The libraries pay "royalties" (not sure if the terminology is right) for everything they make available for the public; music, books etc.


DigitalDictator wrote:



It is irrelevant how much data is discarded. The law protects the music itself, which is (roughly) the same regardless of what medium you're using. If you distribute compact cassettes recorded on a Philips portable tape recorder from 1969 you're still making illegal copies, as much as you do if you're making MP3s available to anyone. A "copy" within the immaterial laws does not need to be bit-identical (there could be a copy of for example the Mona Lisa painting which is not identical, but still a "copy").

The upcoming implementation of the EEC copyright directive 2001/29/EG will most likely limit the possibilities of legal copying, possibly whithin the four walls of your own home.

Libraries have special provisions in copyright law. I'm not sure what the details are, though.

The "I wasn't gonna buy it anyway, so downloading it doesn't represent a lost sale" argument is weak. If you weren't interested in buying it, why did you download it in the first place? (edit) okay, mmortal3 just said this, and he was more convincing.

http://www.bmi.com/songwriter/resources/pu...oyaltyradio.asp

"Payment is made for a local commercial radio performance based upon the extent of the license fee paid to BMI by the station broadcasting the performance."

To see if it was good. That's how I found the magic that is thrice B)

I downloaded Adobe Photoshop a couple of years ago. I would NEVER, in a MILLION YEARS, have paid the retail price for it. As it turned out, after I messed around with it for a few days it was such a pain in the ass that I didn't even use it FOR FREE.

Maybe piracy is unethical. But disguising HORSE SHIT and selling it for the price of GOLD isn't? I think it's SERIOUSLY wrong to discount the "test drive" argument. I know that I have bought SEVERAL CDs that I WOULDN'T have purchased if I had had a good chance to listen to them first...

Law isn't the issue, morality is, ethics is. WHY is it morally and ethically acceptable for a library to share copyrighted books and even provide copy machines? The EXACT SAME bogus arguments being used here against P2P users can be used against library users.

While it is obvious that piracy is a trandition of theft, piracy is piracy. The question is if piracy is theft or not. Well I tend to agree if a law falls out of the scope of what society wants, then that law seems to fall in a non valid area. The simple fact that the music companies had their chance to change their business model, before such a product like Napster came out, tends to lead me to not feel sorry for them. Buying CD's that have anything to do with the big 5 does not sit well with me. I don't like to support those companies, it is like feeding the beast.

If any of these companies or their protection firms actually bothered to gather valid statistical analysis, before all the swapping happened maybe they could have better protected the industry. Instead they pulled whatever information out of their ass, refused to change with an evolving technology (internet), and hooped themselves into an corner they can't get out of. With people believing now music should be free and not paid for, they are going to have one hell of a time unconvincing them. By people I mean the MILLIONS up on millions of users on p2p applications.

While yes the artists get a royalty from their recordings, it is a meger one. For the most part they get a chunk of moula from the recording contract they sign. While "buying the cd" still supports the band, their are much better ways of supporting these artists. Take in a concert, buy a t-shirt, this money finds its way to the actual artist.

The more and more that the RIAA makes frivolous remarks and attacks, the more I don't want to back them. Some of the remarks that they make on their website makes my jaw drop, while it is the truth it does absolutely nothing to win people over. While they say it hurts them so much, I tend to belive otherwise. This is meger propaganda, and I tended to notice the lack of actual statistical facts that would back this.

My question and still is, if this kind of piracy actually helps the industry. Does it right the wrong? I mean the industry as a whole too, not just saturating the pockets of the music companies. Which I am sure is the only thing all of the RIAA's propaganda is refering too.

Yep; with P2P, there's waiting, for something that isn't the same as the original, and isn't on CD. With the library, I can get the exact original CD, and get a copy of it for myself!

How much easier is it to just put a CD on hold and wait to copy it? That would make CD sales go down more.

All I am trying to say, is that the laws should be changed; IT'S ****** HELPING THEM! CD sales went up when the most popular easy to use P2P came out(napster), and up another %5 when AG became popular. Now, they go down. This year, they did. OF COURSE THEY DID; AG AND NAPSTER AREN'T HERE ANYMORE!!!

Also, if I can just ask someone "what would be a good guy to check out?", and he said, for example "joe satriani", am I really going to go out and buy a $15 CD merely on recommendation? Am I going to buy a CD, just because it's on the store shelf with no good cover? Definately not.

