You young fellow feel free to pursue theft of music and other content which deprives the millions of artists of income to pay their rent.
I view this in completely different terms. Before file sharing existed, people would record songs off the radio onto their tape cassettes. The music was already technically (but not legally) out in the public domain for anyone to hear, you were just bypassing the business model of ad supported revenue. The music was even being beamed at you via radio waves against your own will, yet there's probably plenty of obscure laws trying to govern whether you can or can't record it and what you can do with it.
We have a similar situation with ad blockers on websites. Their business model is starting to fail. To me, the whole situation with music is just the state trying to prop up an invalid business model. In the old days, entertainers were considered to have the lowest of social status possible. This is one of the initial reasons Nero was ridiculed as an emperor, because he wanted to be an actor and emperor at the same time. Even if entertainer's social status was garbage, they could still get paid doing it, they just had to do it through live performance. There was no "record thyself and make millions".
Modern civilization elevates these entertainers from the social status of garbage men, to basically higher than the president of the country in both fame and wealth. This is not to say they shouldn't get paid, but past history and current technology both point to the idea that they will likely be required to do so only through live performance. If you're saying it's the government's job to make sure their invalid business model is still able to make them mega-millionaires without even having to do live performance at all, then that would be an extreme left wing view.
I really read your rebuttal with an open mind, because if I am incorrect I will suffer immensely. So I am not writing the following based in what I want to believe, but rather based on my sober analysis of the facts. I am eager to read any rebuttal which can teach me why I am wrong.
First of all, distinguish SUPER STARS from the average indie musician earning couple of $100 a month, or the more successful indie or small label outfit earning just above the poverty line. The former number several dozens to maybe a few hundred (active) whereas the latter number in the 100,000s to millions (and maybe much more if they could earn a bit more).
Depriving indie musicians of a decent income (not even wealth!) to pay their rent and food is not the way to build a new age Knowledge Age economy wherein we creative people create things and sell them direct to each other instead of being slaves to corporations. If you are going to advocate stealing music, and since we are moving into a digital age where all work will be digitized, then let's advocate stealing everything then including 3D printer designs, commercial software, etc.. so that we will be reduced an economy valued only by physical raw materials and energy production so the bankers will own and control all value in economy. Yeah nice.
Afaik, the reason artists were devalued throughout history was due to two facts:
- Lack of abundance in the ancient economy which is required to produce a gift culture. The artists in a gift culture are on the receiving end of the gifts because they don't directly produce necessities of life that are thus in abundance in a gift culture.
- Economies of yore have been capital intensive, economies-of-scale (e.g. Rome road building, post Dark Age agriculture, Industrial Age factories) thus artists contributed no useful labor to the capitalists. The point being that the capitalists were in control. But I have explained this all changes in Knowledge Age[1]
Why you not want to pay an insignificant tip to indie musicians so they can flourish and you don't have to view ads? We are now in an abundance economy. There is no excuse to not tip the indie artists.
Would you prefer to have massive unemployment and social welfare system that will sink us into a Dark Age?
Do you want all those unemployed artists on welfare to vote to steal your money with capital controls because the economy failed them?
Not everyone wants to be a programmer or what ever.
If you enjoy or listen to a song regularly, then is absolutely no financial reason you can justify for not tipping the creator a penny. You will only destroy society, the Knowledge Age, and yourself by being so selfish and myopic. Perhaps you could justify it for other reasons such as micropayments being a hassle and subscription being a lockin (to one provider) paradigm.
What might be more convincing to me, is to argue that those people who are going to steal (or who won't bother to find the music in official venues) will do it any way (or at least will have been exposed to the music thus potentially being another fan for the musician to sell a T-shirt to), thus arguing there is no economic incentive to prevent bootleg copies from appearing on decentralized file storage systems. And thus to argue that the business model that works is give away free the downloads, and sell the fans trinkets and live performances. Perhaps that is your point?
Afaics, SoundCloud was supposed to be offering that model and the musicians pay SoundCloud to offer the downloads for free. In return musicians could afaics promote their music and gain fans for example on their Facebook page and then sell the fans stuff such as T-shirts. But lately SoundCloud has started to limit apps to 15,000 plays per day, apps that play SoundCloud content aren't allowed to develop social networking type features, and SoundCloud disabled their Facebook embedded player (changed it to a link to SoundCloud's website) so that SoundCloud could drive ad revenues and/or synergies on their own site. Appears SoundCloud was being hammered by the RIAA with DCMA requests and SoundCloud caved in to the major record labels. Now Universal has accesse to delete any song from SoundCloud.
So one could argue that a decentralized file storage could provide the function SoundCloud was supposed to be offering.
Musicians like to get statistics on how many plays their song has. They like to get feedback on their songs. Etc.
If society decides to adopt the decentralized file storage and end copyrights, then I will adjust to it. But for the time being, it is not clear whether that is the best model for the indie artists and for our Knowledge Age future.
For example, it is not clear to me that I need 150 T-shirts, one each from each indie band I like. And then how do I tip them for new music they create if I already bought a T-shirt? I don't have time to go to live concerts and what if the band is not in my area. We are moving to global economy (check out songdew.com for music from India). Wouldn't it make more sense for my music organizer to tip them automatically based on my plays? So I don't have to hassle with it making sure I take care of the artists who provide my music that I love.
So you could argue okay, but no reason to not let others steal it if they really want to. Well maybe true, but in that case the decentralized file storage can coexist with the micropayment model.
Which outcome do you think is realistically the most likely and why?