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

I think in our discussion we are sort of taking the burden of musicians' living on the public. For some reason, today people should be figuring out how a musician and record companies should make their money. But basically, it is immoral of them to place people in such a position. Because when a record company (or a musician, father of the family) says that they are going to earn money by selling copies in the age of digital technology, it is basically relying all your livelihood on a business model, proved to be unsuccessful. Yet each time they do it and expect everyone else to consider themselves bound by a moral choice to "support the artist". But it is not the burden of the people, it shouldn't be. In fact, it is a direct responsibility of the "industry" to figure that out because this is what they are paid for - its their job to figure out ways to pay musicians. And there are many nice ways to use Internet to make money. It has been said a million times - set up a torrent site with ads that they say bring millions and be okay. Things like the pirate bay and spotify should have been done by those global publishers, if they had been doing their job. So when we are speaking of moral choices and moral arguments one has to build for himself in order to do what is naturally available today one click away - I think it should be the other way around, really. And when a composer goes to a site and starts writing letters, asking people not to share his music, this strikes me as being pretty unethical and single-minded. Besides, its like fighting a large wave - in the end, the person will only get angry with the "corrupt generation of the Internet". That's one point. The second is the practical side of things. No matter what we eventually rule out - whether its good to copy or bad, copying technology only gets better. And very soon it will be easy to have a catalogue of Universal, Warner and EMI on one flash drive. Preventing copying, on the other hand, is getting sloppier and sloppier - it is becoming more difficult. The diversity of standards and devices increases, free operating systems come into play, systems with no Windows registry and no DRM. In order to control copying, they would have to ban linux, which is unrealistic. So copying will have to be right. It is part of our lives, whether we want it or not. And I cannot imagine a society where people could get any information and works of art for no price, but are trained to think that it is not good and instead go to online shops and pay, pay, pay. This just doesn't add up. L.V.