What's a fair price for a CD or download ?

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Replayer wrote: May I ask for what you're paying when you buy an album? The materials or the content therein? Both. Of course!

My point was that the content is what gives the album its value. The part that required imagination and musical/graphical training and hard work. The part that you can often buy online in digital form separate from the physical vinyl and CD. The part you called valueless in your first post.

Given digital music files and cover art image files, a person with basic computer skills can use a CD-R drive and color printer to make themselves a physical, albeit not professional, version of the album. The digital intellectual property is what gave the album its value.

Also, the rampant digital piracy of the past twenty years has proven that the majority of people are more interested in the “valueless” digital content than the physical artifact.

It is the blank CD and vinyl that are valueless until they have been inscribed with content.
 

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Replayer wrote: It's for effort that goes in recording the music and cover art (band, instruments, studio costs, designer, promotion, manufacturing, transportation) that we are paying when buying an album.  Obviously that doesn't apply to my music buying habits, only greedy record shop owners and private sellers benefit from what I buy, so I'm not included in 'we' u speak of. In general, I'm not interested in music produced after apx. 1985.

That's not something you initially disclosed. It's true that older and more obscure music is scarcer and I’ll grant that out of print music poses a special problem for the music buyer.

Also, while you indicated that you have a preference for vinyl and original pressings, I want to point you that you could have bought the Art Zoyd 3 CD for €25,00 from the band’s website and not given your hard-earned money to greedy record shop owners.
 

Replayer wrote: Nowadays most people don't buy cd's or any other physical medium but resort to streaming - which is horrible. For most artists, and centainly for the pheriphial ones, the income from streaming services doesn't cover the actual expenses anyway.

It’s true that the market for physical forms of music has decreased, but you forgot to mention digital downloads. There is still a significantly large market for legal music, as evidence by iTunes, Amazon, CD Baby, Bandcamp and other smaller vendors. In the past few years, the market for vinyl has also increased significantly, though it remains to be seen whether it was driven by existing vinyl aficionados or new ones.

I agree about streaming not being a viable option for the artists and that’s the main reason why I don’t subscribe to any music streaming services, together with the fact that I want to listen to music even when I don’t have access to the Internet.
 

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Also, nowadays, - and I'm speaking as a hobby musician - it's possible to record music at very low cost maintaining a reasonable standard. Free software is available - use a linux machine, build a realtime kernel and install a (somewhat) high end DAW such as Ardour at no cost! Of course hardware cost money, but can be bought second hand at a reasonable price. If I were to publish what I create, I would never ever require that my expenses should be covered. I have a thing for effect pedals from the former Soviet Union, instruments from the former German Democratic Republic and tape recorders form the former Czechoslovakia. All that crap has cost me some money over time, but no way would it be fair to send the bill to people potentially interested in my creative output! I know that's not typical, but that's my standars.

It’s true that it’s relatively easy to record music nowadays. I even do it myself using Anvil Studio because it also displays sheet music for MIDI. However, this do-it-yourself attitude also leads to a glut of self-recorded albums that do not even have ten buyers.

Here is an excerpt from another Cynical Musician article, which can be read in full here:

“One thing that bears repeating over and over is that the majority of people couldn’t really care less about obscure independent artists. I’ve probably over-referenced the Long Tail of P2P study, but the link’s here, nonetheless, in case you haven’t seen it yet. Chief conclusion: even for free, people will be getting the popular stuff. The Big Business products. Unless independent music suddenly gets major promotional traction (and I can’t see a reason for that, since there’s little or no money to be made there), that’s the way it’s going to stay.

The situation in recorded music reflects the live performance situation quite well. Who’s going to pay to see a show by some band they do not know? (If you play for free, that defeats the purpose of touring revenue replacing recording sales.) The best way to build up an audience ahead of costly and time-consuming touring is through recordings, but if those remain obscure, we’re back to square one. Not to mention the fact that quality recordings (ones that match listener expectations in this day and age) will probably cost you. Plus, promoting those recordings so someone actually hears them will probably cost you some more. If you’re giving them away, so more people are inclined to listen, they aren’t making you money. If you aren’t touring (because you haven’t built up an audience yet), ticket sales aren’t making you money. I guess that means going back to your day job…”
 

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: In the country I live (not Germany), it's possible for some artists to have their expenses covered by the state. A friend of mine sent in a  short letter describing what he would like to work on (some uninteresting and narrow sound art experiments), and the state supplied him with a considerable income over a couple of months. Personally, I would never accept that and would prefer to work, as I do, as a taxi driver, and do my art free of any interests in my spare time.

I don’t think it’s the government’s responsibility to subsidize every citizen's artistic inclinations, because (1) the taxpayers are ultimately footing the bill without having a say if they are interested in the project (2) the risk of having to produce only government-sanctioned art.

You do have to admit that it’s much harder to find time to record music when working full time, so there's something to be said about being a full time working musician.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: But for the future, for the art and for mankind I hope that we'll see a day without copyrigt and claims of intellectual property!

According to your earlier statements, your main gripe is the price of expensive and rare vinyl. However, in that case, the value of the product is related to the physical artifact, because it’s not obtainable in any other form. Also, removing copyright will do nothing to lower the price of Art Zoyd 3 because it will still be a rare collector’s item.

