Free Music License?

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hi Simo,

On Thu, Aug 18, 2005 at 11:16:51AM +0200, Simo Sorce wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-08-17 at 13:03 +0200, Bernhard Reiter wrote:

> > I agree, but there are limit where the compromise in the other
> > direction actually helps the freedom in the society.
> 
> The perfect compromise would be to say: "As long as you preserve the
> meaning you can modify the work to fit technical needs".

I expect a different compromise for each category of works
to be a good solution. 
For software, the four freedoms seem to be a good compromise to me,
for literature, music, law texts or instruction books I am missing this.
There are examples where meaning and technical needs are intervoven
and there are examples where I believe that the right to change the
meaning of the author is a good thing.

> Except that we have a problem in defining both "meaning" and
> "technical", so to ease things we should try to simplify b categorizing
> things and proposing license for each category.

I agree.

> > You to throw the motivations of the authors into the ring.
      have
> > Each bit of information needs to be written or assembled which is effrot.
> > If we want quality works we need to compensate for this effort.
> 
> Are you sure? It's true that compensation give someone a chance to
> dedicate more time to a matter, but are you sure there's a direct link
> between compensation and quality?

I am sure there is a connection, though it is not a simple relation.
Note that I have deliberately not wrote "paied" or "money"
as I wanted a more neutral tone.

> I'd say no, the link is between motivation and skills, and quality.
> Now granted you have the right skills, in some cases compensation can be
> the right motivator. But compensation is not enough in most of the
> cases, and does not matte at all in many cases. 

Your "motivation" seems to be similiar to what I called "compensation".
In admitting that money can be the right motivatior in a fraction of cases, 
you admitted a connection.
Also I am not ready to completely throw away the benefits of
competition and a market. It has its limits, but also its advantages.

A lot of the high quality "content" that I make use of is done by
professionals which are in a competitive market. 
An example are the newspaper I read.
Of course there is also other high quality "contents".

> > I remember an article that claimed that around in the French revolution,
> > copyright was completely abandoned and the quality of publications went down
> > significantly. Unfortunately I do not have the reference on this one.
> > It was a few years ago.
> 
> Even if such data exist I would like to see how they have been put in
> relation to each other. What kind of measure for quality have been
> adopted, how the general economical and political status have been
> weighted and so on, it is to take to set of data and link them together
> through a time relation (they happened at the same time so they are
> linked), but timing is not enough to explain most facts.

Probably this is a broad subject
and I would love to find that article again.

> > To make realistic suggestions for the politicians,
> > we need to accept that many people accept the idea of economic reward.
> 
> I do not see the link, under this line of reasoning you just advocate
> the status quo as that is accepted by most people ...

No, I recommend that our recipe should include an answer for those people
that have accepted the idea of the economic stimulation.
Anything we propose will not be heard until we have a good answer to them.

	Bernhard
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