WILT Who makes a living when everything is free?

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Quattroline

This weblog—that would be me—has received some free advice. Firstly, I should explain that the person offering the free advice is presumably unaware that the weblog settings, chosen when I started, specifically request the service provider NOT to advertise my presence and to prevent search engines from indexing my content. That's not paranoia or seige mentatlity: it's just that even after half a century of putting myself out there, I'm still not ready for overnight fame and acclaim. As mentioned previously, I am prepared to take a chance on what instant riches might do to my composure.

So, I give my free-advice correspondent full marks just for finding me. The subtle message of the privacy settings may have eluded him even if he had known, so I am prepared to make allowances. The free advice is that I offer my visitors free music. The way I do this is to become a downstream provider on the service my correspondent offers for free. So much free is making my head reel. The key to the whole scheme is to tell people 'What I'm Listening To', although it's hard to see how an idea with such a bathos-laden acronym could hope to succeed.

How is all this possible? I have no idea, but there has to be a catch, right? If everything is available for free, why does the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) drag unemployed single mothers through the court system—according to an EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) report—to win damages that presumably they will never be able to collect? This must be a definition of free that has not been within my purview here before unto, m'lud.

The EFF proposes an alternative:

"…the music industry forms one or more collecting societies, which then offers file sharing music fans the opportunity to "get legit" in exchange for a reasonable regular payment, say $5 per month. So long as they pay, the fans are free to keep doing what they are going to do anyway—share the music they love using whatever software they like on whatever computer platform they prefer—without fear of lawsuits. The money collected gets divided among rightsholders based on the popularity of their music."

That gets the rights violators off the hook, rewards the artists in relation to their popularity—aka 'Nothing Succeeds Like Success'—but doesn't keep the lawyers in lucrative employement. At the moment, it seems that the lawyers are the only ones making anything out of free, so their own lobbyists are hardly going to let that particular suggestion spread its wings and fly.

I have my own suggestion: I tell you what I am listening to [1] [2] [3] [4] as originally suggested by my wannabe upstream service provider, but you decide how you will proceed from there. Perhaps you may just decide to pull something from your existing music collection and enjoy that once more. No wonder they used to say that recording was killing music: when did you last hear anyone say that? Certainly you never heard it from the RIAA.

I assert that the album covers in the headline image are legally used under the 'Fair Use' provisions of all applicable copyright legislation. The 'Mimi & Euncie' strip below was offered by its creator, Nina Paley, under a free license because, she says, [♥ Copying is an act of love. Please copy & share.] My legal advisors told me to write the foregoing opening sentences of this paragraph to cover my ass, as we say in the lawyering business. Go on, click the heart; you know you want to: it is free, after all—I said that, without prompting from anyone.

MimiAndEunice KillingMusic

 

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The blog author almost never checks emails or comments.

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