkiness of the rules (essentially down to the murkiness between the European Parliament and the European Commission) still has consequences.
354. I actually once saw an American right wing cartoon attacking “Big Abortion”.
354 - It only sounds sinister if you have the outlook that big is always and everywhere bad.
352. Marquee Mark April 18th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
The problem for Labour is the so-called Core cannot be relied upon - Labour will look well if they go down to a catrophic defeat because the former Labour heartlands just fail to turnout. You cannot force people to vote and Labour are more likely to be trying to get vote out in Marginals than “Safe Seats”.
This is the problem i think Labour have always potentially faced since Blair shifted it from the Clause 4 base. Labour could simply be crucified as it is defeated through the marginals and then in it’s heartlands. The Heatland defeats may only be marginal but a complete collapse is possible just like the Tories in 1997.
@360:
I would have gone for Gi-bortion.
Conservative home reporting New Sunday Telegraph/ ICM poll will be out at 8.30pm
Test 94
364 - Interessant.
@361:
Is there any large corporation on Earth you would trust as far as you could comfortably gob one of their non-executive directors?
366 - But trust isn’t to do with size, and you assume that simply because an organisation is not big that it therefore is inherently more trustworthy.
362 Martin, I think only Nick Palmer is going down to a “catrophic defeat”! The Broxtowe Cats will not be denied their trophy scalp
Fear is all that Labour has to “get out the vote”. Vote for us or else [insert appropriate blood-curdling threat]. But I think recent events have got them close to the point where even their Core just shrug their shoulders…
357- That’s true, it’s not the best analogy. Still, your theory presumes that the downloaders would never otherwise buy the product. But even if 99% of the downloaders are people who wouldn’t otherwise buy the copyrighted product, the artist is still harmed to the extent of the 1% who WOULD have bought had they not had the opportunity to take. Maybe that’s the better argument (all must be stopped in order to save the artist’s profit from the one who would have bought). How else to stop that 1% from effectively taking money out of the pockets of the artist (that being the vital 1% that makes the artist’s ongoing production worthwhile/sustainable to him)?
@368:
I’m not sure that an individual member can have a ‘catastrophic’ defeat. You either lose your seat or you’re returned for another four years.
It’s not like there’s a sliding scale, and that if the swing against NPMP is more than 10pts the returning office will pin him down and bite his cullions off.
364. Another David April 18th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
Maybe it will be the LD’s who suffer? They have not had a very high profile for weeks. Clegg has been awol for some time! It would be amusing if Labour did not get the hit they deserve in the polls after the last two weeks!
368 (cont) It could be gloriously prescient of Ed Balls, as the core Labour vote are warned of the hideous outcome of a Tory victory but their inert response on polling day is
“So what?”
@367:
No, I think size has a lot to do with trustworthiness. The larger a company, the more wealth they have for corruptly cajoling politicians, buying legislation, spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt, burying nefarious activities, and generally avoiding accountability, extracting illegitimate power and undermining democracy.
The power of a corporation to do these things is directly dependent on its size.
370 - True and it is probably easier to accept that you have lost by 15000 than that you lose by 5, because if you lose big you know that there was not a lot you could have done. If you lose by 5 you will always be thinking if you could have got to the requisite half dozen houses.
re 348. Interesting that LabourHome users voted for Michael Foot as “..the greatest Labour Leader over the last 30 years?”.
Maybe his achievement was taking down Labour to its biggest defeat in the modern era - perhaps losing big time is the key characteristic.
The Sunday Telegraph thing looks interesting as the style of the con Home post looks like they have exclusivity ? or perhaps thats just the embargo time ?
Last Sunday Telegraph/ICM poll saw headline voting intention figures of 44-31-18. Be interesting to see if there are any changes. My guess would be Cons maybe 45% and Lab 28% maybe?
Main LabourHome site only 1% of 300 voters say Gordon is best Labour Leader!
373 - Yes but just because someone has the potential to do something does it mean that they should be assumed to be utilising that potential. I have the potential to be an axe wielding maniac, it doesn’t mean taht I in fact am an axe wielding maniac.
368. Marquee Mark April 18th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Yes, I agree with what you say and the most notable thing about the Alice Mayon resigning membership is the reasoning. The Labour party no longer reflect her values etc! Brown is in deep shit if people are saying this about him and by proxy the Labour party. As one notable Labour MP once said that if the Labour Party is not a moral crusade it is nothing!
I fear for Nick Palmer’s safety in Broxtowe! We are not far off people throwing cat litter at Labour canvasses IMO!
375 - They should run it again in 18 months Gordon might be in with a better chance.
@379:
Yes, but you’re restricted (hopefully) by a moral code and a conscience.
Corporations don’t have moral codes and consciences. They are amoral entities driven to seek profit.