Remember, copyright does have a time limit and works do eventually go into the public domain, where they can be freely replicated. Sure, in most cases it’s not going to happen within our lifetimes, but at least the art will be freely accessible to the future of mankind…

Also, don’t take this personally, but I’d appreciate if you’d use the word “you” instead of “u”.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: I've never stated that the price of rare vinyl in general and the Art Zoyd album in particular is too high.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: In addition, the value is very unlikely to decrease and likely to increase - another aspect I like about old vinyls. If I were to buy hundreds of songs as computer files at 7$ each, I would feel that I washed my money down the drain.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: The value of any consumer good is dictated by supply and demand, but somehow it's different - or you seem to mean - should be different with regards to creative output.

As dictionary definitions go, InvestorWords.com has a pretty good one here (1.) In short: commodities are fungible (“[are] interchangeable with another product of the same type“). In a natural state, anyone with a plot of land can produce grain, anyone with a coal mine can dig for coal; and having produced a quantity, supply it to the market.

Notice how that differs from say the Apple iPhone – one of the most successful consumer products of recent years. There’s only one supplier that provides Apple iPhones – Apple. The iPhone is not a commodity, because it isn’t interchangeable with another product of the same type – if you really want an iPhone, then Android or Windows Phone will not be a viable substitute. People are camping out for Apple’s latest shiny-shiny for a reason: that’s the only place they can get it."

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: But the problem is, that such output generally is conceived as mere products you buy as you buy any other product. In the old days that was not not a problem, as supply was controlled and naturally limited. The digital age has posed a series of problems for primarily the music industy, and the solutions offered by the industry such as the horrific DRM, streaming services and downloads are all unsatisfactory.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: If a sausage could easily and readily be reproduced a billionfold, prices would drop rapidly towards zero regardless of the meat industry wanting it to be different by pointing at other factors besides the supply/demand mechanism.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Market mechanisms don't care about art and can't prize art in the way you seem to wish - and to these dreadful laws we are all slaves.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: I think this is complicated, and it's very difficult for me to formulate a coherent point of view on this matter,

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: but I maintain that copyright is a ridiculous construction.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: I'll give a couple of examples: Sheet music by the declared and condemned communist composer Hanns Eisler is mostly copyrighted, surely that was never his intentions and contrary to everything he believed in. He would surely spin in his grave, if he could read crap like the example quoted below.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Consider also this funny and mind blowing example concerning the computer program "true" - a program that does nothing  - successfully!  It contains no code, and yet AT&T claimed intellectual property of it - true - they copyrighted three blank lines.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Finally I would like to draw some general parallels to the software world, where so called copyleft licences (GPL etc.) have proved very effective in rapid creative development of high quality products generally free of charge for users, granting them rights rather than restrictions. Of course music is not software, but it would be very interesting if a movement like the free software movement would spread to the field of music applying copyleftish licences and attitudes.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Replayer wrote: Also, don’t take this personally, but I’d appreciate if you’d use the word “you” instead of “u”. R u 4 real? I am sensible, but this is managable. But I can't help wonder; what has the innocent little letter "u" done to you? It's arguably the most sensible way to spell 'you'. It's easier to read and write. But I guess - we all have our quirks. For instance, you wrote "digital downloads", fair enough - it's a wide spread phrase. I personally dislike tautological expressions like such, "digital" here is avoidable and doesn't add any meaning. All downloads are necessarily digital.  Rot Front!

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: I'll might apply various dirty tricks, and I have a feeling, that flipping the truth value of my utterances infact could yield some absurd consequences. But I don't worry much about that. In fact, I don't think the meaning of a predicate (eg. copyright is such and such) is determined by the binary feature 'truth value' anyway. Word-to-world relations aren't trivial.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: For a far out, yet fascinating, take on the philosophy of language, read (parts of) the Dao de jing.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Before I get to the issue of copyrigt, Replayer wrote: I think the laws of communist governments are of interest because it shows what happens when communism is put into practice. Unregulated capitalism leads to monopolies and externalities such as environmental damage, but I think that with proper regularization (among others, things such as anti-trust laws, penalties on excessive pollution, work safety standards, maternity leave, minimum wage, national holidays)... What happens when free market restricted by regularization is put to practice? - consider the European Union. (Facts about the Schengen agreement and free movement are outdated!)

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Remember, examples are not proof.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: (For the record, I'll state that I in no way think the EU is comparable to eg. the Soviet Union in terms of being a bad thing - the crimes commited by the Stalinist regime in the name of socialism, such as forcing huge portions of the population to starve by enforcing socalled 'collectivization' of farming, the paranoid purges and mass deportations of supposed political enemies and the ruthless killing of retreating own-soldiers etc. etc. are among the most serious crimes of the previous century.)

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Back on track, I took the time to read one of the blog articles. It's refuting the statement 'Copyright is monopoly', a statement I never have comitted to!

I never asserted that you claimed that copyright is monopoly, but it's one of the main arguments used by people who are anti-copyright for “moral/philosophical” reasons. If I quote The Wealth of Nations, that doesn't mean I think you're opposed to the free market

I included a quote that was relevant to one of your statements, namely the assertion that intellectual property's value is tied to the cost of producing copies. I left the link to provide the source for the quote and for you and others to read because it's a well written argument against a popular anti-copyright stance.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: It must have been that 'someone who is strongly opposed to copyright' person who claimed such a thing.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Anyway.. The cynical musician wrote: Let’s state outright: “commodity” is not a synonym for “product”. It is a sub-class of products. All commodities are products, not all products are commodities. Ok. I've never comitted to any definition of a specific subcategory. I named creative output 'consumer goods', a term roughly synonomous with the parent caregory 'products'. I didn't concern myself with exact definitions and further subclassification.

