I’ve been addicted to bargain bins for as long as I’ve known of them. I lost a slew of records in the early 70s, when my apartment was burglarized, but even so, I still have several hundred (vinyl) records dating from that time. It’s not just the lure of getting music for cheap; at remainder prices you can afford to buy things on impulse, just because you like the album cover, or because you vaguely remember having heard something by the artist(s) and sorta kinda remember liking them.
You don’t usually get the mega-hits in remainder bins, though the hits do show up in as used in stores devoted to that purpose (usually not at the cheapest prices, of course). Used vinyl was/is a risky purchase, since even apparently clean albums sometimes have a single, major skip somewhere. CDs are more forgiving, but the downside of that is that more people treat them badly, so used CDs often have pretty ugly surfaces and sometimes those render one or more tracks unusable. Nevertheless, there are often some tricks that can recover the track for ripping if not for straight play. The same holds true for vinyl, there being some wonder-products that clean and even repair (to a very limited extent) the surfaces.
Buying closeout records is sometimes a bit ghoulish. When MGM records failed to option Frank Zappa in 1968, Zappa formed Bizarre Productions, and a good bit of Zappa’s MGM catalog went to remainder, including Lumpy Gravy, which I bought (and then lost to the aforementioned burglary). There must have been something going on with MGM records, because all of the “Boston Sound” artists hit the cheap bins at about the same time. A while later, MGM sold out to Polydor, and another big batch of product hit the remainder shelves, including a number of Verve recordings.
When Tetragrammaton Records bit the dust, I got some Bill Cosby records, plus Steve Barron and some others. The Phillips label also had some financial difficulties, so I own a couple of copies of the classic H. P. Lovecraft II album, and it’s near the top of my list for conversion to MP3.
Realize that buying cheap records doesn’t actually save you any money; you just buy more albums with the same budget, or lack thereof, which is to say, all your disposable income. After I moved to California, I joined a taping club for a while, not so much to save money on any given record, but because the effort involved in taping put a limit on the number of albums I could get at any given time so I saved in the aggregate. The net result of that is a cache of reel-to-reel tapes of some records that are almost impossible to get elsewhere like the Handscapes by the Piano Choir, or Across the Western Ocean by John Roberts and Tony Barrand.
Amy has been involved with a non-profit organization that runs a thrift store, and from time to time a big box of cassette tapes will come in and she’ll get it cheap. One of them was amazing; it had a lot of on-air recordings from KPFA in the mid to late 80s, especially one called “Do Wop Delights” featuring 50s do wop and gospel records (again, some of them so rare as to be unique). There have also been a lot of mix tapes from various people, some of them pretty good music programming (says the conceit of one who thinks he knows). Having those tapes makes the old tape deck in my car more attractive.
There isn’t a single thing that I’ve mentioned in this essay whose purchase put money into the pocket of the recording artist or any other copyright holder. The close-outs do profit the record labels, but that’s about it. Taping clubs pretty much died from threat of lawsuits, just as Napster etc. quit the field owing to legal actions. Neither the demise of Napster nor the end of taping clubs had any real impact on the fortunes of artists, nor would the elimination of libraries assist writers (quite the opposite, as there are some books and even entire small presses that sell mainly to libraries). There are, of course, writers and musicians who’d like to charge rent every time anyone reads or plays anything of their work.
For that matter, paying full price for records benefits a limited number of people. I once had a conversation with a bass player who had just made an album. He explained that the only money anyone in the band really made on the album was from the session fees. The songwriter gets some extra juice, but everything else is water and wind.
On my side of it, if somebody makes some money out of anything I write, I’d like a taste of it. Otherwise, get a bucket and have yourself some free words. It’s a complicated dance, the conspiracy between the author and the audience, and even guys who fill stadiums probably sometimes feel like they’re dancing alone.
Showing posts with label copyrights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label copyrights. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Copyrights ad Nauseum
I was going to write on another aspect of writer loopiness about copyrights, and maybe more, but I’ve been following another long discussion over on Making Light (May 25th). The links to Macaulay, and Legionseagle on Keith DeCandido and amateur law, are hugely useful.
