The whole idea of Creative Commons feels like a relief of sorts when we go back and think about all the things concerning copyright we previously talked about.
The simple fact that there are simpler alternatives to the never-ending struggle that is copyright laws is always a nice thing to see. The copyright laws are so confusing on their own that this is a saving grace of sorts for us. It's also incredibly helpful that there are a wide variety of options that are all thoroughly explained, so trying to figure out what you're allowed to use and what you're not allowed to use is made slightly easier.
I do agree when the article states that creative commons helps expose whatever it is that is copyrighted to the public. After all, if you make something that other people have permission to use, generally it's going to get more attention than things that don't have any use at all. So what really matters is that Creative Commons is helpful for not only the consumer, as it is helpful to the artist as well. All in all, everyone wins! So that's pretty great.
Overall, Creative Commons just makes the copyright law a little easier to deal with, and considering how confusing it can be in the first place, it's a welcome change.
What's up my man Dmitri,
ReplyDeleteI'm going to send all of this your way because you seem like you know about the pirate bay. Fo those who don't know, www.thepiratebay.se is a peer-to-peer file sharing website that lets you download things in the form of torrent files--long story short, you can illegally download media. Hence the "pirate" name. Ethics aside, I just want to have a look at the numbers. Like everyone is saying, creative commons is good and all, but how many people actually care whether or not what they're downloading is legal? According to this report from the Recording Industry Association of America, not too many. The stats are memorable. A little dated, but still good.
- Since Napster' inception in 1999 to 2009, US music sales dropped from $14.6 billion to $7.7 Billion (47%)
- 30 billion songs (30,000,000,000) illegally downloaded on file-sharing networks between 2004 and 2009.
- Only 37% of music acquired in the US was actually paid for.
- Globally, internet users download between $7 billion and $20 billion in digitally pirated music a year.
Looks pretty bleak for the industry, right? Good! Fuck 'em!
So my thought is that if every year people are buying less music, why even bother trying to make money off of it? Even the big-shots don't make their living on record sales. The industry has rebounded, a little, with the popularity of itunes and amazon and the like, but now, people that would have normally had to buy someones whole album just to listen to that one song they like can now buy just that one song! No need for the other 10 or 12 they weren't going to listen to anyway!
Where am I going with this? Well, as a musician, I've resigned to the fact that music sales aren't going to make me money. Hell, I've made t-shirts for my band and made more money from those in like one night than all of the music we've ever sold. Our band has our music on our bandcamp page and you can download it for free. It says "all rights reserved" but you can still have it! Go ahead! We wrote that money off a long time ago.
I still don't know where I'm going. I get real fired up talking about all of this. Ok. How about this. Creative Commons and Magnatune are awesome but how many people are just going to try to pirate your music anyway? Depending on how you look at it, you may be getting better free marketing if you put your music up for illegal download on a site like the pirate bay. If they're going to steal it anyways, you might as well make it easy for them.
Ok. I need to calm down.
http://www.riaa.com/faq.php