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jap
Premium
join:2003-08-10
038xx
 ·RoadRunner Cable
| reply to Combat Chuck
WARNING!- heartfelt diatribe
said by Combat Chuck  :
...purchasing songs and then cracking them is not a legal nor acceptable way to bring the service into compliance with your opinion ...
You are forgetting that law follows the social needs of the masses; "law" is nothing more than an attempt to codify best-practice conduct to balance the divergent needs and desires of individuals & groups throughout society. Of course this cannot be perfectly done, only rather crudely done, and one of the biggest challenges is keeping law updated with the ever-fluid, difficult to predict needs, desires and changing behaviors of people. So what's "legal" and what's "acceptable" often depart - as they must and as they should.
What's "acceptable", of course, is highly subjective, situational, and easily moralized. To argue that "acceptable" should just be whatever is in the law books is myopic in the extreme. Remember the failed US law of universal 55 maximum speed limits? You can say all day long that law = "what's correct" but if a large, persistent segment of society doesn't and won't comply then what's broken?, the law or the behavior, needs & desires of the masses?
The middleman's territory between artist & consumer was once large. It started with headhunters prowling the country's gathering places (by surface transit) and ended with a physical sale of a bulky medium in some bulky, neighborhood store. In between there was an involved recording process, an expensive manufacturing process, and inventory & physical distribution challenges. It was the industrial era and artists had, themselves, no way to record & distribute and were utterly dependent on the middleman who could establish & control this large operation. The middle-operator, in turn, required society's legal protection from one end of this lengthy & wildly speculative process to the other. If the safeguards weren't granted by society -in the form of copyrights- then neither artist nor consumer could bridge the gap between them EXCEPT by good ole live performance. But that expansive middle-ground is hardly the reality we live in now and current copyright laws are simply being used to extend hugely profitable, entrenched business interests that fail to serve either the artist or the listener.
But human relationships & practices don't change overnight and during transitional periods I whole-heartily disagree with your statement that the breaking of existing, outdated laws is an inappropriate way to behave just because the laws remain in the books. Effective law makers respond to all kinds of inputs, and dissent plays a vital role in the creation of legislation: it's never a one-sided, morally "clean and clear" process that creates effective law.
In the case of music copyrights, the incredibly fast shrinking and shifting ground that separates creator from listener is really hard to assess: nobody knows what it'll look like in 10 years. In such an environment of unknowns the tendance is to fall back on what is known, the familiar status-quo .... no matter how disjointed established practice is from current reality. Or said another way, when it's not clear where everyone is headed then policy tends to just sit down where it is and wait for people to get there - then establish guidelines for "what's appropriate & right behavior" in that new place. What other choice does policy have? Policy loathes to guess wrongly as that muddies the progression, shames the maker, and must be quickly re-writ. When change comes very fast policy can only sit & wait for the herd to settle somewhere.
Copyrights, of course, will not and should not go away, but in the case of recorded music practices what future rights will look like, who holds them, and for how long is very obviously not going to be what is now the practice. The broker in the middle has a strong, self-serving incentive to "stay the course" - but nobody but the broker (much) needs the broker anymore. Consequently it's that middle-group doing it's utmost to artificially inflate their value by manipulating the legal process, loudly condemning modern creation, archival, and distribution capabilities (as it makes them obsolete), and otherwise just attempting to extend the bell-curve of their own demise.
There will always be pirates, but the vast majority of listeners will happily pay artists, say, $3.50 per album download when they know that 2$ (or so) covers the recording, promo, and sever-bandwidth wuth the remaining left to the artist(s). It's already happening, but this iTunes-like silliness is transitional - as is widely practiced pirating.
I did not spin these opinions out of nowhere - everything writ here has been espoused elsewhere by people far better connect to the issues than I. And the dynamic is similar in other forms of media (books, movies, TV, etc.). But it's music that has the most practitioners, is most widely consumed, and is most readily digitized so the manner in which that art-product gets from artist to listener will remain varied & chaotic for some time. Which is not "bad", in my opinion, it just works to define & illustrate the greatly diminished roll of those who full-filled the middleman roll: their function has been largely automated and they are no longer valuable players.
Only the uninformed, the not too bright, or compulsive traditionalists could come to a different conclusion of the basics trends in how music will be recorded, distributed, and listened to. I also believe/hope that recorded music, for reasons of ubiquity, will loose value as a listening experience and people will seek more and varied live performances.
And the whole issue of the role of artwork in society and how much does music become partly a commodity once recorded ... ack! ... that will have to be tackled elsewhere. Thanks to anyone foolish and or bored enough to hang-in through my entire spiel. | |
Combat Chuck
Too Many Cannibals
Premium
join:2001-11-29
Erie, PA
| I think it's pretty safe to say that if you agree to a contract with the intent of breaking said contract (ie: you agree to the TOS of Itunes; which prohibits cracking; and then proceed to crack the files) you are in the wrong; or should contracts now be flexible (I agreed to the contract 2 minutes ago, but times have changed now that I have the files...).
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Japan-- Now with 30% more climbable telephone poles!! | |
jap
Premium
join:2003-08-10
038xx
·RoadRunner Cable
| On the face of it I agree, but the agreement(s) between two party's don't exist in a vacuum - they are both the product of & subservient to a larger social construct. So it depends on your assessment of the other party's relationship to the contract: was the service/product created to exploit a (temporary) social environment and the ToC writ to satisfy the company's due-diligence and operational liabilities within that reality? OR is that service/product at the core of why that company exists & is their best assessment of what society needs - which casts a different light altogether on a ToC. In the case of iTunes it's exceedingly clear: Apple didn't create the product, is not in the publishing business, and did not & does not expect that iTunes will be a longterm venture. Apple created & uses iTunes as a response to shifting realities in music distribution and saw an opportunity to create & lock-in market-share (via proprietary file format) of an emerging hardware device that they do have a vested interest in. They say this themselves.
iTunes simply extends the outdated royalties-to-copyright holder model by taking a half-step into the inevitable commodity-status future of digitized music. It's an obvious and excellent business maneuver, but nothing that serves the art or consumer communities. So if the methods of distributing music is manipulated from the middle and both the producers (artists) and consumers are not happy with their options do you revere the middleman's contracts as highly as if you felt they were playing fair? Of course not. It's silly to pretend that respected practices should be held in the same regard as less respectable ones: and courts don't attempt to do so even if legislators do. | |
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