We can only expect the decline of RIAA member companies will lead to less advertising revenue.
Which is less important anyway since top100 gives RIAA member companies advertising gratis, even as they persecute filesharing. There's the irony.
filesharing has done nothing to break the hold of the major labels on the promotion and marketing of musical acts. As long as they can hold on to those, they will survive, and eventually they will figure out how to take advantage of the internet to make loads of money.
Indeed. Filesharing isn't going to break major label hold on our minds any more than sharing copies of Microsoft software was going to break that company's hold on our computers.
In the end, we'll have advertisements embedded into the hit singles, as part of the music and lyrics.
Yep, and if we're willing to look to other cultures, it's probably already happening, see http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2008/02/23/copypop/
TPB is a music (and other media) discovery service to the extent people look at its "top" pages.
Last.fm is of course much more interesting as a music discovery service. For those with concerns like the author of the post, check out http://libre.fm/
But if one starts thinking about it, it has the ironic effect that TPB is a driving force of consolidating the market power of the major labels rather than driving forward any new music. The conclusion has to be that "pirates" are just as little resistant to the major label marketing as any other person. Even though there are thousands and thousands of artists out there that want their music to be shared and listened to, they are widely and effectively ignored by the masses. In fact, one might say that TPB and the likes are countering the development of new markets, simply because the gap between the heavily marketed music and 'the others' is wider than ever, when the bare naked truth about peoples taste in music is put into such a system.
Indeed. So obvious, so seldom stated. I made it point 0 of http://www.slideshare.net/mlinksva/five-myths-about-the-future-of-culture-and-the-commons-presentation
There's no need to create new licenses to have CC-like easy-to-understand software licenses. CC has experimented with "human readable" deeds for a few software licenses and could work more with groups like FSF and OSI to do more and improve on those.
Noncommercial public licensing failed in software for good reasons, and it would be really dumb to introduce it at this point. Many people complain about NC culture licenses, but for software, they are much worse for a variety of reasons that I'll write about eventually, but see some of the bullets at http://www.slideshare.net/mlinksva/how-far-behind-free-software-is-free-culture-presentation
There are lots of poor software licenses out there, but the current generation of ones that are widely used and had a ton of attention during drafting are excellent, ie Apache2 and A/L/GPL3. To the extent they are long it is because they need to be (excepting preambles perhaps). CC licenses are also pretty long.
And I didn't mean to imply it is either/or, either.
I suspect that building voluntary commons (in software and culture) is probably the most effective means of advancing long term reform -- they demonstrate that restrictive copyright is not necessary for innovation, creativity, etc.
We in the non-profit licensing sector of the FLOSS world have a duty to the community of FLOSS users and programmers to defend their software freedom. I try to make every decision, on licensing policy (or, indeed, any issue) with that goal in mind.
Of course CC doesn't do software licenses and some of its licenses are only semi-free by the standards of free as in (software) freedom as applied to culture, but the overall lesson of the responsibility of license stewards applies.
"Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core." -- Hannah Arendt.
