What is enough?

02011-01-12 | Uncategorized | 18 comments

This person can’t stop at an album or two… they are giving away most of my catalog

18 Comments

  1. Carol Anderson

    How can someone like that sleep at night?

    Reply
  2. Carol Anderson

    I just don’t understand. It’s like some people think of musician as some entity so separate they don’t need anything, beside “if we can do it there’s no reason why not”….kinda like people who brag about getting so much from the govt for nothing, not once realizing the govt. is all of us, or it’s like someone loading up a few of the guy’s cattle or grabbing a few things from his business.

    I sure couldn’t sleep very well.

    Reply
  3. steve

    DMCA takedown. You probably already did that though.

    Reply
  4. Gerry

    Some people can never have enough. On a lighter note – Just received an amazing cd from a promising new group! These guys are gonna be huge – ‘Dean & The Martinis’:)
    Thank you very much Ottmar – my fist collectable.

    Reply
  5. Adam Solomon

    They even have your limited edition “Hot Flamenco” album! :D

    Reply
  6. Ottmar

    Adam, you have got it backwards. Of course people want free content. I want free content, and I want a rent-free apartment in Manhattan, and I want a free solar setup for my roof… and so on. That is not the issue.

    The issue is that people want to give away the work of other people for free, because they feel they are rebels who “free information” perhaps, or because they don’t know the value of labor, or simply because they can. I have talked about this with many people from different walks of life and there seems to be a consensus that there are more highly educated people of privilege, who have never worked a day of real labor, who feel the need to share music or movies than anybody else. Those who have not labored will never know the true value of labor, period. So, we have people who feel the need to give away other people’s labor – which in itself seems like a pathology to me: one does not attain cool by giving away somebody else’s cool – and the totally ridiculous DMCA copyright laws, dictated by giant computer and internet corporations and put into law by clueless politicians.

    According to this ridiculous law companies like Rapidshare and YouTube and Facebook and all blogging sites may accept any and all content, provided that they take it down should the copyright owner protest. This puts the burden squarely and unfairly on the shoulders of the copyright owner or creator. Big record companies or mega stars like Prince can afford to pay a dozen or more people to scour the internet for copyright violations, and fill out DMCA take-down notices, but I can’t afford that and would rather spend my time creating than playing police.

    One of the problems of the Internet is anonymity. It is the cause of millions of nasty and threatening comments and the major reason illegal file-sharing is happening in the first place. And of course it benefits the big Google, because they don’t care what a person’s intention is, whether they are a cyber bully or a file-sharer or whatever, they just want to deliver eye-balls to their advertisers. It seems to that the phrase “Don’t be Evil” has long lost any meaning when it comes to Google.

    There is this famous quote by Stewart Brand:

    On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

    And for some reason, perhaps a short attention span, people rip a few words from this quote out of context and proclaim that information wants to be free.

    Information is data and does not want to be free any more than the robot wants electricity the way a plant wants light

    Solutions? We have discussed this before: see this and this. And we could create responsibilty by removing anonymity from the internet or, perhaps, creating a two-tiered internet: one part that’s anonymous and one part that is not.

    Thank you for making the effort marijose, but just have a look at that form: it would take me longer to fill it out than it will take a person to simply open a new and free Blogger account. The game whack-a-mole comes to mind.

    Reply
  7. LindaW

    Issues like this really get to me.

    Last month this person has opened 6 Blogger blog pages that are apparently all for music downloads. While I can’t speak for Google, Yahoo! used to take reports and trace the account with illegal content back to the IP that it was created with. All it took was contact with their ISP and the FBI and they didn’t post again (at least not on the Yahoo! servers).

    I have to wonder how the account owner would feel if he/she was required to work for free?

    Reply
  8. Panj

    I am so sorry this happened Ottmar, it must be discouraging on so many levels. Hopefully this New Year will bring better protections somehow!

    Reply
  9. Brenda

    He or she is a thief. It is terrible.

    Reply
  10. Vic

    Anyone know of a competent hacker who could crash this guys blog?

    Reply
  11. LindaW

    Vic, this person opened 6 blogs in December.. only a month ago, they all look like they are dedicated to music downloads.

    yes Brenda, stealing is wrong… no matter what it is.

    Ottmar, sorry this junk is such a problem for you, I for one can attest that your music is well worth the price, and stealing it is abysmal!

    Reply
  12. Adam Solomon

    Interesting links OL. I would be fascinated to see the results of an ISP tax with the understanding that music is to be free online. $5 is an extremely reasonable amount – too reasonable, to be honest. That’s less than the cost of one DRM-free album on Amazon, to say nothing of iTunes or physical disks. My intuition is that any ISP tax which would compensate artists fairly would be way too high to be worth it for consumers (i.e. at least of the order of people’s current internet bills, since people on average probably consume more value in music than they do in net service), but I’m not as well-read on this as I should be. The question of what would happen culturally is a separate and very interesting one.

    I’m not sure what you mean about a two-tiered internet: if there’s one bit that’s anonymous and one that isn’t, surely the anonymous bit will persist sharing music just like our internet does now. I wasn’t just saying in my other comment that people want free content. We can do what we can to stop piracy, play whack-a-mole all we like, but the internet underground will always find ways to distribute content. We have enough trouble keeping things like child pornography off the net, which is far more pernicious and less widespread than illegally-shared music, because pervs find more private ways than Blogger to share content, and the same is true with music; I would guess that with invite-only torrent sites, newsgroups, private networks, etc., these sorts of blogs are only the tip of the iceberg.

    That was the gist of my last comment. Obviously this is terrible and whatever can be done to stop it should be, but as we’re seeing, there isn’t much that *can* be done. I think that now that we’ve crossed the digital Rubicon, sharing will always be there, primarily since the net is so decentralized (and as much as we can decry the net’s anonymity, do you really ever see that changing? I don’t see how that gets done without devolving into the plot of some dystopian sci-fi novel ;) ). So naturally whatever the solution will turn out to be, it would probably have to be something like the ISP tax which takes this as a fact of life and at least to an extent works around rather than against it.

    Reply
  13. Brenda

    What goes around comes around. All actions have a price. A thief will pay for stealing and the ones that think they will not … are very ignorant.

    Reply
  14. Steve(brokerbiker)

    I concur with Adam’s comments about the links. Unfortunately, there are always individuals lacking conscience and judgment to understand they are not entitled to give away the works of others. Likewise, there will always be individuals who will take those works without conscience. Even in my profession, over the years, I have experienced individuals and corporations taking my work product, after extensive research, structuring and packaging, to competitors, who in turn apparently, thought nothing of copying my work product and undercutting the pricing, as they had not invested the time and effort I had invested.
    It is very disillusioning, particularly when ones livelihood and well being are at stake.

    Reply
  15. Adam Solomon

    Well, that’s interesting – click one of the download links and you’re not brought to Rapidshare but rather to a page like this:

    http://www.mp3panda.com/album/?partner=9403&pk=1047536

    So they’re not being given away. The prices are dirt cheap so I’d think there’s still something fishy going on. My first guess was that this site is making a pure profit off this and not giving any proceeds to copyright holders, but their legal info page at least claims otherwise:

    http://www.mp3panda.com/publish/legal-info/

    It cites Russian copyright law (which might well be a loophole) but claims “In accordance with the License provisions, MUSICLINE LTD executes license payments for all compositions downloaded from the site subject to International Copyright Law.” Do you know if you’d see any money from sales on sites like this?

    Reply
  16. Ottmar

    Thanks for the link, John.

    Reply

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