If I can hear it, then maybe I would. And if I can't hear it without paying for it, how would I know I liked it? If I bought two CDs on someone's recommendation, and they completely sucked, that would decrease my chance of buying CDs on recommendation ever again. I'd want to listen to it before. And if the R.I.A.A., wants to make this completely against the law, CD sales will not go up since people will have to buy it to hear it; they'll go down because people won't take the risk of spending $15 on a bad product. This shows a glitch in the laws, and it needs to be remedied.

Hopefully one has good intuition lol. I see both sides of this argument, and I do not discount the "test drive" methodology. I too have benefitted (as they have from me) by testing the music, and then buying the cd. That is how I do most of my music purchases these days. I would simply like to see some sort of "test drive" legalized, beyond the 30 second clips on many artist's sites. The problem is that though I LOVE the full song downloads at 128kbps, and that is enough of a trial for me, whether you like it or not, this is righteously a decision up to the artist only, not the consumer, how much of a test one gets. Yeah, you sure won't see even full 128kbps downloads on a popular music's site, whether it is actually good or not, but wait, on independent label music sites you find these all the time.

I think piracy is theft; no two ways about it.

That said, I don't care. I own a lot of CDs. I buy 3-5CDs a week. Still, I have rips of a whole lot more than I own.
I don't do any CD-quality copies (well, until copy protected CDs come out... I refuse to buy them but I am happy to actually copy them just for the f**k you value), but I feel no shame or guilt ripping CDs that I don't own. Some of the stuff I have rips of, I've never even heard of before.. (ever heard of 'Curve'? I hadn't till I came across them on my music box last night) but as a result I do buy more music and the proportion that I listen too regularly has improved.
Some music I have is good for parties, but I wouldn't ever listen to it otherwise. Some other people like to listen to when they're staying for a few days so they bring the CD and I rip it so they need not bring it again. Some I simply can not get any more. Some I just don't want to buy.
Sure, piracy is theft but simply put - I don't really care.

gnoshi the immoral

I'd like to see you try and copy an entire book with the library's copier. They're there for you to copy a few pages that you need for a project (Fair Use).

The difference here is that you're borrowing the item and then returning it. As far as I know, copying CDs and books from the library is every bit as illegal as downloading a song you didn't pay for with a P2P service.

So it's OK to copy portions of copyrighted books for personal use but not OK to copy portions of copyrighted CD's for personal use? What about copying a football game for personal use? That's OK? What if I copy Saturday Night Live for personal use? That's OK?

And you don't see a double standard here???

I think the relevant phrase here is "personal use". Profiting off of copied material is when this line is crossed.

You are permitted to copy and use portions of a song the same way you are permitted to copy and use portions of a book. Downloading an entire song is not a portion, however.

You mentioned "try before you buy" earlier. I support this. The problem is that people try and then never buy while they continue to use and enjoy the software/CD/whatever.

I see myself as being in a give-and-take relationship with the music industry. They compress the dynamics of every track I hear for radio play - they're taking something from me. They copy-protect some CD's, trying to disallow me from fair-use media-phasing of the music I bought, ad at the same time, making the CD's unreadable by one of my players - they take away from me. They put an outrageous price tag on their product - they take away from me again.

So I do the logical thing; I seek equilibrium. I copy what I can and share it with whoever's interested - I take away from them.

And it's a pittance compared to what they're taking from me, and you, and everybody else.

Do I think filesharing is legal? Hell no (copying, maybe). Do I feel morally justified? Hell yes.

Trelane's last two posts expressed my sentiments exactly. The library purchases the CD, and then loans it to one person at a time. That person enjoys the music for a time, then gives the music back. (I use the word "music" rather than "CD" for a reason.) Contrast that with file-sharing, where one person buys the CD and copies it, and then many people can simultaneously obtain copies and never have to return them.

My moral dilemma with file-sharing doesn't surround the simultaneous "checkouts", because that just seems like a more efficient library system. It has to do with people never returning their "loans". I'm guilty of this myself, but I don't think that prohibits me from making the argument.

I was away for more than a week, so I didn't follow all the thread...

