"It costs money to duplicate and distribute licensed copies of other people's work."
Notice that I didn't say anything about licensed copies of other people's work. Duplication--the raw act as shown above--of digital data is effectively free.
Your profits derive from your ability to control the scarcity of your product, right? If a publisher licensed your music and stood next to you at your shows handing out your album for free, you'd be boned, right?
The fact here is that these people can and will make duplicates of your work, and there is nothing you can do to stop them. It's not costing them enough not to, and anything you do to increase that cost--pushing for rediculous prison terms, making blank CDs have a big tax, forcing ISPs to limit service, etc.--hurts society far more than your loss hurts you.
"And it's not information, it's art."
To my capture card in the studio, to my sound board mixing analog signals, to my microphone receiving vibrations in the air, reading a phonebook and playing a song are functionally equivalent. To the hard disk, the bytes look the same. Metadata about "art" or "not art" is lost in the medium.
There may be a great philosophical difference between art and information, there may be a moral difference about how one ought be treated as opposed to the other--but there is no practical difference, and getting paid is about getting practical.
cp ShohamsGreatestFlames.txt ShohamsGreatestFlames2.txt
Man, that was really really cheap. Free even.
"It costs money to duplicate and distribute licensed copies of other people's work."
Notice that I didn't say anything about licensed copies of other people's work. Duplication--the raw act as shown above--of digital data is effectively free.
Your profits derive from your ability to control the scarcity of your product, right? If a publisher licensed your music and stood next to you at your shows handing out your album for free, you'd be boned, right?
The fact here is that these people can and will make duplicates of your work, and there is nothing you can do to stop them. It's not costing them enough not to, and anything you do to increase that cost--pushing for rediculous prison terms, making blank CDs have a big tax, forcing ISPs to limit service, etc.--hurts society far more than your loss hurts you.
"And it's not information, it's art."
To my capture card in the studio, to my sound board mixing analog signals, to my microphone receiving vibrations in the air, reading a phonebook and playing a song are functionally equivalent. To the hard disk, the bytes look the same. Metadata about "art" or "not art" is lost in the medium.
There may be a great philosophical difference between art and information, there may be a moral difference about how one ought be treated as opposed to the other--but there is no practical difference, and getting paid is about getting practical.