quote:Originally posted by Clandestineguitarplayer: The producers are the only ones who get hurt, I promise, and they have plenty of money to spare, with every record deal I have ever heard of, the artist gets paid the same regardless of who 'steals' their music... Usually, (and this excludes Metallica) the artists arent terribly butt-hurt by people listening to their music for free, its usually quite high praise... I wouldn't mind, thats for shizzle! And on the concerts money making thing, 1/4 of the money usually goes to the venue 1/4 to the producers and 1/2 goes straight into the band's pockets, so in that way, pirating raises their popularity and more people show up to their concerts to pay them... Those are my thoughts anyway... From my experience...
You're saying royalties on record sales are usually NOT part of a recording contract?
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I think the more relevant question is if an artist (for example, Clandestineguitarplayer) creates a work (for example, a post on a forum), do they then have the legal or moral right to make two exact duplicates of that work and distribute them via internet so that anyone can just take them free of charge?
quote:Originally posted by Clandestineguitarplayer: ...with every record deal I have ever heard of, the artist gets paid the same regardless of who 'steals' their music...
This would depend on what you mean by "artist". If you are referring to studio musicians, then yes, they get paid a flat fee. If you are referring to the songwriters (or more specifically, the copyright holders, who may or may not be the studio musicians), they are paid a mechanical royalty based on record* sales.
The last I checked, the lowest legal statuatory rate for mechanical royalties was 6.25 cents per song per record sold to be paid to the copyright holder (after the copyright holders' mechanical royalties for initial sales recoup the advance for recording costs), though this is the most widely accepted broken law in the entertainment industry, perhaps any industry; A typical first album contract for a band will pay the copyright holders 5 cents per song per record sold, with the added insult that the record company and the songwriters share the copyright.
* "Record" is an outdated term, but is still used as an umbrella term in the industy to refer to any form of recorded media.
EDIT: I just looked it up, and my info is a little outdated. As of January 1, 2006 the statutory mechanical rate is as follows:
9.10 Cents for songs 5 minutes or less or 1.75 Cents per minute or fraction thereof over 5 minutes.
quote:Originally posted by Lisa: Without debating the questionable point of whether an MP3 is a "perfect copy", I'm not sure why scale is relevant. If something is wrong, it's wrong. If something isn't wrong, it isn't wrong.
So are you saying that making a mix CD is morally wrong, but it's no big deal because it's not worth enforcing? Are you saying that something is only wrong if it's big enough to be worth enforcing? That lack of enforcement makes anything essentially moral?
I can't imagine you'd hold those views, and I'm not suggesting that you do. I'm simply pointing out that they seem to be corrolaries of what you're saying. If I've misunderstand what you're saying, could you correct me?
I don't discuss "morals," as I don't subscribe to a specific moral code. Right and wrong get awfully muddled, sometimes. Ethics and legality usually suffice for me, and here I'm talking legally.
If I make a mix tape and give it to you, legally it's an infringement of the music industry's copyright. However, the music industry recognizes that enforcing that is a) insane, and b) counterproductive, since they know that more sales are produced from word of mouth than from advertising. However, if I make a mix torrent and post it, now I have undertaken to distribute it to literally everyone, which may or may not impact sales but certainly violates the copyright on a scale that the companies cannot ignore.
quote:But maybe you're right. Maybe file sharing will make it less likely for people to buy some things. I don't see why that's a problem. My brother has a collection of the old Speed Racer cartoons on DVD. If I borrow that, it's something I don't need to buy any more. What's the difference between me making a copy for myself before returning it or not?
Again, I see a difference between you copying it from your brother and you putting it online.
quote:But I don't like subjective law. And there's no objective point on the spectrum from mix CD to torrent server where you can say reasonably that harm is being done.
ALL law enforcement is subjective. Police do not arrest every speeder, or even half of them. The reality of limited law enforcement resources and the need to keep traffic flowing smoothly precludes even attempting to pull over every speeder, so they go for the ones that are noticeably faster than everyone else or otherwise drawing attention to themselves. That doesn't make it legal to drive six miles over the limit just because you're unlikely to be caught.
quote:I don't see it as infringement.
