/christ/ - Christian Discussion and Fellowship

>>5748

> I try to see it as a sort of library and I figure that the artist would most likely take pleasure that I'm viewing their work but I could see how The Lord would consider it a sin.

Yeah I think the answer to this might be that it is sinful. After all, you are taking the product of someone else's work without compensation and despite the fact that they expect recompense.

Maybe if you hadn't taught so much about it things would be different, now you'd be a little hard press to justify yourself before God for doing this, especially considering you'd like to enter that broader medium yourself.

I personally try and manage with Soundcloud and Youtube for music, I hope the Jews leave the artists something for their trouble, can't be sure. Movies though, that's a tough one. Even renting feels wrong to me sometimes (though I haven't done it since the late aughts).

Be strong mang, and try not to pirate.

>>5758

>There's a game called Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. It's one of my favorites but if you buy it on Steam today all that money is going to Activision. The people who actually created it no longer receive a dime. Their studio shut down and Activision kept all the rights.

mfw I recently purchased that game and apparently gave a bunch of money to someone who had nothing to do with making it

That said, Activision are the copyright holders as, I assume, the once-and-only sponsors of the production. Or is that not true, they're just distributors and are charging for a game that is technically out-of-copyright? Someone must own the rights, even if it's a bankruptcy lawyer.

>>5748

OP, I definitely feel your pain. For one, I am exceedingly annoyed that the promises of the "vast digital library" the doyens of the internet kept promising me has been unrealised, except on pirate bay (and cucktunes, almost completely, for musics). So, where does this leave me in a poorly-served-fag country that has no access to this Alexandrian library of film, except to pay an hours' wages to import said movie from Amazon, if I'm lucky?

Now, cucktunes is getting into movies, but the rates they charge for renting them – for when I am feeling yeah, such-n-such was a good film, I should watch that again, [scroll] [scroll] [scroll] … there we go, WHAT? $7 to watch a 24-year old movie in SD?! – are absurd. At least in Ozfailia. No way you'll convince me that in that two hours I would have watched $7 worth of television advertising if this were network broadcast so some rightsfag is making truckloads of cash outa me.

>>5761

>Especially since it is technically legal here.

where liveth thou that this should be so?!

>Why should someone get recompensation for having an idea 30 years ago?

some rambling thoughts

Herein, I think I will diverge from what seems like most folks on this thread. I believe artists should be compensated for their works. And if their 53-year old ass made that work thirty years ago, good for them – why shouldn't they still profit from the fact that there are still people like me that liked what they did. After all, if Ziggy had produced for the first time the Spiders from Mars album last week, would I not still buy it full-price? Yes, I would, because the music is sufficiently based to be worth paying for.

Alright. But, I want to emphasise that I think ARTISTS should be compensated.

What has emerged over the past decade-plus is the monopoly-like powers the RIAA and their members have over the entire industry, a cabal that guarantees them gargantuan profit margins, and willfully deprives artists of a decent income. And, given they are backed by an army of lawyers skilled in the willful manipulation of the law, and publicists with like skills on the body politic (or the messaging to such), they get to entrench and fully justify this despite the disregard for artists.

The clearest rebuke of the "money-changers in the temple" of the record industry came from Courtney Love who made a very public denunciation of the revenues model she was suffering under. It made a complete mockery of the Lars Ulrich's protests – bands weren't being ripped-off by Napster so much as by the record industry itself. For example, Love noted that promotional video clips came out of the artist's revenues, that after a supposed advance, even a #1 album could leave the band in debt to their record company, a perpetual cycle of indentured servitude until the record company basically cut them off.

>Multiplatinum artists like TLC and Toni Braxton have been forced to declare bankruptcy because their recording contracts didn't pay them enough to survive.

>Corrupt recording agreements forced the heirs of Jimi Hendrix to work menial jobs while his catalog generated millions of dollars each year for Universal Music.

>Florence Ballard from the Supremes (10 #1 hits) was on welfare when she died.

>Collective Soul earned almost no money from "Shine," one of the biggest alternative rock hits of the 90s when Atlantic paid almost all of their royalties to an outside production company.

>Merle Haggard enjoyed a string of 37 top-ten country singles (including 23 #1 hits) in the 60s and 70s. Yet he never received a record royalty check until last year when he released an album on the indie punk-rock label Epitaph.

Same thing was happening in the film industry with productions that made close to a billion dollars exposed as fraudulently declaring losses using disreputable (though, of course, entirely legal) accounting bullshit.

Part 1 of 2

Part 2 of 2

So, what am I saying, that all this legitimises piracy?

Well, probably not, but it does leave one faaaaaar less sympathetic to the RIAA's bleating and heart-rending stories of artists being deprived by those nasty pirates. What should have happened as soon as mp3 technology came into being is that the record companies should have bought out Napster while it was still in the crib, started their own digital download service, for a fee that was absent production costs and thus bypassed cucktunes and thereby stopped them bleating about Apple stealing all their money.

But, it was never gonna happen in an industry making so much money the way things were and so utterly convinced of its own godlike imperviousness to change.

Implied in all this should have been a more flexible revenue model, a greater revenues and flexibility for artists, and, ultimately, the end of the record company dominance of the game. (I know, I'm a fantasist.) For example, I often download foreign television episodes so I can assess whether to buy the series on hyper-expensive DVD. There's no mechanism for me doing this relatively risk (cost) freely. Once upon a time, I would get a cassette off a friend to sample the album.

An example of this flexibility for the artists is the self-publishing (book) industry, wherein authors can publish their own work, collect nearly 70% of the revenues (instead of the not-even-8% in the music industry). Of course this low-cost-barrier-for-entry has resulted in an overabundance of literary rubbish – as made evident by the success of Fifty Shades – which would normally be vetted and controlled by publishers. We need reviewers to be more active, but their role was rendered nearly irrelevant by the publishers and so we're starting from a low base.

What I am basically saying is that it's all forked and the industry models need to be turned on their head so that the artists themselves make the money. I am very, very happy for 70-year old Bowie to collect revenues for yet another golden back-scratcher for making Heroes 38 years ago, but I detest the fact that some snot-nosed music executive who wasn't even born the year the album was originally released is collecting a big fat gilded ivory back-scratcher for doing N O T H I N G beyond repackaging the album.

Fingers in pies. Everyone makes money out of art EXCEPT the artists.

And for this reason I will buy the movies I want to have permanent copies of, but if I just want to view it, well… Kind of a half-way house, an unjustifiable moral model that splits the difference between my morals and my goals for artists, if that makes sense. For musicians, there's cucktunes, so I haven't ever really taken the napster path, which is ironic considering all my ire above seems reserved for the music industry not the film industry.

Ooookay, maybe I need a little time in the corner to think this strategy through.