Recycled Vinyl Blues
Just one of those things you think about, and want to get it out somewhere… did you know that the current ever-more-restrictive copyright laws can be traced back to the Yom Kippur War?
Let me explain:
In 1973, as a result of the US support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War, the Arab members of OPEC decided to embargo the US, as well as raising the price of oil to their other customers. This caused the price of oil to quadruple.
Vinyl, from which records are made, is made of oil.
This meant that drastic measures had to be taken by the record companies, including recycling old records to make new ones, as sung about here:
The other major change that was made was making the records much thinner. If you compare a record pressed before 1973 to one after, the difference is huge. I’ve had turntables that can play, say, my copy of Modern Sounds In Country & Western Music Vol 1 by Ray Charles with no problem, but where the tone arm just skids across Parallel Lines by Blondie because the grooves aren’t deep enough for the stylus to settle into.
This made a big difference to the sound quality of records – there’s a reason why new vinyl is often advertised as 180gm. The thicker the record, the deeper you can cut the grooves. The deeper the grooves can be cut, the more dynamic range can be put into the sound. The music is also louder, and scratches affect it less.
This meant that when the CD was invented in the early 80s, it solved two problems. Firstly, it was made out of less plastic, and so was cheaper to produce (once retooling of factories and so on had been covered), and secondly it sounded better than vinyl. Not better than proper, heavy, good vinyl, but better than the flimsy toys that were being produced by then. This is why the CD caught on.
But this led to several problems:
Firstly, the record companies suddenly found they were making most money not from developing new artists but from re-selling the same records to people who’d already bought them once, with ‘better’ sound (and later with bonus tracks and so on).
Secondly, the music was now in a digital format – which in the 80s and 90s didn’t make it easier to copy…
But come the 2000s, and these two things both cause a crisis for the music industry. On the one hand, all those lucrative records they’re selling to the Baby Boomers for the umpteenth time are going to start going out of copyright (if the EU hadn’t changed the rules this year, the Beatles’ records would have started entering the public domain next year. Most of Elvis’ bigger hits are already public domain in the UK). On the other hand, all the younger people – anyone forty or under – they’ve not bothered with for twenty-five years can suddenly share music on file-sharing services, because it’s all released in handy ready-to-rip digital format.
So there you go – the new, more restrictive copyright laws we’ve been seeing for the last decade are a direct result of the Yom Kippur War. Makes you wonder what completely unpredictable consequences we might see from events happening now. Maybe in fifty years someone will be writing “the invention of the time machine in 2055 was a direct result of the resignation of Liam Fox as defence secretary”?
Brian Wilson’s New Album – Why People Turn To ‘Piracy’
Before I start, for those expecting PEP! today, I’m afraid I was so overwhelmed with fielding the response for my last post I’ve had to leave it til this weekend. That’ll teach you to actually read and like things I write. But to make up for that there’s two posts today – one on comics shortly, and then one on Brian Wilson’s new album later.
But this is just a rant about precisely why people turn to ‘piracy’.
I pay for the vast majority of the music I listen to, because I believe music deserves paying for. I subscribe to eMusic and pay for a Spotify subscription. I tend only to torrent bootlegs. But more and more I wonder why.
Take Brian Wilson’s new album. It comes out today – if you live in the USA. If you’re in the UK, you have to wait til September 6. Also, you can’t buy the ‘Super Premium Edition’ (autographed vinyl, plus CD and MP3/FLAC copies) if you’re anywhere outside the USA. I might have bought that – I like vinyl. But OK, it’s a limited thing, there’s probably enough USians to buy them all up.
However, I do have an American wife, and so I have access to an American debit card, which luckily had the $9.99 available to purchase the album in MP3/FLAC format direct from Brian Wilson’s site. So I have to jump through a few hoops, but I get a confirmation of my ‘advance purchase’ – I can download a single track ‘now’ and the rest of the album ‘on August 17′. Even though it is now August 17.
But to be fair, Brian Wilson’s site is based in California, where I bought it at about 5AM, so I download the single track, and come back at 5:30 PM my time, 9:30AM theirs – a reasonable time, you would have thought. Certainly at this point the album has been downloadable at Amazon for several hours, but foolishly I chose to buy direct from the artist rather than go through a middleman (a middleman which also requires me to install proprietary software, of which there isn’t a copy for my operating system version) – and Amazon also refuse to sell the album to me anyway because my IP address is in the UK.
So at 5:30 PM I click the link provided in my email receipt, to be informed that I have ‘exceeded my download limit’. This despite the fact that I have not yet downloaded the album at all. The Brianwilson.com forums are now full of people asking when they’ll be able to get the album that they’ve already paid for.
On the other hand, checking one of the major bittorrent sites shows a full copy of the album, at the same quality as is being offered on brianwilson.com , was uploaded ten days ago.
