From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lee@piclab.com)
Date: Mon Apr 01 2002 - 10:37:58 MST
> (spike66 <spike66@ATTBI.com>):
> >On Thu, 2002-03-28 at 23:45, Hal Finney wrote:
> >
> >>In my opinion, the situation we face is very clear. If unlimited
> >>free reproduction of information goods continues to be possible on
> >>the Internet, then the profitability of those goods is going to fall
> >>drastically, and people are going to stop creating them. In a nutshell,
> >>we are not going to have much new music and movies, if no one has to
> >>pay for them.
> >>
> We have a clear precedent in the world of published sheet music. When
> photocopiers became widely available in the 70s, it became so easy to copy
> music that the profitability of publishing sheet music decreased
> dramatically.
> Consequently fewer artists bothered to publish in that format. As
> a child and teenager, I always wondered why so much of the music
> libraries were old, ten years or more. Now I know. This is a clear
> example of both quality and quantity of a type of intellectual property
> declining in proportion to the decline of its profitability. spike
...and you're sure the sheet-music publishing business didn't die
because (1) technology made producing and selling recordings of
actual performances cheap and easy, and (2) copyright law was changed
to cover recordings of performances, so musicians could use the same
business model with a different product which had more demand?
The Xerox machine didn't destroy the book-publishing industry. What
makes you think that it was the primary thing that destroyed the
sheet-music industry, and not the fact that the industry was created
by the vagaries of copyright law in the first place, and changes to
that law brought the market more in line with what peole actually
wanted to buy?
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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