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- tejastech08
- Rep: 194
Re: Duff: Quit Whining About SOPA and PIPA
I think the one thing that is constantly being brought up here, is that rock stars/bands made a shitload of money back in the day selling CDs, and now that they're not, it's somehow supposed to be ok. And that they should be doing it for free, for the "love" of what they do, simply because the internet made it that way?
Ok, maybe the millions being made before (and now not) shouldn't be an issue. But musicians putting a shitload of time and effort into creating and recording something, which they then try to sell, should be paid for doing so.
It's a big cop out to say, that just because they're doing something they love and that it is a fun profession, that they should do it for free.
I love my job most days, but I sure as hell wouldn't do it for free.
I have some friends that constantly download movies/music and I've gotten into some moral discussions with them, and they don't even think twice about what they're doing, simply because the internet has made it so easy to download illegally.
If they really want to regulate illegal downloads etc, why don't they cut back the unlimited data download plans that everyone seems to be on these days?
I do think they should be paid, but our priorities are out of whack when entertainers (whether it's movies, music, sports, TV shows, etc.) make so much more money than important positions such as teachers, engineers, and doctors. $20m to make a single movie for a famous actor. Really? What does that say about our society? 
Re: Duff: Quit Whining About SOPA and PIPA
Design law protects some things, copyright others, and patent law others, all types of IP
I might be oblivious to the specifics here, but I do not believe there is an actual distinction in the law between "design" for clothing which is considered an artistic expression & music or film. Are you sure you're not referring to trademark law (logo design falls in that category).
I just figure that unless we want to go back to patronage or some type of other way to pay artisans to be professionals and dedicate their time to making music/movies/books or whatever rather than doing it as a hobby while they work other jobs - then it makes some sense to protect the mechanism for those people to get paid.
Oh, but it does. And don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating that musicians should do their stuff for free. I think we should throw out the industry around it and start paying the musicians instead. You know, for their gigs, or even for their recorded music. Maybe the mucisian can monetize by selling their songs for ads, for other media, etc... As long as we don't pay for the studio bosses, record labels, etc... who no longer play a relevant role in today's society.
I think scale and proportion is actually very important for morality. Hit me in the face not so bad, shoot me in the face is far worse.
That's not scale; scale is about numbers. You're talking about severity or degrees of severity which is expressed by the "what" question (punching vs shooting), not by the "how many" question. I also disagree with you that the volume has actually increased that much.
A high-end studio including engineers will cost you roughly 600$ / day, so recording the album will cost you no more than 18000$. t doesn't take a math genius to calculate the insane amounts of money that sticks to peoples hands along the distribution chain.
Ok...so to this I say...
1. I guess it depends on what I mean by pro sounding and what you mean by the money that sticks to people's hands. I have a protools set up and record some good sounding guitar at home - but I can't make shit sound as cool as someone line Randy Staub who did Alice in Chains' Black Gives Way to Blue can....but to get someone like him on my album it's more like $10,000 a track.
Well, that's actually more about skill. And I would be inclined to say that the skill required to write a good song is a lot more important in the overall quality of the product. I have a Logic rig, and I can churn out 100% pro sounding stuff, it's just my song writing that's not up to snuff and the reason why I'm not "hitting it big".
2. Even if you are right and it is $18k, if we make all the end product free - how is this cost recouped? I know I don't have $18k to put into my project easily, and if I do find a way to get that money, I want at least a hope of breaking even one day. Bottom line - if something costs money to produce - it's not unreasonable to expect money from people's use of it.
Well, you could consider it marketing money for your concerts, that would be peanuts in comparison. That said, as mentioned before, I don't think it should be free. It should be much cheaper than what it is today and it should be within a price range that can be covered by ad revenue.
1. CD Sales have droped a staggering amount since 2000. If this is not due to sharing - what caused it? The end of the Vinyl-CD replacement cycle is one factor - as is market demographics and stuff, but the figures are overwhelming.
Do you have a source for this? Do you have non-industry funded research that shows the correlation between piracy and a drop in music sales? In reality, no study has been able to show that sharing has had a major impact. In reality, the average person's monthly entertainment budget has remained pretty much constant over the past decade. It might have shifted from albums to singles or to on-demand TV or video games; but the overall budget is roughly the same. Isn't a bit of a stretch then to claim all those lost revenues for the entertainment biz?
2. Intellectual property was invented to encourage people to spend the time, effort and in some cases dollars it takes to create unique profit and develop new works, ideas, inventions etc....if we want to start cancelling these protections on a wholesale level - then we really need to have a sociological discussion about the pros and cons of such a move. There's areas where IP law now inhibits progress - eg patent abuse in computer companies and drug companies...but then to suggest that it's ok to just ignore copyright without replacing it with a system to otherwise compensate those who make the content seems ill advised to me.