So by wanting to pay for this music – music created by a multimillionaire who doesn’t need the money nearly as much as I do – I’ve had to obtain a debit card registered in another country, be lied to by a website, pay $10 and make a complaint through an automated system – and I’ve still not actually got the music. Had I not been able to get access to a foreign card, I would have had to wait a further month before I could even start on that process.
When you make it *THIS MUCH MORE DIFFICULT* for people to give you money for your product than to get it illegally for free, you don’t *DESERVE* the money. Wilson has another album coming out next year, apparently. If it’s sold in the same way, through the company ‘Topspin’, I shall for the first time in my life torrent one of his legitimately-available recordings rather than buying it. Because I don’t appreciate being punished firstly for living outside the US, and then again for actually paying money for the product.
ETA – Minutes after writing this, I got a reply to my complaint, and can now download the music
ETA Again – the link to the FLAC version they sent me breaks at the 2MB point. The MP3 version is downloading, though…
My Letter to Lords Razzal and Clement-Jones #debill
Written because I get just as angry when Lib Dems act in illiberal and undemocratic ways as when anyone else does…
I am writing, as a longtime member of the Liberal Democrats (and someone whose wife is employed by the party) to ask you to reconsider your amendment to the Digital Economy Bill.
This bill, even as it stands, is a significant threat to liberty (and is in my view opposed to everything our party is meant to stand for), but your amendment would make it significantly worse. The wording is broad enough that it could, for example, lead to, say, the site blogger.com being made inaccessible – many blogs on that site host copyrighted material, but a far larger number, the overwhelming majority, are devoted to entirely innocent or even beneficial material.
At the moment, the majority of the most popular uses of the internet are for so-called ‘user-generated content’ – sites like Facebook, or YouTube, or Twitter, or blog sites. All of these would be affected by your amendment, and would quite likely have to shut down.
As with any prohibitionist measure, this will not even have the intended effect. It will drive such sharing underground, but not stamp it out – I can right now think of half a dozen ways in which already-existing technology could circumvent such bans for anyone who was sufficiently motivated – while making it significantly more difficult for anyone who wants to use those sites for their intended, legitimate, purposes.
Copyright, Copywrong and Copyleft Part 2 – “Let The Artist Decide?”
I’ve got several other posts planned out – one on Darkseid, one on the Beatles, a new playlist, and so forth, but I’ve spent most of today reading the new Pratchett (not a masterpiece like Nation, but solidly entertaining and summing up a lot of my conflicted thoughts about football – and at this point, the fact that Terry Pratchett is capable of producing ‘an average Terry Pratchett book’ is well worth celebrating). They will be coming over the next few days – having four days off work has made me far less ill.
But I’m going to deal here, briefly, with one of the comments from my last post – LemmusLemmus saying “Revolutionary idea: Let the artists decide whether they want to give their work away or not.”
Which brings me to a point I was going to make anyway – why should it be the artist’s decision, at all?
Essentially, saying the artist has a right to prevent someone who has purchased their work from copying it, is to privilege (literally – ‘private law’) the artist as opposed to the rest of society. When anyone else sells you a product, they don’t actually get to prescribe how you must use it, and proscribe uses that offend them. When I bought my banjo and mandolin, they didn’t come with special songbooks and a rule that I can’t play any other songs on them. When I buy my computer, it doesn’t come with a rule as to which software I can run on it (it might if you run Windows, but I don’t do that).
So why, precisely, should artists and authors be given a right to control what is done with their work once it’s paid for?
Currently they are given such a right, but what I’m questioning is why they should be given such a right. As a more reasonable analogy than the ones above, if I buy an apple and plant the seeds from it, I can grow many apples, which I can give to my friends who can then grow their own apples. We could put greengrocers out of business! Yet nobody has yet attempted to criminalise the growing of trees in one’s garden.
To my mind, the issue of copyright in fact breaks down into several totally different – and possibly incompatible – ‘rights’ for the purchaser and the artist.
1) The moral right of the artist. The artist should have the right to be identified as the creator of the work, and should also have the right to control some minimal set of uses of it. Paul McCartney, a famous vegetarian, should be able to stop people using recordings of his voice to sell sausages, as that would give the impression that he in some way endorses those sausages himself, which he might well consider defamatory.
2) The right of the artist to be compensated for commercial exploitation – I don’t think anyone disagrees that if someone is going to make money from the work then the artist should get some of that money. I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with sharing recordings of Please Please Me by The Beatles – I think Messrs McCartney and Starr have probably been paid enough for their ten hours of work done when my mum was four years old. But if someone’s going to put that album out in a CD box set and charge people two hundred quid for it, it’s only fair that they should get a bit of that two hundred quid.