You explicitly compared intellectual property with sausages when discussing the cost of production and how it affects the supply and demand, when there is a very important distinction in that sausages are fungible because the price of sausages is governed by the cost of the raw materials and distribution, whereas in music/software/film, the cost of creating additional copies represents a small part of the final price.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: I wrote: But the problem is, that such output generally is conceived as mere products you buy as you buy any other product. A statement roughly consistent with the following The cynical musician wrote: Copyright recognizes this factual state of complete initial control of the author over his works and extends legal protection over it – by treating products of the mind much like any other property. Yet this quote is somewhat inconsistent with the obscured point that 'products of the mind' belong to a certain subcategory of products, namely 'non-commodities', which are defined in terms of not being commodities and in virtue thereof differ from any other type of property or product - commodities, for example.

You wrote earlier that “The value of any consumer good is dictated by supply and demand, but somehow it's different - or you seem to mean - should be different with regards to creative output.”

Yes, intellectual property property is subject to demand. For example, the rights to the complete recordings of the Beatles are always going to be worth much more than the complete recordings of The Shaggs (I'm not trying to pick on the girls, who were made to record music by their father; I'm just stating that they had little musical ability or commercial appeal).

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: The category of interest - non-commodities - is left open and undefined, exept in terms of a few examples and in terms of not being commodties. That's unconvincing and non-informative.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: However, this issue of classification is irrelevant as the supply/demand mechanism apply to commodities (grain and beer) as well as non-commodities (Apple iPhones and copyrighted intellectual property), albeit in different ways.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: I'm willing to relax my previous claim that music distributed digitally is valueless solely due to the supply/demand mechanism. I'll modify it and argue that the value is near zero or approaching zero mainly because of this mechanism, and that such a mechanism is more powerful than the indutry's and artists' wish to have their expenses covered - an understandable and to some extend fair wish.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: I fail to see how the market is able to prize expressions of ideas in accordance with the expressors efforts and costs when the digitalized realizations of such are (close to) limitless in supply.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: The increasing popularity of streaming services seems to to indicate that the market can't. In our brave new world, you can buy access to 30.000.000 songs for 9.99$ a month (spotify). 30.000.000 songs? That's just ridiculous! You can also download the songs (spotify calls downloading "to store/sync offline"). Downloads are restricted in this absurd fashion Spotify representative wrote: Do you currently have 3,333 tracks synched offline to that device? If so, that is the maximum number of tracks you are allowed to store offline at any one time on a single device. Source I'm not familiar with using spotify, but I have a feeling they disguise various aspects by obscuring language and calling downloading 'to store offline'. Perhaps storarge is done in some absurd fashion and has additional restrictions - I'd not be suprised, if only the spotify client could access and play those files - I don't know.

I never used Spotify nor any streaming service. For the record, I think streaming is a poor solution to piracy and a bad business model in general because (1) the artists receive a pittance, (2) it introduces a middle man (the streaming provider) that grows rich by aggregating content produced by thousands of artists and skims profit from the monthly subscribers, (3) streaming companies generally divide money from each subscription fee to artists based on their popularity, and I don't want my money going to Britney Spears, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Nickelback or many other big profile artists as a matter of principle, (4) people can still pirate music because it will be cheaper than paying a monthly subscription. The Cynical Musician criticizes streaming in The Paradise That Should Have Been and many other articles.

Then again, if you want to keep listening to the songs, you will have to keep on paying $9.99 per month, so if you stop paying for them, you can't listen to them anymore.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Basically, using one device and presuming 'to store offline' equals 'downloading', you can download 3333 songs at the price of 9.99$. The prize of a song is 0,003$. If you have three devices (the limit), the price of a song becomes 0.001$. Copyright seemingly can't prevent that. Approaching zero?

Also, what does it matter that you can download the music on three devices? You can't listen to all three at the same time (well, you can but there doesn't seem to be a point to it). If you're suggesting that the users give the devices to other people, that it not allowed because the music subscription is for personal use.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: In addition to being laws that are ineffective in securing owners of expressions of ideas a prize remotely related to the expressors efforts, copyright also plays a part in preventing making 'products of the mind' available to people freely on a large scale - the possibility to do so represents a significant technological advance from which people should benefit, even if it conflicts with the interests of owners of intellectual property.

I'm talking specifically about the italicized text. The internet already allows people to send e-mail, engage in e-commerce, conduct video conferences, create blogs, play multiplayer games without having to be on the same network, look up obscure information, engage in discussions on forums, buy music that will never be available in their local music shop (if it still exists). Why should people benefit from free entertainment from movies, books, video games or music?

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: I care much more about the availability of 'products of the mind' than I care about protecting and respecting ridiculous rights given to, or bought by, the owners of expressions of ideas.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: The cynical musician wrote: Copyright extends the control over the creator’s works he enjoyed when he was the sole possessor of his expression beyond the point when he makes it available to others An expression is not something to be possessed and controlled by a sole possessor.

“Article 23” wrote: (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

Furthermore, unlawfully reproducing others' intellectual property adversely impacts their livelihood. Not all musicians are millionaire rock stars, you know.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Even if it was, it wouldn't be very enjoyable.