Nobody is talking about dropping IP. It's about sanitizing IP to be more in-line with society's demands and sensitivities; I think we both agree on that, but we disagree on the direction the sanitizing should go.
Although we disagree on everything..great post though....I find all this stuff very interesting
And that's another thing we DO agree on 
Re: Duff: Quit Whining About SOPA and PIPA
I am leaning more towards agreeing with Roger.....the music business needs to full y collapse upon itself and develop an entirely new model....just like the banking industry should have done during the last/ongoing crisis. Keep the Government out of as much as possible. 
Re: Duff: Quit Whining About SOPA and PIPA
I think it says alot when a Roger Waters "gets it".
Shows you some musicians don't put greed over LEARNING TO READ.
It was very obvious that Duff's article smacked of a "alleged" intelligent college-educated person who put his hunger for more money over someone who actually read the bill and what it actually meant.
And his bizarre take of basically not believing it would be that bad, that it's okay for government to hand over that power to protect HIS industry and only his industry is just arrogant and self-important.
I'd like to walk into his house and take every "gift" bottle of wine he got from friends, and pour it into the sink.
When he says, "what in the fuck are you doing Axlin?", I'll respond "you can't share this. Kendall-Jackson wine is protected by the government. Each person has to buy their own bottle, or you're violating wine distribution rights".
Same thing.
Re: Duff: Quit Whining About SOPA and PIPA
As a major fan of Water's era Floyd, I never get the impresion that he was any sort of pro goverment.
Would be curious if Axl commented on this.
- monkeychow
- Rep: 661
Re: Duff: Quit Whining About SOPA and PIPA
I might be oblivious to the specifics here, but I do not believe there is an actual distinction in the law between "design" for clothing which is considered an artistic expression & music or film. Are you sure you're not referring to trademark law (logo design falls in that category).
There is over here. Trademarks are different again.
Here you can register your design for clothing and other things...for example..."speedo" bathers.
http://www.business.gov.au/BusinessTopi … signs.aspx
However even if you couldn't to me it would be a case of two wrongs don't make a right. Failure to protect creativity in one area doesn't justify reducing protection on creativity on another...I'd prefer to see design law fixed if that was the case.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating that musicians should do their stuff for free. I think we should throw out the industry around it and start paying the musicians instead. You know, for their gigs, or even for their recorded music. Maybe the mucisian can monetize by selling their songs for ads, for other media, etc... As long as we don't pay for the studio bosses, record labels, etc... who no longer play a relevant role in today's society.
Ahh..well we do agree on some things then. My real issue is just that people need to be able to make a living as a musician one way or another. Gigging alone seems a little harsh - although obviously it pays the bills for people like Bon Jovi and those at the top but lower down the chain it would be pretty brutal as you get older.
Also - I want acts to create new music. And gigs only there would be no reason for that once you get enough classic hits.
But if there was some hybrid model that could include sharing I guess that would be one thing.
Another issue to me is how to sort the cream of the crop. For better or worse one function of labels and radio in the past was to listen to everything (the demos that came in) and choose what they felt was best (or i guess at least maybe just more likely to sell). One issue to me now is if every band professional and amateur is on youtube, or whatever becomes the new myspace music or whatever...how do we find what's best amongst the clutter...still i guess something for that will sort itself out.
That's not scale; scale is about numbers. You're talking about severity or degrees of severity which is expressed by the "what" question (punching vs shooting), not by the "how many" question. I also disagree with you that the volume has actually increased that much.
Fair enough...but then on a scale basis increasing the numbers seems worse to me too. If 1% of people do something immoral and unethical it's surely better for the community than if 5% do or if 50% do or if 90% do. The act will remain immoral either way but the more you increase the numbers doing it the greater the potential harm that comes from it.
I personally think the volume has increased. For example if I had made a tape copy of a Megadeth record in 1989 then I could share those copies with my friends who are interested to hear megadeth. That limits the 'damage' from that (potential loss of sales - although it's notable that tapes were not a true replacement for records anyway) to only those people personally known to me in real life who have an interest in hearing megadeth or maybe more broadly people I know who enjoy metal and so will take the tape. It's a fairly controlled social circle limited by my real life social network and my ability to produce copies and distribute them physically to my friends. But here in the internet age I can upload that CD to a torrent search engine a forums or whatever where literally anyone worldwide who has an interest in metal or megadeth can grap a copy. It's not reliant on my ability to send them a tape or even of me having any personal knowledge of their existence, name, or that they are looking for music..
This surely means that the amount of potential sharing done per legitimate paid copy of the music is far higher now than it was in the age of tapes and CDrs and so on.