Anybody in the world has the right to try anything (car, T-shirt, dress, TV, HiFi or anything else) before he buys something or has the money-back guarantee.
But in the world of music it is not so. Why? I just can't buy everything, almost nobody can. If some kind of music in some form gets into my hands, I give it a try; when I don't like it, I wipe it out of my HDD (or I return the CD) and it's okay then, I think. If I like it much, I buy me rather the CD. If I like just some stuff, I let a few songs on my HDD and the rest goes away. It was the case of Apocalyptica for instance, but now I bought their Reflections album, because I like it. In my personal view, artists should have main part of their income from concerts, partly from T-Shirts and similar... selling CDs, DVDs, LPs or MCs should not be substantial for the most of the bands. And those, who are selling millions of copies, they really should not worry about some burned CDs.

Another question is selling the pirated stuff. This is definitely illegal and should be punished in appropriate way.

Just my 2 cents...

EDIT
P.S. Yes, and there is a fee (I don't know exactly, 3-5%) we pay down here in Slovakia when we buy CD burners, CD-R(W) media and even ZIPs and diskettes (!), and this fee should go directly to organisations who care of artists' rights... So I really don't see any reason, why shouldn't I archive music for my purposes even if I don't own the original media.

I'm kind of dropping into the middle of the discussion, but want to make this remark about copying library CDs:

I asked at my library, and they told me it is fully legal for me to keep copies of the CDs I rent there. They pay the copyright organization some 75 cents for every time a CD leaves the library.
This is ofcourse the only logical solution. If they hadn't made such arrangements, CD rental would have been shut down long ago, because people would copy rented CDs anyway.

Surely the answer to this is to BUY any CDs you like which aren't compressed to hell, and forget that the others even exist.


Of course, you may have to download them first to find out that they're not compressed to hell ;-)

but there are record companies and mastering engineers who haven't joined the "louder is better" trend, so you'll be pretty safe buying their products.


Cheers,
David.

P.S. If you buy a CD which is intollerabley mastered - take it back! I have. I haven't seen my one-man-stand against over compresion having a significant effect on the mastering world at yet, but give it time...

I am afraid, it would lead to nothing... A lot of "ordinary" people love this compressed stuff, because it sounds "great" from their boom-boxes shit... And they will buy it, definitely. And many artists go the same way. For the time being I have on my playlist Al Jarreau's "All I Got" CD among the others, and to my very disgusting I found out it is compressed, too...

Not to be offensive but I believe that this is one of the dumbest and most illogical arguments that I have ever heard. I am generally supportive of P2P but it is people like this that makes me against it and makes me worry for the future of this country. This argument is tantamount to saying that hey Porche "took away" a cupholder from me, therefore I need to seek equilibrium by taking away a Porche from them and sharing it with my buddys. That is just plain stupid. Music companies are not "taking away" anything from you by compressing music or making it more expensive, they are simply making a worse product than some people would prefer less dynamically compressed music (remember plenty of people just like their music loud). If you don't like the music because it is compressed then don't listen to it, listen to music that producers haven't compressed and you therefore can enjoy. No one is forcing you to listen to Britney and Eminem. The RIAA says they released about 27,000 CDs last year. Have you listened to many that weren't in the top 500. There are also plenty of groups all over the country who release there own CDs, some of them quite good.

Also the try-before-you-buy excuse is also pretty invalid because most CD stores that I know of do let you listen to a CD in the store before you buy it. Virgin Megastores let you listen to any of their CDs that they sell. Also there are countless online stores that let you listen to songs before you buy them. Also while some people do buy the CD of songs that they have downloaded the majority of people don't, just look at people's attitudes at Zeropaid.

So, do I use P2P for music? Sure who doesn't. I use it though only for songs which I enjoy but would never buy the CD. Artists whom I really enjoy and listen to often I buy the CD but if I only listen to them occaisionally and know I wouldn't buy them anyways I have no qualms downloading them. I know that I am doing this also because my CD buying habits have stayed fairly constant before and after I started using P2P, I simply listen to more variety of music now.

$0.75 is nothing compared to the $15 they coulda got. Unlike P2P, there you get an exact copy of the CD

If you would know Hydrogen Audio, "exact copy" is not very important since you have "transparent copy"...

If you're a freak like me, then there's only one way of getting transparent copies: controlling the encoding yourself...

Never said I knew HA, just learning here. So you're saying a copied CD is not an exact copy? What makes this so? What makes a CD copy with Nero of a non-scratched CD not on the fly not exact? This is interesting B)

Remember, things are not so cut and dry, there are always the little details to look at.

