This is nothing more than a thinly-disguised allegory about piracy in the music industry. There are several big differences between the music and the software industry which I won't go into, except to say that: even taking this story at face value, for the developers to then start suing everyone downloading the fake copies of the app would still be a huge dick move.
From a business/industry perspective (ignoring for now the ethics of piracy or the wisdom of combating it with mass lawsuits), the biggest difference between digital software and digital music is that lots of software providers are still providing value from distribution.
Especially with database-driven apps and SaaS products, distribution (hosting) is still most of what you're paying for. If someone leaked the back end source code for Github or Dropbox, of course there would be people who would host them for themselves and avoid paying, but I can't imagine it would cut into their revenues at all.
But with music, as soon as it's released in a digital format, anyone with an internet connection has near-frictionless access—the music creators are no longer offering any value from distribution other than the convenience of online stores like iTunes or the artwork and collectibility of a physical CD. The music industry and smaller musical groups/labels are certainly figuring this out, and experimenting with ways of offering something of value. Removing DRM was a big win because DRM did nothing except ruin the supposed convenience of online purchases. Cloud and subscription services (both pay and ad-supported) offer convenience and even better immediate availability than piracy.
Nine Inch Nails seem to be one of the few bands who are able to look into the future. They offer most(all?) of their music for free to download and make their money touring and selling other merchandise.
In a future with rampant piracy, what I see is a whole lot less music and software. We won't even notice. It's not like we'll wake up and suddenly apps will be gone. We probably won't even be able to measure a decrease year-over-year in app production. What we'll never notice is that twice as many apps or ten times as many apps would have been created, or would have had much better quality, if the creators had been properly incentivized.
In a future with draconian copyright enforcement, what I see is a whole lot less music and software. We won't even notice. It's not like we'll wake up and suddenly apps will be gone. We probably won't even be able to measure a decrease year-over-year in app production. What we'll never notice is that twice as many apps or ten times as many apps would have been created, or would have had much better quality, if we had a more reasonable legal framework and creators weren't terrified of being sued because their creation was "too similar" to something else or transformed or remixed previous work or used/re-implemented an API without permission or ...
What a lot of people seem to lose sight of is that IP is supposed to be a compromise - somewhere between producers and consumers. It gives producers temporary property rights on something that is not naturally rivalrous or excludable in order to give them an incentive to produce said goods.
These days, that compromise is, in some ways, probably tilted too far towards producers (or some categories of producers at least), but with no intellectual property at all, that would tilt things too far the other way.
I think you are absolutely wrong about this. You might be correct when it comes to mid- to low level professional music/software. But the threshold to producing and releasing music and software is getting lower all the time.
These days, kids can go online and find tons and tons of instructional material and peer support for learning to play musical instruments or make software. They can noodle around at home with amazingly cheap equipment, record using the best recording software in the world at levels of fidelity only dreamt of a few years ago, and release it to the public without paying a single dime.
I think we'll see amateur music and free/open software quickly fill the gap left by professional musicians. And people will keep finding ways of financing their love (playing music). In fact, I don't know many of my favorite musicians today who make a living from their music. They all work day jobs. Music is their passion. If anything, they lose money from releasing albums.
And people will keep finding ways of financing their love (playing music). In fact, I don't know many of my favorite musicians today who make a living from their music. They all work day jobs.
I think this new cultural line of thought of "in this day and age with the tools we have why would you need a full day job support for ..." (replace ... with making music, running a blog, developing games, etc) is pure arrogant bullshit. Yes, you can have hobbies, and side projects, and some might excel at doing them for a while. But doing your craft as an actual full time job is the only way to reach, and maintain, your full potential.
I don't see where I said that I endorsed this state of affairs. I would love it if people who make music could make a living off it with less of a struggle. I'm just pointing out the fact that they don't, today. Somehow, there's still music being made.
I just don't see a realistic turn of events where suddenly everyone is paying for CDs again. I also don't think creativity will stop because the money does.