To those I’d add material from Ray Patterson. There’s a link on my Color Cycling article that contains a link to an excellent essay by Patterson that has since been removed, (probably because of Patterson’s death in 2003), so that link is now broken and I need to update the article. I have that linked article of Patterson’s saved somewhere, and I may put some of his philosophy into action by posting excerpts sometime. I imagine that the material is also in Patterson’s book, Copyright in Historical Perspective, and at some point I’ll no doubt read the book for review.
The comments thread on the Making Light entries are quite revealing of the other aspect of writers’ perceptions of copyrights: ego involvement. One writer made it clear that they consider someone else’s use of “their” characters in “fanfic” as akin to rape, and the mere thought of it creates an inability for that writer to function as a writer. This strikes me as being a potentially career ending handicap, similar to horrible stage fright in a performer.
Of course, this is easy for me to say, given my own view that writing itself is a collaborative art, even if it is never published, since I hold that individuals change sufficiently over time that a single individual often collaborates with other selves. For that matter, the idea that a single individual self contains multitudes means that even a solitary soul is a collaboration. When other people are added, when a work is published, in other words, even more people are added to the collaboration (albeit one at a time for readers), and I do not think that I can or should have a proprietary right over what goes on in others’ heads, nor the expression of that in material form.
But cause and effect are tricky here. Do I read things I wrote years ago as if they were written by someone else because of the way I feel about these matters, or do I feel that way because I’ve found that reading old stuff is like reading someone else’s work? I don’t know.
What I do know is that the debate is to a large extent a distraction from the shell game. The arguments are always made predicated on the benefits that will go to “artists” and “creators,” but somehow it is the organizations of lawyers and moneymen who get the lion's share.
Now, for no particular reason, other than the obvious, here's Cab Calloway and Betty Boop:
To those I’d add material from Ray Patterson. There’s a link on my Color Cycling article that contains a link to an excellent essay by Patterson that has since been removed, (probably because of Patterson’s death in 2003), so that link is now broken and I need to update the article. I have that linked article of Patterson’s saved somewhere, and I may put some of his philosophy into action by posting excerpts sometime. I imagine that the material is also in Patterson’s book, Copyright in Historical Perspective, and at some point I’ll no doubt read the book for review.
The comments thread on the Making Light entries are quite revealing of the other aspect of writers’ perceptions of copyrights: ego involvement. One writer made it clear that they consider someone else’s use of “their” characters in “fanfic” as akin to rape, and the mere thought of it creates an inability for that writer to function as a writer. This strikes me as being a potentially career ending handicap, similar to horrible stage fright in a performer.
Of course, this is easy for me to say, given my own view that writing itself is a collaborative art, even if it is never published, since I hold that individuals change sufficiently over time that a single individual often collaborates with other selves. For that matter, the idea that a single individual self contains multitudes means that even a solitary soul is a collaboration. When other people are added, when a work is published, in other words, even more people are added to the collaboration (albeit one at a time for readers), and I do not think that I can or should have a proprietary right over what goes on in others’ heads, nor the expression of that in material form.
But cause and effect are tricky here. Do I read things I wrote years ago as if they were written by someone else because of the way I feel about these matters, or do I feel that way because I’ve found that reading old stuff is like reading someone else’s work? I don’t know.
What I do know is that the debate is to a large extent a distraction from the shell game. The arguments are always made predicated on the benefits that will go to “artists” and “creators,” but somehow it is the organizations of lawyers and moneymen who get the lion's share.
Now, for no particular reason, other than the obvious, here's Cab Calloway and Betty Boop:
Friday, May 25, 2007
Keys
When I got to RPI in 1968, they’d just opened a spiffy new Student Union building. Its top floor consisted of a lounge/balcony area that overlooked the Student Union Dining Hall, plus outer offices and meeting rooms. Since those were all on the outer perimeter of the building, practically every meeting room and office had windows. Pretty slick design, I think.
