Well, now, I have to seek out this movie I haven’t seen in 30-odd years.
Thanks!
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So Cory is choosing to give away his works. That’s great for him. Does that mean that everyone should be forced to give away their works? Sure, the technical crew on movies is paid before the film is finished, but the actors all get paid royalties, which depend on sales. There are dozens of actors in any film who aren’t getting paid the millions the big stars are, and for them that could make a difference.
How is your taking this creator’s data for free, without their consent, different from the companies that scrape your personal data from websites and then resell it? Would you think it was ok if it was discovered that someone had a huge database of all of the info they could get on people they thought attractive, even if they never hurt anyone with that knowledge?
Ain’t no Thelma here, man!
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Ok, Cory provides DRM free copies of his books, but he also does other things besides being an author which gave him the freedom to do that, so it may not be realistic for every author to do that, I’m not an author, so I’m not sure. What he hasn’t seen is any measurable dip in how his books sell, which we’ve echoed with multiple examples of the same effect in action.
Film and the film indutry (not unlike the music industry) is a hive of scum and villany, and people down the totem pole receive minescule fractions of hundreths of cents per theater view, and even the blockbuster stars get screwed over by streaming, unless they’ve spent loads on their contract lawyers. I don’t think residuals are going to be worth much to anyone who isn’t named on the movie poster. If I’m going to get angry at people screwing over small actors, 99.999% of my ire will be directed at Hollywood, not someone who downloaded a movie for free.
As for your first example:
It’s not based on selling it, to start. Secondly my personal data wasn’t put up on the site with the explicit goal of earning a living from it? I could go on…
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In God We Trust Inc. Original appearance of Nazi Punks Fuck Off. I remember it well, although Frankenchrist was my favorite.
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SAG says actors above the line get paid weekly. Most actors with clout are able to negotiate terms.
Non-union actors get paid at the end of the workday. I know this because I’ve been an extra on a few productions.
Low-budget and independent productions are able to do what they want to get around union wages, but they’re also not the ones complaining about piracy.
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Anyway, as a BBS vice admiral, surely you can issue yourself with a letter of marque and then you can pirate what you like?
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Why should we stick with a system that benefits corporations over the entire rest of humanity. The reality is that the current copyright system doesn’t work for the majority of us. It’s too restrictive, and gives large corporations an incredibly effective way to hoard tons of creative content for essentially more than a century… So much is lost because of that, because there is creative works that are locked up in copyright, even if they’re no longer popular. They become incredibly inaccessible because they are monopolized by big content owners (not creators, OWNERS, rent-seeking owners).
That’s what I like about the creative commons - it gives creators the flexibility to decide just how much they want their things to circulate. They can chose to give their works away online in addition to having physical sales of their books, like Cory. Or they can chose to have a more traditional type of restrictive copyright.
Well, no. Because they get paid when they do the performance (or before) and most likely unless they are the big stars, they’re not getting lots of residuals. Seems like a better system would be to pay ALL actors a living wage up front for the work that they do.
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Historically, and right now, this is what “being an author” means.
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“Ooh, Lamaze. Well, I forgot that you spent three whole weekends sitting on a floor… learning how to breathe. I had to get by on a degree from Harvard Medical School!”
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Yeah, it is only the select few who can earn a living from that (writing books/acting/speaking/etc), and that alone.
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Unfortunately, Tor put a stop to that a number of years ago, with Cory’s agreement i might add. I can’t remember the details but he did explain it in a recent interview. I think the last book of his he offered as a free download is Homeland (they are all still available up to this novel on his website though).
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No one is saying that. No one is even saying we should screw over artists. What people are saying is that publishing is clinging to a financial model that’s from five centuries ago, where physical media were scarce and difficult to produce & distribute. Now, digital media is functionally free to distribute and the publishers prevent distribution in order to maintain their own outsized position in the market. Until they get out of the way and let artists have a more direct relationship with their audience, people are going to pirate media.
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There are other ways we can support artists. Patreon isn’t perfect, but it’s a step to acknowledging the reality of what publishing is actually like for creative types.
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People pirate media from artists who are self-publishing. If an author sets a price that someone thinks is too high, they will find a way to get the content without paying for it. Claiming that it’s the distributors that are the cause of pirating is disingenuous. You don’t want to pay for something, but you want access to it anyway.
I don’t think that’s the same as what we’re talking about, which is pirating from large corporations, who have a powerful tool to profit off the work of creatives.
BTW, often it’s corporations that steal from independent artists, the ones who are the primary beneficiaries of the modern IP regime. They can afford to do it, and not worry about any consequences, because at worse, they’ll have to pay out, but mostly, they have an army of lawyers that can make people pressing their own copyright claims go away.
Details on how this plays out matters and I would argue it all points to the IP system being fundamentally broken and primarily only benefiting corporations, not creatives.
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Bullshit. As several studies mentioned above show, people who can pay for the artist’s work, do. Those who can’t, pirate it. The artist loses zero revenue. And in many cases, the net result is more sales as people have a low-risk way of trying new artists out.
As for your unfounded assumptions about me, well I pay for the music/books/art/film that I want; I just look for ways to see that more of my money goes to the artist than the bloated middlemen.
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I don’t think people made that argument about radio, but that’s because radio become an effective way for the labels to profit off their artists. Much like streaming now.
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Speaking of piracy, this showed up in my newsreader.
As a general rule, I have no qualms about illegally downloading major label music, because I know that the actual artists make almost nothing off record sales (it all comes from live performance and marketing deals). Film and TV are a little better about paying people, so I try to pay for that. Independent artists, I pay directly whenever possible.
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