But who says innovation is dead? Here comes news of a daring new way to monetize live music: sue the people who will record it, before they do, before they can, because the festival hasn't happened yet!
A lot of effort has been put into developing a series of more and more sophisticated legal instruments for siphoning and restricting the flow of money from the designs of things which can be sold (a song can't be sold, but it's most of the design of a CD which can be), at the cost of neglecting the implementations of those designs.
But the implementations are the things with root value, and their sale is the source of the money being contested. If we were to draw music as a food web (and let's do), the things that people buy would be the autotrophs, the foundational organisms that don't need anything but the sun (or the human creative impulse) to grow. Artists graze on these. Publishers graze on them. And then comes the final level, those hoping to be predators or parasites (functionally identical) on top of this edifice, scrambling as high up the trophic ladder as they can.
Maybe they think they make it them strong or beautiful? Large predators are often photogenic, and culturally identified with celebrated qualities. They embody a cruel strength, that takes and does not see fit to give. Like parasites, but with better presence.
The flourishing of corporations built on equally mad pyramid schemes - from the ones that send letters demanding out-of-court file sharing settlements to people concerning whom they had collected no evidence of file sharing, to the ones that collect patents so vaguely worded they might describe the powers of golden age super-heroes so that they can sue every market leader and their uncle on a regular basis - brings out the curmudgeon in me. They can't last: there's too many links in the chain between them and the actual value. Only one thing needs to change to invalidate their model, and they're all going to change. They call it the trophic ladder because the higher you climb, the less stable it gets.
Maybe it's time to found a vegetarianism when it comes to creative work, to avoid giving money to the highly complex publisher-organisms purely on principle, out of concerns for cruelty or sustainability, or even for reasons of mental health, if books on the NYT best-sellers list are found to be less nutritive than those we buy direct from the source.
But the implementations are the things with root value, and their sale is the source of the money being contested. If we were to draw music as a food web (and let's do), the things that people buy would be the autotrophs, the foundational organisms that don't need anything but the sun (or the human creative impulse) to grow. Artists graze on these. Publishers graze on them. And then comes the final level, those hoping to be predators or parasites (functionally identical) on top of this edifice, scrambling as high up the trophic ladder as they can.
Maybe they think they make it them strong or beautiful? Large predators are often photogenic, and culturally identified with celebrated qualities. They embody a cruel strength, that takes and does not see fit to give. Like parasites, but with better presence.
The flourishing of corporations built on equally mad pyramid schemes - from the ones that send letters demanding out-of-court file sharing settlements to people concerning whom they had collected no evidence of file sharing, to the ones that collect patents so vaguely worded they might describe the powers of golden age super-heroes so that they can sue every market leader and their uncle on a regular basis - brings out the curmudgeon in me. They can't last: there's too many links in the chain between them and the actual value. Only one thing needs to change to invalidate their model, and they're all going to change. They call it the trophic ladder because the higher you climb, the less stable it gets.
Maybe it's time to found a vegetarianism when it comes to creative work, to avoid giving money to the highly complex publisher-organisms purely on principle, out of concerns for cruelty or sustainability, or even for reasons of mental health, if books on the NYT best-sellers list are found to be less nutritive than those we buy direct from the source.
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