Also, I think you are the one spouting pure arrogant bullshit when you completely dismiss amateur production. Just because you can't squeeze in hours of practice time outside your work schedule doesn't mean other people aren't doing it, right now. In fact there are tons of hugely talented musicians out there who aren't making a living off their music.
edit: Oh, I think I misread your intent with the "pure arrogant bullshit" thing, sorry for turning harsh. We don't really disagree, I completely agree that having to work a day job to support a music "career" is crap. On the other hand, I don't really see how it's ever been much different, except for a few lucky people who made it huge the golden eras of vinyl and CDs.
>In fact, I don't know many of my favorite musicians today who make a living from their music. They all work day jobs.
What a nightmare. You mean I have to do this job I hate for the rest of my life because I should want to do the thing I actually like for free? Is there really no value in it at all?
People are still "making it", whatever that means. But, yeah. Welcome to the reality of 90% of all musicians, actors, artists, entrepreneurs out there.
90% of musicians make music nobody wants that bad. We're talking about people who make music that people do want, and those people not paying for it for no other reason than they don't have to.
People who make products we want badly enough to need one of our own should be compensated for their efforts. They should not have to go out and play it in clubs, or sell you a t-shirt. If you want a copy of their song, you should compensate them. There are always going to be 90% of artists whose art is not popular enough to earn them a living. The problem we're discussing is that of the people whose music is very popular, but is being taken illegally without their permission.
Face it, we're not born with a burning desire to buy Metallica albums. You grow up listening to radio or watching tv, getting exposed to certain types of music (typically between 2 and 6 minutes, most on 4/4, with accompanying lyrics sung by one or two artists) and that's the music you'll end up wanting "that bad" -- pure coincidence?
Artists who succeed following traditional models (who, incidentally, are the most supportive of draconian copyright laws) are the ones who marketed themselves more heavily and got more access to traditional media: they went on TV, did interviews and concerts, paid for airplay... -- without any of that, they wouldn't be "popular". To do this, they had to borrow a lot of money from their label, and often will see very little financial reward.
So why they should not have to go out and sell you a t-shirt, instead of borrowing from a label to buy (increasingly more irrelevant) airplay? What's the big deal ?
The argument is essentially that piracy is okay because 90% of artists are never going to earn their living from music. 90% of artists do not create a product that appeals to enough people for them to earn a living selling that product. 10% create something popular enough that they might be able to earn a living at it.
How those products came to be popular socially is completely irrelevant. You're saying, let's not compensate them for being great musicians who created a recording I want a copy of. Let's instead require them to be in the business of selling clothes because I respect the value of a t-shirt more than the art they created that made me give a shit about a shirt with their name on it.
No, what I'm saying is that we're not compensating them for being great musicians, we're compensating their corporate sponsors for being great producers and marketeers.
So I'd rather compensate them for being great t-shirt sellers, it doesn't really make any difference and it will probably guarantee them more cash.
> Artists who succeed following traditional models (who, incidentally, are the most supportive of draconian copyright laws) are the ones who marketed themselves more heavily and got more access to traditional media: they went on TV, did interviews and concerts, paid for airplay... -- without any of that, they wouldn't be "popular".
Sometimes (maybe mostly). Other times it's because the artist is actually good and people buy their stuff just by word of mouth (Metallica is actually more an example of this). I think it's easier to tell in hindsight which is which. Milli Vanilli vs. Led Zeppelin, for instance.
The traditional role of the record company wasn't to manufacture music and shove it down our throats, but to be the filter--find the good musicians and sign them up. While I agree that there is a lot of manufactured crap out there, I do think that you can't dismiss all pop music because there are actually artists out there that are good and popular.
Incidentally, I think the real revolutionary thing that napster did was stop the record companies from being the filter, at least in our minds. Being able to try out any weird music I liked was liberating and when I found some bands I liked I could look at that user's whole library and use it as a primitive recommendation engine. I was able to find way more indie stuff and it effectively gave some of the filtering controls over to me.
