I didn’t say that hits are dead. Anderson points that out in his book as well – there are still hits, but they don’t sell at the same volume as 10 years ago and there are fewer of them, purchasing has been distributed down the tail. So my premise here is that if the Long Tail is a lie – that all the content providers have been offered paradise when in fact the powers of distribution are just being re-aggregated under new banners, then the danger is that we forget to ask the question “but who gets paid” as all these one song sales line the pockets not of the content creators but the Web portals.

This leads to pressure to compete. This pressure to compete leads to a guild-hall mentality, one in which stuff is given away for free, in which content creators resort to the Creative Commons on the slim chance that it will somehow give them SOME small slice of the pie.

Sure, there’s no such thing as the monolithic corporation. There are content creators who want to be companies, companies who want to tap into the content creators as cheaply as they can, and copyright whose goal was to protect intellectual property for its value in commerce. Did I say that was wrong? I don’t remember saying it was wrong, I simply said that the response to this was a reaction by those with fewer levers to power. And my point is that this is a trade-off. While trying to protect their own rights to distribute their content and have a slice of the pie, and while hoping that maybe there’s a slice of that pie in being able to mash up other content, the creative commons was created.

But my very point is that this is a guild hall mentality. And my point about a guild hall mentality is that it’s medieval, not that it’s necessarily to be applauded or supported. What I fear is that the folks trumpeting creative commons don’t realize that they’re participating in a group compromise. Instead of asking what’s WRONG with the “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours” approach to IP, they’ve adopted the attitude that old industries are being upended, they want in, so they’re letting themselves be co-opted to a degree by the folks who are trying to be the NEW industry, and whose doors they may find have been shut on them once the whole mess is sorted out.

And finally, I MEANT M Linden, I didn’t mean Anshe Chung. Where you read land baron by my use of the term baron, I think I was fairly clearly that the person who decides that our IP rights aren’t worth enforcing isn’t Anshe, it’s the Lab.

So I’d like to understand where the cliched ideas and erroneous claims are.

1. It is a “hit” society it’s just that WHAT is a hit has partly shifted.

2. I’m not celebrating the guild hall. It’s a medieval notion which has resurfaced in a misguided attempt to come to an accommodation with power rather than simply asking what’s wrong with power in the first place.

3. Our issue is with the Lab, not with copybots.

I see us, perhaps, as aggressively agreeing unless I’m missing something here. And I can’t believe I just said that, being the Canadian thumb-sucking liberal that I am.

First, the idea that the “hit machine” is being replaced. I guess that’s why…every news outlet faithfully covers “American Idol” on TV every morning and everybody watches “American Idol” every night, to its advertisers’ glee. YOU may not watch it; I may not watch it, but so many people do, that your notion of the death of the hit machine is completely skewed. Top 40 radio; top selling CDs; top-draw live cts — these concepts all completely pertain, and completely reward the stars they make even if there are now garage bands that also have a chance to make a little bit more on MySpace than they would on their home town club circuit.

The dirty little secret of the long tail is that it is…long. Mining it is time-consuming and hard work. And in fact the very people who celebrate it don’t live by its rules. Arrington tries to get first interviewed by mainstream media then gets himself a column on the Washington Post. People’s blogs and social media sites are constantly bought out by bigger media entities. The large concentrated media corporations own a lot of the blog and social sites anyway.

Creative Commons is socialist or communistic — when it isn’t being corporativist and medieval — and in fact the two ideologies have many basic similarities.

Groupism is fanned by those making a dime off the conference circuit with the new cyber communism, but in fact, real people in the real world keep defeating them and not marching in the rows they wish. The long tail is long — except when it isn’t, and is playing WoW.

Like Lessig, as I explain on my blog comments, you portray “monolithic corporations” as a caricature. At what point does a record company that helps a band get seen and sold become “monolithic”? There is such a range of these companies, and their operations have changed so in recent years that your notions are as outdated as your cliche about them
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/07/dear-lindens-no.html#comment-121245216

I’m glad you’ve conceded that this shill of “self-empowerment” and “self-actualized man” a la Marx are terribly deceptive. In fact, if Marx was REALLY about “self-actualized man” you wouldn’t have seen the destruction of the individual and his rights under communism that you in fact did see. The path to restoring that self-actualization does not lie in communes and guilds but in the struggle for individual civil rights and respect of property rights, just as it does in real life.

re: “we find ourselves at the whim of the local baron who decided that our IP rights aren’t worth enforcing, or who tries to cajole or co-opt our willingness to do stuff for free.”

But that’s Linden Lab. That’s Lessig. Lessig cajoles and co-opts willingness to do for free for the massive fraud that is Creative Commons. LL also pushed the freetard spirit as a way to get free labour for itself as a start-up and later as a business making a profit on fairly risky and thin margins.

The local baron isn’t Anshe Chung; it’s M Linden.