Hopefully Shkreli nuts up, chances some more jail time, and releases his copy so these crypto freaks get some amount less than they would've had it not been free. I know the article says they're "in talks" with the artists but I don't believe for a second that the people who actually did the work will get what they deserve for having made it, or even close to what these vampires will get for shitting on the original point of the album.
> I don't believe for a second that the people who actually did the work will get what they deserve for having made it
The people who actually made it chose to sell exclusive rights to one person instead of releasing it like a normal album. They've got no room to complain.
They didn't choose to sell exclusive rights to one person, they wanted the sale of the album to roughly follow the old patronage model of funding. The idea was that their patron would give them money upfront for the artistic output and then exhibit it to flex their wealth and good taste. They specifically didn't want the buyer to buy it and then sell it themselves with the artist getting a pittance relative to the overall proceeds, which is why the purchase agreement had an 88 year non-commerical-exploitation clause. Shkreli largely keeping the album to himself probably isn't what they had in mind, but what the current owners are doing is without a doubt pissing on the original terms of sale and the reasoning behind them. They have all the room in the world to complain, but they're probably not going to win any legal argument against crypto shysters with huge amounts of money, so they might as well get what they can out of it.
Not every desire can be encoded into a legal and transactional text.
Laurence Lessig, Creative Commons founder in Code 2.0 (1999) identifies four elements that regulate behavior online: Laws, norms, markets, and technology
- *Code/architecture* – the physical or technical constraints on activities (e.g. locks on doors or firewalls on the Internet)
- *Market* – economic forces
- *Law* – explicit mandates that can be enforced by the government
- *Norms* – social conventions that one often feels compelled to follow
So even if you sell something, you can still complain about it. Unless of course they explicitly signed a “I won’t complain about this” clause.
I think the reason the commenter was pointing out that Wu won’t be getting paid is that the average person might not know that. And the people making money not the situation aren’t exactly incentivized to raise awareness.
Part of the wild history is that following Shkreli's conviction for securities fraud the album was seized and the DOJ had it for 3 years until they auctioned it for $4M (2x Shkreli paid at the original auction).
