 m mike masnick mike techdirt com writes m in which world are we talking about that may be true for the m first sale but once something is out in the world the m creator loses control if i buy a chair you built and then m decide to give it away to my neighbor by you re definition he m just stole from you i don t endorse the whole riaa thing but to be accurate you would have to duplicate the chair so that both you and your neighbour could continue to sit down and yes i suppose that would be more serious they can sit on your copy but if you start churning out exact dups of a name brand artifact people with law degrees start to smell money for example i could copy a gibson guitar exactly so long as a i don t put orville s name on the headstock and b i license the patented bracing methods if i instead try to sell a homebuilt guitar on ebay with gibson written in crayon on the headstock and then claim it is a true les paul limited edition i expect people would get upset m why is it that people don t understand that giving stuff away m is a perfectly acceptable tactic in capitalist businesses to play the devil s advocate here it s not about giving stuff away it is about granting endless and cascading duplication distribution rights even if _i_ only make the copy i give to you that doesn t stop you from making NUMBER copies to sell m access to free stuff often helps to sell other stuff this is the difficult question how will they draw the distinction the other stuff is just as easy to duplicate as the free stuff this is why ms is hunting people with illegal windows it s no harder to dup than a linux cd only what is there that actually prevents people from doing it personally i don t think the issue should have anything to do with sales or units the issue is that basic phallacy that says a suit should be able to own someone else s intellectual property sarah mclaughlin isn t suing you it s her label s legal dept because it s the label who stands to lose sarah s already fat beyond her wildest dreams so a few bucks here or there or even if the well dried up tomorrow it s not going to really traumatize her unless she s been blazingly stupid with her money but the label like disney and mickey they need the cash cow so they can keep all sorts of uncreative hangers on in limos and coke if you thought only elvis or brian jones or dennis wilson had problems with beautiful people deadbeat leech friends draining their riches think again the problem is really very simple because it is semantic and until we make the semantic flip it s unsolvable but like trisecting an angle all it takes is looking at the same situation in a different way here s the revelation elvis never ever made a hit record elvis didn t make the hits his fans made the hits his fans did the work cleaning toilets manning the convenience stores driving milk trucks sitting at endless office desks they did the real labour that paid for every last one of elvis presley s pills all elvis did was sing into a microphone every so often and pen or collect the odd song that all those people liked and wanted as something of their own but it s not _elvis_ who made them universal statements it is the universe of fans who slurped the songs into their own lives it was pull technology not push therefore the question becomes how many times must these fans pay before they own what they themselves have created they pay royalties for listening to the radio for blank tapes for concert tickets for a beer in a bar with a cover band they pay over and over and over again for the right to make some hack writer s song their favourite song that s where the whole system has been seriously warped by the record companies and ad companies reframing it into your thinking that it is the elvis who makes the elvis it s not it s the people who make them the songs are already theirs gary lawrence murphy garym teledyn com teledynamics communications inc business advantage through community software URL computers are useless they can only give you answers pablo picasso 