If you only reward amateurs then amateur content is all you will get. Some skills take decades to master. The world you describe will never produce a Mozart.
This is quite ironic, considering that Mozart made most of his (relatively little) money by touring and composing for wealthy patrons. Somebody else made much more money out of him: sheet printers, who also ended up being the real force behind original legislation on copyright.
Plus ça change...
It's not ironic. He made his living (little as it might have been) by doing what he wanted to do. He wasn't cleaning toilets on the side to supplement his hobby of composing. Other people making more money off his work doesn't change anything. His passion supported him financially.
He wasn't relying on copyright laws, which is what the parent poster was implicitly talking up with his statement; i.e. a world without copyright laws did in fact produce a Mozart, and it will keep producing it regardless of legislation.
Exactly: gigs, concerts. This is how musicians make the bulk of their money when they are locked into shitty record deals. And it provides an experience people are more than happy to pay for. Free music drives concert ticket sales (ie. radio singles promote new touring bands).
The point is that it was possible for him to make enough money at his trade to move beyond the amateur stage. It's not clear that many people will be able to do this now, at least not those that can't cultivate a healthy live following for whatever reason.
Interestingly, Mozart got paid to write music for his patrons. Today, I don't see any bands being willing to write music for payment. Could I get Elton John to write a ballad for my S.O., for instance?
I'm not describing the world that I want. I'm describing what I think is what is happening.
At the same time, I don't think you can say that we'll only get Rebecca Black in the future, you can't know that. Mozart had a lot of factors playing into his level of success (timing, the right parents, innate skill, etc). At the same time, Mozart lived before albums or musical copyright, and worked under the patronage system. It's possible we'll see a return of that as well, if the current model completely breaks down.
Who here has seen the webcomic world? Quite a few webcomic artists make enough money to support themselves through donations and the selling of merchandise.
Many people seem to be attacking your statement for being counter-intuitive. I will attack it for going against the observed reality of the past 10-15 years. In that time, piracy has grown significantly. Yet in that time, I guarantee you the rate of software development has increased dramatically by any metric you want to look at. I can't say the same thing for music, because I don't know how you would measure how much music is bring released, but anecdotally I will say that I have discovered a lot of music with a very small fan base through the Internet and small regional labels.
Also, with software we can empirically look at the history of IP law and see that a huge amount of software that is fundamental even today was created before any sort of software patents were awarded (and presumably, before those people ever even considered monetizing software through government-protected monopoly on distribution).
I think it requires a naive and backwards view of human psychology to assume that money is the sole or primary incentive to create quality music or software. In fact, I surmise that anyone capable of producing top notch content would discover a way to do so without current IP protection laws.
>I think it requires a naive and backwards view of human psychology to assume that money is the sole or primary incentive to create quality music or software.
When will you make it? In the evening when you're off from work? What about my marriage? My kids? They all have to suffer because people think they have a right to my effort for free?
> I will say that I have discovered a lot of music with a very small fan base through the Internet and small regional labels.
Meaning that they probably have day jobs and don't produce as much music as they could if they were able to work at it full time. This may or may not have anything to do with piracy, but I think the point of fewer digital goods being produced is one to consider.
But these particular musicians making as much or more music is only part of the puzzle.
The same digital technology that makes piracy easier is what made it possible for baddox to find them in the first place. It is hard to imagine solutions to the problem of music piracy that wouldn't also make it harder to find these musicians. After all, music piracy has become easy because music is easy to copy and distribute... which is also why it has become easier to find the niche musicians you like.
Suppose you're right (though I don't think you are) and we successfully clamp down on music piracy so that these musicians can more easily monetize their small fan bases and spend more time making music. Does baddox care about this music if, in this alternate world, he never discovers them?