You're certainly free to play cover version of songs if you contact the copyright holders, gain their permission, and pay the associated licensing costs.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: I don't consider expressions of ideas an undertaking motivated by the free market and don't consider such expressions possessable.

The writers of the United States Constitution certainly considered copyright to be an important protection for innovation. Below is an excerpt from the United States Constitution. It is called the Copyright Clause and it is part of the enumerated powers of Congress:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: The reason people even express ideas is to communicate them, not to keep them for themselves and use them for trading.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Communication and expressions of all sorts are social in nature. We wouldn't have any means of expression, if it weren't for other people.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Recall the pot head pixie's advice:     "Remember     You are me     I am you     All of us together     Now go     AUM"

Also, the second sentence is redundant because equality is a reflexive property.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: The cynical musician wrote: Copyright also doesn’t actually restrict anyone’s rights; for that to happen, that person would need to have a right in the first place. That's truely cynical.

The cynical musician wrote: The existence of such a right to use a work one hasn’t created is completely unsubstantiated and leads to such absurd conclusions as: a creator who is slow to create or publish is infringing the public’s rights.

That's statement is not a strawman; that is an example of Aristotelian logical implication.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: A slave owner can't tell his slave: "I don't restrict u no rights, u didn't have none in the first place". For those claiming that copyright resctricts rights, the point must be that copyright restricts potential rights. Anyone fighting for rights usually don't have the rights they are fighting for in advance.

Positive law is man-made and determined by the government that has authority in the place in question.

For example, slavery was legal in the United States until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865. It was even obliquely referenced in the original United States Constitution, as “all other Persons” or “Person held to Service or Labour”. Slavery is immoral according the the prevailing moral codes of our time, and even according to the moral codes of many people of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, which lead to the abolitionist movements and ultimately to the American Civil War.

Positive law is sometimes an example of “might makes right” (the Code of Hammurabi), sometimes an example of political pragmatism (as that EU video indicates), sometimes an example of natural law (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights), sometimes an example of corruption, and sometimes a combination of the previous categories.

Natural law, on the other hand, is a philosophical concept concerning the inherent rights of man, discussed throughout history by thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Anna Maria van Schurman, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, etc. Natural law is influenced by the concepts of fairness, justice, the Golden Rule (“do unto others what you want them to do to you”).

The United States Declaration of Independence offers example of natural law, some of which were not sadly included in the Constitution (such the unalienable right to Liberty):

“United States Declaration of Independence” wrote: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Only three countries, Eritrea, Turkmenistan and San Marino, are said by the U.S. Copyright Office to have no copyright protection either for authors within their borders or for foreign works.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Thank you for your reply. I'd like to stress that I'm not in the business of defining or proposing any universal rights or laws and I concede that my point about free mass availability is kind of cheesy and somewhat off the mark.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: The spotify example was naive, as I suspected. A little research reveals that you have almost no control of the files as they are encrypted, DRM infected, tied to the client and not available for play by the end of subscription. I'm way too used to freedom in computing so these restrictive measures extend my imagination. It can however be handled with some hax, but I realize that would be illegal and not worth the hassle as it would be easier to obtain the files illegally - which would be just as illegal.

Thank you for conceding these points. At least we can find some common ground in this debate.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: I'll first elaborate this off-topic issue. Replayer wrote: I'm not sure what you said here. Regarding the '"truth values" of copyright, a person either has the right to makes copies of a work (such as the artist, the publisher, or whomever bought the rights), or they don't as far as the law is concerned. My point was about truth values of propositions (not! predicates as I wrote). Fx, the statement 'copyright is monopoly' can be analyzed as a proposition. Following this line of analysis and terminology, 'monopoly' is the predicate and 'copyright' is the object . In other words, 'copyright' is the object of which the predicate 'monopoly' is predicated. It's the whole proposition 'copyright is monopoly' that is the bearer of a truth value, it's either the case,  true, or not the case,  false. Nowhere in between.

That’s true in bivalent/classical logic. However, as I suppose you’re aware, there are other logics that allow for other truth values, such as “unknown” value in ternary logic or even an infinite spectrum of truth values in fuzzy logic. But that’s beside the subject at hand.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Anyway, this point was aimed at your reductio ad absurdum strategies you revealed to me in a previous post. The definition of the strategy reads Wikipedia wrote: ...is a common form of argument which seeks to demonstrate that a statement is true by showing that a false, untenable, or absurd result follows from its denial, or in turn to demonstrate that a statement is false by showing that a false, untenable, or absurd result follows from its acceptance. When you deny a true statement or accept a false statement you flip (or alter) the truth value. In order for the reductio ad absurdum strategy to function effectively both participants in an argumentative discourse must adhere to a variant of so-called truth-based semantics,  e.g. that the meaning of propositions, or in more general terms, statements, is determined by the notion of truth. Fx, the statement 'the world is round' bears the semantic feature 'true' and is thus meaningful, the statement 'the world is flat' bears the semantic feature 'false' and is thus meaningless.

Is there another way than truth-based semantics to conduct a logical argument? I mean, if the participants can’t even agree on the truth of some fundamental concepts, what is the point of conducting an argument? And how would each party or observers decide in a relatively objective manner which side makes a better case?

Perhaps you want an appeal to authority? Then read The Cynical Musician's blog, because he is qualified as a musician, someone educated in economics and as software developer.

