Too Much of a Good Thing
If this were a recess time baseball game, I would pick Barlow first, and not take Valenti if he were the last man standing. Steve Jobs could play, but he would have to play right field or left bench until he toughened up a bit.
Music is everywhere. People pay for music to add to their iPods, play on the radio (the stations do directly) and add into commercials to help build an atmosphere for the product or service they are selling. But when we can get it free (i.e. the radio, file-sharing programs) why do we pay for it? Personally, I pay just 10-15 cents for music from www.gomusic.ru which is basically the cheaper version of iTunes, but still works on my iPod. I didn't scour the web looking for alternatives to iTunes as Napster and related sharing programs were being shut down, but instead talked to a friend from Sweden who said he had used it ever since he wanted cheaper music. It was not a moral reason for me to not use file-sharing sites, but instead a "I don't want to pay thousands of dollars or get in trouble with the law" reason as I had read the news about the unlucky few who were taken to court by RIAA and lost. There was nothing moral to do with it because I feel I could listen to music on the radio anyway. Yes it is a different order, but music just isn't that valuable in my mind. I do not feel like artists are being at all underpaid when I can see them on MTV's Cribs even AFTER they complain about copyright laws.
The non-commercial use of music is exactly what we did when we would put in a tape and record straight from the radio. The pirate producing thousands of copies of ripped DVDs and CDs without paying a cent is not hurting from the current copyright laws, he can still profit and is a hard-to-catch criminal. The person who hurts is the average American with no intent to reuse the music other than for running or getting through the day by driving up costs to pay for music our already well financed entertainers and labels that is becoming more of a commodity.
One good example of why we shouldn't pay for music is baseball:
Radio and TV: free with commercials, the team makes money, the product reaches a large audience
In person: Even though there are 81 home games many teams are able to make money at each one. This is proof that although the "game" is repeated, the differences in a live performance are worth the money.
I like Barlow's talk of verbs and nouns and the role ethics play into this whole scheme. When you have something useful and give it to people, humans have a natural reciprocity to give back. I learned this in Psych 1001. Sure there are people who have other needs and decide not to, but look at Wikipedia's recent fund drive that raised about $12,000 per day. To me that sounds like quite a success, and it included both $1 donations as well much bigger amounts.
It sounded like Jobs was on the right track, but wasn't saying what he should say. Valenti sounded like he was getting paid a lot of money and trying to keep things how they were so he could keep getting paid a lot of money. I think the EMI-Apple deal will wind up lowering costs of all music as the other companies will have to follow EMI's lead as consumers shift to copyright-free music. I hope that all copyrights are eventually gone, except for the exact blatant copying of another work or product. Things get better faster when people are allowed to simply improve things that are already great.