perhaps an interesting/entertaining read: (not by my hand, found it yesterday)
http://www.demonbaby.com/blog/2007/10/when...k-birth-of.html



edit2: thanks for editing the title, kind (and anonymous) moderator

very nice read! thank you for sharing this!

"so this is why CDs cost $18..."

Haha, priceless!

If you disregard their 'illegal' status, both Oink and allofmp3 showed two perfect ways of running a music site. The latter for cash but with all the transcoding options etc, and the previous for being the best site to discover new and old music ever.

If it wasn't for Oink I wouldn't have BOUGHT music by Jack Johnson, Brad Paisley, Rick Moranis, Leftover Salmon and tonnes of others. If I ever get to meet Alan, i'll buy him a beer or 3.

No DRM, no 'featured content', no shitty bitrate rips and a genuine community feel, the music industry has a lot to learn from Oink.

Interesting. I was wondering just how long it would be before a thread about the pink pig popped up on HA. Last time I saw the site mentioned, mods were handing out warnings ...

Mentioning an illegal site that no longer exists is not linking to or mentioning a site that provides illegal content.

I certainly don't disagree that the music industry is a stupid dinosaur deserving only our contempt.

But, it's legal to be a stupid dinosaur.

And even if stealing music leads to actual sales, as it did with "seanyseansean", companies also have a right to decide what marketing and promotions to use for their products, even if you think you know a better one. Here in the Boston area a local furniture chain offered its customers 100% rebates for furniture purchased in April if the Boston Red Sox won the World Series. The Red Sox won and the customers have netted an estimated $30 million on the deal. The company had the deal underwritten by insurance so it turned out to be a great marketing ploy benefitting both the customers AND the company, but my point was that it was their decision to make. It would not have justified stealing a couch.

No amount of rationalization gets around the fact that stealing is stealing. There are plenty of other legal ways to get back at the record companies. Buy directly from indie artists, for example. Buy MP3's from eMusic (~25 cents apiece, 192 VBR) Or do what I do: Buy used CD's - this is perfectly legal, it's cheap, and the record companies never see a penny of it. This also gives me the option of ripping/encoding it any way I want.

How would WHAT make sense? That you bought a 160G iPod without any thought to how you would fill it up with MP3's? Why is it the music industry's job to "make sense" of your purchase decision? If you bought a city parking garage and tried to fill it up with your own personal car collection and blew through your million dollar retirement nest egg before even one level was full would this justify stealing cars? You knew what music cost BEFORE buying your iPod (which, incidentally is 160G because it was designed with video in mind).

The bottom line is that a sense of entitlement is not the same as having an actual right to something. The European settlers who took over North America felt entitled to it, and, just like music pirates, they had the technology. We have people on this forum from all over the world, so if you happen to live in a country where the government bends the laws for "national security" reasons, remember: they are exercising their powers of rationalization the same as music pirates. Anything can be rationalized.

*rofl* Why is it always the stealing cars analogy that comes up... why not stealing apples or eggs or stealing ships[i] or [i]airplanes for a change? As if anyone would care about such a hilarious analogy anyway.

Obviously YOU care enough to post about it.


I liked "cars" because, like major-label music and 160G iPods, they represent market-driven consumerist acquisitions. Ships, eggs and airplanes don't have that quality of American consumer-driven excess.

American automotive culture and American big-label music culture share many of the same properties of heavy, glitzy promotion, status-seeking, and conspicuous consumption - the chrome wheels, the white earbuds, the promises of sex and coolness, etc. You just don't get that with eggs.

And I also liked the absurdity of buying a city parking garage and then complaining that AFTERWARDS that it was too expensive to fill. At least when I bought my 80G iPod this summer it was based on my projections for how much space I would actually need.

An MP3 is a very long number. Likewise, a track on a CD, and indeed, the data on the entire CD are just very long numbers. Making analogies to physical objects is meaningless. I am describing here what we are actually dealing with, free of abstraction or metaphor.

It is absurd to say that you can own a number, yet the record companies are trying to do exactly that. What's more, they're laying claim to large sets of numbers that happen to sound similar to humans when interpreted to be representations of audio and played back accordingly.