At the four corners of the top floor were office areas, the main Union office, plus three “special interest” office clusters. One of them was for student publications. Most of the space got taken by The Polytechnic, the school newspaper, because it was, by far, the largest organization. There was also a darkroom (in one of the few spaces without windows), and the Poly guys used that a lot, but all the publications had access to it. There were three other main publications on campus, The Bachelor (humor magazine), The Gorgon (literary magazine), and the Rensselaer Engineer, which was my equivalent of pledging a fraternity (albeit a very small one).
There were three editorial jobs on The Engineer: Features Editor, Managing Editor, and Editor-in-Chief, usually occupied by a sophomore, junior, and senior, respectively. Taking the Features Editor position traditionally set you up for a three year gig, and that’s what happened to me. Actually, the transition usually took place in the spring semester, so there was overlap with the outgoing editor-in-chief for the one semester, at least theoretically.
So I became Features Editor my freshman year. I got a key to the office, and kept it for three years. I spent a lot of time in that office, and why not? It was on campus, in a cool new building, and better than the offices that most faculty members got.
Having the key to that office was a source of comfort, or so I learned when I gave it up. Suddenly, bereft, I had to find other places to store my stuff, eat lunch (or sometimes breakfast; I kept cereal in on of the desk drawers), hide out when I felt like hiding. The office hadn’t been exactly property, but it wasn’t not property, either. I mean, how else to explain the feeling of loss when it was no longer “mine.”
Keys are interesting for a number of reasons, but here I’m interested in the fact that they define and protect property without specific legal recourse. They prevent theft or unauthorized use even in the absence of police protection. Access is both freedom and power. Property is both freedom and power.
When they were planning the new RPI Library, during the time I was in graduate school, there was a suggestion to put one of those electronic theft detectors at the entrance. The new Head Librarian and I were dead set against it. He held the very admirable position that students were part of the University Community, and that one does not begin with the assumption that members of your community are thieves. Trust them and they will reward that trust was his belief.
My own position was that putting a technical barrier in at an engineering school was just asking for it. There would be students who would never consider stealing books who would begin to do so just to show they could do it. I’d known too many students who’d gimmicked telephones, cracked the main RPI keying system, and otherwise gotten into trouble, just because it had been a challenge. Well, okay, the challenge and the getting free phone calls and getting parts for their electrical engineering projects from the labs at 3 A.M.
The two of us won the argument, at least temporarily. I think I saw some of the electronic detectors at a reunion or so back, but at least someone could maybe check to see if it did any good, because we had some years as a baseline.
So we come to copy protection (CP) and Digital Rights Management, both pernicious and foolish ideas, in my estimation, but apparently very seductive to those who want control of “intellectual property.” But CP and DRM differ from the sort of protection that keys provide in fundamental ways, ways that underscore the difference between intellectual property and chattel property or real estate.
The message that is sent by copy protection is that you don’t own what you bought, someone else owns it. So where does that leave you? Wherever it leaves you, it leaves you with less than you otherwise would have. Copy protection is never transparent; it’s a pain to deal with. It makes whatever is being “protected” less valuable.
Now an automobile that can’t be stolen would be more valuable to the owner, not less. So CP and DRM isn’t protection for the owner; it’s just restriction.
How much is that reduction in value actually worth? Hard to say, really, though I note that there is currently a move to sell non-DRM music for about 30% more than DRMed music. So somebody thinks the vigorish is about 30%.
But the other message that is sent by CP and DRM schemes is that anything goes if you can break the protection. And some people have made it their mission to do just that. The result has been an ongoing arms race, with the latest moves being to make such attempts illegal. In fact, the idea is to make even the transmission of information about how to break DRM illegal.
Me, I’m just fascinated at all the different ways there are to invent the Thought Police.
