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Given that the article is about how everyone on the Internet expects everything to be free, I’ve changed the image, after realising you probably have similar issues as a pro photographer as what I have.

Please let me know if this is ok.

Thanks, Ryan

Well it’s your photo and I would happily take it down if you wanted me to.

Getty Images’ restrictions on the photo are as follows:

“Contact your local office for all commercial or promotional uses.”

As this blog is neither commercial or promotional it’s my understanding that the image can be used if the source of the image is referenced, which it is. Enlighten me if this is not so?

The ‘un-christian’ statement is interesting. Is it really an un-christian thing to do, or do you just have issues with Christians? 😉

This is part of my point about Yorke’s quote. Without EMI, Radiohead’s old music label, Radiohead would not be in the position it is now. Radiohead can sell their music on the Internet through a ‘pay-what-you-want’ model because they are so popular already. But they have a LOT to thank EMI for, for getting them so popular.

So it’s easy for Yorke to say that we don’t need these corporate companies, but that’s because he isn’t an up and coming artist. For the rest of us, we need huge budget for marketing to compete. That’s the bottom line. And corporates have the budget.

Besides, Radiohead even use corporates and music labels for distribution purposes.

I think to ask what the businessman owes everyone else is the same as asking why the businessman should pay anyone for their services / work anyway. Does he owe anyone for their work done for him? Why? The answer is more or less the same as to why a corporate should have more than profit in mind. It’s grand goal should be to improve the life of all not just its shareholders. It has a moral obligation here.

Besides, we are talking corporates here, a conglomerate of sorts of businessmen. We’re not looking at the businessman as an individual.

I come from first-hand experience where a corporate pulled off a number of jookies to ensure that profits for the shareholders continued to rise while employees (stakeholders, surely) suffered. Some of these were to deliberately downplay ‘official’ positions so that employees were graded lower and therefore were paid lower. ACTUAL responsibilities didn’t match to the responsibilities on paper. It has been done many times.

Having had contacts in the higher eschelons of the business, I knew for a fact that the shareholders’ pockets were getting fatter while the employees were constantly told sad stories about how low profits were, why increases couldn’t happen, and lay-offs would be common. In other words, rather than taking the knock along with everyone else, the shareholders insisted on seeing profit increase even if that meant the stakeholders (employees) should take a knock in salary or a knock in their own time with no overtime paid.

That’s not a sustainable mindset at all.

Now it would be unfair to translate my experience to ALL corporates, but the fact of the matter is that the prevailing undercurrent always feels as if profit is the grandest of all goals even at the expense of other values. Even at the expense of sustainability.

For instance, the very values of the business I worked for, in all of its official paperwork, PR etc., included that the company would look to improve the life of its employees and for South Africans. Not only did it fail at doing this, it didn’t even try. Why did they feel a responsibility to put those kinds of values into their business plan when in fact they didn’t care about that? To save face, surely, but why would they feel they need to save face?

I even asked a high positioned guy in the business to tell me the core five values of the business, and he couldn’t tell me. Yet he was part of the initial sessions when they put those values onto paper. To me, that says a lot about worldview.

Al you are fierce. In future I’ll try make sure you don’t get the sword, haha.
Fear Not Ryan, where you add value, it will always be trade-able, you can’t keep a good horse down.

Skype launched with the slogan: The whole world will talk for free.
Linux Ubuntu posted me free a free CD with there OS.No catches
Nokia cellphones now come with “free” music.

Popular opinion counts, that’s mostly why Playstation owns the lions-share of the market and I think it was the “Dreamcatcher” that never got going even with a better spec product. WRT. Predicting the fall of Music Label corporates, I think popular opinion will decide. If they add value they will still continue maybe just reinvented and if they don’t add value they will fall.

Profit, There’s nothing wrong with it, but the “Love of Profit” is mischief.
The Capitalistic Construct is all I know and so I work with it, I am committed to reading “The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx” when time is my friend.

Blessings
MH

Interesting stance, the problem with it is that without “The Corporation” we would have not read your opinion, you would not have even have read the Thom Yorke quote, and Tom York would not even be a public figure.

I don’t think that The Corporation is an angelic institution, it has all kinds of evils, but it also does a not of really nice and helpful things as by products of it’s single goal, profit.
I think that one of the travesties of Capitalism is that in a capitalistic society individuals have no value unassociated with their assets. That is just plain wrong… But I have to say that in a capitalistic society the individual has a lot more value than in any other form of government practiced today!

So you say: “There’s nothing wrong with profit but it cannot be the only goal a business sets itself”
I ask why not? What does the businessman owe everyone else?
I have some answers, but I’m keen on the discussion. :^)