There is no upper bound to how many copies of a number a person can have. A person can make a copy of a number and give it to a friend. That number does not cease to exist.

When you side with the record industry, you proclaim that numbers can be owned. There is absolutely zero abstraction or analogy in that statement. It is a direct logical consequence of current copyright law. This raises a great many ethical questions, yet becomes no less true. So, then, we enter into the next meaningful stage of debate: Should numbers be ownable?

The money in your bank account is also just a number.

Absurd or not, it's still the law. There are perfectly legal means of changing the law if you disagree with it.

And why is it absurd to say numbers can't be owned? Do you own your identity or your likeness? If Coca Cola created a digital simalcrum of you - its appearance, voice, and mannerisms and had it endorse Coke, would you have a problem with that? It's just a number.

Your DNA is also a number. Sure, at the moment it happens to printed in base-pairs but it doesn't have to be. At Cornell they've already taken pure digital files of virus genomes and constructed living viruses out of them. And DNA sequences can be patented.

What's your opinion about owning property in Second Life?

The idea that only a physical object can be owned is so 20th-century. The world is virtual - practically ANYTHING can be a number and as time goes on the distinction you are trying to draw between the digital and the physical will become more and more archaic. In any case ownership is a legal concept, not a property of the physical universe like mass or temperature, thus it is prescriptive, not descriptive, so philosophizing about it like it is a pint of sand is pointless. Something can be owned if the law says it can be owned.


They can - that's the law. If you don't like it then change it. Until you do, legally you have no case.

And then there's the moral reciprocity issue - if you steal some music you are enjoying the efforts of the musician, not to mention the sound engineer, producer, etc, not to mention all the time and effort they all put into to developing their professional skills, without compensating them for the enjoyment they have given you. Is it right to enjoy the fruits of someone's labors without compensating them? The musician gave you something - what have you given him for his efforts?

So far you haven't provided any evidence that you aren't just rationalizing stealing. The European settlers who took over North America rationalized it partly by saying that the native Americans had a different concept of property than the whites so it was OK to take it. (this is similar to your idea that you can't steal what can't be owned) In South America that didn't work because they did have a more familiar concept of property, so the Europeans had to resort to a different rationalization. But in both cases it was the same as you: they felt entitled to take what they wanted so they crafted some rationalizations to suit their purposes.

numbers are interpreted by a program, so they are more like words. can words be owned? sure they can when put in the right order.
take goethe's faust for example. that's what intellectual property is all about.

Exactly. I'm a published writer and photographer, not to mention a software engineer. All of those expressions of my labor and creativity can be encoded digitally and copied perfectly an infinite number of times. But they are still all mine and if someone misappropriated them I would have both the legal and moral right to take action against them.

The world economy is increasingly based on knowledge and symbol manipulation - the fruits of millions of people's labor are "just" numbers. We're not living in Victorian England where a good day's work depended on sweating limbs and clanging hammers. The long term legal trend is to strengthen rights for abstract property, as well it should given that more and more people's livelihoods depend on it.

neomoe, at the basic level, words are numbers as well. They're just in an encoding that you can interpret without requiring math.

plnelson, I said nothing about rationalizing stealing. There is no stealing happening. What is happening is unauthorized reproduction, nothing more. According to Mirriam-Webster's dictionary, steal means:

intransitive verb
1: to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice
2: to come or go secretly, unobtrusively, gradually, or unexpectedly
3: to steal or attempt to steal a base

transitive verb
1 a: to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully <stole a car>
b: to take away by force or unjust means <they've stolen our liberty>
c: to take surreptitiously or without permission <steal a kiss>
d: to appropriate to oneself or beyond one's proper share : make oneself the focus of <steal the show>
2 a: to move, convey, or introduce secretly : smuggle
b: to accomplish in a concealed or unobserved manner <steal a visit>
3 a: to seize, gain, or win by trickery, skill, or daring <a basketball player adept at stealing the ball> <stole the election>

Furthermore, to clarify intransitive definition 1, we need to clarify "take", which in almost all definitions means transfer, which implies that the original party no longer has it.