My honest opinion, in a perfect world, would be for music to be less money, a lot less, and for some more variety, and for P2P to be allowed since it's doing nothing bad for the artists(at least at this time). More artists means more music and fans(rotation is badly needed), less money means more people buying music(of course in this situation, it would be minimum of $3 to the artists, not this $1 crap and $14 to the people putting it on the plastic), and music would be enjoyed by more. But hey, we live in a world of loopholes and technicalities, and soon there will be more of them for P2P.

I never managed to get an error free extraction from the few library CD that were in a state good enough to be recognized in my drives

Just for the record (pun? ) as a reference, i hereby present the views of An Artist, in case somebody reading these lines haven't read these before.

THE INTERNET DEBACLE - AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW

FALLOUT - a follow up to The Internet Debacle


You may be suprised what an Artist feels when he/she finds a rare piece of his/her work he/she couldn't find for years from any other place.

Times are changing...

Heh. That's why you lie, and order out even if they are said to be there

I remember only having one CD, that was bad actually. Two skips, and EAC fixed them up quite nicely. I don't remember if I had C2 on or not and the percentage, but the skips aren't there when I play it now. CD wipes work nicely unless the person last had used a pin on the CD or something...

DVDs, are another story entirely. CDs are probably not thaqt scratched, since in this day and age, in NY city, I doubt many step foot in a library for anything compared to blockbuster

I feel artists should have control over downloads/file sharing. That said, these artiists
having control would find that the "sweet spot" for them would be to allow downloads
of some of their tracks, so potential customers can sample, but must buy the album
to get it all.

In fact, one of the CD's I bought on my last trip to the store was the Nora Jones CD
even though I had already downloaded several of the tracks in fairly high bit rate mp3
from the publisher's web site, bluenote.com (nice that they used >128 kb/s).

Some folks say all the music should be free, and the artist can make money off T-shirts etc,
but I'm sure you can find plenty of T-shirt pirates who would say the opposite.
(self serving philosophy)

My problem is that most of the music I want doesn't have a CD. I like a lot of independent music, and the best electronic I've ever heard( http://gtonic.dmusic.com ), doesn't have a CD. He did use 160k on all tracks and 224k on one though, but most of it is 128k. I rarely do download, but I do a lot of sharing.

getting back to he topic:
piracy is always theft, piracy is always illegal.

I allow me to disagree with you: under piracy I definitely understand somebody (or group of people) makes illegal profit from the art-work of the artist(s) whereas copy for my own purposes doesn't harm anybody. If I should have not such a possibility, I would rather leave it alone and maybe would never know, if the music (in the cases we talk about) is worth our money or not. And it's quite normal I own some original CDs from an artist and some material I have is either as lossy compression or on CDR. Because not everything is equal good for me (and definitely for everybody else, too). That doesn't mean I am a thief. Another thing is when somebody has everything in form of lossy compression or CDR. That's surely something we should all refuse as illegal.

And a musician should not definitely live from the CDs he sells (and to be honest, I don't believe a lot of musicians/performers could live from the CDs or any other medias they sell), the music should be performed live and the live performances should make him a substantial part of his earnings. The same goes for every possible genre of music.

Just my another 2 cents...

What about an artist who performs every part in the music. The performance ONLY exists as
as a product of combining separate parts in the studio and can not be performed live.

You view seems to boil down to: "The artist shouldn't plan on making money on something I
plan on stealing"

That may have a certain practicality, but that doesn't make it right.

Here's a twist for the debate. Legality aside, what about downloading/sharing material which is no longer
in producton? If you can't buy it then there is no argument that the (possibly dead) artist is losing
income from your download.

Yes, I know ;-) - 'twas sarcasm - the lowest form of wit, but one that I'm quite fond of.

Cheers,
David.

In the UK, all recordings issued before the beginning of the year 50 years ago are out of mechanical copyright.

There is usually still publishing copyright in existance on the recorded work, since this lasts seventy years after the author's death (who comes up with these ideas?!?).

About 4-6% of the price of CDs containing re-issues of old recordings goes to pay these publishing royalties. At around 2 pence per song (typically) I would be happy to pay this price for downloading the recording off the net, if a mechanism were in place to handle the payment.

This is a serious suggestion, and I've often thought about setting up such a scheme - the amount of vintage material that's shared on p2p is impressive, and to be able to have legal p2p at such a small cost would be an interesting proposition - even if you will have to wait 50 years to download Britney :-) Actually, that could be a selling point...


