(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Neil Young is right – piracy is the new radio
As an artist who probably makes a substantial income from licensing his music, you might think Neil Young would frown on piracy and file-sharing, but that appears not to be the case, according to an interview he gave at the Dive Into Media conference in Los Angeles. Instead of railing against file-sharers, Young called piracy “the new radio” because it’s “how music gets around.” The musician’s comment puts a lot of the hysteria about copyright infringement into perspective – as we’ve pointed out before, file-sharing and monetization aren’t mutually exclusive, and in many cases a certain amount of so-called “piracy” can actually be good for business, as authors, musicians and even game developers have come to realize.
And Bill Gates sort of agrees:
Even Microsoft CEO Bill Gates has been known to see the virtues of a little piracy, especially in developing markets like China. The Microsoft founder reportedly said of that market: “As long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.” Gates clearly saw pirating as a kind of loss leader, creating eventual market demand.
9 comments
Skip to comment form
The former senator from Connecticut who was instrumental in watering down Dodd-Frank to suit the bank & Wall St., who eschewed ever becoming a lobbyist but is now the chief lobbyist as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc, joined forces with his pal Sen Joe Lieberman to impose Chinese style censorship on the Internet.
The Democrats are the ones that are pushing SOPA, PIPA and ACTA.
Obama is their ring leader who thought he who pull this one off. He needs to be stopped, even Republicans are opposed to this.
… creators of complex collaborative works like movies ~ where musicians can make money selling tickets to live performances, and where an author can write during her or his own time and hope to cash in on her or his fame if she or he becomes famous …
… for complex collaborative works, funding the production is more challenging if the work itself cannot be monetized.
So a successful filesharing model that supports creation of new music will not automatically succeed for works like movies.
However the MPAA already has a track record of abusing the system in place, so they are the last people to trust to write any extensions of the current system.
And if Dodd shook my hand, I would count my fingers afterwards.