Call it whatever you like, but unauthorized copying is not stealing by any normal definition of "steal".

I spend what I can on music. However, given modern technology, it is going to be very difficult to prevent people from transferring numbers to and from each other.

We may be at the end of the short period of time wherein it is possible to charge for recorded music. Music was in no threat of dying out before recorded music could be sold, and it will be in no threat after recorded music dies out.

You're right that it's contrary to copyright law, but that doesn't make copyright law, the ownership of numbers, any less absurd.

I firmly believe that only physical objects can be owned. If you would not like a certain number made public, do not publicise it. There's nothing 20th century about this belief. For that matter, I believe that in the ideal case, there would be no concept of ownership, although in the status quo it is required. What exists ideally and what exists presently are two extremely different realms.

'Money' also is a social convention, as are governments, kinship bonds (at least the rules and ideas that come with them), and pretty much everything else.
Stating something is 'nothing' just because it's somewhat less tangible to me seems rather trivial.

Music has value because we attribute it, whether it is recorded onto vynil or onto your pc.


Anyway, the whole point the article writer is making is that 'music' is not considered a luxury good anymore, and as such, the prices are rather out of this world.

yes, downloading music could be considered 'stealing' in some respects..
OTOH (and i'd say equally importantly) 'music' is considered one of the necessities of life by a lot of people.

As the writer states, We live in the iPod generation - where a "collection" of clunky CDs feels archaic - where the uniqueness of your music collection is limited only by how eclectic your taste is, a point i agree with as it indeed does seem that we consider it thus these days.
And if indeed music has become like bread, does it seem reasonable to have to starve in a society where bread is freely available in large quantities, but you are unable to buy it because the prices are kept artificially high?

from the rant:



Yeah, riiiight.

You know as well as I do that you're just rationalizing. Copyright law is very clear on this - the artist or copyright owner is the only one with the legal right to authorize reproduction, therefore it is being taken wrongfully.


"Almost" isn't good enough. If someone steals your identity you still have it but it's still stealing.

It doesn't matter how "firmly" you believe it - you are still doing what I described centuries of invaders and conquerors as doing - you have a firm sense of entitlement so you are trying to paper over taking something you have no right to with transparent rationaliztions. All you're trying to do is play semnatic games to justify what you already know is wrongdoing. You wouldn't have to resort to semantic games if your argument held water.

Didn't we already have this discussion a short while ago?

Where's the smiley that indicates boredom?

The bigger question is how the overall flow of money in the intellectual property trade influences what IP is developed. Remember, the whole point of copyright wasn't that IP rights were inalienable, but that allowing IP to be treated like physical property gives a much stronger economic incentive to develop it. The recent trends towards considering IP an inalienable right may be right or wrong, but even if it's not, the general question is the same.

Clearly, music as a whole will get along fine without big music labels, or any sort of DRM or IP enforcement. But nobody's proposed (or identified) a system where so much money can be focused into the industry. Without that much money, would we see as much expense being paid towards good recording studios, or sound mastering practices, or any other musical item requiring a large investment? Would it ever become profitable to publish recordings of new classical music, for instance? Would as many experimental acts be published if the risk involved in producing them would not be offset by large amounts of guaranteed income?

What I really fear is that music as a whole will become more amateur, and ultimately more conservative, as IP rights degrade. When the money stops flowing, only the people who don't care about money will continue to play - but that doesn't mean that the music will be any better or any more authentic; just that it will require less investment to produce, and that it will be harder to earn a living doing studio recordings.. Those people that do enjoy music that required great investments will only find it in the music of the past, when the industry could support it. Therefore, because music listeners would predominantly listen to the past, genres (notably rock) would stagnate.

.

.
You cats need to take a stiff shot of your favorite eye-ball reddener and trip on over to:

http://fingertipsmusic.com

"The Intelligent Guide To Free & Legal Music"

Andrew D.
www.cdnav.com

.