At the four corners of the top floor were office areas, the main Union office, plus three “special interest” office clusters. One of them was for student publications. Most of the space got taken by The Polytechnic, the school newspaper, because it was, by far, the largest organization. There was also a darkroom (in one of the few spaces without windows), and the Poly guys used that a lot, but all the publications had access to it. There were three other main publications on campus, The Bachelor (humor magazine), The Gorgon (literary magazine), and the Rensselaer Engineer, which was my equivalent of pledging a fraternity (albeit a very small one).
There were three editorial jobs on The Engineer: Features Editor, Managing Editor, and Editor-in-Chief, usually occupied by a sophomore, junior, and senior, respectively. Taking the Features Editor position traditionally set you up for a three year gig, and that’s what happened to me. Actually, the transition usually took place in the spring semester, so there was overlap with the outgoing editor-in-chief for the one semester, at least theoretically.
So I became Features Editor my freshman year. I got a key to the office, and kept it for three years. I spent a lot of time in that office, and why not? It was on campus, in a cool new building, and better than the offices that most faculty members got.
Having the key to that office was a source of comfort, or so I learned when I gave it up. Suddenly, bereft, I had to find other places to store my stuff, eat lunch (or sometimes breakfast; I kept cereal in on of the desk drawers), hide out when I felt like hiding. The office hadn’t been exactly property, but it wasn’t not property, either. I mean, how else to explain the feeling of loss when it was no longer “mine.”
Keys are interesting for a number of reasons, but here I’m interested in the fact that they define and protect property without specific legal recourse. They prevent theft or unauthorized use even in the absence of police protection. Access is both freedom and power. Property is both freedom and power.
When they were planning the new RPI Library, during the time I was in graduate school, there was a suggestion to put one of those electronic theft detectors at the entrance. The new Head Librarian and I were dead set against it. He held the very admirable position that students were part of the University Community, and that one does not begin with the assumption that members of your community are thieves. Trust them and they will reward that trust was his belief.
My own position was that putting a technical barrier in at an engineering school was just asking for it. There would be students who would never consider stealing books who would begin to do so just to show they could do it. I’d known too many students who’d gimmicked telephones, cracked the main RPI keying system, and otherwise gotten into trouble, just because it had been a challenge. Well, okay, the challenge and the getting free phone calls and getting parts for their electrical engineering projects from the labs at 3 A.M.
The two of us won the argument, at least temporarily. I think I saw some of the electronic detectors at a reunion or so back, but at least someone could maybe check to see if it did any good, because we had some years as a baseline.
So we come to copy protection (CP) and Digital Rights Management, both pernicious and foolish ideas, in my estimation, but apparently very seductive to those who want control of “intellectual property.” But CP and DRM differ from the sort of protection that keys provide in fundamental ways, ways that underscore the difference between intellectual property and chattel property or real estate.
The message that is sent by copy protection is that you don’t own what you bought, someone else owns it. So where does that leave you? Wherever it leaves you, it leaves you with less than you otherwise would have. Copy protection is never transparent; it’s a pain to deal with. It makes whatever is being “protected” less valuable.
Now an automobile that can’t be stolen would be more valuable to the owner, not less. So CP and DRM isn’t protection for the owner; it’s just restriction.
How much is that reduction in value actually worth? Hard to say, really, though I note that there is currently a move to sell non-DRM music for about 30% more than DRMed music. So somebody thinks the vigorish is about 30%.
But the other message that is sent by CP and DRM schemes is that anything goes if you can break the protection. And some people have made it their mission to do just that. The result has been an ongoing arms race, with the latest moves being to make such attempts illegal. In fact, the idea is to make even the transmission of information about how to break DRM illegal.
Me, I’m just fascinated at all the different ways there are to invent the Thought Police.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Playing the Rent VI –Qualms About Copyrights
“No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.” —Mark Halpern, The New York Times, May 20, 2007
“When I appeared before that committee of the House of Lords the chairman asked me what limit [on copyrights] I would propose. I said, ‘Perpetuity.’” —Mark Twain
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."—Thomas Jefferson
Yes, I have been hesitant about writing about copyrights, in part because the idea is apparently so difficult for some to understand, and the “some” to which I am referring includes a large number of writers.
