Re: Napster: thoughts and comments?

From: Emlyn (onetel) (emlyn@one.net.au)
Date: Tue Jul 11 2000 - 11:19:35 MDT


> > I'm not a terribly big fan of all things big & commercial; however,
> > this copyright issue will cut to all levels. How does anyone make money
if
> > everything can be pirated so fantastically well?
>
> The archives of this list contain many discussions about how artists
> make money in a world without copyrights. It never ceases to amaze me
> that people who claim to be creative have such a pathetic lack of
> imagination for business models, blindly assuming that the standard
> old method of selling recordings is all there is.
>
> You can also check out the archives of the Freenet project for more
> discussions about the topic (http://freenet.sourceforge.net/).
>
> --
> Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
> are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
> for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC

Ouch. I'm reeling (really)...

I'm afraid you'll have to spell it out for me, I'm suffering from a pathetic
lack of imagination. If my entire audience has the idea that they need never
(and should never) pay to listen, and reality maps onto this by way of
pirated material which is incredibly easy to access (easier than the
paid-for stuff), then how do I get paid?

I can see it with software, especially where large orgs have an interest; if
they want specialised stuff, they are going to have to pay for it one way or
another. Open Source looks really good to me in this light; saves orgs
money, lets the code be free, very cool. I find "work for hire"; ie: losing
the ability to access code I've written for someone else, really annoying,
so something that might change some of that is great. I must say I'm also
not such a crank about piracy in the software business, at least at the
consumer level, because of the balancing factor; someone is still there to
pay the bills.

But with music, who's paying the bills? There's no big orgs who are the end
consumers; just joe public, who wants his mp3 for free.

I think the same thing goes for books, at such time as they go digital.

Emlyn
(I'm crusing around freenet, and can't see anything about making money from
free information so far. I'll keep looking)



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