That means you can "express your labor and creativity" once. An then make inexpensive copies of "it" and sell them at "expensive" prices and abuse your fellow man or neighbor. And you call it moral?!!!
We, people that work in honest jobs should combine forces and pressure politicians worldwide to LEGALLY change those immoral abusive copyright laws so the "creative "people" out there can be forced to work more often for their money.



We. People that WORK for our money have to act quickly before our blood is completely sucked by the people above mentioned.

How long do you think before the labels are out of business?

Trent Reznor: I mean, who knows? I remember a time when it felt like, being on a major label, our interests were aligned. At times, it's a pretty well-oiled machine and the luxury is that I feel like I've got a team of people who are taking care of the shit I don't want to think about. I don't care about the radio guy, I just want to make music. But those days are gone. Because, mainly, that infrastructure is broken at the moment. How long before [record companies] are irrelevant? Who knows? They seem to be doing everything they can to make sure that happens as quickly as possible.

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2007/...l_williams.html

@ plnelson: Aren't you the same guy who started that immensely pointless thread about the legality of ripping CDs in which you asked the same questions and made the same points repeatedly under the guise of soliciting advice? Some of use have had enough of your evangelizing, really.

Let's take a look at the people who are providing these numbers, shall we? There are a few fields out there:

1) Software. Nowadays, it is quite common to see people releasing software and its source code at no cost.
2) Music. Nowadays, it is quite common to see people releasing music at no cost.
3) Writing. Likewise, via blogs and the Internet. Wikipedia is a proof-of-concept that a professional quality resource can be created without compensation for its writers.
4) Web development, which is designed around cost-free content.
5) Photography. There is no shortage of free stock photo sites.
6) Games.

Am I missing something? Is there some purely virtual field in which some do not provide content without cost? Not that I've seen recently...

The change has not happened across the board yet. It is happening though. There are many who produce this content and release it for everyone, rather than hoarding it and using our monopoly on a number to benefit ourselves and not society as a whole.

However, you do me wrong to say that I do not work, and that I am not paid for creation. As a matter of fact, I spent the summer being paid to update and maintain a local civic website, and have been paid for previous content creation in the past. Here again we see yet another way to commoditize the creation of free content: create a need in those you are mandated to serve.

There are still significant opportunities for custom software development, and for the analysis and configuration of systems. These opportunities keep increasing! Customization requires skilled individuals, as does the adaptation of existing software and content to meet new needs.

You keep saying I'm somehow rationalizing unauthorized reproduction (not theft, I'm not depriving anyone of anything). I am not. I feel no need to rationalize my behaviour, even in light of particular unfounded ad hominem attacks.

I could easily drop any and all copyright infringement and not look back. As it is, I purchase those products that I enjoy most, when I can afford to do so. I am not rich, and my infringement of copyright in the instances where I do infringe does not appear to make a significant difference in the success or failure of the products I infringe on.

Call it what you will, it is simply impossible to prevent the unlicensed propagation of a number, no matter how much law you try and throw at it. Why? Because the only way to enforce that law is to remove the right to transfer numbers.

I'm not arguing that numbers are not valid because they are not tangible. I'm saying that attempting to claim ownership of numbers is silly.

My, my, this topic is also here
Quoting myself at some other site...



Current laws in USA are made by and for the benefit of large corporations. The people at large is irrelevant.

The original intent of copyright was the opposite of what people think of it today. It was meant to put an end to the unlimited control english printer guilds used to have of written works. By fixing a limit, of 14 years i think, after which, the work had to go into the public domain. This allowed a reasonable time for authors to profit, while at the same time ensured continued access for the masses.

Enter the 20th century: corporations changed this and turned it upside down, repeating what it was meant to destroy.

This of course has led to the questioning of the need to preserve an "intellectual property" concept at all, with many advocating its complete dissolution. Others are simply asking to change the laws, to allow copies without permission for non-profit uses (Countries like Spain already have this).

The shameful behavior of the American cartels (RIAA, MPAA, etc) suing young girls and elderly women, forcing them to pay with all their savings plus half their income for life; rather than set an example as they had hoped, has only fueled a big worldwide anger against them and the system they try so desperate to maintain.