Unfortunately, mechanical copyright lasts longer in the USA - but there's nothing to stop a UK company operating this service on the internet to allow customers from the USA to import the tracks from the UK, as long as they meet UK copyright law. A track never issued in the UK, or issued for the first time after 1952, is not "out of mechanical copyright" in the UK, and cannot be traded by anyone other than the original rights holder.


Cheers,
David.

In the US the constitution say copyright will be in force for a limited time.
The length has been exteded a few times. Now the practical criterion
seems to be that as long as Disney keeps up the campaign contributions,
"Steamboat Willly" (the first Mickey Mouse cartoon) will NEVER go out of
copyright. The current length is 95 years.

And... who are you to decide what a musician must live off? If someone is musically gifted, and enough people enjoy their music, well they should reap the rewards. In the same vein, why are we paying athletes more than surgeons?


Well, the thing is that under the current "way of doing things" the musicians don't "own" their music. The musician is just an employee of the company, which is the actual owner of the music.

In the world of books, the author is the one that usually owns his or her own writtings. Then the tables are reversed and the publisher is the author's employee. They market and distribute the book, keep a cut themseleves and gives a cut to the author.

piracy == theft == illegal.. can't get passed that.

If the copyright is extended on an already existing work isn't that stealing my
scheduled unfettered access to that piece?

edit: since congress is doing it, it probably technically isn't stealing since it is legal, but
it is a government "taking" which by law should be compensated at a fair value.

Lol MTRH, you have such an open mind, it makes for such detailed discussion

I've read probably 4 pages now, I'm slowly reading through this in a random order, it's an interesting subject for me at least. I've made 2 albums of my own as music has been a hobby of mine, both listening and creating. I haven't sold a single album, but the friends I have passed cd's or uploaded tracks to have enjoyed some of my stuff - so I guess I could gain at least some sales.

I plan on offering all my songs available for download at a listanable quality.. it's the cheapest form of advertising I know of, and from what I was taught, getting your name around is more important than making a sale. If someone doesn't buy my cd because they got all the files from the net, yes I'd be unhappy (as I'd be ~$6 poorer for it, having no record boss as my keeper) - but they will at least of heard of me, and be a possible source of recommendation to others.

This 'philosiphy' came from a professional hard-house dj in the US, and a creative musician with 4 albums to his name.. both small time on the scheme of things, but huge compared to me. The DJ's cd's all explicitly contain the message "Please copy this cd and pass it to all your friends", and the creative guy paid his mp3.com prices to send me 2 albums free - just because I talked with him about his music and starting to make my own.


Because of this I don't see downloading as such a crime. I avoid it when I respect the artists work on the whole. An album with >50% tracks I love or at least enjoy, I'll buy it. If it's less I will borrow and copy, or download as a last resort.

Thanks to this thread, I'll be checking out my local libraries.. I knew they had cd's, but never thought about it in relation to expanding my music collection... or more rather, replacing mp3's with ape's, which is something I'd like to do

MTRH is sticking to the topic which is "Piracy. Theft or not?" Other arguments, really, don't apply.

Later.

MTRH, don't you love the people who complain about the government this, the government that & then when confronted with the evils of what they do, immediately hide behind a million statutes, laws & forms of double-speak created by the very government which they complain against? I said it a two pages ago as well, maybe my font size was not large enough so here it is again in larger font,



IF PIRACY WERE NOT THEFT IT WOULD BE CALLED SOMETHING ELSE. To ask the question is not academic, but rather evidence of a weak grasp on the english language and a weak moral foundation.

Jeff

As a music lover and fair man (I'd rather use the word "gentleman" but I am not sure ) I would like to own everything I like listen to. But this is not possible from various reasons - you have no possibility to buy only the track you like or just a part of an album... Besides, there's quite another situation nowadays than it used to be, say, in 70's. Then I could afford to own all Black Sabbath, Led Zep, Deep Purple, King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Santana or Uriah Heep albums. Since the mid-80's you have no easy chance to orient yourself in the music market, it is just too huge and complex. You should be given an opportunity for "try before you buy". I am the owner of approx. 5000 LPs and cca 1300 CDs and I will always pay for the music I want to have. But the music shouldn't be really assumed just as any other commodity... It's definitely not, no kind of art is just plain goods. It's more than this. Again I must repeat myself - who has the music for his own purposes, i.e. for private listening, makes really no crime. See this and this
http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html
http://www.janisian.com/article-fallout.html
I think in the long run most people buy for themselves the music they really like.
Just my another 2 cents.