I'm pretty sure that, like most laws, you don't get to define it.
Again, I agree that the system must be changed, that the music industry in particular needs to change, that free sharing often results in increased sales, and that the entire creative marketplace must come to terms with the Internet. Also, if Disney insists on keeping Mickey out of the public domain, they should give up all the money they've made off of public domain stories over the years.
I think the reason I've kept hammering is due to my reaction to this: "If something is wrong, it's wrong. If something isn't wrong, it isn't wrong."
I so disagree with this I hardly know where to begin. Punching your friend on the arm vs. punching your friend on the arm 1,000 times. Sprinkling rose petals on your loved one vs dumping 3 metric tons of rose petals on your loved one. Letting one trusted friend have the password to your e-mail vs. posting your password on a blog. By your logic, if an excess is damaging, the smallest example of it should be considered equally as damaging.
Frankly, people with no gray areas in their lives scare the crap out of me.
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Giving a mix tape to someone might well be fair use. That hasn't been settled in law, and if someone took significant creative effort in constructing it, it might be sufficient to have it exempted under fair use.
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quote:Originally posted by fugu13: Giving a mix tape to someone might well be fair use. That hasn't been settled in law, and if someone took significant creative effort in constructing it, it might be sufficient to have it exempted under fair use.
My university music classes regularly involved CDs that were passed out to the class, or posted on the class website (which was password protected). That's an educational context though, and pretty much impossible to prosecute.
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Plus, your school almost certainly pays for a site license of some sort. Most universities do.
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But I don't see how that could cover every recording that was passed out. There were plenty of musical genres and specific recordings that had to be from dozens of labels.
But yeah, there were fees paid for some of the music we used, I know that.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: But I don't see how that could cover every recording that was passed out. There were plenty of musical genres and specific recordings that had to be from dozens of labels.
But yeah, there were fees paid for some of the music we used, I know that.
Given the number of music programs that exist worldwide, it seems plausible that there is some company whose business involves negotiating licenses so that they could bundle and sell these sorts of libraries to educational programs and other similar things. If I had to guess, I'd suspect that the school probably obtained licensing through something like that, but this is just an off the cuff guess, so I could very well be wrong about it.
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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Well, practically speaking such a business would be undesirable to a music department, or at least to the teachers who were using the library.
While it's fine for the average consumer to buy, say, the BMI classics collection, or some other big box or series on classical music, music departments carry huge ranges of recordings ordered by different teachers for different purposes. I want to say my library had at least 20,000 recordings in it, but I don't know the actual number. It could be more. And have a single recording of any piece is not enough for many teachers. If you are taking a class focusing on the works of a single composer in one genre, such as Mozart or Bartok String Quartets or Bramhs Piano works, all classes I took at university, the teacher is likely to assign up to 10 alternative recordings of a single piece, for comparison.
Besides, half of the material passed out to us was from the personal libraries of teachers, and I know no-one got paid for those. But studying recorded music is a bit more complicated than most other subjects. It requires access to a pretty broad range of material that would seem redundant in another subject. I mean, who would need 5 printings of 1984? But you really do need 5 recordings of a Bach Solo Partita if you want to have an understanding of its history. More than 5, in fact.
Edit: That said, there are such libraries for educational purposes online- they are subsidiaries of major textbook publishers, mainly. The recordings offered are sub-par, most of the time, and would only really suit for an elementary school curriculum or a music appreciation class.
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There are licensing clearing houses that cover just about everything published in the US. It doesn't work like purchasing a library; you don't receive copies. Instead, you receive the right to use any copy covered by the license, acquired through independently legal means, in many ways that would be potentially infringing without the license (such as distributing copies to a class).
We're talking licenses that cover all music published in the US by pretty much any label above the very small since copyright came into existence, that sort of thing. Any remaining works can probably be considered fair use.
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