> Let's say you argue that aggregated creators deserve a share of the > profits of an aggregator. That doesn't follow from economics. The > economic point of view is that investors in the aggregator, its > owners, are the ones who deserve a share of the profits, because they > also stood to lose money if it lost money.
What is the product being sold? That's the question. Of course there are 2 products being sold, and neither of them belong to the video aggregator. One is a profit stream and one is a cost. The profit stream is the advertising revenue based off of the number of eyes they can deliver. The cost is the content required to secure that advertising. There are production costs in the stuff that captures eyeballs. Entities profiting from the sale of advertising based on content have always, and should always pay for that content. They cannot steal it. They have no right to it free of charge. At least buy the CD, man! If you are going to sell it - to advertisers. If people want to give up their rights to their creative work as their intellectual property so an aggregator can profit, hey man, that's cool. Some of us are not willing to part with our rights to our work for profit from any business entity. Some of us are willing to give it to certain businsess entities. Some of us want to sell it to anyone; some of us to select businesses. Point is, that it's our work. If you are going to sell my work to your advertisers via the consumers eyes, you are going to pay me for it. You don't get product for nothing. Business' aren't going to share profit with us as a share of business profits. I don't want to gamble. They are going to share profit with us as a cost of doing business. If they want my work as a product to sell their advertisers, let them buy it like moral economics asks them to; we are not slaves, and we are not without rights. Supply and demand? Perhaps you think investors should be free from having to pay the costs of doing business and obeying the law, but I don't think most people believe that. And of course I'm not talking about google ads and such on personal and community websites and personal aggregators. But when we are talking about million dollar budgets and such, the scope is so entirely different. It's not you copying and sharing a CD for your friends; it's a factory in china ripping us off. Again; big difference. > When I buy a house for $X, I stand to lose $X and also stand to gain > whatever I can sell it for above $X. If the value of my house goes up > because my neighbor painted and fixed up their own place, my neighbor > has no claim to my profit. But if your neighbor builds you an addition that raises that selling price, you must pay him, right? You can't make him build your addition. You can, however, negotiate a price for the work. Does that mean he has a share in your profit of your home sale, or does it mean that you paid the cost to improve your home to him? Sharing profits is shorthand for getting paid if your work is for commercial use. You are really mixing up rhetoric with reality. > There are people who read my blog in Bloglines, for example, but I > make no claim to Bloglines' revenues. If Bloglines goes out of > business I lose nothing, so why should I stand to gain if it makes > money? Ditto videoblogs and video aggregrators. What if I go over to Bloglines and copy all of your work and release it in a magazine for my profit? How about if I took your 10 best pieces? Would you want to be compensated by me for the usage of your work? Is it wrong if you are willing to give it for free to the readers of bloglines, but not to me for my, or my shareholder's profit? You've entered into an agreement with bloglines. Do you have a username and password? What if I just started grabbing everyone's blog stuff and publishing magazines? Jeez that sounds like a great deal for the blogger! You get exactly what you want, more readers, right? > Ask yourself this: if MyHeavy goes out of business, what does it cost > you? And how do you know whether they are even making a profit right > now? (I doubt they are). The reality is that you don't know or care > whether they exist, much less whether they are profitable. The only > thing that matters to you is whether *you* are profitable. Again, I want no part of waiting for their profit to get paid for my work, and nobody here wants that either. If you are selling my stuff to your advertisers, you are going to pay me for it. So yea, I don't care whether they're profitable or not, but I don't really care a lot more about whether or not I am profitable. I will not be taken advantage of. Shame on you for making this a ploy for videoblogger selfishness. > People in the music business made the same bogus argument over and > over again in reaction to third parties who benefit from their work. > If somebody sings my song at a birthday party and everybody has fun > because of that, don't I deserve a few bucks? If my song accidentally > ends up in the background of a scene in a documentary, don't I get > paid? If an Elvis impersonator lands a good gig in Vegas, doesn't the > Presley estate get a cut? Again, there is a big difference from playing a ditty at a wedding and selling CDs by the truckload. They are not like at all. Of course they were wrong to argue that. I would say that you are being disingenuous to even make the comparison to this situation and a company that specifically sets out to deliver as many eyes to their advertisers as possible using other people's creative work copied in full. > What matters has nothing to do with the benefit of third parties. It > has to do with the health of the videoblogger. If you got what you > wanted out of your vlog, who cares whether other people benefitted > too? Did you have fun? Did you make friends? Did you make something > beautiful and worthwhile? If so, keep doing it. If not, quit. There > is no need for my neighbor to get a share of my profit if their > intention was to live in a better home. What if what I want out of my videoblog is to not be part of the status quo ad-wrapped media? What if what I want out of my video blog is to not play into consumerism at all? What if I want my work to be non-commercial? Shouldn't I be compensated for that infringement upon my rights as the creator of that content? Shouldn't I be consulted as to how I want to conduct the business of my video blog? What if what I want is to get paid? We're really good at what we do. I think I should be consulted and/or be paid for the commercial use of my work. You really