The Logic Off Topic list

From "The Guardian", British newspaper

Thursday September 12th

Net News: Second Sight

Title:
"It's OK: the fat lady can't sing"
"The music industry versus the net: It is not over yet."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,790297,00.html

Kool Musick
Keep Musick Kool

>From "The Guardian", British newspaper
>
>Thursday September 12th
>
>Net News: Second Sight
>
>Title:
>"It's OK: the fat lady can't sing"
>"The music industry versus the net: It is not over yet."
>
><http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,790297,00.html>http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,790297,00.html
>

	Hmm.  Interesting take.  I hope they're right.  I'd like to 
have this thing resolved so artists can get royalties and users can 
have the convenience without the guilt!

	I haven't found a "legal" MP3 provider for Mac users yet so I 
continue to download from peer-to-peer systems.  I'm actually willing 
to pay a fee, but I don't know of any systems that are Mac-friendly 
and offer a fee based subscription.
-- 
Doug

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

--- In logic-ot@y..., Kool Musick <koolmusick@y...> wrote:
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,790297,00.html

I think the problem is that the music industry is largely run by 
record companies, and record companies are notoriously incompetent 
when it comes to understanding and being able to react sensibly to 
any issue that can't be fixed by hiring more lawyers or ringing up a 
mate in the business to sort things out for you.

So what has happened is that in areas where record companies don't 
really seem to care about providing a service to their customers or 
to their signees (except to the set that are currently considered 
fashionable), there's a strong demand for music services that aren't 
suppled by the record companies, and can't be serviced by any legal 
means without them.

If I want to buy a copy of a single that was #1 in the late 1980s, 
the record companies can't sell it to me, because chances are, 
everything from back then is deleted. You'd think that they'd have a 
website where you can type in a single title, and pay your money, and 
an autochanger drops a backup copy into a CD duplicator at their 
office, and runs off a copy and sends it to you, but they don't. The 
only way that you can get that old material is by unlawful means, off 
the net.


Even when you want to get something from a major act that was 
sucessful, you are often stuck: If I want to buy a legal copy of the 
old Duran Duran videos, they aren't available. If I want to buy the 
Janet Jackson "Design of a Decade" compilation DVD, it only seems to 
be available in the US, and if I imported a copy or bought it off the 
net off Amazon.com (US), it would probably have an area spoiler put 
in by the record company to stop it running on my DVD player. 

They have a major artist, they've produced a product and spent 
millions on promoting it, and a few years later if I want to give 
them my money and buy a copy, I can't do it.




============  
It's a bit like when Star Wars Episode 1 came out and the film 
company were complaining that it was the most pirated film ever. 
Of course it was. In the UK the film was being promoted all over the 
place, with cardboard cutouts in burger bars and bookshops and 
splashes on cereal packs, etc, and you couldn't wanlk down the hight 
street without being confronted by lifewsize cardboard aliens, but 
when you buckled under and decided to actually go and see the film, 
there was no legal way to do it except by taking a plane ot the US
(which some people did!) 

If they don't have the systems in place that allow people to legally 
buy their product, I think its more difficult to be outraged when 
people eventually develop workarounds. If they are really upset about 
artists losing royalties, what about all those groups that can't get 
royalties because the company has deleted their entire back-catalog 
as uneconomic? If a work is effectively out of print, what happens to 
the copyright? 
Should a record company be forced to continue to make their old back-
catalogues available, if they want to be able to retain their right 
to be considered to be the only legal distributor?


There's lots of issues here.

[Erk]