No amount of rationalization gets around the fact that copyright infringement is not stealing.

When somebody takes a CD from a record store without paying for it, they rob the store of the actual cost of the piece of plastic. The object itself has an actual monetary value, the store has already paid for it, they won't see that cash again, and they can't ever sell the object to anybody. That's stealing.

When somebody makes a digital copy illegally, no money has been lost by anybody. Nobody paid anything for that copy. The original is still there for someone to sell and someone to purchase. Nobody's been robbed of anything, except for a potential (and I can't stress that word enough) sale. The equation results in $0 instead of a potentially positive number, while stealing a CD always results in a negative number.

Please stop equating copyright infringement to stealing - it's just not the same. Period.

My music collection is very diverse but about half of it is classical, and I personally know more classical musicians, including fulltime professionals, than any other genre, so I can speak to that. Classical will do OK.

First of all, there is not anything like the widespread music theft in classical as there is in rock and pop genres. Unlike rock and pop listeners, classical listeners do not start with a sense of entitlement to the music, so they are used to the idea that they have an obligation to support their music financially. Even the most popular and best-known orchestras and chamber ensembles routinely run donation and subscription campaigns and other fund-raisers. My wife and I are financial contributors to several orchestras and chamber ensembles - unlike rock bands, classical ensembles develop close relationships with their listening audience and are often set up as 501( c ) 3 's (US tax code for non-profits so donations can be made on a tax-exempt basis). So there's a whole different culture in the classical community - we know that the music exists only because we support it - IP thieves feel no obligation to support the music they enjoy - they expect to get it for free.

In addition to that, classical musicians are less expensive. Many of them have other jobs such as conservatory teaching or coaching, and in general they don't aspire to the expensive and glamorous lifestyles of big name rock-stars. The care and feeding of even the most prominent world-touring and world-class chamber quartet is a fraction of a major world-class 4 piece rock band.





All the armchair philosophizing in your posts and those of Artemis3, etc, are just your personal opinions. But you can't cite any case law or other legal opinion by anyone with any professional expertise in copyright or intellectual property to support you. The bottom line is that virtually everyone who has devoted their professional lives to studying this disagrees with you. And case law is completely against you, not just in the US but in the UK and EU, too.

Offer us something other than a plain assertion.

ad verecundiae own, really.
sadly, outside the church they are less than convincing when posited without any supporting statements, and they come across as generally obnoxious, since you're tying to exclude people by claiming that 'expertise' is necessary to take part in this debate, which isn't the case, for the below reason.

The whole point of this thread is (imho) to point out that current IP laws might be outdated given how music is viewed these days, [as i pointed out in my last post, which you sadly seem to have missed] and what might need to be changed in order to make them more relevant to today's society.

Excuse me, there's no "philosophizing" going on in my post at all. I could have argued that copyright infringement is not that bad when it is commited by poor people - that would have been "philosophizing". But I didn't. I stated simple, unquestionable facts (not opinions). Stealing is actually taking something away from someone. Copyright infringement is unauthorized replication - the owner keeps his goods. I didn't bother arguing the morality of either crime.

One of the definitions cited was "to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully". The music is clearly appropriated without right or leave so even the meaningless semantic point you are trying to make fails.


And the bottom line is that you and others here are trying to use semantic devices to justify taking things which you have no legal or moral right to.

Nor did I ever say the IP laws should not be reconsidered, but the US, the UK and the EU are all democracies so if you don't like the law then convince your fellow voters to change them. Until then sharing of copyrighted music is illegal.

WRT canar's comments:

These are all choices that the creator made freely. I've also written open-source software, and I've also released some of my visual art over the web (including a recent anti-Iraq-war poster). But that choice is (and should remain) up to the artist.

Despite all the free stuff, most commercial stuff is doing just fine, thank you, so customers must think there's something worth paying for. Maybe the stock photos are better, or maybe they offer other advantages. I've used GIMP and Photoshop CS and I don't think there's any comparison for doing professional work. Likewise I've used Open Office and Microsoft Office, and I got tired of reporting bugs on O-O. Also the Wall Street Journal reported recently that Linux's share of the desktop market may have actually shrunk in the last could of years - they attribute this to OSX, not Windoze.