show a great deal of contempt for the creators of content. On the side... Let's just talk about externalities (a part I did not copy & paste). While it is the corporate ethos to displace the external costs of their business onto the consumer and deliver it to their shareholders, they have no right to take my creative content and deliver it to the consumer. My work is not an externality. It is a straight up cost of doing business. Don't that call that capital investment? (totally not an econ guy... could be off on the lingo...big picture) . > Our work on CCMixter.org made it possible for remixers in the > community to do stuff they couldn't have done otherwise. Ok, they > lost the potential to earn money from people who sampled them, but > they wouldn't have created those samples if they weren't able to > sample others in the first place. Whatever they might have lost was > something they wouldn't have had in the first place. As Rox says, > "from way out there it all belongs to all of us. We are the > messengers." Thank you for helping people gain access to irrelevant pieces of media. Not allowing sampling and such is just asinine. You can take a tiny bit of my stuff. You can invert it, subtitle it in chinese, whatever. Just don't grab my whole piece of work and put your ads around it. Run it in the background? Sweet. I'll take it. Post it to your community site? Great I'll take the traffic. Steal it, repackage it and sell it as if you own it? Not cool. Sorry if I come off like a dick, but this email insulted me, Lucas. I took offense. I wonder if it did that to anyone else? Cheers, Ron On Jan 28, 2007, at 8:18 PM, Lucas Gonze wrote: > On 1/27/07, Steve Watkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Im not sure Id agree that a sense of victimization or righteous > anger > > are the primary driving forces behind such things, but they are > in the > > mix somewhere when it comes to reactions of music etc industry. > > When somebody makes the argument that the profit of a third party is > necessarily their loss, they are arguing from victimization. > > Let's say you argue that aggregated creators deserve a share of the > profits of an aggregator. That doesn't follow from economics. The > economic point of view is that investors in the aggregator, its > owners, are the ones who deserve a share of the profits, because they > also stood to lose money if it lost money. > > When I buy a house for $X, I stand to lose $X and also stand to gain > whatever I can sell it for above $X. If the value of my house goes up > because my neighbor painted and fixed up their own place, my neighbor > has no claim to my profit. > > There are people who read my blog in Bloglines, for example, but I > make no claim to Bloglines' revenues. If Bloglines goes out of > business I lose nothing, so why should I stand to gain if it makes > money? Ditto videoblogs and video aggregrators. > > Ask yourself this: if MyHeavy goes out of business, what does it cost > you? And how do you know whether they are even making a profit right > now? (I doubt they are). The reality is that you don't know or care > whether they exist, much less whether they are profitable. The only > thing that matters to you is whether *you* are profitable. > > People in the music business made the same bogus argument over and > over again in reaction to third parties who benefit from their work. > If somebody sings my song at a birthday party and everybody has fun > because of that, don't I deserve a few bucks? If my song accidentally > ends up in the background of a scene in a documentary, don't I get > paid? If an Elvis impersonator lands a good gig in Vegas, doesn't the > Presley estate get a cut? > > So that's my case that the sense of righteous anger is misplaced. Now > for the issue of victimization -- why do I say this anger flows from a > misplaced sense of victimization? > > The value of my house goes up because my neighbor painted and fixed up > their own place. Do they deserve a cut? Why shouldn't they get a > share, since it was their work? Their improvements weren't cheap > either! I mean, they slaved on their fixup every weekend, they put a > ton of money into the painters, they took a day off from work to get a > construction permit -- where do I get off making a fortune off them!? > > But hold on, there's another way of looking at it. My benefit is a > positive externality. Per Wikipedia at > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality, 'an externality is a cost or > benefit from an economic transaction that parties "external" to the > transaction receive.' Just so for remixers and aggregators and all > the other third parties, whether street people or rich corporations, > who benefit from the labor and investment of a videoblogger. > > What matters has nothing to do with the benefit of third parties. It > has to do with the health of the videoblogger. If you got what you > wanted out of your vlog, who cares whether other people benefitted > too? Did you have fun? Did you make friends? Did you make something > beautiful and worthwhile? If so, keep doing it. If not, quit. There > is no need for my neighbor to get a share of my profit if their > intention was to live in a better home. > > Our work on CCMixter.org made it possible for remixers in the > community to do stuff they couldn't have done otherwise. Ok, they > lost the potential to earn money from people who sampled them, but > they wouldn't have created those samples if they weren't able to > sample others in the first place. Whatever they might have lost was > something they wouldn't have had in the first place. As Rox says, > "from way out there it all belongs to all of us. We are the > messengers." > > So that's the arguing from victimization thing. It's an argument that > doesn't flow from economics, just from a sense of entitlement. > > > What a totally different attitude we might have to all forms of > > ownership, rights, control, freedom of all creative works, ideas, > and > > reuse, if we lived in some totally different world where > everybody did > > a practical job such as farming during the first part of the day, > and > > then returned home to converse, create, remix and redeploy, > entertain > > , amuse and educate fellow humans during the afternoon & evening. > > As a musician, I have no desire to do it for a living. I really do > prefer to do it on the side. It makes me happy to play in the morning > before I go to work, and that's all I need. > > -Lucas > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
