I think in our discussion we are sort of taking the burden of musicians'
living on the public. For some reason, today people should be figuring out
how a musician and record companies should make their money.
But basically, it is immoral of them to place people in such a position.
Because when a record company (or a musician, father of the family) says
that they are going to earn money by selling copies in the age of digital
technology, it is basically relying all your livelihood on a business model,
proved to be unsuccessful. Yet each time they do it and expect everyone else
to consider themselves bound by a moral choice to "support the artist".
But it is not the burden of the people, it shouldn't be. In fact, it is a
direct responsibility of the "industry" to figure that out because this is
what they are paid for - its their job to figure out ways to pay musicians.
And there are many nice ways to use Internet to make money. It has been said
a million times - set up a torrent site with ads that they say bring
millions and be okay. Things like the pirate bay and spotify should have
been done by those global publishers, if they had been doing their job.
So when we are speaking of moral choices and moral arguments one has to
build for himself in order to do what is naturally available today one click
away - I think it should be the other way around, really. And when a
composer goes to a site and starts writing letters, asking people not to
share his music, this strikes me as being pretty unethical and
single-minded. Besides, its like fighting a large wave - in the end, the
person will only get angry with the "corrupt generation of the Internet".
That's one point. The second is the practical side of things.
No matter what we eventually rule out - whether its good to copy or bad,
copying technology only gets better. And very soon it will be easy to have a
catalogue of Universal, Warner and EMI on one flash drive. Preventing
copying, on the other hand, is getting sloppier and sloppier - it is
becoming more difficult. The diversity of standards and devices increases,
free operating systems come into play, systems with no Windows registry and
no DRM. In order to control copying, they would have to ban linux, which is
unrealistic.
So copying will have to be right. It is part of our lives, whether we want
it or not. And I cannot imagine a society where people could get any
information and works of art for no price, but are trained to think that it
is not good and instead go to online shops and pay, pay, pay. This just
doesn't add up.
L.V.
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Received on Tue Jul 6 08:15:02 2010
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