3) The right to share. This isn’t a legal right in the same way the above two are, and I think this is a problem. I think pretty much every decent human being will, if they have something they like, that they think their friend will also like, want to share that thing with their friend – especially if they can do so at no cost or inconvenience to themselves. I think that this is such a general instinct in humanity that trying to legislate against it is pointless, even were it a negative thing, which I don’t believe on the whole that it is.
4) The ‘right’ of artists to get paid. This is the one that most people focus on, even though the world doesn’t actually owe anyone a living for writing or singing or acting. A recording, book or whatever is only worth what people are prepared to pay for it.
So what we need to have for copyright (and please note I am here only talking about copyright, not ‘intellectual property’, which lumps a load of different, incompatible laws about trademarks and patents into one category) to function well – and whatever your view of the rights and wrongs of the current law, I think we can all accept that it simply doesn’t function – is some system that protects rights one through three, while at the same time providing some form of compensation for artists for ‘right’ four.
I’m going to talk about some of the ways we can do this in future posts, but for now I’ll just say that ‘letting the artist decide’ is not only simply not working – and prohibition of anything where tens of millions of people both engage in that activity and consider themselves justified in doing so is never going to work, no matter how much you may wish it – but also on shakier moral ground than it at first appears.
Copyright, Copywrong And Copyleft Part 1 – Is Filesharing Stealing?
There’s been a lot of debate recently about the morality, ethics and legality of filesharing – between the success of the Pirate Party in the European elections, the formation of a similar party here, the proposals to cut off internet access for ‘offenders’ and the comments made by that towering intellect Lily Allen.
As someone who makes music myself (MP3s of which can be purchased here (along with CDs by my friend and collaborator Blake Jones) for a very low price, or you can listen on Spotify here), and would very much like to get some money from doing it some day, I obviously have very strong opinions about this. But before I get to what I think we should *do*, I’ll just use a few anecdotes (anecdotal data – the best kind!)
In 1999, I was a student. I read in Mojo magazine about the Nuggets box set, which sounded like just my sort of thing. However, it cost sixty quid, which to a student is a lot of money. I couldn’t justify spending that on a box set of CDs without having heard any of the songs. However, my then-flatmate had this thing called Napster on his computer, so I downloaded a few songs from it – Psychotic Reaction by The Count Five, I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night by The Electric Prunes, and a few others. As a result of this I bought the box set, because I loved those tracks. As a result of *that* I bought albums by The Knickerbockers, Sagittarius, Love, The Thirteenth Floor Elevators and many more, as well as the Nuggets 2 box set and various other albums branded ‘Nuggets’, ‘Pebbles’ or ‘Ripples’. As a result of *those* I also bought albums by Curt Boettcher, Sandy Salisbury, The Millennium, Gary Usher, Roky Erickson & The Aliens and more than I care to think.
I also went to see both Love and The Electric Prunes live. As a result of the Love gig I bought albums by the backing band Baby Lemonade, and I also became a fan of the support act, Stew, which led to me buying albums by Stew, The Negro Problem, The Passing Strange Original Broadway Cast, Candypants, Carolyn Edwards, Kristian Hoffman and The Stool Pigeons, as well as spending several hundred quid commissioning Stew to write and record a customised song for my wedding (a really fantastically good song, incidentally – I doubt he’ll ever do that again now he’s a Tony award-winning Broadway composer whose musical has just been released as a Spike Lee film, but if he does it’s more than worth the money).
At a very conservative estimate, me downloading that handful of songs ten years ago has led to me spending at the very least a couple of thousand pounds on obscure music – and most of that spent during times when I was a student, unemployed, or on minimum wage (which I was until about a year ago).
In 2002 I bought Neil Gaiman’s book Adventures In The Dream Trade, a collection of miscellany which included forewords for a lot of comic collections. I had been a comic fan in my teens, but had more or less dropped the hobby, but thought ‘some of these sound good’, so I downloaded a few random issues of Cerebus, Brat Pack and Astro City from Soulseek. I now have two bookcases groaning under the weight of trade paperbacks (one has literally broken under the strain this week), a few longboxes full of individual issues (I would have more but I regularly clear out less-good comics and give them to my niece), and spend about fifteen quid a week on comics – because of that handful of downloads.
Around the same time I remembered how much I’d liked Doctor Who as a kid – I’d been a HUGE fan while the show was on, and for a couple of years afterwards, but living in a small town and being very young had no access to fandom so once the local newsagent stopped stocking DWM, I’d dropped away. But I thought “I wonder if it was as good as I remember? I’ll download one of the ones Douglas Adams did – that should be good”. I now have fifty-nine stories on DVD alone (depending on how you count the Lost In Time and Trial Of A Timelord sets), along with books (both novels and reference books), audio dramas (spent twenty quid on those *yesterday alone*), toys (a little mini K9 my wife bought me), posters and the occasional conference visit. (I have many of the rest of the stories as downloads, incidentally, but will be buying the DVDs in due course). I definitely spend several hundred quid a year on Doctor Who, largely as a result of that single download.
