[Air-L] Digital Music Economics, expanded

[Robert Withers]

Thanks to Hugh Brown for an impassioned and elaborate discussion of free distribution
of music on internet. The argument was economically rather than ethically based.

I'm interested in a related subject that I can find little discussion of through internet
searches. This is the free sharing of copyrighted software by computer-sophisticated 
individuals. Everything from MS Office to Adobe Creative Suite to Final Cut Pro 
seems to be passed along from user to user, often loaded on used machines that are
sold to other users. The documentation and keys aren't sold, but these programs
that retail for thousands of dollars are passed along as a matter of course. 

The typical explanations:
No one can afford these programs.
The corporations are greedy.
The corporations actually want their stuff bootlegged so the hackers who work in
the other corporations will get their corporations to buy it.

Does anyone know of any discussion or writing anywhere on this topic? There is endless discussion on music sharing but little on software sharing. All I can find are corporate statements on bootlegging. Yet the practice seems extremely common, at least among my peers. 

On another related subject, I found a pdf of a photocopy of a UK library edition of On Grammatology at some random site available for free download while Columbia U Press is selling a copyrighted version on Amazon. Does anyone know who are Derrida's heirs and whether they care if they're getting royalties or not. Or whether he would have cared?

Cheers,
Robert Withers
Independent Media Artist
New York City

I don't yet know how to manage the bit limit on these posts so only the head of Hugh Brown's message is quoted below. 




>------------------------------
>
>Message: 14
>Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2007 11:38:54 +1000
>From: "Hugemusic" <hmusic at ozemail.com.au>
>Subject: [Air-L] Digital music economics
>To: <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
>Message-ID: <005601c81770$f9247070$0901010a at Office2>
>Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="us-ascii"
>
> 
>Hi all.
>
>I've been writing the theory compnent of my thesis, so I've been out
of the
>loop for a while, but I got irritated by a series of blog posts in various
>places, the last one of which triggered the following.  I'm interested in
>what other peple think.  It will appear on my blog shortly:
>
>
>Music files may be abundant, but listener value and attention are still
>scarce. 
>
>By Hugh Brown
>
>For some time, the independent music industry has been crowded with people
>discussing the benefits of giving music recordings away and the consensus,
>much to my disgust, seems to be that it's a great idea - nay, a necessity