Copyright and Compensation

Greg Costikyan (apparently a game designer, writer, and consultant, among other things) has a very nice discussion on his blog about ”Recasting the Debate on IP”.  Probably my favorite line is right at the end:

The whole “antipiracy” thing is not ultimately about preserving the rights of artists. It’s about preserving the value of intermediaries who have already fucked over the artist. And from a purely ethical perspective, I don’t see why the intermediaries have a leg to stand on.

Basically, it talks about how the entire file-sharing/piracy thing right now is going way overboard and that the music labels are just scared and trying to protect their crappy business model.  I really have to agree with Greg about the legit online music download sites: a buck a song?  As The Register said in an article I read earlier:

Why a song costs just as much when delivered via the Internet sans packaging instead of by a complex global shipping system is a question that needs answering.

When you get down to it, I guess that’s probably why I haven’t bothered to try out iTunes (or any other service) yet.  It just doesn’t seem like much of a deal to me…

(As a total aside here: why is it “recompense” and “compensation” instead of “recompensation” or “compense”?  I must assume the two are related, at least, and it seems odd that the different forms of the word are spelled so differently...)

Posted Monday October 20, 2003 in Around the Internet by Chris Curtis

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Comments

Is this the same Greg Costikyan that designed the original Star Wars Roleplaying Game for West End Games back in 1987? Very interesting.

By Khairul "Khairul Hisham" Hisham on October 21, 2003 at 07:54am link

Oooh… interesting!  It appears that you are indeed correct.  Not only was he in on SWRPG, but he also worked on Paranoia.

By Chris Curtis on October 21, 2003 at 09:02am link

Nice catch, Hish!

By Derek Jones on October 21, 2003 at 09:07am link

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