That is pure myth. Do we not already have 'rampant piracy', as the music/tv/film/etc industry would say -- indeed, we have had it for 10 years. And what is the result? Well, it pretty much looks like we have more of everything than we ever had before! Has there been a great 'dying off of culture'? Do you have less good stuff to enjoy -- music, film, tv, software -- than in 1995 or before? Is anyone going to say that?! It seems ridiculous.
And this is more true of software than anything else, and there is a good reason. The most important ingredient of software production is not 'incentivization', not money. It is other software, other information. That is because it is leveraged unlimitedly by being copyable: a single sum of money can support a single piece of development effort, but a single piece of information can support any number of development projects.
The more completely you have and enforce copyright, the more you destroy that leverage.
I agree with your assertion of a decrease in apps and music in time, but for complete different reasons. There are numerous songs and apps out there which aren't even worth the cost of listing them.
Hopefully in time we'll see a lot less fart apps for $5 and the umpteenth song about a weekday from people who see it as a quick way to make cash and not something they have a passion for.
If both of these industries were about passion and not money then piracy wouldn't be such an issue.
Why can't we let people have passion for software or music and also make money at it? Should I need to pursue software development in my 2 free hours at night after coming home from flipping burgers because only jobs that involve production of physical goods that can't yet be copied still pay the bills? How can anyone afford the time to become a professional in this kind of future? Even if someone had the "passion" to give up everything else in their life, I don't think they should have to. Just thinking about it is depressing. The parasites will walk around happily listening to their free music in their makerbot printed mp3 player (from pirated plans) and collect their social security checks from the government, while software developers and musicians slave away in $200 basement apartments 10 hours per day, and are looked down upon by everybody around them for not being successful by doing something profitable. That's where I see this going.
I think you misunderstood what I was arguing. I am not against someone making _good_ software for money. One only needs to take a look at Humble Bundle that prominently show people will pay for software. 148,194 people have paid a total of $690,575 for a package that is delivered in the way a user wants: No DRM, download straight from the website, heck even integrate with Steam.
There is nothing stopping those 148,194 people from going and pirating those games, but they haven't because people will pay for a product.
Positive some of those people won't even play the games but donated just to support the idea. (I am one of those).
> Should I need to pursue software development in my 2 free hours at night after coming home from flipping burgers because only jobs that involve production of physical goods that can't yet be copied still pay the bills?
And yet there are many people that actually do this already, otherwise how would you be booting your linux box? I know I program in my spare time...
> Just thinking about it is depressing. The parasites will walk around happily listening to their free music in their makerbot printed mp3 player (from pirated plans)
I don't know, that sounds kind of cool--everything would be different, that's for sure. I think there will always room for really good programmers. Also, never bet against people trying to find a market somewhere--there's always one somewhere, it just might not look like the ones we have now. Don't fight the future, embrace it (or starve).
> The parasites will walk around happily listening to their free music in their makerbot printed mp3 player (from pirated plans) and collect their social security checks from the government, while software developers and musicians slave away in $200 basement apartments 10 hours per day
Piracy stopped them from collecting the social security check and live the wealthy life of the unemployed pirate.
I buy lots of electronic music where I would neither bother to see a live show, nor wear their merchandise. What are those bands supposed to do? Be more controversial to make t-shirts attractive? Change their business model by becoming rock bands?
It's like saying that authors can still make money through public readings when pirated ebooks are everywhere, <cue famous example here>. Or that games can just have unpiratable multiplayer. That's all true, but it kills off whole genres.
I have donated to software projects before, but it's so annoying to keep track of it. I honestly couldn't tell you if I have donated to Adium, Colloquy, or both. I don't think donations can ever achieve the fairness and efficiency of buying songs.
To clarify on the fairness, buying software and music almost feels like a donation already. And I have been surrounded by anecdotal evidence in my youth who happily cracked "silly" casual shareware games, which just felt awkward to pay for, then played them for months. Yet when their favorite brand's AAA game was released, they bought it, played it for three days, then proudly put the box on top of their shelf and claimed that they do buy software -- but only when it's worth it. I can easily see the same thing happening for higher-profile vs lower-profile bands.
