Knucklepopper: So you justify it because artists don't make enough money from the cd.

justify what? piracy? I don't need to justify using technology in the easiest and most effective manner possible. I realize I have a choice of whether to pay anything or not, and I choose to pay for it. There is more to the bargain then just a zero cost but ignore that cost at your own failed ideologies peril.

Knucklepopper: lockers: I can get all sorts of music free from the internet. I pay amazon for the music to get some vanishingly small amount of money into the artists hands. Copyright has almost nothing to do with this _other_ than the fact that I have no other way of achieving my goals. They get paid because I want them to get paid, not because I can't get their creative effort. This is why your question has been answered so often and you don't get it. They only get paid this way because it is often the only way they allow us to pay them. The people who get reputation for producing virus free quality works with easy distribution and no limitations will succeed the most, and there isn't a flipping thing you can do to change that.

"Vanishingly small amount of money."
So you justify it because artists don't make enough money from the cd.
Hm. How much do they make off an album? Do you know? How much did they used to make? Do you know that?
No, no, don't go Googling it. You're using this as a justification for lifting music for free so you should know the answer.


Hen't not saying that he downloads the music for free. Quite the opposite - he pays Amazon for the music so that at least *something* goes to the artist, no matter how small. I'm the same way, except I mostly use iTunes instead of Amazon.

Right now, I pay $0.99 for a song, and 10-20 cents goes to the band (maybe even less). I would much prefer that the band use a direct-distribution method where I pay less (like maybe $0.50), but where more of the money goes to the band because they've eliminated the middlemen.

Unfortunately, I don't get that choice very often since the middlemen still have a stranglehold on much of the process.

ScottRiqui: I'm the same way, except I mostly use iTunes instead of Amazon.

What sucks about iTunes though is the region restrictions. You can't buy something from country X store with a credit card issued in country Y.

You can use gift cards, but you can't buy gift cards for country X store anywhere outside of country X by normal channels. Instead, you need to go through resellers and pay people over the internet to go buy the cards for you and tell you the serial numbers.

In short, it's a pain in the ASS. So yeah, I'll pirate that music.

The apps, well, there's not a way around that (at least not that I know of), so I do the stupid middleman/paypal/get someone to go to 7/11 and mail me the numbers thing.

But region limiting has GOT to go.

TsukasaK: KajakPro: By that logic, Toro would also have a case against everyone who bought a Honda.

In all honesty, I think when when star-trek-esque "replication" technology becomes standard, the human race will be forced into star-trek-esque economics, as in, economics becomes a thing of the past.

Why buy anything when you can simply press a button and have a perfect copy of it?

Service labor, performances, and most especially real estate will still have monetary value.

ScottRiqui: Right now, I pay $0.99 for a song, and 10-20 cents goes to the band (maybe even less). I would much prefer that the band use a direct-distribution method where I pay less (like maybe $0.50), but where more of the money goes to the band because they've eliminated the middlemen.

To be fair, a lot of value of the work comes through middle men. Consistent quality, low prices and convenience have to do with a good reputable distributor. I _want_ to have that in my works, and for some things paying artists directly may actually produce worse results... copyright is totally irrelevant to the kind of producers I want to buy stuff from.

Knucklepopper:

"Vanishingly small amount of money."
So you justify it because artists don't make enough money from the cd.
Hm. How much do they make off an album? Do you know? How much did they used to make? Do you know that?
No, no, don't go Googling it. You're using this as a justification for lifting music for free so you should know the answer.

I pirate music, movies, and anything else I can pirate rather than pay for because I'm a broke college kid and need my money WAY more than the producer's of said media need my money. It's largely overpriced garbage, and to effectively wade through the cesspool out there you really do need to sample things. If I had money, I'd definitely support artists. In my opinion, the best way to buy an album is to send the band/artist your $20 and download the motherfarker.

Basically, I don't need to justify it. My piracy harms no one. If I could walk into my local grocery store and grab shiat off of the shelves, place it in my cart, put it back on the shelf, and have a copy of the product in my bag ala Diablo II dupes and walk out with a cart full of groceries for free without depriving the store of those products then hell yes I would.

You can get FREE stuff off the intertubes?

Weaver95: I help my aussie friends get around their asinine restrictions all the time. My buddies should be able to play left4dead 2 with all the gore splattering goodness intact!

Luckily whatever format of the machines that game is on lets that happen...

