Taking the Anti-Piracy Argument Back From the Music Industry

[electrizer]

This is about forcing very powerful entities to STOP profiting from illegal activity and getting the actual creators/artists the money they are entitled to.

I do understand that. And I would also argue it goes deeper than that because those entities only facilitate what happens by means of general social consent. Instead of pumping money into legal battles, I would actually do what they do: invest in a long-term, powerful, emotional marketing and advertising campaign aimed at changing peoples' attitudes. In that what Vinnie's advocated could help. Look at what trade unions are able to achieve as opposed to individual employees.

Was it Napster, Kaaza, Pirate Bay themselves who shared files? It was the people who were only provided the platform.

What I'm trying to say that instead of fighting windmills and engage in a tug of war with an opponent much stronger than you are, it's better to bypass that and address the audience rather than the platforms they use. (And the link about Google you posted a couple of posts back only goes to prove that.)

And regarding the "You are entitled to nothing" bit, I meant that in the sense of commercial success, not being actually remunerated for what you have created. That being your intellectual property, has to be paid for and the fact is indisputable.

[Paul Marangoni]

invest in a long-term, powerful, emotional marketing and advertising campaign aimed at changing peoples' attitudes.

The part of the population that partakes in and accepts the concept of ignoring the rights of creators will never change their attitudes. They were born AFTER all of this nonsense began. Besides, there are already laws in place that should not be ignored. Why should we spend millions up millions of dollars on a campaign that serves to convince people that what they are doing is wrong or unfair? Do you think Google would sit idly by?

Back to that "report" you linked to:

This week a variety of outlets are reporting on a 2014 study commissioned by the EU to examine the impact of piracy on sales, and are howling in protest that this study was buried by the Commission since it didn’t support the pre-conceived political conclusion that EU action was necessary in light of the known impact. Luckily the persistence of the Pirate Party’s Julia Reda has unearthed this gem which theoretically calls into question the Commission’s intended agenda, and Reda herself is suggesting that it “may not be too late” to be used to stop the EU from proceeding in its quixotic attempts to save a creative community that according to her, needs no saving.

I am sorry, but this is crazy talk–some of it no doubt intentional, and some of it flowing from a misunderstanding of what it means to not find statistical evidence of causality. IBT went with the sensationalist headline: “EU Buried Study That Found No Impact From Piracy On Entertainment Industry”, notwithstanding that its own article contradicted this supposed “finding.” And Newsweek went with “INSIDE THE PIRACY STUDY THE EUROPEAN UNION HID: ILLEGAL DOWNLOADS DON’T HARM OVERALL SALES,” again ignoring the fact that the study made no such finding.

And those partisans parading this study as proof of lack of harm are also surprisingly quick to assert causality in the action of the EU–burying the report because it didn’t support their political agenda, and failing to consider alternative reasons…say, that they felt it didn’t add enough probative evidence that would help in decision-making, and that it was likely to be misunderstood as implying the lack of correlation between piracy and sales in ways that confused the public. I personally don’t know what relevant officials in the EU were thinking, but this latter alternative not only seems plausible and likely, but sound.

So let’s go back to what the study “found.” As reported in TorrentFreak, the key conclusions were: “In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements…That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect.” It does not mean that piracy doesn’t impact sales, only that they were unable to prove this effect based on the data they had at their disposal. In other words, they could not disprove the null hypothesis. You know, just like scientists couldn’t disprove the null hypothesis about the effect of smoking on health for decades, or present efforts to disprove the null hypothesis on the effect of human activity on the climate. There are about a million reasons for failure to disprove the null hypothesis, but mostly they come down to one thing–understanding causality in complex relationships in which it is nearly impossible to establish control groups is incredibly complex. Essentially economists are looking for a straight line in a ball of thread. Truth is, we know many things that statistics can not prove. The truth can be more than the sum of its unknowable parts.

“So what part of this universe do we objectively know? Global music revenue in 1999 at the dawn of Napster and internet piracy was $28 billion.

And in 2016? $16 billion.

Did people lose interest in music? Far from it. It only lost its value, not its listenership. Indeed, according to reports, music consumption is at an all time high.

So tell me again how to interpret the failure of the study to disprove the null hypothesis! Does anyone truly believe that piracy was not a material factor in the dramatic reduction of revenue even as consumption has increased? I will grant that statistical proof of causality is hard to come by (at the end of this post, I have listed some references for peer-reviewed literature on the subject) but that is principally due to the limitations of statistical analysis in a complex and non-linear world rather than an observation of the world in which we live and breathe.

We may not be able to statistically prove our existence (i.e. disprove the null hypothesis that there is no connection between our awareness of self and our actual existence), yet most of us have little trouble in assuming that we are not imaginary.

Reda, TechDirt and others want people to reject their knowledge and sensible understanding of the world based on a study that doesn’t stand for the proposition they advance. Small wonder if the EU decided to not release a non-finding based on a concern that it would be intentionally misused. I haven’t spoken to anyone in the Commission and have no idea why they decided to refrain from publishing this study–all I can do is observe that if they were concerned about it being used to advance nonsensical arguments, they were sadly prescient.