I stopped buying physical media since I've started traveling, but I am still putting them on my wish lists for when I'm home and people want to spend money. So practically both.
I really enjoy the ease at which I can buy things on an app store (The music industry has/had problems because they try/tried to control the sales process).
The development community has a great solution: app stores. But these only work if the people who run the app stores are willing to help protect the products of those who sell in that store. I think this is what the post is mostly about (and has little to do with the music industry).
To pirate work on the net... Whatever.
To pirate work by placing it in the same app store that your product is sold. That is just messed up.
Further, what is the message of the allegory supposed to be?
The analogy between music and tech suggests that the two hits-based industries selling digital goods are not so different after all. But why would our morality in one case be so different from the other case?
If anything, this allegory seems to suggest to me that the recording industry has committed one of the biggest public relations bungles of our lifetimes. People who wouldn't think to pirate a mobile app would pirate music without a second thought thanks to widespread lawsuits, pay-for-play, price fixing, and of course, ease.
what is the message of the allegory supposed to be?
It sounded to me like the message was supposed to be "it doesn't sound so awesome when you see it from the other side of the looking glass, now does it". (It felt like it was targeted at people who can identify with developing mobile apps)
"The point of the article is that making that choice for someone else is wrong."
It's my feeling that in this article at least, the author does not really care about the rights and wrong of copying, piracy, intellectual property, etc. He is scared by relatively few people on the internet being both lawmaker, judge, party and executioner when it comes to the monetization of a digital product, and the reason why he is scared is that these few people are not even potential customers.
Actually, I'm scared that we live in a world where people think they're entitled to anything they can take without consequence. The fact that they aren't taking the original means nothing. They have broken a social contract with the creator of content that, ironically, they really enjoy and would like to see more of in the future.
The problem of someone taking copyrighted content and making it available for others is a small one. The big problem is the many millions of people who take advantage of it. If everyone recognized that they're not entitled to anything except their basic human rights, none of which have anything to do with access to MP3s, then others posting that content online wouldn't matter.
The hope with this article was a little empathy from a community that often leans toward not caring about copyright law as it pertains to music. While many chose to go the route of poking tiny holes in parts of the analogy, plenty didn't realize it was an allegory and talked about how messed up it was. Many of them the same people who fight music copyright tooth and nail.
It's just sad to think that everybody enjoys music, just like they enjoy software, and so many other things that can be easily taken, and yet don't care if the people who create it see enough benefit to keep making it for them. It's short sighted and will result in fewer people having the time to become experts in these crafts, which is a loss for everyone. Sure, quantity is at an all time high, but in art that hardly matters.
Stay assured that people do care, by and large, for the creators, the inventors, the artists, those who truly provide for them with commodities and overall a better life, but the harsh truth is that there just isn't enough money for everyone, and when 99% of the money they pay for a product goes into the pocket of someone that has apparently nothing to do with that exact moment of enjoyment they just experienced, people just don't want to pay a dollar for a cent. There just isn't enough time for everyone either, so they won't spend thirty minutes figuring out how to pay the artist after listening to a 3 minutes song, or figuring out which is which between the legit app and the pirate clone so they can put their money in the right wallet.
We need to figure out fair solutions to these time & money issues in order to void the piracy problem and make devs and artists feel better. In the mean time, well... there are concerts, donations, advertisement, register-only services, drm... crappy stuff(1) compared to the real deal if you want my opinion (that of an independent android app dev), but eh, tough times.
(1)except concerts. Live music is awesome. Horribly expensive and probably really hard to setup, but extremely enjoyable.
> The problem of someone taking copyrighted content and making it available for others is a small one. The big problem is the many millions of people who take advantage of it.
Precisely. Many millions of people take advantage of it, and the overall good is greater than if they didn't. If the cost of distributing some good falls down to zero, you can't make a living by distributing these. Find another way; for instance provide a web service through your app, that unregistered copies can't access.