I think the reason why writers are sometime more that a little loopy on the subject is that copyrights are our lottery tickets, chips in the Big Casino. Of course, it’s not just professional writers who are a party to this, and it’s certainly not restricted to fiction. Anyone who hits sudden notoriety has a story to tell, and if the notoriety is salacious enough, it’s worth money, sometimes big money.
But fiction seems to be where the real lure arises. There’s the ego involvement thing. Behold! I have created something where nothing existed before! I am like unto a god, and you should bow down before me, or at least pay me a lot of money, because it’s mine, mine, I tell you! Bwahaha!
Yeah, there’s a lot of that. Never mind that it’s most likely a slightly below average attempt at a bit of genre fiction, derivative, clichéd to hackney’s depths, it took effort to produce and guts to put it out there, and it’s someone’s angel child.
I don’t usually put blog links into these essays, but there was a May 20th thread on Patrick and Teresa Nielson-Hayden’s “Making Light” that was prompted by the Halpern article I quoted in the beginning of this piece. Teresa, I believe, makes several good points in the comments:
Most works are somewhat derivative. Even much-imitated landmark works like Star Wars or Neuromancer are in many ways powerful new syntheses of older material. If you own the rights to such a landmark work, then to the extent that you can keep subsequent works from copyrighting implicit or potential aspects of that synthesis, your own right to such implicit or potential derivative works will be more valuable…
…nibbling-away of the uniqueness of influential works is a normal literary process. How, then, does the entertainment conglomerate maintain its long-term hold on the valuable rights to the source work? The obvious way to do it is to make sure that other authors don't hold the copyrights on subsequent works. Any story or narrative mindspace they and their heirs own is a story or narrative mindspace you don't own. You might have to pay them something for it, further on down the road. Best not to let them lay claim to it in the first place. –Teresa Nielson-Hayden
Copyrights are not “natural.” When scribes did all the copying, there was no further need for state control of copyright, as the labor cost itself was the limiting factor in the spread of information. But with the invention of the printing press, publishing became a lucrative endeavor, all the more so it there could be some sort of monopoly on publishing generally, or, failing that, the publishing of a particular work. Copyrights, in other words, benefit publishers, the Owners of The Casino. We writers are just the gamblers holding the chips in the Big Game. But the Casino always winds up owning most of the stakes.
Without the Casino, there is no Jackpot, so writers often identify their fortunes with those of the publishers. Well, fair enough, without the publishers there are no fortunes to be made.
The Jackpot is a cruel temptation. I’ve said before, in other circumstances, that if you take up all the money spent by would-be writers of fiction, from the creative writing course fees, to the postage spent, to the paper and ink cartridges bought, not to mention the scams, dodges, vanity presses, phony agents, “readers’ fees” and all the rest, add it up and subtract it from every royalty and advance paid by the publishing industry, and you get a negative number. Maybe movie sales push it back into positive numbers, but I have my doubts, since movies don’t pay their writers that much, and it’s work-for-hire besides. And if I’m wrong, if it isn’t negative sum, it’s because of maybe ten writers, starting with J. K. Rowling and Stephen King, and ending with some writer that you’ve also heard of, Grisham, Clancy, the Usual Suspects. And you’d better ignore the vast amounts of time spent staring at the hellish blank screen, (formerly the blank page), or typing words that no one but the spouse will ever read, because if you add up that time and count it as even a quarter of minimum wage, then not even King and Rowling could make a dent in the debit.
So, one way or another, you’d better enjoy writing your stories, or at least enjoy reading them, because the likelihood of your making a living at it is comparable to winning Powerball, and in fact depends less on how well you write than a hundred other things.
Whew. I hope that’s out of my system for a while. Maybe I can get to actually writing about copyrights now.