So when I read all these ‘home taping is killing music’ type articles, I just find it ludicrous. When I have downloaded stuff via filesharing programs (as opposed to legal downloads via emusic) in the past, it has been literally impossible for it to have been taking any revenue from the artists who worked on it, because every single penny of disposable income I have had – and to be honest quite a lot of money that should have been spent on things like clothing, rent and utility bills – has gone directly to those very same artists. Short of getting another job, or robbing a bank, there is no way I could have given any more money to those people – and most of them would have not got a penny without my initial exposure via filesharing.
So I hope that disposes of the ‘filesharing is stealing!!!!’ part of the argument against filesharing. Sharing is, in and of itself, about as far from stealing as one can get – sharing information, especially, is in my view a wholly good thing, because nobody has been deprived, and someone has gained.
However, there are other arguments that are tied up in the filesharing issue, and the issue of copyright in a digital age, and I would like to deal with them in separate posts, simply because this one is already far longer than I planned on it being. Those other posts, which I’ll do over the next few days, will deal with the issues of ‘moral rights’, of compensation of artists, of new artists gaining recognition, and what I hope will be the solutions to this.
There are some huge problems with the current models for artistic compensation and copyright, and these are particularly hitting people like me, who are capable of making (I believe) very good recorded music but who are not able to perform live for whatever reason. I hope to point out some ways that these problems can be overcome in the next few essays (next part probably on Tuesday).
Linkblogging for 07/09/08
As you will have noticed from the long post yesterday, my computer problems are now (pray God) over. The laptop I got just over a week ago broke within a few days, so I got another refurb as a replacement. In another case of fate playing silly buggers with me, this was the day after I made my post talking about how Free Software is now very usable for absolutely everyone and doesn’t give you the kind of problems that you had before, so *of course* the laptop turned out to have a soundcard that isn’t supported under GNU/Linux. I ended up having to recompile ALSA from source in order to get any sound on it at all and the headphones still don’t work and the sound is a bit tinny. So if you like Free Software, don’t buy a Toshiba Satellite.
On the other hand, whatever you like, you should buy the Davros boxset from Big Finish, especially if you’re one of those who come here for A Big Finish A Week. I just got mine in the post on Friday, and it’s fantastic. They’re currently on sale, which is why I’m linking them now, and so for forty quid you can get every post-Tom Baker Dalek TV show (Genesis of the Daleks, Destiny of the Daleks, Resurrection of the Daleks, Revelation of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks), plus all their DVD special features (an entire disc of them in the case of Genesis) plus all three Big Finish Doctor Who audios featuring Davros, plus the four-part Big Finish non-Doctor series I, Davros, telling the life story of Davros before he met the Doctor, plus an exclusive Davros audio not on anything else and a documentary film about Davros.
For forty quid you get nearly ten hours of Doctor Who episodes, plus more than thirteen hours of audio adventure, plus God knows how much in terms of documentaries, deleted scenes, commentary and so on. If you ever got terrified as a five-year-old by Terry Molloy’s closed-over eyes and withered arm, this is for you. Highly recommended.
The Mindless Ones have yet another excellent post (I should just set up an RSS feed from them here, I link to them so often), this time amypoodle talking about Perry Bible Fellowship, the Mindless Ones’ own excellent single-panel feature Terminus and whether newspaper-strip type comics have to be funny.
It’s been a bad week for British comedy again, as not only did Geoffrey Perkins die, but also the great Ken Campbell, whose death I missed hearing about for a few days due to my lack of net access. I only saw Campbell live once, at a tribute to Robert Anton Wilson last year where he performed with Coldcut, Alan Moore and Bill Drummond. Again I’ll break my rule about embedding YouTube videos:
Campbell was one of those people whose influence vastly outweighed his public visibility, and comedy, theatre, science fiction and forteana would all be unrecognisable today without his work. Holly and I watched him on the Secret Policeman’s Ball DVD yesterday, ordering a midget (the great David Rappaport) to chain up a near-naked Sylvester McCoy, and I got a tiny bit tearful. But anyway – I was going to link to Mark Borkowski, who said all this rather better than I could.
Gavin Burrows talks interestingly about hipsters and geeks (there’s a reason I never use the g word myself, even though I’d fit by most people’s standards – like he says, it’s defined by consumption).
Sadly, No! point out exactly who John McCain classes as rich – and who he doesn’t.
All that talk about copyright extensions being ‘for the artists’? The average performer is likely to get 50 cents (euro) per year out of it.
And something I never thought I’d see actually happen – Cliff RIchard has effectively outed himself and is calling for the Church to recognise gay marriage. Of course, if he hadn’t spent much of his career campaigning with the likes of Mary Whitehouse for a return to the Middle Ages, maybe they already would…
1 comment