> It's just sad to think that everybody enjoys music, just like they enjoy software, and so many other things that can be easily taken, and yet don't care if the people who create it see enough benefit to keep making it for them.
For the tremendous majority of professional musicians recorded music never represented a significant source of revenue at all, if ever. Most musicians get paid for playing, and nothing else. That people swap mp3 around have absolutely no influence on their life -- except when it helps them getting known.
The overall good? The overall good of what? Your right to listen to music for free? That's not good overall for the artists who created that music. Why should they have to make 2nd and 3rd products that you "approve of" in order to be compensated?
People already use lack of easy access as their excuse for piracy. Now you want them to make some hard to crack app just for people to be able to listen to it? How about people just stop taking what's not theirs and treat artists with respect?
And in regard to your last statement, it's not your right to determine whether exposure alone should be the reward of their hard work.
If you swallow a cost of 10, but that 11 people gets 1 from your contribution, the society as a whole wins.
> How about people just stop taking what's not theirs and treat artists with respect?
When something that used to be hard becomes totally simple, obvious and costless, there is absolutely no sense trying to stick to the previous state of the matter. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, what used to be a complex, tough and expensive endeavour (copying books by hand) instantly became worthless. Too bad, but the net gain for the society as a whole was immense.
Similarly, the net gain we could enjoy from being able to copy, transfer, duplicate, mix, rehash, transform existing digital goods is world-changing. Some will lose at some point, but they'll have to get over it. Nowadays large parts of the copyright laws are only manacles impending progress, defending soon to be dead practices and business models.
> And in regard to your last statement, it's not your right to determine whether exposure alone should be the reward of their hard work.
Did you read me? As a musician composer and arranger, I've earned a living by teaching and live performance, but a net loss on recordings; and it was back in the 90s, when CD-R was unheard of.
The hard true fact : only artists aired on radio and TV make money on recorded music. They are a minuscule minority of musicians. Same goes for actors, painters, etc.
A large proportion of taxes are for the purpose of wealth redistribution. We do it because giving $900 to a poor person (arguably) results in more of a benefit than the harm caused by taxing a rich person $1000 and spending $100 in overhead.
"Artists" would get a lot more respect from society if they didn't display such (deliberate?) ignorance of the basic conventions that make society function in the first place.
Those wanting the crash-course could start with the very real difference between actual human rights and artificial privileges. They could continue their educations by developing some appreciation for the (very substantial differences) between tangible and intangible goods. And they could demonstrate their commitment to civil society by NOT supporting the development of law in ways that would - inevitably - lead to an astonishingly omniscient police state.
And that's not something that any artist worth the name would be okay with.
The whole idea of moral offsetting is nonsense. That's like saying that I'm going to steal Oreos from the grocery store but make up for it by buying milk.
Do you live in a country where there are restrictions on products you would like to purchase? (as in -- anywhere that's not the continental US). Perhaps an ebook that's not available in your country.
If the only way to consume a good is to obtain it illegally (and there is no loss of the orginal owner - I'm talking about digital copies) then moral offsetting is the only slightly moral way to consume/acquire the item.
...or not consume it in the first place. I don't understand where this 'right to be able to get everything I want' has come from in recent years. Sometimes it sucks to not get all you want, but - you know - that's life.
To be fair, it's more like saying you'd wait for Oreos to come to town, pay an outrageous sum of money to view them and then buy milk at four times what you'd normally pay for it.
It's not that I think music piracy is justified, but let's not understate the reality of merchandising and touring prices in the music industry.
When people feel they're being ripped off, they're probably going to be more likely to not feel so bad when they return the favor.
I feel the same way. I don't understand the point of this allegory other than to insight discussion and get ranked highly on HN.
Maybe I'm used to reading "easy" articles that provide a problem and possible solution to it. I haven't read the allegory of the cave since college so I'm not used to thinking this hard... (laziness on my part I guess)