“When I appeared before that committee of the House of Lords the chairman asked me what limit [on copyrights] I would propose. I said, ‘Perpetuity.’” —Mark Twain
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."—Thomas Jefferson
Yes, I have been hesitant about writing about copyrights, in part because the idea is apparently so difficult for some to understand, and the “some” to which I am referring includes a large number of writers.
I think the reason why writers are sometime more that a little loopy on the subject is that copyrights are our lottery tickets, chips in the Big Casino. Of course, it’s not just professional writers who are a party to this, and it’s certainly not restricted to fiction. Anyone who hits sudden notoriety has a story to tell, and if the notoriety is salacious enough, it’s worth money, sometimes big money.
But fiction seems to be where the real lure arises. There’s the ego involvement thing. Behold! I have created something where nothing existed before! I am like unto a god, and you should bow down before me, or at least pay me a lot of money, because it’s mine, mine, I tell you! Bwahaha!
Yeah, there’s a lot of that. Never mind that it’s most likely a slightly below average attempt at a bit of genre fiction, derivative, clichéd to hackney’s depths, it took effort to produce and guts to put it out there, and it’s someone’s angel child.
I don’t usually put blog links into these essays, but there was a May 20th thread on Patrick and Teresa Nielson-Hayden’s “Making Light” that was prompted by the Halpern article I quoted in the beginning of this piece. Teresa, I believe, makes several good points in the comments:
Most works are somewhat derivative. Even much-imitated landmark works like Star Wars or Neuromancer are in many ways powerful new syntheses of older material. If you own the rights to such a landmark work, then to the extent that you can keep subsequent works from copyrighting implicit or potential aspects of that synthesis, your own right to such implicit or potential derivative works will be more valuable…
…nibbling-away of the uniqueness of influential works is a normal literary process. How, then, does the entertainment conglomerate maintain its long-term hold on the valuable rights to the source work? The obvious way to do it is to make sure that other authors don't hold the copyrights on subsequent works. Any story or narrative mindspace they and their heirs own is a story or narrative mindspace you don't own. You might have to pay them something for it, further on down the road. Best not to let them lay claim to it in the first place. –Teresa Nielson-Hayden
Copyrights are not “natural.” When scribes did all the copying, there was no further need for state control of copyright, as the labor cost itself was the limiting factor in the spread of information. But with the invention of the printing press, publishing became a lucrative endeavor, all the more so it there could be some sort of monopoly on publishing generally, or, failing that, the publishing of a particular work. Copyrights, in other words, benefit publishers, the Owners of The Casino. We writers are just the gamblers holding the chips in the Big Game. But the Casino always winds up owning most of the stakes.
Without the Casino, there is no Jackpot, so writers often identify their fortunes with those of the publishers. Well, fair enough, without the publishers there are no fortunes to be made.
The Jackpot is a cruel temptation. I’ve said before, in other circumstances, that if you take up all the money spent by would-be writers of fiction, from the creative writing course fees, to the postage spent, to the paper and ink cartridges bought, not to mention the scams, dodges, vanity presses, phony agents, “readers’ fees” and all the rest, add it up and subtract it from every royalty and advance paid by the publishing industry, and you get a negative number. Maybe movie sales push it back into positive numbers, but I have my doubts, since movies don’t pay their writers that much, and it’s work-for-hire besides. And if I’m wrong, if it isn’t negative sum, it’s because of maybe ten writers, starting with J. K. Rowling and Stephen King, and ending with some writer that you’ve also heard of, Grisham, Clancy, the Usual Suspects. And you’d better ignore the vast amounts of time spent staring at the hellish blank screen, (formerly the blank page), or typing words that no one but the spouse will ever read, because if you add up that time and count it as even a quarter of minimum wage, then not even King and Rowling could make a dent in the debit.
So, one way or another, you’d better enjoy writing your stories, or at least enjoy reading them, because the likelihood of your making a living at it is comparable to winning Powerball, and in fact depends less on how well you write than a hundred other things.
Whew. I hope that’s out of my system for a while. Maybe I can get to actually writing about copyrights now.
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