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

On Tuesday 29 June 2010 03:18 pm, Mark Knecht wrote: I think it's important to distinguish the importance of the continued viability of artistic careers from the assertion that their viability must continue in the same form it's taken for the century or so that the recording industry has existed. There were plenty of artists around before it became possible to perform a song once and sell it thousands of times over on pieces of plastic. There'll be plenty of artists still around once they've realized that pieces of plastic are no longer necessary and an intangible copy of a performance does not inherit the value of that performance. It's just the industries exploiting them that'll go away, and the artists who can't adapt will be replaced by artists who can. Proponents of "intellectual property" call free culture proponents anti- free-market, but it's they, not us, who are pushing for more and more regulation. All these lopsided, DMCA-type laws, all the perpetual copyright term extensions and treaties, they're just more and more sandbags piled up in the face of a tsunami of market forces. Rob