As a result, it’s reasonable to assume any large corporation is to some degree evil, until proven otherwise.
“Barack Obama has a Chief Technology Officer in his administration - I’m not sure (off the top of my head) which Cabinet Minister is even responsible for teh interweb.”
Well, it turns out the Digital Engagement Minister is none other than the lesser spotted Tom Watson. Though if Icarus @ #5 is right, maybe not for much longer.
@383:
What the gabbling cockhole does “digital engagement” mean?
382 - Well ultimately you can’t place a value judgment on a company in that way. So you cannot say that a company is evil.
384 – I think it involves poking someone in the eye with a finger..
I could be wrong though.
384 - whacking it to internet porn.
On topic. For the most incisive, unbelievably superb analysis of the implications of the Pirate Bay decision, read the following:
http://www.iam-magazine.com/blog/Detail.aspx?g=e19af5c3-14fb-4cc5-8b88-3306bbc6be74
It could not be bettered. Hats off to the author
@375 (Mike Smithson)
It is a voodoo poll.
The results were different (Tony Blair was leading) before commenters on Guido Fawkes discovered it.
As someone that is involved with record labels, I can say the business model is changing. Record companies have licensed more than 10 million tracks to over 400 services from “traditional” stores like iTunes to streaming services like Spotify that are free to use.
Sky is inking deals with majors to wrap music downloads into your broadband/TV service, by adding a small monthly premium as you’d pay for sports or movies. Such services already exist in other countries (like TeliaSonera or TDC in Scandinavian countries). Nokia sells unlimited music downloads for 12 months with a mobile phone handset and labels are talking to car firms and home builders to license “comes with music” offers.
The difference between all these services and The Pirate Bay is that artists, songwriters and producers get paid and can carry on making a livelihood from music. The evidence in the trial showed that The Pirate Bay set up a company in the British Virgin Islands to process the money they made through selling advertising on their site. They were a commercial business that got a kick out of ignoring complaints from copyright holders.
The cost of distributing music may be lower, but the money needed to promote artists (so that you’ve all heard of them) and invest in discovering new talent remains constant (you can’t tell if an act can cut it just from looking at their YouTube or MySpace video).
As a Tory, I think that the need to stop the internet becoming a playground for those that distribute music (often before it is officially released) ignoring copyright law is one that both Andy Burnham and Jeremy Hunt grasp….
Morus - “Big” Pharma - it’s like the end 19th century and early 20th century, when the big thing was the trust. The money trust or the oil trust. It’s left its mark on the law and the language - Anti-trust law. Somehow I cant see “Anti-Big law”.
Is the only reason Brown is on 1% that this vote has no postal voting?
*** New Thread ***
374. It’s been a lot closer than 5.
1886: Ashton-under-Lyne, a tie, decided on the returning officer’s casting vote (lawful until 1984)
1910D: Exeter, 1 vote, decided after seven days in Court, the lead changing three times.
1966: Peterborough, 3 votes, decided after seven recounts, the lead changing three times.
1997: Winchester, 2 votes.
Bless Michael Foot - a man in it with the best of intentions, but completely unpalatable as a national leader.
A bit like Gordon really. But nicer.
368. MM. But Labour should be about more than threats. It should be about social justice. But it isnt. They have failed. In an epic manner. They have also really fouled up the economy. Labour are morally and intellectually bankrupt.
The handbag analogy is ludicrous from all angles. The handbag wasn’t designed and crafted by the old lady. It’s just a handbag that she happens to own. “Copying” the handbag isn’t copying a part of her soul.
This debate it seems to me divides the world very neatly into two camps. The creators and the consumers. Most people consume, they do not create. Let it all hang out, they say.
Almost all creators I know want copyright protection. Only a few feel otherwise, and they tend to be the ones who are already loaded, and don’t actually *need* protection.
I guarantee that if Morus or Martin ever did anything truly and uniquely creative - if they wrote a potential bestseller, say, or a potential hit single, they would feel very different. Immediately.
384 et al. I don’t know what it means either - it’s another meaningless New Labour job-title.
344, 349. Thanks.
Also, one I forgot about. Copyright Term Extension,
The Open Rights Group keep pointing out that the economic only a tiny % of artists will actually get any benefit from the recent law changes.
“Certainly not the vast majority of recording artists. It is estimated that approximately 80% of new recordings do not ‘recoup’, i.e. they do not earn back the money that was invested in their creation7. Because artists generally do not receive any royalty payments until the record label has covered the cost of production and promotion, this means that 80% of recording artists receive no royalties from their records. Their only income from recording is the nonrefundable advance against royalties paid to them by the label so that they can survive whilst working on their album.”
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/uploads/releasethemusic_aug07.pdf