I know way back in the days of "Famicom" (NES) in LA there were shops that sold pin-switch clamshell type things so you could play the Japanese games on American systems.

Not everyone is only from one country or wants their media filtered, y'know?

At least with DVD there's region free players (either bought that way OR not) and there's long been "how-to" for fixing playstations and what not.

VHS was convenient for me (both Japan and the US use NTSC) but it was routine for there to be stores that would dub VHS tapes from NTSC to PAL and vice-versa. Plus supermarkets always rented tapes of foreign TV taped off satellite. That gave way to DVD sometime in the late 90's, and now it seems to be less popular generally just because everyone has bittorrent now.

But yeah, people want their worldwide media.

Still, electronics? Amazon won't sell outside of country, so for a whole bunch of things I still have to either buy it when I'm in the country or else go through resellers again.

Pain in the ass.

lockers: To be fair, a lot of value of the work comes through middle men. Consistent quality, low prices and convenience have to do with a good reputable distributor.

100% honestly I think that's why very many people even today would PREFER to pay for legal nice convenient versions of content, provided it's not too expensive.

I think there really is a non-zero price point, at least for the decently-employed audience. Will they wipe out piracy? Probably not. But plenty of people are willing to buy for the right price. It's just that $20 for a CD that requires you to get the whole album is not the right price anymore.

But iTunes and Amazon, all my region-complaints aside, have apparently found a good price and are making money of legal buyers.

What the fark??

Did Fark fire all the decent mods and now accepts anything even if it doesn't relate to the headline?

Knucklepopper: Albinoman: Make less copies of the art and make better art. Painters sell originals, bands put on shows. Just because you did a good job once doesn't mean you get to quit working.

So you download music for free as a form of protest against artists' quality? Is that it? Shiat, and here I thought you were just bein' cheap.

No, cd's shouldn't have much more value than the plastic, printed aluminum, and distribution costs that go into making it. Production costs are nil when divided a million ways. The internet is slowly replacing radio, cable/satellite TV, and libraries. Why should the RIAA be any better? In an age of copying available to anyone, copies of music don't have any more value than advertising for seeing the real thing.

killick: When Amazon started offering ordinary mp3s without DRM, I took all my business to them.

Same.

I think Drew should change Knucklepopper's ID to Knuckledragger.

I also think copyright term lengths should go back to their original time periods - and until that happens, all bets are off; why should the public hold up their end of the bargain, when content owners aren't, and haven't for decades?

itazurakko: ScottRiqui: I'm the same way, except I mostly use iTunes instead of Amazon.

What sucks about iTunes though is the region restrictions. You can't buy something from country X store with a credit card issued in country Y.

You can use gift cards, but you can't buy gift cards for country X store anywhere outside of country X by normal channels. Instead, you need to go through resellers and pay people over the internet to go buy the cards for you and tell you the serial numbers.

In short, it's a pain in the ASS. So yeah, I'll pirate that music.

But region limiting has GOT to go.

Region limiting is a classic case where the music/movie industry shot itself in the foot big time over copyright paranoia. Australia got stuck in the dreaded Region 4 - thereby ensuring that a few years after DVD became common that every single DVD player sold here was region free, and that people got used to ordering DVDs from overseas (at cheaper prices too). Good job industry execu-losers.

I sometimes think that the MPAA/RIAA/ARIA etc almost WANT me to pirate their stuff. I buy a legit DVD and have to put up with anti-piracy advertisements every bloody time I play it. I go to iTunes to find that Apple Oz won't let me buy Apple US songs (identical product and medium, but they want to screw us for more money), Hulu blocks me from watching TV there because some national network or advertiser is pissed that I don't want to wait for them to eventually get around to showing it here. I buy a copy of Windows (yeah - I know, I'm stupid for actually buying it) and Micro$oft's stupid anti-piracy verification programs keep screwing up my PC.

I'm sure it's actually a social experiment to see how far they can push people before they engage in wholesale revolt.

I'm going to go back and read the thread, but I wanted to post this as a rebuttal.

Offline Book "Lending" Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion

Sent it to all my librarian co-workers this morning :)

Well, I've hung with the whole thread thus far--but my head hurts a bit, even though I've only been a lurker.

