Re: [LAU] ASCAP Assails Free-Culture, Digital-Rights Groups

On Wednesday 30 June 2010 08:37 am, Dave Phillips wrote: My company and I hold plenty of copyrights. Or do copyrights only count to you if they result in royalty payments? "My advice, try making your living selling buggies for a few years and then let me know how you feel about automobiles." "My advice, try making your living as an elevator operator for a few years, then let me know how you feel about the new ones with all those buttons." "My advice, try making your living as an oil refiner for a few years, and then let me know how you feel about windmills." It's inevitable that people who subscribe to a business model that's still dominant but on its way out will rail against the forces making that business model unsustainable, call those advancing the opposing technology all kinds of names, and pretend the status quo will remain in force indefinitely. But doing so doesn't make a business model any more sustainable in the face of change. I pay for software, books, movies and music. Probably more than most people, though not using Windows or MacOS at all pretty much limits my software expenses to things like Wii games. But geez, look around you. If you can't see that young people don't see digital representations of things as having the same value as physical objects, and that some of those young people are going to be lawmakers in another couple decades, you're in denial. When works were tied to physical objects -- CDs, vinyl, magnetic tape -- it was easy to perceive the value of the whole package. But typing: cp davephillips-springof23.ogg /mnt/mp3-player/songs doesn't instantly create value the way building a second copy of a car would, no matter how badly copyright proponents would like to pretend it does. Even copying an LP to a tape created more value than that, back in the day. Rob