And even in music, the only real problem WRT file sharing has been in popular, mass-market formats such as rock, hip-hop, etc. The fans of classical, folk, jazz, etc, have a more mature attitude toward their music and don't feel like they're entitled to get their musical enjoyment for free.

So my point is that free products are fine if you like them and if the creator agrees to it.

Care to back this up?

Right and Wrong
The copy-right infringement.







Note that they are in whole separate sections:
TITLE 17—COPYRIGHTS
TITLE 18—CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE

Also note TITLE 18 chapter 31 is not TITLE 17 chapter 5.
In short, from a legal stand point: COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT is not THEFT.

Laws, are made by people. Laws can be changed. Laws are not always right. Go back to the time when slavery was legal, and releasing them was not. As i said current US laws mostly benefit the corporations, because its them who pay US politicians to do so. In most countries that would be corruption, a crime. In USA, its institutionalized with the figure of the lobby system. Founders of that country, thought that it should be the rich and wealthy the ones influencing political decisions, since they are supposedly the educated, unlike the rest whom they considered "ignorant masses". This school of thought still prevails to this day, whenever they mention it or not. It is not the populist dream of Abraham Lincoln (of the people, by the people, for the people). The word Democracy means the people has the power, it is not certainly the case here. Only a few really have this power, and these few are controlled by a few rich. It is much closer to Aristocracy if something. Just because you have limited freedom of speech (no pics of US dead soldiers coming back, for example) and some meaningless rights to vote (bi partisan almost the same choices) does not make it a democracy. In fact the concept of democracy is heavily distorted there, and the media enforces this distortion. Otherwise ideas threating capitalism itself might surface, people might start caring; and you know what happens when masses think they can make choices and rule a country; according to that school of thought...

So these corporations who puppet the stronger country makes it bully others to establish laws the way they want it. Some oppose, but they never stop. Trading agreements, WTO, threats, direct intervention, etc. Yet, laws are not the same everywhere. In Spain, copying for non profit uses is allowed by law. Many are proposing just that elsewhere, or at least to restore the original Copyright spirit; put limits to it and restore the balance and rights for the people.

If you look into Title 17, Section 506 provides that certain kinds of willful infringement constitute criminal violations. There is then a reference to Title 18 for the specification of how the offense is punished.

Whether this means criminal infringement is a form of "theft" seems to me to be a semantic argument. Copyright laws are federal and there is no federal law of "theft." Theft is usually the common English word used to describe a criminal offense against property, where the offender appropriates the property in some way. Under that simple definition, criminal infringement could be considered theft.

As to whether infringement carries the same moral implications as other forms of theft (and whether it should be criminalized at all) - that is a separate question. But that confuses prescription (what ought to be) with description (how it is).

Just my 2 pence: Labels will be smaller, but they will not die. They have 2 important functions:

a) They are guardians of a huge back-catalogue music where I can purchase without the hassle of trying to find them from p2p muppets.

b) They provide reliable quality. As for quality I know about loudness race and all that. In fact that change my musical taste. (Now I only listen to jazz, blues, folk and classical and I enjoy them much more.) Still they offer reliable and good quality compared to p2p (or allofmp3 etc)

Triza

PS The cited article was indeed a rant rather than a balanced cool analysis of the situation.

Who pays $15 - $18 per CD?

CDs in Germany usually cost 15-18 EUR (20-25 USD). :-(

SG

CDs on Ebay are a lot cheaper!

Here, a newly released CD by a local artist, or anything from overseas that isn't entirely mainstream pop rubbish will cost you around NZD $28 which is more than $20 US. That's a lot of money for someone (eg. a student) who plans on buying more than a few CDs a year.

i just read on blabbermouth that trent reznor had an oink account.