Odds and Ends:

1) College Textbooks: a) yeah, they're big on getting revised editions out faster than, well, really needed. I'm told that some publishers' contracts with the author say that, if you don't cooperate in preparing an updated edition "X" years from now (typically
2) The Recording Industry: I can't defend all their past practices--before the Internet made easy distribution (legal or otherwise) so cheap and convenient. But, please remember that we're talking about _entertainment_ here, not food/clothing/shelter, or life-saving medicines. You don't want to pay for the song/video? Just don't buy it. Yeah, the 99-cents-a-single idea should have gone into place a lot sooner--but why isn't everyone willing to pay the damn ninety-nine cents for the damn song?

3) The Film Industry: They, too, could/should have adjusted their business model sooner; I remember how much the first Laserdiscs and VHS tapes cost. They've gradually worked down to a lower and lower price (and DVD sales sooner and sooner after theatrical release), figuring that the resultant increased sales will be the best tradeoff--but, it's still just entertainment, not an essential.

4) Copyright-Infringement-Vs-Theft: I'm not gonna jump in on the fight here, except to say that I was comfortable with the terms of U.S. Copyrights/Renewals (as both consumer and "owner" of a few copyrights of very little cash value) up until the Sonny Bono extension, which put a couple-decades' "freeze" on things created after 1923 [?] into the public domain. It just felt like Hollywood buying off Congress.


5) Human beings seem to be good rationalizers, and those who want their entertainment and other inessentials "for nothing" always seem to have a rationale available that satisfies them. As to stuff arguably more essential--like independent, fact-finding journalism--I'm especially worried about its future (if no one's willing to pay for newsgathering), and would love to have a crystal bowl to see where this will all be headed a few decades from now. A Brave New World, indeed!


/hang in there, KnucklePopper (and semiotix)
//myself, I'm now going to cut and run, and won't return to the thread......no need to reply to any of this.

People who claim piracy is stealing and harming artists must hate libraries. You can get books, music, movies and games from libraries without paying a cent to the original artist.

Also, Knucklepopper is a very dedicated troll or a very dedicated idiot. Or maybe a very dedicated idiotic troll.

Knucklepopper:
No idea who WOTC is but anyway: So they insist no downloads or pdfs of their IP, right?
Everybody else went ahead and sold pdfs of their products (mind you, I'm using your own verbs here). They sold pdfs, while WTC wouldn't. And they're now doing better than WTC.
WTF?
For your example to be at all relevant, you would have to show me a company that is giving away the pdfs for free and doing better than WTC because of this. You haven't.
Again, dude. Because four times now, I've asked you this question and you've yet to answer it:
If nobody pays the creator of a work, how will they produce more work?


//Trolltastic

Weaver95: so lemme get this straight - book publishers jack prices up on books required for their classes, then don't even pretend to respond to market forces that demand they lower prices and be competitive. Then students pirate the books online, and pay next to nothing for them.

And somehow this is the fault of the students?

There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.

- R Heinlen

darth_shatner: I sometimes think that the MPAA/RIAA/ARIA etc almost WANT me to pirate their stuff. I buy a legit DVD and have to put up with anti-piracy advertisements every bloody time I play it. I go to iTunes to find that Apple Oz won't let me buy Apple US songs (identical product and medium, but they want to screw us for more money), Hulu blocks me from watching TV there because some national network or advertiser is pissed that I don't want to wait for them to eventually get around to showing it here. I buy a copy of Windows (yeah - I know, I'm stupid for actually buying it) and Micro$oft's stupid anti-piracy verification programs keep screwing up my PC.

Yeah. For what it's worth, I don't know about the US TV situation (as I'm in the US, I can watch Hulu) but in Japan there are places that will, for a fee, sell you VPN access by the month so you can appear to be in Japan and thereby watch all the Japanese equivalents to Hulu. I've not sprung for it mainly because, well, there's bittorrent, but it's occasionally tempting.

If you use those you can also play all the region-restricted "we must keep out pirates from China!!1!1!!11" MMORPGs. Not my thing, but there's people who get it for that (or have friends/relatives similarly set them up the VPN).

Completely aside from electric media though it's also worth noting that corporations have been getting rich off wage arbitrage for decades now, making things in low-wage countries and selling them at insane markup in high-wage countries - think sneakers for one example. They don't want you doing all your shopping in the cheap wage countries and undoing their game. With physical merchandise, the logistics prevent a lot of that, but with electric media it's pretty impossible to stop - just witness all the region-cheating that goes on already.

roncofooddehydrator: People who claim piracy is stealing and harming artists must hate libraries. You can get books, music, movies and games from libraries without paying a cent to the original artist.