And I would be inclined to say that the skill required to write a good song is a lot more important in the overall quality of the product. I have a Logic rig, and I can churn out 100% pro sounding stuff, it's just my song writing that's not up to snuff and the reason why I'm not "hitting it big".
I can't speak for your music as I've not heard it, but my point is that all musicians are not necessarily audio engineers or have the skills to produce amazing sonic recordings even when they have amazing songwriting skills.
They are separate things I absolutely agree that songwriting is the primary thing and no amount of expense can polish a bad song into a good one. Likewise a great song is still great on bad equipment - but at the same time if you have a great song and also want to make something that's sonically great you need to hire people with sufficient audio engineering skill and that costs money.
Let's say Slash and Axl write a new GNR album together. It's going to be good song writing. Bottom line to me is that those songs will sound better if they spend $100k getting someone like Randy Staub to Mix and Master the record than if they do it themselves on protools.
Sure it would be cool anyway, like I enjoy the song Crash Diet cos I like the lyrics..it's a good song even though it was recorded on comparably bad equipment back then. And I have a protools rig where Axl could come to my house and sing it at professional recording sample rates. But I also think that having a professional mix that output sound is going to sound better than not having that.
I understand it's possible to make records for a fraction of what it used to be, hell i do it on my own as a hobby, but I also still think that to a degree in audio stuff you get what you pay for - and if you want products that sound like stuff like "Black Gives Way to Blue" then unless every band member also has a mixing genius in it...it's going to cost a bit of money to get those kind of results.
Do you have a source for this? Do you have non-industry funded research that shows the correlation between piracy and a drop in music sales?
No but there's a lot of data that shows that sales have dropped in the last 13 years. And it does pretty much correlate to the invention of mp3 and widespread adoption of internet. if the impact is not from sharing - what is it from? Just that modern music is not as good?
In reality, no study has been able to show that sharing has had a major impact. In reality, the average person's monthly entertainment budget has remained pretty much constant over the past decade. It might have shifted from albums to singles or to on-demand TV or video games; but the overall budget is roughly the same.
But that's exactly my broader point. Some people like to claim that they support the artist another way or that they try before they buy and legitimise all their downloads later. Maybe some do. But I also think that the majority of people just have a fixed entertainment budget. They're going to spend $100 a month (or $20 or $2000 or whatever their income allows) of disposable income on fun. Sharing alters where it goes.
Without sharing my $100 is going to be a $20 CD, a $30 DVD, a $50 ps3 game and a $10 bottle of wine. Make it easy to torrent music and now I can buy a $30 bottle of mine. Speed up my bandwith and I can torrent the CD and the DCD, now I can buy 2 ps3 games. Invent tech that makes it easier to pirate ps3 games and then I can just spend my $100 on getting drunk. You're right - the entertainment budget doesn't shift - so it's not like the economy is loosing that money - but the shift in the direction the money goes ends up having sociological effects. If the whole nation is made up of lots of clones of me - and we do this for long enough - then eventually it's no longer profitable to produce anything but my wine...the quality of the CDs movies and games goes down to passionate hobbiest level because all the serious R+D money now goes to where it's going to be made back by my spending dollar - making me new and awesome drinks.
That's an extreme way of looking at it..but fundementally that's what I see as a problem. People will always do creative activities..but you can't reduce the purchase price of a product to $0 and expect no drop in standards unless an adequate alternative model is made to fund it.
Nobody is talking about dropping IP. It's about sanitizing IP to be more in-line with society's demands and sensitivities; I think we both agree on that, but we disagree on the direction the sanitizing should go.
We definitely do agree on that.
For the record I think the SOPA bill was misguided and very badly worded and potentially dangerous. It's not the answer to the problem - but I do think there is a problem.
To me if we're going to basically trash historical copyright models then we're going to need as a society to work out an alternative that also works and encourages people to be creative and invest in art or technology development and all the industries that IP was originally invented to foster.
But seems at the moment no-one is having that conversation..we're all just busy torrenting anything we want and telling the companies they had it coming and the artists that complain that they're too old. For a while that works, but someone needs to put up a new model soon or what happens in 40 years time?
Re: Duff: Quit Whining About SOPA and PIPA
@Russ
Bwhahahahahha... now Duff is backpeddling. What a fuckin' tool. Now he makes a post basically reversing everything he said and basically blames Facebook & Twitter for the misunderstanding and those mother fuckers as being the problem.
Now i've lost even MORE respect for the guy than last week. Good God man, just shut up and admit...
"I was not fully aware of all the details and made a premature statement on the subject. Love my fans, love the support anyway I can get it. xoxo luv Duff LAMF"
That's all he had to say. Instead he's getting political and buttsore about it and continuing to just dig deeper. 
