senator coleman dares question

8 Responses to senator coleman dares question

1. sidereal says:

   August 1, 2003 at 1:25 pm

   Bad html in the mp3 link there.
2. lessig says:

   August 1, 2003 at 1:34 pm

   fixed
3. Brian says:

   August 1, 2003 at 2:34 pm

   Maybe its just me and you caught me in a bad mood but I feel no remorse for “ripping or sharing” a.k.a. “stealing” music according to Sen Coleman. The artists already get screwed by the labels who are just in it for the greed. I will support artists by going to shows/buying merchandise (which they tend to make more off of), not by buying CD’s. When will everyone wake up and see that the recording industry has been acting like extortionists all these years (settled a lawsuit out of court pretty much convincing me about the price fixing of CD’s). I guess I get too frustrated in this country when what really matters is money. Call me uninformed or mis-read but I am just plain tired and I have a feeling if the founding fathers were around today they would be just livid with us.
4. Joshua says:

   August 1, 2003 at 3:04 pm

   I think it’s just accepted these days that the RIAA’s efforts against, e.g., Napster, are all about controlling avenues of distribution, and nothing about artist’s rights. As a recording artist, I was thrilled with the amount of exposure my indy label releases got on Napster. It drove traffic to our website and resulted in sales and fan interest. The RIAA didn’t care about that. My band won’t sell enough CDs in the course of 10 years to pay a single RIAA lobbyist for a week. Since there was no benefit to the RIAA, my music was expendable to the RIAA.
   I personally find it disgusting that in the course of our “free market” system, we accord industry megaliths like the RIAA the right to determine who is an artist, and therefore what is art. This is so formidable a task that even the U.S. Supreme Court has not been willing to take it on. (An obscenity definition yes, but whether a work has artistic merit–no.)
5. sidereal says:

   August 1, 2003 at 4:16 pm

   What irritates me about the entire dialogue, and the related conversation about the place of intellectual property law in society, is that the unifying justification for the status quo is this:

   “Without patent/copyright/distribution/trade secret/foo protection, nobody would make music/software/books/inventions/bar, because there would be no profit in it”

   That’s it. The single and only justification for intellectual property. And yet it is demonstrably false on its face, and can be disproven with about 8 seconds of thought. People have been making music for thousands of years and writing books for hundreds of years without the slightest protections of intellectual property. People donate software requiring only attribution in the license on a daily basis. My favorite musician du jour is MC Frontalot, who derives 0 dollars from his hard work. This justification is false.

   The real justification for the existence of these rights, which nobody attempting to defend them is going to tell you, is protection of enormous profits available to large corporations who can consolidate and control distribution of the intellectual property.

   To distract people from this fact, they inundate us with this meme that suggests that the violation of those rights is ‘piracy’ and ‘theft’, despite the fact that the real analogy is a ‘conversation’ where information is exchanged, because ‘piracy’ sounds much more dangerous and illict than the mechanical reduplication of magnetic bits.
6. Rae says:

   August 1, 2003 at 5:44 pm

   Your quote on the justification for property law is intriguing to me – as a writer, I’ve been writing for upwards of a decade with *very* little monetary compensatoin for my work in general and zero for the creative endeavors I prize most highly. What has always counted most to me, and most of the other writers and artists I know, is having that dialogue with the people they’re reaching that lets them know they’re reaching someone.

   Yes, we all need to have a way to make money enough to live on, but I’m beginning to believe that copyright shouldn’t extend beyond a writer or artist’s own death – that it should be in place to help them survive during their life, NOT to make other people rich after the person who brought the art has passed away.
7. Bruce says:

   August 1, 2003 at 7:19 pm

   Creating music/art/inventions/etc is like having children… people are going to do it regardless of whether they get paid to or not. This is why intellectual “property” laws are utter bullshit.
8. joe says:

   August 2, 2003 at 9:20 am

   Here’s an interesting thought experiment: What if a law were passed that made compensation for Art illegal? (set aside for a moment other, less-artistic types of creation… consideration of which in this context would negate the “knowledge economy”.)

   Would such artistic creation cease? Absolutely not… there is a much more primitive, intrinsic need that creation fulfills and that would not dissappear. In this strange world we would likely not have IP… or cheap-ass corporate art.

   However, if you wanted a sculpture installed in the courtyard of your organization (like the Calder at Stanford Law) you’d have to convince artists to contribute out of principle rather than compensation (that is, this could broadly affect the values of society in general…).

   I know this thought experiment has a lot of holes… but it’s still fun to think about the circumstances that would trivialize IP.

Comments are closed.