I've been in situations where i had to think about the overall model from a literature and music perspective of a creator, and as most of you from a user. There are quite a few parallels between the two. To be honest, i do not think, that the middleman will anymore be like THIS, or like THAT - a modern middleman which is efficient for both, creators and consumers, will instead offer modularized services (no transfer of rights and bullshit!) which can be tailored to the needs of the creators. Thus, i dont think that the future of the middleman will have one or two specific forms, but instead a varied and dynamic form. It is also possible that there wont be a single catch-it-all middleman per project, but instead multiple specialized middleman - i can for example imagine marketing and promotion models which would work totally different than anything people have seen so far.

- Lyx

Did you not read what I wrote at all? And what do you not understand about the difference between taking something away from someone, and unauthorized replication?

The numbers argument is funny. Of course one cannot own a particular number as it is not unique (comparatively). When the number reaches several hundred or thousand digits it becomes unique and, therefore, copyright able (property).

An obvious analogy would be letters (as in alphabet) vs literature (a novel is, after all, just a collection of letters).

All of this is merely the growing pains of the digital age. New problems require new definitions.

The thinly veiled "CD's cost too much money therefore my pirating is justified" argument is silly. Capitalism. Supply and Demand, baby.
Believing something is overpriced does not justify theft. You have a choice: buy it or don't. If enough people do not the supplier will be forced to lower prices or go out of business. Simple economics.

Having said all of that.....

I shamelessly download Gig's of music.
I just happen to be an honest non-delusional thief that does not spew forth lame rationalizations to justify it to myself / others.

Not one single person in this entire thread is justifying piracy.

If you or plnelson think you can prove me wrong, feel free to try.

...but to address your point about supply and demand, when the price of something is too high, less people will be willing to buy it. Record companies should start here instead of pretending that every illegal copy accounts for a lost sale.

An easy solution to this dilemma could be devised tomorrow -- or yesterday, or three years ago, for that matter. Simply require a reasonable flat fee and then allow those who wish to upload/download to their hearts' content. Tracker logs will readily display the numbers of each and every file, thus allowing for a fair and equitable distribution of the money.

Had such a system existed over the past few years, had Torrent sites been allowed to be set up as registered legal entities functioning in the manner of stores (required to report their 'sales' and income), the distributed profits generated from, say, Oink, would have amounted to a significant financial benefit to all concerned.

So why hasn't this been done? It's an inescapable conclusion that the RIAA, BPI, etc. care less about alleged "lost potential sales" than they do over the potential loss of their monopoly distribution status.

Contrary to the absolutist copyright (read: corporatist) screes from the likes of plnelson, I can speak more directly and authoritatively on this particular manner. He wants 'expertise'? Then I will provide it for him. I had at least three of my own releases available at Oink; I did not upload them. One of them, my first record is currently considered to be the 'intellectual property' of a formerly independent label, now owned by a major. Said label never paid, has consistently asserted that they own all rights to this recording, regualrly fails to provide proper (read: any) accounting, refuses to turn over the master tape to which they have no legal document that proves their 'ownership', etc, etc. On top of that, said record has been deleted ever since the major label acquired the company. They have no plans to re-release it, yet they firmly assert their dodgy 'right' to this material. To add insult to injury, they will not even license the record -- a record they have no interest in releasing -- to me, the original artist. But their multi-national attorneys have been kind enough to send me a letter warning me not to attempt to 'distribute by phonographic, electronic or any other means' my own record. This letter is what I received simply because I demanded a full legal accounting of their vague claims to legal ownership.

Had I signed a bad deal, giving my copyrights away, that would be another matter. I did not do that. According to four different copyright attorneys I have consulted, the master tape and the rights to this material are mine. However, the only way for me to assert those rights is to challenge a team of multi-national attorneys and prevail in a court of law. As the major label and their legal team are well aware (and as you've no doubt already surmised), I am not in possession of the astronomical amount of money required to mount such a challenge. Meanwhile, I could conceivably be sued for uploading MY OWN RECORD, had I done that. Fortunately, some unknown person did upload it, and I am grateful, because that was the only way you can get the record, bar finding a used copy somewhere -- and I wouldn't make anything from the sale of a used copy either.

