[secretwhistle]

Charles, I'm the author of the idiotic article and I thought I'd wade in and explain my comment about not wanting to hear another rundown on why the system is the way it is.

Over at Techdirt, a site I've been reading for a half-decade and contributing to for nearly a year, IP issues compose probably 80-90% of the posts. The reason I inserted that particular paragraph was to head off discussion centered around rehashing multi-national licensing nightmares and instead get some sort of explanation as to why this isn't being fixed faster.

Obviously, there is a multitude of systems already in place and extricating ourselves from this won't be easy and won't happen quickly. But rather than working to streamline these processes, representatives of content industries are spending a great deal of their time (and lobbying power) trying to do the impossible: stamp out piracy.

Most people don't need an excuse to pirate content, but situations like this push people who otherwise would have purchased something into finding an alternate route or doing without, neither of which will make the labels (or studios or whatever) happy.

There's a lot of numbers thrown around equating each torrent to a lost sale. Actual lost sales due to speed bumps and hurdles in the distribution are rarely discussed by the industry and when they are, they result in horrendous "solutions" like Ultraviolet or the "drive your DVD to the retailer in order to rip a copy to the cloud."

So, if I'm ignoring the "why" behind the situation (which I don't believe I am), it's because the point of the article was "Don't cry about piracy if you can't give me an option to buy."

We know the system is a tangled mess. We know there are many more middlemen than there needs to be. We (and every time I use "we," I'm speaking broadly from my experience as a writer/reader of Techdirt) don't believe ALL middlemen are useless. Many of them DO add value, but when you've got several middlemen guarding turf in several different locales, all hoping to carve a slice of a digital good, it leads to this. And knowing every detail of "how" and "why" a particular band can't sell a particular album via the internet to you simply because of where you live doesn't change the fact that it's frustrating for fans who want to support artists and, I would imagine, greatly frustrating for the artists themselves, who need all the paying fans they can get.

So, we can engage the real nature of the problem, but unless someone towards the top starts slicing away at the undergrowth surrounding worldwide distribution, not much will change.

There are some great comments here. I found yours to be very informative as well as the contributions from commieneko and Gfischer. Both raise very good points about this situation. In short, the systems in place can't adjust as quickly as the market does. (Or in some cases, won't.) But back to the point of my post: you (this would be the royal version, not you personally, Charles) really shouldn't be hollering about piracy when you're unable (and in some cases, unwilling) to let would-be paying customers give you their money.

(P.S. I don't really consider myself a journalist. I'm sure many, many people would agree with me.)

[cstross]

Over at Techdirt, a site I've been reading for a half-decade and contributing to for nearly a year, IP issues compose probably 80-90% of the posts. The reason I inserted that particular paragraph was to head off discussion centered around rehashing multi-national licensing nightmares and instead get some sort of explanation as to why this isn't being fixed faster.

Obviously, there is a multitude of systems already in place and extricating ourselves from this won't be easy and won't happen quickly. But rather than working to streamline these processes, representatives of content industries are spending a great deal of their time (and lobbying power) trying to do the impossible: stamp out piracy.

Agreed the piracy issue is a red herring; it's an emergent side-effect of the unavailability of cheap, convenient legal purchase options. But it's also one that is popular with the folks who fill boardroom seats at the top, who tend to be old and anxious about hot new technologies that they don't understand.

And that in turn is an emergent side-effect of the wave of media conglomeration that happened in the 1980s, as large publishers went on acquisition and merger sprees and ended up as part of huge groups within a handful of large cross-media multinationals.

What they urgently need is some sort of cross-licensing agreement, but I'm unsure where it's going to come from ...

(Reply cut short due to urgent business IRL. May be more to say later.)

[secretwhistle]

"What they urgently need is some sort of cross-licensing agreement, but I'm unsure where it's going to come from ..."

Yeah, that's the issue. Here's my pipe dream. Someone at one big studio/label/publishing house stands up and says "This is ridiculous" and begins a Sherman's March to Sea on the existing system and streamlines it using common sense and ass-kicking.

That's my dream. I wish they would, while they still have the money and power to make it happen. Of course, that still doesn't address the problem that the industry heads and the artists have very different ideas about what's equitable. So, that's another issue. The industry doesn't have a great track record on treating its artists fairly so in all likelihood any slash-and-burn revamp would likely heavily skew in favor of those at the top of the heap, much as it does today.

A very slim possibility exists that this revamp, though heavily skewed, would still end up being a net gain for most, if not all of the artists working within that system.

What gets me is that they have still have massive amounts of power and money and they're using it all to play a largely defensive battle. Being the last to market, so to speak, isn't going to help them take control of the future. I understand that you can't suddenly yank an ocean liner into a tight 90-degree turn, but you also can't avoid icebergs (to continue this awful metaphor) by waiting until it's tearing chunks out of the hull before making your move.

[bigiain]

' … it's because the point of the article was "Don't cry about piracy if you can't give me an option to buy."'

Keep in mind there's no obligation on their part to sell it to _anybody_. Taking matters into your own hands and choosing to download something you want-but-can't-buy happens to be different to physical goods, in that you're not depriving the original owner of the use of the file, but assuming you've got the "right" to have a copy is a particularly advanced sense of entitlement.

It's probably easier to have come to this realisation from Australia, quite a lot of "the internet" doesn't believe you exist if you don't have a US credit card billing address, so it's not just music and ebook downloads that I've had to make the choice of "Pirate? Use VPN & fraudulently-obtained-pre-paid-credit-card*? Bother a friend who does have US internet-commerce-existance? Or do without thing I was about to buy?".

Maybe I should pot a graph of my major label music purchases by year, and do a blog post explaining the recent steep decline?

[secretwhistle]

I don't think this is a case of entitlement. There are plenty of people who do without rather than pirate. There are plenty who pirate after trying to make a legitimate purchase. As you say, no one is under any obligation to sell their music, books, etc. to anybody. But if you're going to make it available to purchase, actually make it available to purchase.

Setting it up so that only certain people can purchase your goods does nothing for the two parties most interested in each other: the customer and the artist.

You should plot a graph of your purchases and their subsequent decline. Every decline these days is written off to piracy while situations like yours and BRAT's (and thousands of others) are ignored or dismissed as outliers.