Artists, more than ever, are doing just fine on their own. Self-funding, kick-starting, self-publishing etc. If anything they need these money hungry middlemen even less, not more.

You seem convinced that piracy means the artist loses income – and it’s nowhere near that black and white.

I’m not sure that’s the same though…

They make money from selling the original and from exhibits – pretty much the same as recording artists (bar the original work of course).

CD’s are just promo material you pay for.

If the people that spend money on music are the one’s pirating, then the only way that an artist is ‘losing money’ is via that purchaser not having more wealth to spend on media.

A budget is a budget, if I download $10m worth of Disney movies it doesn’t mean that Disney has lost $10m – because I don’t have $10m to spend on Disney movies. But that’d show up as a loss in an RIAA document regardless.

If pirating suddenly became physically impossible, I’d be willing to bet the profits of the record industry wouldn’t budge an inch.

Artists that actually speak about copyright tend to see the benefits of having people hear their music and become fans. And do I have to go through the tired history of Tape, Radio, Minidisk etc. to highlight how this is nothing new anyway?

Puppets picked out of the crowd to autotune their way through the latest song Prince has written? Yea they’re probably not big fans of it, but seriously, who gives a fuck about them? They’re probably already making twice as much as the first group anyway.

But that sword cuts both ways.  The RIAA chooses their numbers selectively, just like TorrentFreak does.  The truth is we don’t have much good data about musicians on either side.  So, I ask you to provide any evidence whatsoever that torrents do not rob artists of money.  

I looked around for a specific page, but I couldn’t find the one I was looking for.
This one is pretty good, it provides a lot of data, some good, a lot bad for your argument. 
http://money.futureofmusic.org/mythbusting/4/

And to your quote that you mentioned in another comment, that file sharers spend more money on music than non-file sharers, I say, “OF COURSE”.  They’re music fans.

My grandmother is not buying music and she is not pirating music, because she doesn’t care about music. 

That quote has nothing to do with how much money they might spend if they had to buy music.  It only proves that music fans pirate music, something everyone knows.

This is exactly the point.  Villainizing the RIAA and Sony and Universal (who are villains at times) actually opens the door for much larger villains to profit off of hard working people’s content.  

Shouldn’t they be trying to create better content?  

Wouldn’t content be better, if content creators didn’t spend most of their time trying to game the system?

What I object to are the arguments that piracy and the easy distribution of non-commodity goods are better for artists.  

That is one of Cory’s primary points, and he’s been hammering that nail for years now.  

The problem is, there is no clear way to move forward except for bringing more corporations and big donors on board to co-opt the art that is being produced.

If average people aren’t going to pay for art, then someone has to, and it probably will not be the entity that average people want paying for art. 

I mean, this could be taken as an argument that Instagram should be able to take your photos and sell them for use in advertising. After all, you were going to take that photo anyway, and you weren’t expecting to get paid for it anyway. Why shouldn’t Instagram be able to make use of it? (I’m not trying to be Internet-Debate Clever Dick — “haha! your argument is invalid!” I’m genuinely trying to explore the ethical principles at work here.)

The brief discussion of Facebook in the article makes it sound like the difference is that companies like Facebook and Instagram (yes, I know Facebook owns Instagram now) are essentially farming their users for content they wouldn’t have otherwise produced. But I’m not completely sure about that understanding.

Thoughts?

How about Google’s massive attempt to infringe the copyrights of any author not backed by a major publisher with Google book search?

Have you ever done a google book search?  Books returned by the search that aren’t in the public domain don’t give the user the full text, but the search does provide shopping results so that you can legally purchase the full text.  Can you explain how advertising a written work for free constitutes an infringement of copyright?

Bear in mind that I can get the full text for free from a public lending library in almost every case that google doesn’t provide the full text. But google’s infringing on copyright and libraries are hunky dory?

My argument, which maybe you don’t care about because your primary interest is getting free stuff, is that the while the old media empires
paid creators poorly, at least they were constrained by the moral principle that creators needed to be aid.

You’re making unwarranted assumptions:
1. I DO care about your argument.  That’s why I asked.
2. I don’t torrent.  I pay for any media I consume that’s not in the public domain, presumably the same as you do.
I won’t call you out on getting unnecessarily nasty since my initial response to your comment (since modded) was also nasty.  Can we drop the histrionic ad hom attacks on both sides?

The tech industry, however, is backed up by vague hand-waving arguments like yours about “changes in the economy” somehow making it okay not to pay people at all.

You’re giving “old media empires” a lot of credit for paying their quite small stable of artists while ignoring the fact that they completely destroyed an entire industry of live music and destroyed thousands of jobs in the process.  Recording technology changed the economics of music, destroying the livelihoods of many and creating new ways to make livelihoods for a relative few.  How is the current situation in the music industry any different?

Somehow finding a way to profit off of other people’s work without compensating them is supposed to be a “positive externality.”

That’s pretty much the definition.  Road construction companies don’t get paid by the snow plow companies that profit from keeping the roads clear.  Google takes money for helping people find content.  It’s on the content creators to figure out how to make money from the attention that google gets for them — just as road construction companies need to make a profit from building the road and not count on those sweet snow plowing royalties that are bound to come rolling in any day now.

I can’t help but notice google hasn’t been doing the “don’t be evil” thing.  Pretty much the only ones using the phrase are google detractors.  Seems a little disingenuous.

My argument, which maybe you don’t care about because your primary interest is getting free stuff, is that the while the old media empires paid creators poorly, at least they were constrained by the moral principle that creators needed to be paid. The tech industry, however, is backed up by vague hand-waving arguments like yours about “changes in the economy” somehow making it okay not to pay people at all.

Somehow finding a way to profit off of other people’s work without compensating them is supposed to be a “positive externality.”

It’s the kind of utopian language that Cory Doctorow likes to throw around that a grasping and rapacious tech industry uses to justify being even more abusive and exploitative than the old media empires.

Can you back up this assertion?  How do we quantify the rapaciousness of various industries?

I just don’t understand this presumption that we have to forbid certain kinds of technology for the sake of preserving the lifeways of particular artists. Changes in technology lead to changes in the economy lead to changes in how people make their living. I’m REALLY trying to understand what your argument is but I just don’t get it.

Let’s bear in mind there were musicians before there was recording.  In fact, there were a lot more of them and a lot of them were making decent livings.  People are quick to jump on how pirates destroy people’s livelihoods while ignoring the fact that this is exactly what recording technology did in the first place — destroyed the livelihoods of thousands of musicians.

The weird part is, the evidence seems to say that pirates legally buy more music than non-pirates.  I don’t understand how everyone ignores the fact that the introduction of recorded music demonstrably destroyed livelihoods and that’s perfectly fine but piracy just sort of seems like it should destroy livelihoods (despite evidence to the contrary) and is therefore this really terrible thing that must be stopped at all costs.

And those do get annoying, even to people happy to give everything away. Cory writes sensibly about the pernicious effects of this, but he’s not being especially charitable in describing why it happens.

I hope that you’re not an author, because if you are I have some bad news for you…