Feel like some bedtime reading tonight? What about over 600 submissions from individuals to the government’s piracy discussion whitepaper?
The submissions have all been posted online for you to download now thanks to Senator Scott Ludlam.
Senator Ludlam’s department has been looking to obtain copies of the documents for some time, and now all 630 of them are available online to read, rather than having all of them shipped out to you on dead trees in a document carton.
There are submission in there from ordinary concerned citizens, through to well known musicians and actors like Josh Pyke and John Jarratt.
Some are just a single paragraph in length, like this from self-titled “disgusted musician” who despairs to the submission process about having his song ripped onto YouTube without his permission:
I have spent a lot of time and money on my song to be mastered and distributed through CDBABY and iTunes. In the last 4 months since my song was released there has been over 30,000 hits on Utube [sic] where someone has uploaded it. To make matters worst [sic] there is only about $80 in the bank from the sales. Can someone tell me how to stop this.”
Another interesting observation comes from John Ferris. He’s the Head of Licensing and Sync at Ministry of Sound Australia:
If you look at Australian content only, music is now “freely” available on Spotify, Pandora, etc, through streaming services. For Australian artists, making music available this way has not stopped file sharing of songs — in fact it seems to have encouraged the belief that music should be free all the time. It continues to put downward pressure on content suppliers’ prices. You might say that this is the “modern” way, but how do you expect artists to get paid for their work, which is seemingly valued by those who want to listen to it.
These submissions, and hundreds more, are now available via a simple Dropbox download link.