I agree with Gabe Newell's stance on piracy.<p>"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."<p><a href="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Piracy-Is-a-Service-Problem" rel="nofollow">http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe...</a>
I wonder what has changed his mind since he was a member of Oink, a UK torrent site aimed at music. The (very brief) article mentions it. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace#Notable_users" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oink%27s_Pink_Palace#Notable_u...</a>
Is it, though? In my experience YouTube (or is it the copyright owners?) are quite aggressive about scanning for unauthorised music and removing it - to the point where you actually have to be careful about things like having the radio on in the background during a video.<p>In fact, they even provide tools to help you fix videos that have audio copyright claims against them...<p><a href="https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2902117?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2902117?hl=en</a>
> It’s a markedly different opinion from when a 2007 pre-Apple Reznor said the iTunes store made him feel “uncool” (“[it] feels like Sam Goody to me”) and admitted he was a frequent user of the file sharing website OiNK.<p>Whatever your views on his statements are, this comparison is fallacious. He's called YouTube disingenuous for building a business on the back of stolen content. OiNK can neither be accused of disingenuity, nor of building a business.
Laws that try to stop people from getting what they want in what they perceive as victimless are doomed to fail, no matter how punitive the enforcement. Examples:<p>prostitution, gambling, drugs, books, music, video
I'm sure then that he paid for and licensed all his NBK samples, Star Wars samples, Prince samples, and Queen, and David Bowie, and Kiss, and and and.
As if he should criticize about being built from stolen content.
Watch "young gods envoye" from the 80's then watch Reznor's "broken", which was produced many years later... and I recommend using youtube to do it.
Much of the internet is built from free things. If we really want to talk about inequity of rewards for effort expended[1], I think content producers need to get in a long line...<p>[1] The difference, of course, is that many of the free resources were given away by license. However, at the end of the day, very little compensation has gone to many people who have built critical, foundational parts of the infrastructure that has fueled billions of dollars in revenue for companies world wide. On some level, hearing a musician who <i>has</i> been compensated, significantly, for their work complain about inequities kind of makes me laugh.
Personally, I find it not at all obvious that artists "deserve" to be paid for any use of their "intellectual property".<p>Hell, I don't even find the concept of physical property to be straightforward. Almost every single physical object we have in our lives today is built off the work and ideas of countless millions and billions of people before us. So the objects in our lives that we "own" and have "earned", in reality, were earned and produced by large swaths of humanity over thousands of years.<p>Now, how do we reconcile this with the fact that I'm still standing here, holding the object in my hand, and "no, I definitely would not like to give it to you, thank you very much". That seems incredibly tricky. And then of course there is the fact the concept of property ownership does incentive huge amounts of innovation and productivity. So we don't want to ruin that. I'll have to continue thinking about this another day...
How many record labels are making massive profit (via bogus DMCA/Content Aware disputes) off of the backs of YouTube creators? I've had multiple videos get their adsense dollars removed because there was 5 seconds of pop music emanating from a storefront I walked by in my video.<p>With views and adsense revenue being heavily front loaded against the upload time of the video I have no method of recovery of those lost dollars.