Do you prefer an appeal to emotion? Then I feel that making and distributing copies of someone else's hard work is not right and deprives musicians of their livelihood.

Do you want an argumentum ad populum? Nearly every single government in existence has copyright laws, so it must be an important right to safeguard.

Is it an appeal to fear that will persuade you? Then know that the penalties for piracy can be very severe and there are many cases where the people involved in file sharing had to pay millions of dollars in penalties.

How about an appeal to loyalty? You've listened to certain album dozens of times and they were recorded by musicians you like; don't they deserve to be paid a modest fee for providing your entertainment?

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: For further functionality of the reductio ad absurdum strategy, the participants have to subscribe to a variant of the correspondence theory of truth, a realist metaphysical position where word-to-world relations are discovered and made true in strict accordance with logic, and that humans, due to a conception of our mental faculty as some godlike truth-maker machine, can ascribe truth and falseness to anything said of anything existing.

I object to that formulation I highlighted, seeing as Gödel's incompleteness theorems showed that any system of axioms that describes something as simple as arithmetic over the set of natural numbers will yield statements that are true, but not provable within the system.

However, just because not everything can be proven by a countable set of axioms does not mean that nothing can be proven.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: I don't think this is the case, actually it seems just a clever reformulation of the self-boosting myth that we are created in the image of God.

There are so many implicit assumptions within that sentence that I don’t know where to start.

First there are the claims from the previous sentence, referenced by the pronoun “it.” These are C1: humans have mental faculty as some godlike truth-maker machine and C2: humans ascribe truth and falseness to anything said of anything existing, which have been disproved by Gödel's incompleteness theorems for the better part of a century.

Then, there is the claim that that C1 and C2 “seem” to be a reformulation of claim C3: humans are created in the image of God, without providing any evidence that the statements are logically equivalent.

Are you saying that someone can’t be an atheist and still believe the disproved claims C1 and C2? In the nineteenth century there was a significant trend in scientific thought that humans could use reason to explain all the universe. For example, the British logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell was an atheist, but that didn’t prevent him from attempting to formalize mathematics in the Principia Mathematica (this was before Gödel's theorems).

Then there is the claim that C3 is a self-boosting myth. C3 is not a statement that can be proved or disproved by logic, despite the efforts of noted atheists such as Bertrand Russell and G.H. Hardy. C3 is something that is either accepted or rejected as an axiom based on personal belief.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Realist metaphysics and truth-based accounts of meaning are dominant within anglo saxon analytical philosophy and are often taken for granted.

The 19^th century German Hermann Grassman is the one who started the effort to formalize mathematics using axioms.

René Descartes, of cogito ergo sum fame, was French.

Mathematician and philosoher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was German.

Zermelo-Frankel set theory attempted to formalize set theory and is named after a German mathematician and a German-born Jewish mathematician.

The Peano Axioms for natural numbers are named after Italian Giuseppe Peano.

What makes truth-based accounts of meaning especially Anglo-Saxon? Do not other cultures use realist metaphysics? If anything, the ancient Greeks were the ones who laid the foundations for proof-writing based on axioms and logic.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Your analysis of the pot head pixie's advice and your general style of solid rational argumentation indicates that you too are influenced by the deceptively termed 'realist' positions.

On one hand, I feel complimented by what you describe as solid rational argumentation. On the other hand, I feel somewhat disconcerted that my analysis of the pot head pixie's advice was taken seriously.

You do realize that my dissection of art was used in a facetious manner because you were attempting to use the quote (humorously perhaps) to support your argument that people should freely share all artistic output?

I’m not a robot and I understand the sentiment of the song that human beings should question their beliefs and humanity is formed of individuals who share similarities and depend on each other.

If people really cared for other people as they did from themselves, they would not steal the fruit of someone else's labor and then provide other with the means to do so, as well.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: As I see it, contradictions, tautologies and other fallacies can't just be discarded as mere meaningless falseness.

What you probably mean is that “contradictions, tautologies and other fallacies shouldn’t just be discarded as mere meaningless falseness” and that a subjective feeling. Just as Euclid's Fifth Postulate can be rejected to create non-Euclidean geometries (spherical, elliptical, hyperbolic, etc.), rules of classical logic can be rejected to form non-bivalent logical systems.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Such can function just a different kind of sense making, just take another look at the dao de jing.

In art, the audience create their own interpretation and meaning of what the artist created. Such interpretations are subjective and represent a basic human right in freedom of thought.

Syd Barret used excerpts from the I Ching to good effect on Piper at the Gates of Dawn's Chapter 24.

However, I wouldn’t use the Dao De Jing or the I Ching or The Classic of Poetry as a guide for writing a physics textbook, a book of recipes, an architectural blueprint, emergency evacuation instructions, flight-control software or copyright laws.

Living in the real world, humans need to communicate with each other and that requires objective definitions. Even as they are written now, laws have enough ambiguities to make a career out of.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: I realize such sense-making may be ineffective, considering that the purpose of our existence is to act as rational agents in a market, where understanding is enslaved and made true by notions defined by mainstream economic theory resting on dubious assumptions of human nature and conduct and the state of the universe.

I not sure whether that was a sarcastic statement (because it sounds at odds with how you presented your views in the previous posts), but if that’s your real belief, then it’s my turn to say that it’s a truly cynical point of view.