Yeah, but (1) libraries are old, so people hadn't thought of these issues before they became accepted as mainstream, and (2) with print media, the library has to pay for limited copies, so it's slightly less scale.

kenny's mom: As to stuff arguably more essential--like independent, fact-finding journalism--I'm especially worried about its future (if no one's willing to pay for newsgathering), and would love to have a crystal bowl to see where this will all be headed a few decades from now. A Brave New World, indeed!

Thing is, journalism is very different from popular music. Journalism is new work done every day, which is what makes it expensive - popular music is one song recorded and then sold in identical format for decades.

WhyteRaven74: netweavr: If anyone can turn on a facet, how will Evian produce more water?

By bullsiatting people into thinking their bottled stuff is better than the stuff they pay for that comes out of their taps.

Ah yes, the "Vinyl Records are better" argument.

ScottHimself: I pirate music, movies, and anything else I can pirate rather than pay for because I'm a broke college kid and need my money WAY more than the producer's of said media need my money.

This is the only honest answer I've seen yet.
Self-entitled little farkwads who think their immediate needs are more important than any standard of morality, common decency, and in some places, the law. Congrats.
What's the answer, Weaver?
Pay for what you consume. This doesn't seem hard.
Or don't - but then don't try to justify it by pretending your "I got mine" policy is some sort of new social order.

-1 for subby since the article mentions nothing about public libraries (unless I missed it)
-1 for everyone else for greenlighting and posting 300+ comments about this

TEXT BOOK PUBLISHERS RAPE STUDENTS. It's always been that way and it will always be that way until professors are given incentives to select worthwhile AND REASONABLY PRICED texts.

There are plent of legal, good books out there.

Unfortunately they're all copyright expired, soooo, yeah.

Knucklepopper: ScottHimself: I pirate music, movies, and anything else I can pirate rather than pay for because I'm a broke college kid and need my money WAY more than the producer's of said media need my money.

This is the only honest answer I've seen yet.
Self-entitled little farkwads who think their immediate needs are more important than any standard of morality, common decency, and in some places, the law. Congrats.

Yep. What is worse is you can't stop it. All those self entitled little assholes will make your world view irrelevant. But keep on pushing the view that the gatekeepers need things to work like they do. It will change nothing.

Copyright means nothing to me anymore.

Until the day comes that all copyrights expire within 10 years of being issued, it will stay that way.

Kasira: Babwa Wawa: Got sick of putting $1000/year toward books.

Geez, I wish I only spent $1,000/yr on books. I'm looking at $1,000 this semester.

What the fark are you studying!? Book Bindery: Gold Inlay and application of jewels!?
Does that come with a masseuse or anything?

/Tell me you sell them back at the end of the semester.

lockers: Yep. What is worse is you can't stop it. All those self entitled little assholes will make your world view irrelevant. But keep on pushing the view that the gatekeepers need things to work like they do. It will change nothing.

Oh, it's changing. Don't worry. Web sites like Hulu and news services like the New York Times are slowly going up behind a paywall. The free ride is ending and the only regret I have is that the publishers didn't start sooner.

Babwa Wawa: Torrents are unnecessary for book downloads - 50-100KB each book.

Except for the single torrent of 13,000 plus Sci-Fi books that I just downloaded.
Torrents are pretty useful for things like that.

WhyteRaven74: Al!: ou are stealing, in both cases.

Copyright infringement is by law not theft. Hell it's not even under the same heading. Copyright infringement is civil law, theft is criminal law.

Copyright infringement may have both civil and criminal consequences. However, "theft" is not the correct legal terms to describe it. People who quote a general dictionary instead of a legal one may be confused by the distinction. The correct term to use for copyright infringement is "copyright infringement". Intellectual "property" is a misnomer for a number of limited monopoly rights. Theft involves depriving the rightful owner of the original. Copyright infringement is is still illegal. It is better to use the correct legal term.

Whether or not copyrights should continue to be extended "forever minus a day" past the death of the authors is another debate, as is the morality of copyrights and infringement. Personally, I think if you do not make a profit in a 7 year monopoly, you are never really going to make a profit. If you did make a profit, that is enough and you can still sell it without the monopoly. We should limit copyrights again and build up a healthy public domain as was originally intended. We should also narrow the definition of derivative works so that people can build on the old works--like Disney did with old fairy-tales.

