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

On Thu, Jul 01, 2010 at 07:48:00PM -1000, david wrote: "Jazz is not dead. It just smells funny." -- Frank Zappa Heh, speaking of Zappa: "I hear the people of this land enjoy traditional jazz" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ond09u9bekA Back to the OP: with regard to ASCAP, I joined it last year at the behest of a friend who suggested I get my publishing situation together. If this nonsense is what ASCAP going to use my US$25 for, I will not be renewing. With regard to the general discussion about money, publishing, copyright, and commerce, I've given up. I think we've made a total of US$30 gross-- altogether-- from the CD we put out, and it cost us about US$180 in out-of-pockeet costs (studio time, mostly), and another US$200 or so in capital equipment (headphones, headphone amps, cables, etc., which will get amortized over the course of other things). The studio time came out of band funds saved up from previous gigs, and the equipment came out of my own pocket. Working on it was a joy, but the realization that such efforts will never result in anything more than just costing money, kind of took the wind out of it, though at least it was POSSIBLE to do it on a shoestring, which was satisfying in and of itself. Humans will create stuff (music, code, art) because humans like-- or NEED-- to create stuff. The question of whether we get paid for it or not is in the hands of a system that is largely arbitrary and often outright malicious (obvious example: corporate executives getting paid massive sums to destroy the environment, cheat pensioners, and sack workers). In the case of music and art-- and to get back on-topic--, corporations and organizations like ASCAP figured out a long time how to control the means of producing and distributing music, and for a long time they forced musicians to enrich those corporations and organizations in order to fulfill a basic human need for expression and creation. Happily, they are no longer in control, we have Linux and the GPL and Creative Commons and Moore's Law and digital distribution and the internet, thus art and music and code can be made without sucking up to the bastards. Victory for us. But how about getting paid? That's a much bigger issue-- bigger than art or copyright. I think our whole global economic system is broken, and I'm not surprised to see it teetering on the brink of a total collapse that is long overdue. I often riff on the English word "value" to indicate this disconnect, much like RMS has so often riffed on the English word "freedom". It goes like this: definition #1 of "value" is what something is worth in money and/or trade, something is "valuable" in a monetary sense, but definition #2 of "value" is the moral or social por spiritual or ethical or religious sense of "values"-- what is important, what is right or wrong. Our economic system has disconnected the two from each other, and has gone schizoid: what is "valuable" in an economic sense is often the complete opposite from what is "valuable" from a moral, ethical, or social sense. "Value" #1 is often the inverse of "Value" #2. Such a society is bound to be ill, and such a system cannot survive. Maybe it's just my getting older-- and my formative years occurring during the "NO FUTURE" days of punk rock and hardcore, and the Reagan/Thatcher and the Boesky/Milken Wall Street feeding frenzy--, but the more repetition I've seen in these patterns of discussion over the past three or four decades, the more a nihilistic streak comes out, and I'm tempted to wish that the whole corrupt edifice would just crumble, already, and be done with it. But what would take its place? That's the hard question. I predict that the next evolutionary step would be to apply the GPL or Creative Commons to money: to run an entire economy-- or sections of it for starters-- in an open-source kind of way. Over the past decade I've found alternative currencies interesting, such as Timebanks, LETS, etc., Maybe there's some promise there, but it's still very early to say. Sorry for the long digression there, but I guess I felt I had to say it. -ken