I just wanted to add a remark regarding the opinion about file sharing as good PR for the artist that has been expressed by more than one poster.

Whether free copying and distribution could be of good for some artists or not is not relevant when discussing the copyright laws. They are there to ensure that creating artists are entitled of some basic power over their work. There are in fact not many artists at all who does support free copying and sharing of their music.

And it's rather selfish of some to state (as has been doen in this thread) that you have the right to do what you want with the music, since - as a form of art - it should belong to everybody. Again, ask the artist in question what he/she thinks about it. Their wishes should be respected, regardless if it happens to be an artist you don't particularly like.

The whole 'try before you buy' thinking is flawed. If you're curious, buy the record. Noone forces you to do it. You have no legitimate right to try it out. You can't try underwear either, you know!

That analogy is flawed in that you can buy 10 sets of the underwear you like and get 10x the use, but
in general people would never buy more than 1 copy of the same CD.

"Try before you buy" for popular music can be accomplished by radio, or CD stores that have
demo stations. For more exotic fare, the "try before you buy" proponents should ask themselves if
they delete pirated tracks after deciding they don't like them enough to buy.

The RIAA propaganda (including threat letters to universities and corprations) does not
acknowledge that legal music downloads exist, and they don't want to admit to themselves
that people like me are spending more of our music money with artists and publishers that allow
sample track downloads. For me, maybe 3/4 of the CD's I've bought in the last 4 years have come
after legally downloading at least one track.

Like cerial makers, they would really prefer that we just swallow a certain amount of crap that we buy
because of the packaging without really knowing what's inside.

Personally I have no qualms about this. If the music is out of print, and very very hard/expensive to track down that is.
I once asked an artist (Matthew Good) about his stance on sharing/copying an EP of his that was out of print, selling for $150+ (american dollars) on Ebay, not going to be repressed and generally impossible to find.
His answer was that sharing/copying that EP for non-profit was fine by him since no plans of repressing it was considered.

Bootlegs is harder to answer. There is no financial loss for the artist to be considered by sharing bootlegs, but by spreading bootlegs against the artists will, I would be disrespecting him/her. Dilemma.

I don't know how others behave, but for my part I just can say I have no reason to store any music I do not want to listen to... I repeat myself like broken vinyl record, but I must stress I see anything wrong when I own for instance 12 original CDs from Jethro Tull and besides have 4 CDRs and approx. 20 tracks as MP3s (Jethros and Ian Anderson personally, because he is the Jethro Tull, can see it from another point of view...). I do not think the artists would suffer because of this When the ratio approx. 6:4 or better is achieved, nobody should complain about the matter.
Just my another 2 cents...

P.S. If the great companies would stop to pay exaggerated money their artists, like Robbie Williams with his 60 million contract, that would be even better. This is the main reason we must pay horrible amounts for the music these days...

If you believe that word of mouth is a good thing, then deleting pirated tracks and removing them from your file sharing program of choice is a actually a bad thing. The tracks wouldn't have the opportunity to spread and reach someone willing to pay for them after checking them out.

As far as the "try before you buy" rationale. If it's possible to try before you buy, people will do it. Test driving cars, buying clothes then returning them, taking a couple of swings with a baseball bat ... The problem is that most digital music has no natural limitation like the above options. That makes it difficult for the music releaser to control what happens to it.

its kind off topic but it is interesting news
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?t...storyID=2341183

Piracy does equal theft and it is unethical.

However, how do you define piracy?

Is it piracy for someone to download the only good Led Zeppelin song when there is no alternative, like a reasonably priced CD single?

Is it piracy to make someone pay $15 dollars for 7 piece of crap "songs"? Or if you prefer $15 dollars of one song?

Is it piracy to make a series of four CD "singles" that cost $12 like metallica (and others) did? The same studio recording on all four with two to three live songs?

Is it piracy to make a person pay for Vinyl, and after finding out the vinyl was crap, to buy the tapes so that he could hear the songs without record noise?
And then make them buy CD's, then "remastered in 22 bit", make them buy CD's "remastered at 24bit". Allowing an ignorant public to believe that remastering will magically make the sound better?

Now they want them to buy audio DVDs, and I am sure that most of the listening public will truly benefit from the extra resolution.


One rants more, and I will stop.

If someone genuinely does not like an album after giving it a chance, can this person return it? Or does the record company and artist still get to keep the money, while the buyer has to suck it up?
No, because they *might* have made a copy.