Comments on: Bad but Appealing Copyright Arguments

By: john

john — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:47:28 +0000

They, CAL, are also very keen on extending copyright into new areas, a long way from the original concept of royaltys mostly involving the re– use of something: re-play, re-read , re-sale and so on .
Ever since the high court blank tapes ruling (1992) they have been working at creating other ways of turning individual copy-rights (where the right of use is controlled by individual rightholders),
into a tax-like
system controlled/owned by CAL.

By: Don Marti

Don Marti — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:48:16 +0000

@etbe, Magnatune counts toward changing the political process the same way the GNU Project counted toward changing the politics of software in the 1980s. You need a working example of programmers or musicians making a good living without the corporate welfare of unaccountable copyright expansionism.

By: TGM

TGM — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:12:50 +0000

Try this… Not quite copyright but insightful.

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/index.html

By: etbe

etbe — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:55:12 +0000

http://brendanscott.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/cals-06-07-annual-report/

Brendan Scott has a good analysis of CAL at the above URL. It seems that they send much more money out of Australia than they bring in, and on average authors get a small fraction of the average wage from them. While publishers get the majority of money that they disburse it’s still not a lot. The amount of money that they spend administering the system dwarfs the amount that they pay authors.

By: etbe

etbe — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 22:14:16 +0000

Don: I haven’t got into Magnatune. Recently I’ve been spending most of my casual music browsing time watching fan-made Youtube videos. I’ll have to try out Magnatune.

Magnatune doesn’t count towards changing the political process – at least not unless it suddenly gets a dominant share of the music market. People will say “oh Magnatune is different to the others, let’s just make draconian new laws to protect the artists who don’t use it”.

By: Don Marti

Don Marti — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 13:38:16 +0000

Raising points is all well and good, but for reaching regular users, one Firefox download beats all the free software manifestos in the world. Why not show your favorite music on Magnatune to musicians, music listeners, and people who need to license music for a game, movie, or public place? http://magnatune.com/