As for humans acting irrationally, you've no need to convince me. Why, some of them go as far as enjoying the creative output of artists they like and respect without paying them, helping and encouraging others to do the same and then claiming it is their right to do so.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Replayer wrote: Arguing that the value of music is (almost) worthless because it can be easily replicated is akin to saying that food doesn't have value because it's easy to shoplift from the grocery store. That is, just because it's easy to steal, does not mean that goods being stolen have no value (otherwise why would anyone steal them?). It's not natural that replication is theft.

Back to the natural law discussion, are we?

You seem to hold the belief that replication is not theft (correct me if I’m wrong). By the same token, you could buy a brand new book, transcribe it and then print copies to sell or give away without paying the author or publisher. Or you could take a vinyl LP, buy a record stamper and hydraulic press, scan the album cover and then make album copies to sell or give away without paying the musicians or music label. The only difference between replicating digital artefacts and physical artefacts is that it’s much easier and cheaper to do in the case of the former.

Making an exception for digital content is like arguing that robbing a bank vault is theft because it’s difficult to do, but robbing a convenience store is not theft because it’s easy to do.

To address your claim that “It's not natural that replication is theft”, I’ll answer with a reductio ad absurdum argument once again.

You started out with the assertion P1: It's not natural that replication is theft.

I'll reword this as:

P2: It's not natural that unauthorized replication is theft.

I added the word “unauthorized” because it is an important distinction. This is because if a party gains authorization by coming to an understanding with the copyright holder(s), then the said party does have the right to make additional copies under rules established in the contract with the copyright holder(s), which is clearly not theft as the copyright holder(s) are being remunerated to their satisfaction.

There are certain cases where making limited use of copyrighted materials without securing the rights is allowed, known as the Fair Use doctrine in common law jurisdictions, but that doesn't concern us here.

There is some ambiguity with your use of the words “it”, “natural” and “theft.” It is not clear what the subject “it” refers to, although it can be interpreted as a dummy pronoun, such as in the sentence “It is raining.”

The word “natural” is more problematic. What does it mean for an act to be natural? Who decides what constitutes a natural act? I can simply interpret “natural” as a synonym for “true,” but I don't want to put words in your mouth. Therefore, I will slightly amend your proposition to

“P3: The belief that unauthorized replication is theft is not natural,” with the understanding that “natural” refers to natural law as commonly understood.

Finally, the issue with the word “theft” is that it is not clear what the exact meaning is. If we are talking about positive law, then “theft” is a legal construct whose definition depends on the legal system in effect. We could substitute “immoral” for “theft,” but that changes the scope of the sentence. To provide more a specific meaning, I propose to use the common parlance meaning of “theft” as “taking something without permission.”

I will now focus on the phrase “unauthorized replication is theft.”

I think it is same to assume that you don't mean (or you don't think that I mean) that unauthorized replication and theft are synonyms. That is, there are acts of that can be considered theft but do not qualify as unauthorized replication, such as stealing from a grocery store.

Thus, in order to make the statement more precise, I'll reword it as “the act of unauthorized replication is an element of the set of acts of theft.”

Let T denote the sets of acts that are considered theft by society. Let u be the act of unauthorized replication.

Then “unauthorized replication is theft” can be expressed as “u ∈ T ”. Substituting the statement into P2, we now have

P4: The belief that u ∈ T is not natural.

I hope you agree that P1, P2 , P3 and P4 re equivalent statements.

Let D be the set of actions that deprive a person y of an item of y's property or labor without y's permission.

I propose the following natural law:

N1: The belief that D ⊆ T is natural.

That is, the belief that the set of actions that deprive a person y without y's permission is a subset of the set of actions that are considered theft is natural.

It is true that the government can deprive a person of their property or liberty according to ways prescribed within the law, because it is in responsible of making the laws.

You may disagree with N1 by rejecting the concept of private property, but that would conflict with your willingness to pay 99€ to be the exclusive owner of a rare vinyl album.

Now let's consider the act of unauthorized replication denoted by u. By creating an unauthorized copy of an item of intellectual property and giving it to a potential buyer (that is, a person who has not paid for a copy for personal use), the copier deprives the copyright owners of the income they would get if they sold that copy to the potential buyer.

In set theory, this can be expressed by u ∈ D.

Since D is a subset of T, that means that for every act d ∈ D, we have d ∈ T. Since u ∈ D, this implies that u ∈ T. That is, “the act of unauthorized replication is an element of the set of acts of theft.”

N1 stated that “The belief that D ⊆ T is natural,” that is to say that “the belief that for every d ∈ D, we have d ∈ T is natural,” yet we have element u ∈ D ⊆ T I, implying that “The belief that u ∈ T is natural” which contradicts “P4: The belief that u ∈ T is not natural,” which was a restating of the original assumption P1: It's not natural that replication is theft.

That means that either P1 or N1 was false. I think that N1 is a reasonable description of the common-sense understanding of the concept of theft, so that means that P1 is false.

Q.E.D.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Also, I specifically speak about the value of digital music, not! the value of music as music. The shoplifting parallel doesn't include replication. If the stolen item would still be in the shop, what would happen then? Is it then a stolen item?

That’s the crux of the problem, isn’t it? You can’t remove music from digital music, otherwise you get a random string of bytes. When people pirate music, they want the specific patterns of bytes, which when decoded using the proper algorithm, can create an audio signal that represents the music they wanted to listen to.

