“They took lots of time to develop, learn, improve, try, fail. Great music takes investment.”

Apparently you know nothing about stolen content from these bands,they abused a lot of “black” musicians creativity by cutting and remixing their work and now they go after kids who do the same with no purpose of profit…Copyrights exists only for hollywood evryone else has no rights to it,so yes its moral to do whatever they have done to others,and yes i refuse to pay $10.000.000 to X actor or band.If we live in democracy let the people decide.I have never downloaded media and never bought media.Radio and streaming is enough i think ;)

Conversely, go “pirate” someone else’s quality work (with attribution) and watch their brand value and opportunity go up.

So, the author is likely going to benefit one way or the other (at least over averages and over the long run). Give credit so that they benefit more quickly and you suffer less in the long run or pick the other choice. It is your choice.

Creating a work is half the battle. You should position yourself to take advantage of your unique position and significant skill as the work becomes more and more popular.

As for incentives, the key thing you miss is that downloading the song is EASY and PAINLESS. If it was about the money then no one wold use ITunes, yet it is a 5bn a year business.

Give me a rigourous definition and i’ll take your bet. I will happily bet that there is a band as dominant as the Stones – not very – in the next ten years. So please stop whinning and give some facts and figures to back up your claim that piracy is the cause of woe if such woe exists.

“Maybe the record industry is in decline because of piracy. Maybe it’s in decline because people have finally stopped replacing their LPs and tapes with CDs. Maybe it’s becaue the industry missed the boat big time by refusing to enter into what would probably have been a very profitable licensing agreement with Napster. I don’t know, but I do know that yelling “piracy” isn’t a convincing explanation of anything.”

The music industry is in decline for all those reasons. The business side shouldn’t have been so inertial, they should have adapted, yes.

Everyone knows economic behavior is about incentives: a kid with no money who can get that song or movie or expensive software in one click will do it. You can’t really blame the kid. It’s just the way people work, like it or lump it.

But this is why laws exist. To adjust incentives. To raise the cost of engaging in societally unbeneficial behavior.

No surprise, economics works on the supply side too: if you want people to produce something, you need to have incentives in place for them to do it.

This is why what Felix and so many others (like Julian Sanchez, Brad Delong among others) are doing is so culturally reprehensible. These people know better; incentives are their expertise. They like to steal stuff, and cheerlead it on their blogs. But they’re smart enough to know that without laws to incentives creative production, creative production goes away (apart from what’s generated as result of narcisstic need for self-expression, but which work product brings little value to anyone but the narcissist in question).

This is a moment when BOTH sides of the story need to be told: 1) How do we increase global marginal utility of creative work (which is happening, since anyone can get anything now instantly), BUT ALSO 2) how do we incentivise production of societally beneficial creative work?

Everybody loves #1 because they get free stuff and justify in their own little way why they shouldn’t have to pay for it. Felix sits happily in the self-justified thief camp.

But people like Felix, who are broadly-read public intellectuals on the topic, have the obligation to look at #2 seriously.

And it disgusts me that he doesn’t.

-I- am talking about unattributed IP. Felix doesn’t think my output as a creative is worth protecting, so I don’t think he gets any rights as regards his creative. Pure and simple. So I guess I’ll just do with it whatever I please; Who cares what he thinks? He gets to make up his own rules, I get to make up mine.

Tough titties: “adapt or die”, as Engraver writes.

Clearly you know nothing about the music business. The fact that kids can put some kind of crap together in their basement in Garageband (a pirated version, of course), and put it on their Facebook page has NOTHING to do with the music business. If you want to say that “musical expression” is alive and well, fine. That’s certainly true.

But the Rolling Stones didn’t come out of someone’s basement. The Beatles weren’t some kid in a garage. They took lots of time to develop, learn, improve, try, fail. Great music takes investment. And without a hope of return, no one will invest. If anyone can just steal anything you do and society doesn’t care, and morons like Felix are even out cheerleading it, no one with any talent (or sense) will do it.

The only ones who will do it are those who don’t care about making money off their work.

So there will never, ever be another musical act with the recognized quality and recognized contribution to the culture of the world of the Beatles or Rolling Stones. I’ll be more than happy to take an escrowed $10,000 bet against anyone who disagrees. (We’d have to make it a period of, say 10 years, since “never” is an unuseful betting period).

Thanks to Felix and the like, new music is going to be crap for the rest of our lives.

1) I had to buy AGAIN my old DVDs just to play them in the far east. If i ever leave the far east i will have to replace the new ones.
2) I have to sit through ads about why i shouldn’t buy pirate DVDs on my legit DVD. Can’t skip them either.
3) When i tried copying them to a hard drive to cut down on the amount of crap i take from place to place turns out i can’t play them because of encryption, something that would not be an issue with pirated stuff.

So legit DVDs are more expensive AND more of a pain. Is there any wonder there is piracy?

Also China does have a history of property rights, in particular land rights. What it also has is a rampantly corrupt legal system.

langelgjm, Newspapers are collapsing because frankly most of the “journalists” are not terribly bright, cut and paste from each other anyway and barely fact check. NYT isn’t going bankrupt because of piracy but because its “news” is mostly worthless. Why pay for regurgitated propaganda? and ps in South Korea, virtually no one buys dvds, so much for that argument.

True story.

And I’m sure Felix commends the behavior.

Answer, the music business is doing better than ever. It’s the recording industry that has suffered because it can’t seem to adjust to the new reality.

So maybe there won’t be many rockers that become multi-millionaires like before. (Well … there were never all that many anyway.) But now more independent musicians than ever before can make a living by leveraging the new digital media. But they have to connect with their fans and give them a reason to buy.

This has been proven to work many times with artists with big name recognition as well as artists just starting out.

Adapt or die. Isn’t that the free market philosophy that Americans are so proud of? And rightly so. Many are adapting. The others are trying to hold onto the old ways with lawyers and lobbyists.

I’ll give you that the music industry is in decline, but I need more than “piracy exists, the industry is in decline, therefore the industry is in decline because of piracy.” That is a basic post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy that is endless and unfortunately repeated in so many policy discussions.

Just the other day I witnessed an IIPA representative say the following to a class of law students: “South Korea had weak copyright laws; then they improved them, and now their economy has improved dramatically. Coincidence?” I was embarrassed that this is the kind of statement that passes as reasoning.

Maybe the record industry is in decline because of piracy. Maybe it’s in decline because people have finally stopped replacing their LPs and tapes with CDs. Maybe it’s becaue the industry missed the boat big time by refusing to enter into what would probably have been a very profitable licensing agreement with Napster. I don’t know, but I do know that yelling “piracy” isn’t a convincing explanation of anything.

I think I’ll start robbing old ladies. If God had meant them not to be robbed, he wouldn’t have made them so weak.