<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 11:18 PM, Mark Knecht <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:markknecht@gmail.com">markknecht@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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Anyway, I don't suppose my views are very popular among the majority<br>
of folks that might be reading this. I actually think it's very<br>
important that artists be paid a living wage. Once we start bringing<br>
the 0.1% of them that are monster money makers into the discussion it<br>
gets pretty crazy pretty quickly but the 99.9% of them that cannot<br>
make a living really are, in my opinion, hurt financially by all of<br>
this.<br>
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Keep in mind that this is not _only_ about the headliner - it's also<br>
about composers, arrangers, back-up musicians, etc, that never make a<br>
penny from the band playing live.<br>
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Cheers,<br>
<div><div></div><div class="h5">Mark<br>
<br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br><br>Hey Mark!<br>I like the points you make, but in my opinion, having discussed copyright a lot and working<br>directly with major labels and publishers as my day job, I can tell you that the link that we make<br>
between making copies of artists' work and their wages have nothing in common. Copies<br>almost never benefited musicians and when you are downloading music off of torrents, trust me -<br>you are not making any musician poor - I see those contracts and in real life 90% of musicians<br>
don't get a penny anyway, even if you are buying it. This is just how it works. This is how it always<br>worked. In fact, if you look around, you will see that since the come of Internet streets of cities did<br>not become filled with starving musicians. That's because they are not really starving.<br>
<br>It is important that artists be paid wages, if they choose to be professionals (nobody is forcing them<br>to do music, btw, it should be a calling, ideally), but it is also important to not put the burden of<br>responsibility on people who simply know how to use modern technology. Even if we force people<br>
to think that copying is bad, several generations more and a concept of NOT copying will be alien to<br>people. Copying becomes better and better and in 10-20 years I bet you would be able to copy all<br>book ever written to a small device within a couple of minutes. It is not science fiction anymore. And<br>
artists will continue to create and have wages.<br><br>Just to try to bring in some real life, none of my musicians friends, who are professionals, make money<br>byselling copies of their work - none. And my musician friends range from computer music composers<br>
who write for games and movies, to rock, folk and classical musicians. They all live fine and don't care<br>about copies. Seriously. Looking around I do not see a problem at all.<br><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Louigi Verona<br>
<a href="http://www.louigiverona.ru/">http://www.louigiverona.ru/</a><br>