As a business model, I like Neil Gaiman's approach: http://boingboing.net/2008/07/11/neil-gaiman-giving-a.html. Then again, Neil Gaiman is a god and I will buy anything with his name on it. I read the free material and I buy the book. Fans buy the book, the t-shirt and all other fan crap because we love the author. Capitalizing on that might work better than suing the fan base. That's not a law, just an idea.

Text books have no fan base. Maybe they need to rethink their pricing. Many student would like a physical book if the price were reasonable.

Knucklepopper: lockers: Yep. What is worse is you can't stop it. All those self entitled little assholes will make your world view irrelevant. But keep on pushing the view that the gatekeepers need things to work like they do. It will change nothing.

Oh, it's changing. Don't worry. Web sites like Hulu and news services like the New York Times are slowly going up behind a paywall. The free ride is ending and the only regret I have is that the publishers didn't start sooner.

And how long do you think that will last? I can still remember down here when the Straits Times went to subscriber-only. And the online readership went to almost zero. Hulu and the NYT are about to find out the same thing.

Unless the price is trivial, free online conent supported by advertising will beat subscriber-only every single time.

semiotix: Weaver95: so lemme get this straight - book publishers jack prices up on books required for their classes, then don't even pretend to respond to market forces that demand they lower prices and be competitive. Then students pirate the books online, and pay next to nothing for them.

Not to defend academic book publishers, but Jesus, if I thought it would mean they'd accidentally read some of it, I'd pirate the damn books myself and hand out personally-copied DVDs on the first day of class.

/sorry for the impotent professor rant
//ignore anything I say about academia for the first five weeks of the semester
///or the last five weeks
////or the middle... actually, just come talk to me in July, after I've had a pitcher of margaritas

Are you my ex-boyfriend? Seriously, this sounds just like something he'd say.... I didn't think there could be that many despondent academics out there, but now I'm rethinking that view.

As for the topic at hand, I love libraries. All the thrill of getting something for nothing and none of the catholic guilt that goes along with it. No piracy required.

Late response, we'll see if this finds it's target anyhow...

Knucklepopper is in a panic. If I'm right, he's one of the magical "content creators" that has been suckling the teat of a failing business model. Instead of trying to solve his underlying problem - finding a new way to be profitable - he's screaming in impotent rage and pounding his tiny fists.

Copyright infringement isn't stealing any more than retelling a story you heard your uncle make up once while he was drunk at a family get-together is stealing. Once upon a time, people who created intellectual property found people to pay them to create things. Patronage it was called. The current system is just a fancied up form of old school patronage. If things truly fall apart for the publishing industries - books and music in particular - we will likely see a drastic decrease in the amount of horrid crap being published. I would applaud this.

Many so called artists, writers, musicians, actors and wanna-be journalists would then be forced to do something useful (like manual labor) for a living and pursue "art" as a hobby. If the current distribution model is killing your profitablility - find a new model. Find a new patron to pay you for your work. If you can't find anyone willing to pay, perhaps you might consider that your product isn't desirable enough - improve it so someone will buy it. The distribution chain is a tool you use. It's a poor craftsman that blames the tool.

Knucklepopper - if I'm right about who you are - some of your work appears valuable. If need be, find your audience, form a company/non-profit group/something using them as a income/donation base and go from there. There is always a way to get paid to do what you love if you're willing to put in the work. If you aren't willing to make the effort - find a new career path.

Too many people have said this - just because copyright infringement isn't stealing doesn't make it right. Quit beating this dead horse. Oh - and quit assuming the consumers of a product are the ones responsible for finding a way to pay a creator. It's the creator's responsibility to find a way to get paid.

--On the WoTC/not WoTC pdf distribution - once a pdf is in the wild, after the first copy sells, theorectically (according to big business) no more will sell. This is obviously incorrect. Bad business model, make a new one.

i got away with buying my books for the semester for 270 bucks!! i felt awesome!

Jubeebee: The college I went to had a book rental system. Came out to about $50 per semester since they charged you a few bucks if you wrote in the books, and I write all the hell over my books.

But since most universities make you buy the books, some of which you use only a handful of times, I don't think pirating text books is quite the sin* that pirating music, movies, or even fiction books is. If some jerkoff prof is making you buy his $70 book to teach you 2 chapters from it in GenEd 102, I'd say you're perfectly justified in getting it from half.com or downloading it.

*I have more than a handful of 'creatively obtained' copies of popular media myself, but I'm weaning myself off of it now that I actually have a decent income.

