Quote:
|
Originally Posted by theknife
Slashdot is kind of a tough crowd anyway, no?  |
i'm always fascinated by the (barely contained) nonsensical rage directed at file-sharers by certain segments of the blogshere, those high-grounders equating swapping with stealing, and swappers with immorality. none too subtle comments like
"i'm sorry if i want to actually get paid
for my labors!" seem to imply there are legions of starving software, record and movie company execs and creators filling welfare offices on an unheard of global scale, all because we're trading media with each other. that is of course a lie. anger and dogma aside, with album sales up two percent this year in the us, theater ticket sales up and dvd sales continuing to skyrocket, and some of the wealthiest companies in the world selling software, the
facts are strikingly different. not that they let that interfere with their propagandizing, but we shouldn’t take it any more seriously than other mythological musings. still, if you have to hear real sob stories take a look at some of the physical goods manufacturers, like car companies, or entities like rubbermaid, once one of the most respected organizations in the world, now bankrupt, it's employees watching listlessly as auctioneers sell off it's physical carcass. not a victim of ip theft among them but doa as doa can be. globalization a culprit perhaps, but with the copyright cops some of the biggest boosters of globaliztion on the um globe, don’t expect them to highlight that connection.
you’d think after five years of “out-of-control” file-sharing (they should watch somebody who’s good at it like me. i’m very in-control lol) people might realize the so-called “intellectual property” world hasn’t come to end, far from it. you can still profitably sell books and dvds and software, people still watch commercials on tv (ask somebody if they’ve seen a good one lately) and artists still collect royalties on compositions, which was called the “biggest threat” created by p2p
“sure, musicians might get paid for performing even if they can’t sell records, but how are the poor songwriters going to survive?” since you've asked, very well thanks. bmi, the songwriters’ big collection society saw revenues
rise 9 percent.
slashdot is fine as far as it goes, and i’ve seen wonderful things there i probably wouldn’t have caught otherwise, but there does seem to be a misanthropic contingent waiting to pounce on anything even remotely p2p-positive, regardless of the facts or the benefits. their peculiar form of moderation-by-mob may or may not encourage trolling and sloppiness, but it wouldn’t hurt if the anti-swapping contingent buttressed their rants with some actual facts, and moved the hysterics out of the realms of fantasy into something approaching empirical intellectual discourse.
- js.