[Gnu-arch-users] Re: [OT] copyright and economic incentive

[Tom Lord]

to stephen who is no longer participating in the thread:


    > you've written a document in
    > political economy where you

    >   o reinvent ASCAP and the RIAA,

Not entirely, no, but approximately, yes.  And deliberately so.
Frankly, I think that the RIAA would do well to embrace my proposal --
that would give them a smooth path to the future rather than a chaotic
one.

In the abstract, those organizations are fantastic financial hacks.
You have a pool of capital with which to speculate in new works, in
anticipation of future returns.

RIAA is a little out of scale with modern technology.  For example,
one can nowadays produce in the living room a recording of such
(technical) quality as could only have been produced a few decades ago
in a very expensive studio -- truly awesome studios are struggling and
failing these days.  And, for example, we'll all benefit from the
diversity of tastes as competitors to RIAA members grow in number and
strength.  And, for example, the explosion of "bandwidth into the
listener's environment" means that they're going to have to learn
lessons from the many niche-cable-tv networks ("faster, cheaper
better").  And labor (the artists) are a bit underrepresented in the
RIAA way of doing things.  Unions are a good thing.

But generally, the financial hack: lending against the value producing
potential of artists and speculating in creativity?  Totally
brilliant.  Quite sane.  My proposal moves that hack into the 21st
century.


    >   o breathe new life into the pernicious notion of "fair trade" (in
    >     practice "collusion against which we don't enforce anti-trust
    >     laws because they suck blood by the pint on the half-hour rather
    >     than by the quart hourly, and sit in the front pew at church")

Nice poem.   Totally decadent but nice technical use of words.


    >   o and in the process provide a vehicle which would make the group
    >     you label as "the Stanford Poofs" a legally enforceable cartel.

It doesn't really, but since you've started waving your arms and
begging off of defending you positions, I guess we'll have to leave
that topic for a more dedicated debator.

    > All mixed with the same set of carefully obfuscated presumptions 

You're talking about me but describing yourself.  Funny, that.

-t