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Been musing more on ownership of art products (
& 
etc). I think owning and sharing art is a big part of enjoying it. Artists and art-merchants should EMBRACE that, stop fighting us and help come up with a good way for us to pay them fairly. Handwoven, artisanal THREAD0/8: https://twitter.com/kmei_/status/1343507660868644864
1/8 Art is what makes life worth living. More people having access to more of it is a measure of human progress. Sharing art is one of life’s great pleasures. But there's a struggle between art makers/vendors and art consumers to control the means of reproduction and distribution
2/8 Take music. First there were cassette tapes (there may have been something before tapes, but I wasn’t paying attention at that point). If you had a dual tape deck and some Sellotape, you could copy tapes and give them to your friends. Winner.
3/8 Then the music industry put a stop to this by inventing CDs. Not only could you NOT copy them, you could only listen to them if you held your Discman perfectly still and parallel to the ground, and if you touched them, they stopped working. Rubbish.
4/8 Then there were MP3s. You could download them from Napster (such nostalgia!). You could put them on hard drives and hand them to your friends, you could burn them onto CDs (I take it all back!). Hooray! This total content bonanza was pretty short-lived (kind of fair enough).
5/8 [There may have been something in between CDs and MP3s called “minidiscs”. However I don’t know anything about those as I was poor and a late adopter, and by the time I had saved up for one, they were already obsolete.]
6/8 Then there were streaming services. I can access more music than I can even conceive of through Spotify, and I can share it with you, although you might have to listen to the odd advert if you don’t have a subscription. Not bad.
7/8 But we don’t own it ( https://alexdanco.com/2019/10/26/everything-is-amazing-but-nothing-is-ours/). If Spotify goes bust or I decide I don’t like their ethics and don’t want to do business with them any more, I have nothing to show for all my £14.99s. Feels unsatisfactory.
8/8 For some bits of content, I would like to own it (i.e., I want to be able to enjoy it independent of the entity I bought it from). I would like it to be able to take some physical form. And I would like some limited rights of reproduction. Thanks art capitalists.
