Comments on: Interview with Gordon Firemark

By: chicderract

chicderract — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 02:46:23 +0000

Very nice Blog, I will tell my friends about it.

Thanks

By: djgreene

djgreene — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:40:37 +0000

Downloading an album certainly affects commerce. Each album is about $15 that will not enter the stream of commerce. But should that person be liable for $750-$30,000 per work infringed (which could be each song on the album)? Such draconian penalties are ridiculous. There was a time when money counterfeiters were hung, disemboweled, emasculated, and cut into four pieces. In fact, Sir Isaac Newton was famous for condemning counterfeiters to death in this fashion, and he was an intellectual man. If this were still the punishment for counterfeiting, there would probably be fewer counterfeiters. But such punishments bear no relation to the crime of counterfeiting in the same way that statutory damages bear no relation to the actual damages caused to "commerce."

I believe that applications like Pandora and Hulu will do well. But they are not a substitute for music on demand in that a user of Pandora cannot pick the precise song he wants to play. Nor can the user listen to music outside of a WiFi hot spot. Furthermore, Pandora has recently moved to a model where it will have to compensate artists via SoundExchange, the internet equivalent to ASCAP or BMI. This compensation is inconsistent with the advertisement driven business model that Pandora began with.

By: djgreene

djgreene — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:40:22 +0000

To answer your next question, I do not know what is used for commercial reason. However, I do not think that there should be a presumption of commercial use in cases of end-users downloading music and movies. Shawn Fanning did seem like a normal kid who downloaded for non-commercial reasons, and he did. He only made money when he sold Napster. Thus, the legal dynamic that exists today, and that has existed since Napster, is that of creating an illegal application that is user friendly, then build a fan base, get sued, and sell the application for millions. This has been repeated with The Pirate Bay. However, if non-commercial downloading were presumed legal, then people would not make millions of dollars breaking the law. This is precisely the kind of conduct that I think should stop, and I think would stop if downloading were presumed legal if not used for commercial gain.

By: djgreene

djgreene — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:40:11 +0000

I think that the songwriter Montt Mardie put it best when he said, "An artist has got to make a living just like everybody else, there's no doubt about it. And these are tough times, believe me I know. The thing is though, if I were to go back in time, 10 years or so, and tell the 15-year-old version of myself that over a night, 60 000 people had heard one of my songs, the first question I'd throw back at myself wouldn't be "how much money did I make?" Montt Mardie recently wrote a song that is free to download; it is called "We're All the Pirate Bay," and can be downloaded, remixed, and uploaded without incident.

By: djgreene

djgreene — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:39:09 +0000

There does need to be a threat of action against violators, I agree. But that threat should not extend to the non-commercial user who only wants to listen to more music than his wallet will allow. Certainly not the draconian punishment that was handed to Jammie Thomas-Rasset. Multi-million dollar civil penalties should be reserved to those making profit from downloading illegally.

Sometimes I think about the consequences of downloading, and I think, "what if no one downloaded illegally?" But then I realize that the people who currently download illegally would not buy every album in the absence of free sharing programs. Quite to the contrary, I think that the current downloaders would be much less sophisticated without sharing programs. They would be limited to the music that their wallets would allow, and would have music libraries that would be dwarfed by any "illegal" downloader's library.

By: Nick DeSiato

Nick DeSiato — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:49:44 +0000

Personally, I'm reluctant to advocate a policy where we cherry-pick seemingly random kids for infringement. However, the law is the law and there needs to be some threat of action for violators. As a musician and writer, I can relate to copyright owners' concerns.

Also, how do you know what is used for non-commercial reason? Shawn Fanning seemed like a normal 19-year-old kid who downloaded music for "non-commercial reasons." Next thing you know, he's making international headlines with Napster. And, say I download an entire album for free. While I may not be distributing it in the traditional "commercial" sense of the word, this may preclude me from purchasing the album. Doesn't this affect commerce?

With all that being said, I see an ongoing trend of hybrid free-music-with-limited-commercial-interruption access (i.e. Pandora) on the rise. In fact, I'm listening to Pandora right now…

By: djgreene

djgreene — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:51:58 +0000

What do you think about Lawrence Lessig's argument that we are making our kids criminals by making non-commercial file sharing illegal. Millions of kids download and know that they are doing so outside of the law; they don't care. Most of these kids will not understand that the criminal laws that are ridiculous are merely the copyright laws; instead, they may think that other laws are laughable also. This lack of understanding means that the kids will disobey other laws under the same pretense that they are laughable.

Lets remove the excuse, and stop suing people who download for non-commercial reasons.