To be clear, I do not advocate pirating but I also think objections from the upper end of the media factory are way overstated. I have far too many friends that are authors or musicians to think it should all be free but I know at least a few that have stories about getting screwed over by publishers far worse than losses due to “piracy.” This isn’t victimless, but the ones complaining the loudest about how much they’re being hurt by piracy aren’t usually the authors.
As for physical materials, I don’t work in technical services, which is where books and other materials go for repairs in our library, but I know that department can perform some minor miracles of restoration. They may not get 1000 circs out of a given item, that of course is purposeful hyperbole, but some popular items do manage to last longer than you’d expect.
Ultimately, I don’t think that there is an easy answer to this conundrum. What it takes to ensure that creatives are fairly compensated and not screwed over is a complete rethinking of how we produce and consume culture in the first place. I appreciate that people are attempting to do that (the patreon model, band camp, etc). But the corporations are simply pointing to piracy and claiming that that is the actual and only problem with fair compensation for artists… partly so they can sweep their own culpability under the rug. As long as large corporations are the primary beneficiaries to IP laws, then many artists will continue to struggle - especially those that challenge the narratives about our society and how it’s organized.
Player piano rolls are killing live performances, records are killing dance halls, radio is killing records, taping is killing radio … (mix and match as needed, of course.)
Well, except piano rolls and sheet music is the roots of the modern label system… Early sound recordings too. Up until pretty recently, the way things worked was that a musician would be paid a set fee, and the label reaped the lion’s share of the profit from sales (especially Black artists - some of that is addressed in the play/film Ma Raineys’ Black Bottom). I don’t think that really started changing until the vinyl era and artists started to push for a greater stake in sales. The rise of singer-songwriters probably pushed that to the front of our public consciousness, as the division of labor began to change. It became less about the performer being the public face, while there are song-writers doing the work who are on staff with the label (which still happens, but you have a greater number of “singer-songwriters” in the industry now than you did in the 50s). As such, the singer-songwriter demanded a much larger cut of profits and a stake in the IP too. Famously, the Beatles did not own the rights to their songs, for example.
As for radio - I’d argue it gave record labels a stranglehold on what got through to listeners, especially with the advent of payola in the 50s…
[ETA to add link]
Meanwhile, this is what corporations are doing. But yeah… downloading a book or song without paying for it is a real crime against humanity… After all, corporations are more people than actual people… /s
Many of you are saying that you feel it’s ok to pirate from big corporations. So basically you have come up with a way to justify stealing something from an entity you don’t like. And while the financial losses to those corporations may not be a huge insult to humanity, the attitude that people are entitled to take things they ought to pay for but don’t want to pay for-let’s face it, a movie ticket isn’t that expensive, nor are streaming rentals-whatever their reasons for not wanting to pay, it’s theft.
It has been theft on the part of the corporations for centuries. Imperialism, genocide, war, and racism, all in the name of corporate profit. Have you not been paying attention?
So you cherry pick an example and ignore the context the person (and others here, some of us who study this topic for a living, BTW) is providing you… Once again, it’s the artist that is often getting screwed over, and more often than not, it’s by the people who have a stranglehold on the industry. As many others have said in this thread, most of us would prefer a more direct way to support the artists we love, but we hate the way that those same artists are being exploited (losing out more from that than from illegal downloads), but you seem determined to ignore that part.
“They did it first!” isn’t really a good response. I’ve never disputed the crap behavior of corporations. I just find the methods of justifying downloads of content that has not been offered for free disingenuous. I’m not comparing movie piracy to genuine horrors in history or the present. I find the attitude that people should feel free to steal if the purveyor is a corporation they don’t like an undermining of the social contract. The creators, for good or ill, agreed to have this content sold by others for a negotiated return. The system often screws over creators but I fail to see how harming the corporations involved will fix that.
I find the method of providing a streaming service that I pay for – when it’s already paid for by advertising dollars – is geo-blocked on the grounds that I happened to cross the border disingenuous.
It’s not that “they did it first”… it’s that “they” built an entire industry that specifically ensured that the vast majority of artists would never see much of the wealth that their work generated. For all the hate that Courtney Love gets heaped upon her, she was not too wrong about the situation being akin to sharecropping. This is doubly true when you bring this discussion to the history of the exploitation of Black artists, which most of modern popular music is based on…
Because they’ve had a literally monopoly until relatively recently in the history of the industry. And even then, in the age of punk independents which sought to correct that historic wrong, there were STILL some indies that played that game. And the current situation with corporate streaming services, which takes even more wealth from the creators and funnels it to corporations, has us back to square one, after the 80s and 90s saw a set of truly independent structures for alternatives to the mainstream industry. They’ve used plenty of dirty tricks to ensure that they are the only game in town…
They’re not being harmed. For all the industry hand-wringing about how “piracy is harming music”, those corporations STILL rake in a mind-boggling amount of scratch each and every year.
Not that I’m advocating for listening to Steve Albini (and not like you’ll read this anyways)… BUT, this is a classic that came out in the alternative era that pretty solidly described the exploitative situation with the contracts new artists are often tricked/forced into…
