Technology

Pretty much what happens now--name and shame, get the story out there. If McDonald's wanted to plaster a billboard with someone's personal family photos, the odds that that family could even afford a lawyer for recourse to an appropriate degree is essentially nil. What would likely happen is that McDonald's would settle for some absurdly low dollar value and perhaps take down the billboards--or just as likely, negotiate for use in the settlement agreement, saying "take this and let us use the photo or we'll see you in court."

If someone gets a reputation for stealing others' work continuously, who is ever going to work with them?

copyleft. make contributions voluntary, credit mandatory, and commercialization impossible. gift your creations to the collective knowledge of humanity, and if people like it, they will in turn give you support. cut out corporate middle men, and cultivate an audience that will reward you generously for what you give to them.

Streaming (as a legal business model) is not violating copyright, but streaming changed the business model for a lot of artists negatively.

my point is that people seem to think copyright law is somehow protecting artists from corporate exploitation, when it categorically is not doing that. you're right, streaming as a business model is legal, and it does mean that lots of artists don't profit as much from their work. that's the part i object to, the part where copyright law did not in any way prevent record companies from eating into artist compensation.

It should be fairly obvious that the big record companies come out of this change of business model a lot better because they have a continuous stream of revenue across their played/consumed portfolio, but smaller labels face the same difficulty as the artists.

here's the thing, though. the revenue is being generated on the basis of their ownership of that portfolio, and the only way that works is if there is an enforcement mechanism for that ownership. that enforcement mechanism is copyright law. that state of things as they currently exists allows people who did not make music to make the vast majority of the money from the music that gets made. that is wrong.

But remove copyright law and no-one is getting paid for anything.

they already aren't getting paid though. copyright law just isn't ensuring people get paid. like, have you paid attention to the WGA strike at all? companies use copyright law to legally strip the rights artists have over their art far more often than artists use it to prevent their art from being used by corporations.

The problem you are complaining about is how labels are milking artists, in lack of a better analogy. A cow gets fed and cared for just enough to make sure milk production keeps going and the cow stays healthy. A farmer doesn’t cry when a cow gets old and slaughtered, he’ll get a new cow to replace her. That’s just how the business works.

look. i really don't care how business works. if it's depriving people of the fruits of their own labor, we should make it work a different way. in any case, making a comparison to a system of agriculture which routinely tortures living beings, forcibly impregnates them, steals the milk meant for their babies, then kills them when they are no longer useful is not the slam dunk you think it is. i'm not particularly fond of that business model either.

Obviously not a perfect analogy, but the discrepancy between what the label earns and the artist is nothing new and anyone who was around before streaming should know this.

right. i'm fully aware this isn't a streaming only problem, but its one that streaming has exacerbated. that doesn't make it more okay. functionally, the fact that we have a mechanism by which the legal ownership of artistic works can be transferred to corporate entities concentrates the wealth generated by working artists into the hands of rich executives. i don't know how i'm meant to ignore the way in which ownership of music is the primary mechanism by which record companies separate the wealth that music produces from the artists that make all the music, no matter how much its actually supposed to make doing that more difficult.

i'm a radical, so i'd say don't use copyright, use copyleft. make everything free. use open source software. let people listen to your music if they want to, and donate to you if they choose. make it so that the best products on every market are freely available to all people to modify and alter as they wish, and make it so the modifications must also be freely available. allow anybody anywhere to produce any medication they have the means to safely synthesize. make our culture free to use and free to participate in. the open source economy is a great model to look at, and its how we're talking to each other right now. every piece of information can be that way, if we choose it. information scarcity is already a lie, copyright just artificially imposes antiquated notions of scarcity onto a limitless resource. its a gift economy! we freely contribute, and receive support in turn.