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That’s what you get when you head over to a Million Music post once slugged ‘bloggers-vs-majors’.

And to the left of that »»»

Ultimately, the only thing that matters is the relationship between you and your audience. If you’re an artist, a label, a manager or a promoter Million will help you to build that relationship. Here, we try and tell you how we do it. Email: neil AT 1-000-000 dot com 

Sound words, but not words to live by, apparently.

“Hi Jon,” says Crosbie Fitch (right) in an email.  “I thought you may be interested in a recent blog article ‘unpublication’ I’ve just blogged about.”

He goes on, “How ironic that a blog item about labels upsetting bloggers by taking down their entire blogs via the DMCA is itself taken down by a label upset that bloggers are upset about labels.”

Intriguing.

So I went over for a look and, “There was a very good article on the Million Music blog yesterday,” posts Fitch, who says he’s researching and developing revenue mechanisms and business models for producers of digital art and who in the process of thereof, “has discovered that copyright is not only an ineffective anachronism, but is unethical and unconstitutional”.

The post continues the Million Music item asked why music bloggers had changed, “from sympathy and tolerance toward major record labels to outright condemnation, and wondered if this had been due to the labels’ recent ‘assertion of their rights’ by exercising their powers under the DMCA that had resulted in people’s entire blogs being taken down rather than just an offending post.”

He goes on »»»

So I commented thus:

Individuals (human beings) have natural rights. Corporations don’t, they have privileges.

Copyright is a privilege that suspends the natural right to cultural liberty (specifically the right to share and build upon published works) in order to grant a lucrative monopoly to publishing corporations.

The DMCA is simply an enhancement of powers granted to copyright holders.

So, the majors are not asserting their rights, but exploiting their privileges.

If anyone was going to assert their rights it would be individuals asserting their right to share copies of published music recordings.

Unfortunately, most file-sharers and people who publish blogs containing mp3 files don’t realise they have a right to do what they’re doing.

Users of Google’s ‘Blogger’ service are reliant upon Google, so really they should host their blogs themselves on their own PCs if they don’t want them taken down by those privileged by the DMCA.

The blogger agreed in a subsequent comment with my moral viewpoint, but invited my further explanation.

So I then suggested in a second comment that if the labels kept on using the DMCA (or EUCD) as if it were a cultural sniper rifle, that eventually they’d have so many victims that they’d prompt a rebellion, that the worms would turn – if they haven’t started already. Cultural participants will either develop bullet proof vests (defenses against the DMCA) or will shoot back (use the DMCA against the labels).

Shortly afterwards it seems (from my referral logs) that someone from Universal Music found the post and its comments so disagreeable that they’ve ‘persuaded’ the blogger to discontinue publication.

Time: 21 Nov 2008 11:06am
IP: 167.167.136.2
Host: ip-167-167-136-2.ukrom.umusic.com
Page: index.php
Referrer: http://millionmedia.wordpress.com/2008/11/20/bloggers-vs-majors/
Method: GET
Status: 200

Interesting times…

Indeed.

Meanwhile, “I work on tools and technologies to provide alternatives to copyright based business models,” said Fitch, giving a little more detail on his contention that, “copyright is not only an ineffective anachronism, but is unethical and unconstitutional”.

“Throughout most of my professional life I’ve specialised in R&D in the fields of software engineering and information technology, particularly with respect to large scale virtual environments and their implementation as distributed systems (p2p based massive multiplayer games),” he states »»»

Specialising in R&D means that I am predisposed toward problems for which solutions are not well defined or have not yet been developed.

It is in addressing problems that arise in the case of distributed systems (file-sharing, etc.), especially the lack of IP based business models that can operate without centralised control, that has occupied most of my R&D in recent years. There is little interest in decentralised P2P systems if there’s no money in it, so that’s the first problem to be solved before any other – if funding is to be obtained for R&D in such systems in other respects (implementation).

This has necessitated my research into copyright (its artificial and now ineffective constraint over the distribution of information and intellectual property) and the reasons for its creation, and whether its legislation has any ethical basis.

If copyright is ethical, a natural right, then its ineffectiveness might supposedly result from moral decay, which allegedly can be solved through education and better policing. On the other hand, if copyright has no ethical basis, then its ineffectiveness is probably natural, resulting from the intrinsic nature of information, and the natural laws that govern it.

From researching the history of copyright as far back as Thomas Paine and the Statute of Anne I have concluded that the US Constitution has a sound ethical basis in terms of a natural rights philosophy. However, the subsequent US copyright and patent legislation is both unconstitutional and unethical.

JN

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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