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To: Mike Masnick <mike@techdirt.com>
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Subject: Re: The GOv gets tough on Net Users.....er Pirates..
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From: Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@canada.com>
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Date: 27 Aug 2002 13:49:25 -0400

>>>>> "M" == Mike Masnick <mike@techdirt.com> writes:

    M> In which world are we talking about?  That may be true for the
    M> first sale, but once something is out in the world, the
    M> "creator" loses control... If I buy a chair you built, and then
    M> decide to give it away to my neighbor, by you're definition, he
    M> just stole from you.

I don't endorse the whole RIAA thing, but to be accurate, you would
have to duplicate the chair so that both you and your neighbour could
continue to sit down, and yes, I suppose that would be more serious.

They can sit on /your/ copy, but if you start churning out exact dups
of a name-brand artifact, people with law degrees start to smell
money.  For example, I could copy a Gibson Guitar /exactly/ so long as
(a) I don't put Orville's name on the headstock and (b) I license the
patented bracing methods.  If I instead try to sell a homebuilt guitar
on eBay with "Gibson" written in crayon on the headstock, and then
claim it is a true Les Paul limited edition, I expect people would get
upset.

    M> Why is it that people don't understand that giving stuff away
    M> is a perfectly acceptable tactic in capitalist businesses?  

To play the Devil's Advocate here, it's not about giving /stuff/ away,
it is about granting endless and cascading duplication/distribution
rights.  Even if _I_ only make the copy I give to you, that doesn't
stop you from making 10000 copies to sell.

    M> Access to free stuff often helps to sell other stuff.  

This is the difficult question:  How will they draw the distinction?
The "other stuff" is just as easy to duplicate as the free stuff.
This is why MS is hunting people with illegal Windows; it's no harder
to dup than a Linux CD, only what is there that actually prevents
people from doing it?

Personally, I don't think the issue should have anything to do with
sales or units.  The issue is that basic phallacy that says a suit
should be able to "own" someone else's intellectual property.  Sarah
McLaughlin isn't suing you, it's her label's legal dept because it's
the label who stands to lose; Sarah's already fat beyond her wildest
dreams, so a few bucks here or there, or even if the well dried up
tomorrow, it's not going to really traumatize her (unless she's been
blazingly stupid with her money)

But the label ... like Disney and Mickey, they need the cash cow so
they can keep all sorts of uncreative hangers-on in limos and coke.
If you thought only Elvis or Brian Jones or Dennis Wilson had problems
with beautiful-people deadbeat leech "friends" draining their riches,
think again.

The problem is really very simple because it is semantic, and until we
make the semantic flip, it's unsolvable, but like trisecting an angle,
all it takes is looking at the same situation in a different
way.  Here's the revelation: Elvis never ever made a hit record.

Elvis didn't make the hits, his /fans/ made the hits.  His fans did
the work cleaning toilets, manning the convenience stores, driving
milk trucks, sitting at endless office desks, they did the /real/
labour that paid for every last one of Elvis Presley's pills.  All
Elvis did was sing into a microphone every so often, and pen or
collect the odd song that all those /people/ liked and wanted as
something of their own.  But it's not _Elvis_ who made them universal
statements, it is the universe of fans who slurped the songs into
their own lives, it was pull-technology, not push.

Therefore the question becomes: how many times must these fans pay
before they own what they themselves have created?  They pay royalties
for listening to the radio, for blank tapes, for concert tickets, for
a beer in a bar with a cover band ... they pay over and over and over
again for the /right/ to make some hack writer's song /their/
favourite song????  That's where the whole system has been seriously
warped by the record companies and ad companies reframing it into your
thinking that it is the Elvis who makes the Elvis.  It's not.  It's
the people who make them; the songs are already theirs.

-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@teledyn.com> TeleDynamics Communications Inc
 Business Advantage through Community Software : http://www.teledyn.com
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)