My university had copies of most texts on reserve at the library. Worked well when books were updated for apparently no damn reason whatsoever (has fluid mechanics really changed that much from last year?). Buy old edition from a friend, check new edition it out for 2 hours, copy the homework questions (inevitably the same from previous edition, but with different numbers), done.

It got kind of irritating when I worked at the library and had to check out / check in the intro Statistics book every hour (and field questions about it's availability every 15 minutes) but it was appreciated nonetheless.

s1ugg0: dogette:

They really get mad if you figure out you can do without 80% of your textbooks.

My god this!!!!! I stopped buying books after my freshman year when I learned the library had copies and I could just photocopy the 1 farking chapter the professor uses from it.

/Professor and author? hmmmmmm no conflict of interest there.

I had a kickass professor (for many reasons - had him freshman and senior year). Anyhow, he was pissed off at textbook prices, so he wrote his own book, found a really cheap local publisher (and had printed without a hard cover) and made sure the bookstore would sell it to us for $35. And it was a damn big book for $35.

Had another who essentially had an entire textbook she had written over the years with help now and then from paid student research assistants. All in pdf form, all online for us to download before each class. She could've made decent scratch from publishing that, too (the only other widely published book on that subject was crap).

I love those professors.

Knucklepopper: How is the artist going to create more art if nobody pays them for it?

The longer I read this thread, the more certain I am you're a troll. You're assuming nobody will pay for it. I've taken a lot of photos for fun, I've sold some for commercial use. Under the license I use on them, if there's no profit, it's free. Yet, I still have people who have paid me to use photos for commercial reasons.

I don't have an agent, I don't know what the market rates are, and I'm a nobody. They could get away with pirating my photo and I'd likely never notice nor have the resources to sue, yet they still are willing to pay me.

The oddest part? Since my prices are (apparently) very low, I've been paid by some of these companies to go out and get requested photos for them after they'd bought one I had on file. Those are works for hire, so it's up to them to protect the copyright if they so desire, but yet the content creator still gets paid.

You obviously are trolling since you have no idea how most artists work. How do you think artists were supported before we had distribution companies? Are you familiar with the concept of an artist having a sponsor, or patron? Do you think they do it for the same reason the guy at Subway shows up to make you a sandwich?

Have you ever worked with a local band who were playing for their love of music, and making money would just be a bonus? (I've worked with bands that lost $10,000 out of pocket because they just wanted to tour.)

Have you ever met someone who was willing to help someone for nothing, because it's the right thing to do? Have you never overtipped a bartender because she did a great job?

You're either trolling or you have no farking clue of what motivates most artists.

Screw seafood restaurants! Outdated technology!



+



=

darth_shatner: Hulu and the NYT are about to find out the same thing.

Hell, the NYT already learned that once when they put their commentary pages behind the members-only filter.

Trivial MICROPRICING that doesn't region-discriminate I can see catching on for some services. But it has to be very small (meaning, you don't fork over $25 for a year, you pay $0.02 per article ONLY when you actually read one and it bills you later) and it has to be region-free.

came _BACK_ for Jim Baen and Baen.com, leaving convinced that you're all farking imbeciles.

gonna throw this out there - book piracy creates sales.

I work in a college bookstore so I'm getting a kick out of this thread...

Hey, who changed the channel? I was watching the Weaver95/Knuckledragger fight, and then it was suddenly over? man, what am I gonna do with all this popcorn?

Knucklepopper: Weaver95: yup. more willful blindness and stupidity. Nobody could possibly be this stupid and not drool on their keyboards. c'mon - admit it. you're just trolling the thread.

I've asked you seven times now, and you still won't answer, you just keep shaking your head pitifully at some higher knowledge you claim to have:
How is the artist going to create more art if nobody pays them for it?

So far, the only thing you could say is: smaller companies will sell it. Which, of course, ignores that their material is also free for the taking.
I gotta say, I'm disappointed; I didn't think you were so weak about difficult questions. At the very least, I thought you'd take a shot at answering it.


Here's the short answer: In the EXTREMELY unlikely event that the artists don't find a way to get rabid fans to pay them, they could always go back to historical methods such as "Get a second job" or "Find a rich sponsor". Some of the best works of art and literature in history were made by artists who had a patron supporting them.

I'm starting a new site...and I'm calling it, FARK(s).COM

/who could possibly mind?

//hoping for advertisers...