Here's The Cynical Musician's take on the matter (as always, I encourage you to read the entire article):

Krzysztof 'Faza' Wiszniewski wrote: We have to keep reminding ourselves that the value isn’t in the copy, but in the work itself. [. . ] The arguments being made about how the marginal cost of digital copies being zero implies the price of recordings being zero are bogus for this very reason: while the copies may be free to make, the recordings are not. The marginal cost of a recording can easily go into four figures. The marginal cost of a movie is usually millions of dollars. [. . .] The value to consumer is actually contained in the song, but what the consumer ends up paying for is the copy. How easy to convince oneself that the copy is where the value is and that when buying one, one is paying for the cost of making the copy.

If you think digital music doesn’t have value, try erasing a pirate’s 500 GB music library then telling him that it was valueless. He might beg to differ.

Do you think torrent leechers would be happy when they find that their freshly downloaded copy of Taylor Swift or Adele's latest album is actually William Shatner's 1968 spoken-word album The Transformed Man? I'd say they would definitely put a higher value on the former set of bytes than on the latter.

If you replace the bytes of digital music from your hard drive with random bytes, do you really feel nothing of value was lost?

People wouldn’t be spending hundreds of dollars on music players and music streaming services if the digital music on them had no value for them personally.

Krzysztof 'Faza' Wiszniewski addresses this particular argument in this article:

Krzysztof 'Faza' Wiszniewski wrote: From the artist’s perspective, downloading a pirated copy of an album is more or less equivalent to lifting a CD from the store – that’s one copy he won’t get paid for.

Digital media is as real as analog in the physical sense. The sequences of zeros and ones are a representation of the intellectual property therein. So a pirate could be accused of stealing the sequences of zeroes and ones. On digital media that rely on magnetic storage, the encoding of zeroes and ones is determined by the positioning of electrons, which are "real" and do have mass.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Yet, I still hold the view that the digitization and mass distribution of the past twenty years play a part in decreasing the market value of digital music, and that what people are willing to pay is completely unrelated to the costs and efforts by the expressors, and that copyright can't make this the case. I'm not 'strongly opposed to copyright', and my main point is that digitization poses a special problem because the very process of realizing a digital music file includes copying.

For someone who is not “strongly opposed to copyright,” you sure seem to enjoy engaging in long debates about how “copyright is a ridiculous construction.” Is this an examples of those contradictions that realist metaphysics is too strict to properly appreciate and extract meaning out of? I’m being sarcastic here (as the two statements aren’t necessarily contradictory), but I curious whether you’re not strongly opposed to copyright and just enjoy debating piracy and metaphysics for their own sake.

It's true that digital media amplified the issue by making easy to make copies. However, even when data was stored on analog media there were people who made illegal copies and sold them for profit.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: To listen to a digital song, the machinery makes a copy, which technically infringes copyright.

No. Copyright means that people are not allowed to make unlicensed copies, except as established under the Fair Use doctrine or other such exceptions. If the copy is licensed, such as a file stored in Temporary Internet Files for a paid Netflix or Spotify subscription, then it does not infringe copyright. Now, if the user were to find the local temporary copy, decode it, make a back-up copy, and cancel his subscription service, then yes, the back-up copy would infringe copyright because he has access to the copy even though he's not paying for it.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: This issue is addressed in length in this insightful article  Scott Brennan & Daniel Kreiss wrote: … At the same time, this underscores that transferring digital information does not include any actual transfer of physical materials. Instead, there is only the transfer of information about the configuration of transistors - meaning there is only copying. Some see this as eroding the distinction between the original and the copy, an idea that holds particular relevance for legal issues of intellectual property. As Lessig notes, this raises troubling implications for the expansion of intellectual property: “The law regulates ‘reproductions’ or ‘copies.’ But every time you use a creative work in a digital context, the technology is making a copy.” (references removed) You might argue that the object of interest is the content - the music itself regardless of format - and that the issue of how digital media is realized is just some peculiarity of some format and that the nature of the format is irrelevant because copyright is concerned with the content as content and is disregardful of whatever format. Yet copyright has to assume that the expression it protects has some kind of format, a particular iconic, symbolic or indexical representation needed for the existence of the thing to be protected from copying.  I can rationally distinguish format from content of recorded music, and I understand your views that it's the content regardless of format that has value, a value ideally ensured and protected by law.

Yes, it is the content that is the object of interest. That's why if people publicly perform an artistic work, even if it's for high school theater, they need to pay royalties to the copyright holders.

Regarding distinguishing the content when it's present in multiple formats, you do realize that there exists software that is capable from recognizing music by recording a short snippet?

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: But actually I don't operate by the format/content distinction. They make a unified whole, when mentally carving through this whole, it ceases to exist and remains only as rational abstract entities, and I can't accumulate willingness to pay for the non-existent entity 'content as content' regardless of any law or any moral imperative.

Well, that's too bad, because you live in society. Here is an article on freedom vs responsibilities by Krzysztof 'Faza' Wiszniewski:

Krzysztof 'Faza' Wiszniewski wrote: A man stranded on a desert island is free to undertake creative activity and even record his expressions in whatever form. He is not equally free, however, to communicate these expressions to another and even less free to communicate the expressions of someone else to a third party. As I’ve stated many times before, it is the act of Creation that is autonomous. The act of Replication always requires the existence of something to be replicated. In a conflict of Rights, the autonomous one should always be granted precedence, because it can exist without making contact with the rights of others.

