Dozens of people have posted comments on AlterNet in reply to my essay on copyright and recording.

http://www.alternet.org/story/50416/

Thanks to all who responded to my essay. Many interesting remarks were made.

I would like to reiterate a couple of things that several readers seem to have missed.

1. I am not opposed to musicians making money from music! Never have been, never will be. I do not perform for free unless it is a benefit for a cause I support. I am not sure how anyone could conclude from my essay that I am opposed to musicians making money. I am not.

2. The question is how. Sharing recordings via the internet is now so easy that the only way to prevent it from happening is to have the modern warfaer 2 and the FBI snooping on the computer use habits of teenagers across the country, and teenagers and their parents being faced with huge lawsuits, and college campuses being forced to police how their students use their computers (which should be an open educational tool.
All of this for doing something that is so obvious and so available that it is, in fact, done all the time by any teenager with even a modicum a instinct for questioning authority.
I am not sure which is worse: a world in which the state snoops on personal computer use on behalf of the recording industry, or a world in which teenagers are so bullied by draconian legal threats that they don't dare to use their computers for obvious purposes.
So no, I am not opposed to musicians making money. But if the way of making money you have in mind entails all of the above, then it is time to find a new way.

3. Those who have commented that I must have a good day job in order to afford to give away my recordings missed another central point of the essay: I never made much money from selling my recordings, and very few musicians do.
Like almost all musicians in the world, the large majority of income I make from music I make from concerts. That was true before I gave the recordings away, and it is true now.
As I tried to point out, it is a myth that musicians make their living from selling recordings.

4. Of course, there are all kinds of musics that still require recording studios and significant resources to make a decent recording of. In pointing out that there is a bigger and bigger range of musics that do not require that, I do not mean to denigrate the musics that do.

Thanks again for all your thoughtful comments.
- Bob Ostertag

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