One word before closing. TorrentFreak also summarized the report as follows: “So, it appears that products that are priced fairly do not suffer significant displacement from piracy. Those that are priced too high, on the other hand, can expect to lose some sales.” I hope to explore this at greater length in subsequent posts, but it is truly straight out of Alice in Wonderland. Given issues of compression and bandwidth, movies were not as immediately affected as some other forms of entertainment, and thus retained their value. Music files on the other hand were small and easily distributed and transferred. The ubiquity of free music drove the perceived fair value of music to near zero, and licenses then reflected this perceived value. There is nothing fair about this–indeed, perhaps the most pernicious and lasting effect of piracy on music creators is that they are forced to operate within licensed environments based on the perception that recorded music has little if any value. This effect of piracy has consequences far greater and far more lasting than the straight substitutional effects the study sought to examine.

[Paul Marangoni]

[electrizer]

Kinda off-topic but not so much...

There’s Only One Career Choice Worse Than Being a Musician…

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/12/16/louis-ck-musician-stupid-career/

[Paul Marangoni]

If you are thinking about whether or not you want to pay for someone's work, you can undertake this thought experiment: if your boss told you that you weren't going to be paid to go to work tomorrow, but you're expected to put in a full day regardless, what you would tell them?

https://www.contentcafe.org.au/articles ... 017-update

[electrizer]

Paul sorry I had a long reply to you but it turned out I had to log in again and lost the entire text. Don't feel like writing it again tonight...

[Paul Marangoni]

https://thesmartset.com/why-music-ownership-matters/

Music seems to have returned to the medieval era, when starving bards survived by serving the nobility, providing the playlist at a banquet where others were feasting. That’s a fitting metaphor for the new reality in music. The shift in economic models has been rapid and devastating. Apple could now acquire every major record label with just the spare cash in its bank account. But Apple CEO Tim Cook is too smart to do that. He knows there’s no money as a content creator — in fact, his company has worked to ensure that state of affairs.

But there’s another problem in the music business, and it may turn out to be even more devastating for the music ecosystem. The transition from physical to digital music may be less damaging than the shift from ownership to streaming. Most people in the industry are complacent about the latter change. They care about cash flow — they want listeners to pay for streaming. But they rarely worry about how the behavior of music fans changes when they no longer own recordings.

This is a big mistake. The music industry was built on the passions of record collectors. The album wasn’t just a physical object, but a lifestyle accessory, almost a fetish and talisman. People didn’t just listen to their records, they displayed them as quasi-holy relics. The album cover might seem irrelevant — a baby swimming after a dollar bill, a painting of a big banana, or even a blank white slate with only tiny text (The Beatles) emblazoned on it. But to the owners, these served as supercharged personal emblems. The image could change, but the message stayed the same: This is my music. This is who I am.

During the most formative years of emotional development, teenagers would meet and, almost before learning anything else about each other, peruse each other’s record collections. You judged your peers by what albums they owned, and also by those they excluded from their collections. They did the same to you, and teens trembled in fear at the verdicts rendered. Even the furniture collectors used to contain their treasures was revealing, whether old orange crates or ornate cabinets. Parents tended to choose the latter, so we learned to view those with suspicion.

I note that generations began adopting music as their cohort’s identity immediately after the rise of recordings. The 1920s were called the Jazz Age. The late 1930s became the Swing Era, and in the 1940s people started talking about the Big Band Era. The 1960s was the Age of Woodstock. That doesn’t happen anymore. It’s now the Digital Age or Post-Truth Era or whatever, but music no longer defines demographics the way it did back when people bought albums.

This connection between ownership and passion is vitally important to the economics of music. If you eliminate the former, you erode the latter. Yet there’s an even bigger danger to a music ecosystem that gives up on ownership.

What happens when the mega-corporations who run the streaming services decide to delete a million songs that aren’t generating sufficient profits to justify their storage costs? Or ten million? Or maybe whole genres — 12-tone-row music, Native American chants, 1920s jazz, etc. — because they just don’t draw a meaningful audience?

What we take for granted today will disappear tomorrow. And the internet brings with it the potential for cultural destruction on a scale previously unfathomable. Do you want to trust the preservation of music to Apple and Google? Do you think they value it the same way you do?

In the meantime, fans should show their commitment to their favorite artists by buying their music. Don’t just stream, but own. As John Lennon once said: It’s easy if you try.

[Paul Marangoni]

A team set to publish a book on the untold history of Spotify were threatened by the company, one of its researchers has revealed. Earlier this year, Rasmus Fleischer, who was also one of the early figures at The Pirate Bay, said that Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s to launch its beta. Soon after, the researchers were contacted by a lawyer, with strong suggestions to stop what they’re doing.”

...Rarely noted is the fact that a mechanical license is bound to a particular recording of a composition. What if another artist covering the song is mistakenly sourced? Or a live recording? Or more troubling an unauthorized live recording? Isn’t this a completely different set of copyright infringements not covered in recent settlements? Holy shit. If this is not an illegal practice on the part of Spotify it’s certainly another bit of sloppiness from a company that is getting a reputation among investors for recklessness.

https://thetrichordist.com/2017/10/06/t ... ers-a-lot/

[Paul Marangoni]

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles ... -than-ever

And artists don't just deserve a greater reward as the reason the industry exists: The relative lack of money for musicians makes for less good music. It's one reason back catalogs now outsell current releases.

[electrizer]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand

supply and demand is an economic model of price determination in a market. It postulates that in a competitive market, the unit price for a particular good, or other traded item such as labor or liquid financial assets, will vary until it settles at a point where the quantity demanded (at the current price) will equal the quantity supplied (at the current price), resulting in an economic equilibrium for price and quantity transacted.