Krzysztof 'Faza' Wiszniewski wrote: Ultimately, rights and freedoms can only be read in the context of society at large – however large the society might be.

Krzysztof 'Faza' Wiszniewski wrote: We are responsible to others because otherwise society would quickly disintegrate. Even die-hard libertarians acknowledge principles like nonaggression or pacta sunt servanta. Freedom without responsibility is oppression of those weaker than yourself and the rational observer might note there’s always a bigger fish – or even that the largest shark can be eaten by a large enough school of piranhas. To disavow responsibility towards others is to encourage a world of constant aggression – not something that bodes well for prosperity. Responsibility, however, does mean a curtailing of freedom. It is a choice most of us gladly make, because we realise that it is to our ultimate benefit. Ultimate freedom means freedom to starve.

And I fail to see how just because I can enjoy Hamlet either by reading a book, viewing a live performance, listening to an audio book, or viewing a recorded performance this somehow means that Shakespeare's text as a recognizable work of art ceases to exist.

Is it not theft or some other form of immorality to take advantage of something someone sells “regardless of any law or any moral imperative?”

I am unwilling to pay for rap music, so I don't listen to it. Problem solved, everybody's happy and it doesn't require a debate on metaphysics.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: Considering the indexical nature of digital media, digital media point to the real while being something else, namely abstracted gestalts of the real. I hold that the real becomes more real when offered by the concrete representations of analogue media. Also, no two copies of a vinyl disc are the same, each copy is an unique item. The uniqueness disappears when a digital music file can be replicated endlessly and all copies still be exactly alike. In general, uniqueness is valuable and sameness not. The content, the music itself, is for me inconceivable as a (kind of) product that has a certain value in some market. With digital media, the format and content constitute a distorted mirror image of the real which is completely unpreferable to the uniqueness and intrinsic value of the analogue counterparts.

Firstly, people who pirate don't care about the uniqueness if they can get the music without paying.

Secondly, one can argue that when artists record in a digital format, they can control all the recording parameters and ensure the final song is exactly how they intended, rather than introducing slight deviations due to the idiosyncrasies of the vinyl printing process. If a book has a few blank pages due to a printing error, does that make the book more valuable because it's more “unique?” There are a few cases, like certain stamps, coins or rare books where the manufacturing errors make them valuable, but that is the exception rather than the rule.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: It seems people interested  in both, generally are willing to pay less for streaming, downloads and cd's than for the analogue counterparts. Format matters, and I hope for the future that we'll see further popularity of analogue media and also see a rethinking of notions like intellectual property and copyright so that they cope better with the nature of digitization.

I agree with the sentiment of these statements, although I would restate the first sentence as “It seems people interested in both generally are less willing to pay the same for streaming, downloads and cd's as for the analogue counterparts because they have no resale value.” The reason is that assuming consumers are rational agents (which as you pointed out, is not always the case), they are always willing to pay less for a product, all other things being equal.

There is a value to owning physical items produced in relatively small because it can be traded to other people who value physical formats, whereas digital files can't be traded (I've heard of some attempts at selling mp3 out of users' libraries, but it didn't work out because of privacy issues involved in scanning the seller's hard drive to remove all copies of the mp3 and because it was impossible to check whether the seller had back-up copies on external storage media). However, the ongoing digital piracy has proved time and time again that most music consumers do not put a special value on physical goods if they can get the musical content without paying. If this were not true, then music piracy would be insignificant because the music consumers would prefer buying the “valuable” analog recordings to paying for “valueless” digital recordings.

Melodie&Rhythmus wrote: If digital music becomes unfashionable, it would be easier for artists to secure an income which I believe they are entitled to in some way or other. You have a choice not to distribute your work digitally (though that won't necessarily prevent piracy). When you choose to distribute digitally, you must be aware that you in some senses devaluate your product due to the nature of the format.

Most musicians and record labels are fine with charging less for digital copies because there are no production, inventory, and shipping costs, there is no risk of overproducing copies, and the digital files can't be traded like a used LP, cassette, or CD.

Before the advent of copyright, musicians were paid either as performers, deriving income from playing their instruments in a live setting, or by composing, which meant being independently wealthy, like some noble troubadours, or by being maintained by by a wealthy patron. If that's what you have in mind, then you're literally suggesting to send back the music industry to the Middle Ages.

Here's an interesting article where Krzysztof 'Faza' Wiszniewski discusses mass production and patronage:

Krzysztof 'Faza' Wiszniewski wrote: Imagine, for a second, a world where if you wanted to hear a musician perform a song, you had to ask them specifically to come over to your house and play it for you. I don’t think you’d be very surprised if they asked you to pay through the nose for the pleasure. Certainly, you’d be competing for the singular musician’s services (assuming that you had your mind set on that performer in particular – I don’t know, maybe he’s a John Lennon-equivalent) with everyone else who had the same idea. Naturally, those with most money would be the ones hogging all the best music. We call it “patronage”.

I'm way too busy with an upcoming exam, a project and work to reply in length to this thread in the next two weeks and I've wasted enough hours on this reply as it is, but be assured that I'll answer to any of your future replies in due time, lest you think you've had the last word in the matter of copyright.

P.S. The links for the Benthamite Utilitarianism and the indexical nature of digital media in your previous post don't work.