I am not seeking sympathy for what may appear to amount to a sob story. Not at all. On the other hand, if a copyright purist such as plnelson wishes to contribute to my legal defense, I'd be happy to accept. The rub, of course, is that his rhetoric is identical to that of the BPI and RIAA. He invokes the 'artist's rights and protection' as the sentimental clencher to his inflexible law-and-order binary arguments, when he should be (and perhaps even is) well aware that the strongarm tactics borne from the 'copyright' assertion rarely if ever serve the interests of 'the artist'.



Please get off your moral high horse. For whom are you speaking? You speak as if you are a Thatcherite clasroom swot and not an artist. If financial motivation is your utmost concern, being an artist of any sort is not for you. First and foremost, the artist desires that his/her work will be appreciated. Financial compensation is welcome, but hardly a motivating factor. This is not a job, and one does not clock in and out. More to the point, I tell you something: if the major label currently in possession of my first record rereleased it tomorrow, neither I nor the other musicians nor the producer nor the sound engineers would receive a damn thing. But the major label would. Sod them. I'd rather you did not hand over your money to them.

Speaking as someone who HAS seen his own music available at Oink, I can say with certainty that I would MUCH rather see you enjoying 'the fruits of my labours' for free, rather than paying an incompetent and immoral corporation for the 'privilege' of doing so. As for my other records -- which, yes, I unambiguously own outright -- I would much rather someone hears them than not. Judging from my experience and that of other musicians I know, the worst thing was not seeing your record on Oink. Rather, it was seeing it there and noticing that no one downloaded it. Fortunately for me, several people did download my work, and -- one hopes -- it was enjoyed. Now, what do you, plnelson, propose happen to those people at Oink who enjoyed my work? Sue them? Incarcerate them? Please do tell.

well said, pepzhez.

And yet, Pepzhez is not the only one...

So plnelson, Do you get the message? It doesn't matter, others do. Your antiquated position will fade away leading to different model. The current generations will demand no less. Call it a "paradigm shift" or some other buzzword if you will and try to make benefit from it or go the way of the dinosaurs. But be assured that things won't remain the way they are, and threating your customers and fans like criminals will not win their hearts to you...

So be it.

You wouldn't like the outcome of such a system. Such systems do already exist in some countries for "public performances" and similiar stuff - they are just as mucha mafia as the record industry - small artists get screwed in terms of rights and they at best get a few pennies from all the cash which was collected "in their name". Such systems would again just benefit stars and the middleman - and thats why i would reject such a system. Give me an easy, standardized, honest and legal way to pay the artist directly with near 100% profit margin instead - just about 2-3$ per album would benefit the artist multiple times more, than if i buy a CD for 18$. I dont want even more greedy middleman-parasites which perform capital-destruction.

usually artists dont earn much from cd sales unless they sell alot of cds...most of their income come from concerts and merchandise

Personally I like this idea of an ideal state-of-the-art music distribution:

Record companies (or contractors) have something that is similar or identical to private trackers just like OiNK. But you'll have to pay a minimal fee to get access to them, in exchange you get access to the entire catalog of the label in CD quality.

The system should make use of P2P technology, no it must make use of it. For instance just like in private trackers, uploaders are rewarded and leechers are punished.

With a top ratio, you get some benefits like, free merchandise and promo material, "dinner with the stars" or free concert tickets.

With a constant good ratio you get, your access fee paid back.

With an ok ratio, you get the normal stuff, access to the whole catalog, etc...

I don't know if it's wise to punish leechers as they still might simply go to "illegal" trackers instead. But it's not impossible to find a solition for all the fine tuning on a large scale network...

Anyway the point is, that certain P2P communities like OiNK are the thing. That's the technical standard of music distribution today. I'm strongely convinced it is. It's getting more popular each month. And the labels are just silly to not start their own trackers.

Would I join a tracker of a distributor for Sub Pop, Kill Rock Stars, Recommended Records, etc. music? Sure I would! In fact I'm sure that something exactly like this might pop up anytime.

Artists and people who whine about the loss of the "package" (i.e. that ugly plastic box with the ugly error-prone plastic disc in it) should get a life (or a PC) and grow up! When I have the choice between looking at >600dpi artwork on my 21" screen and looking at a tiny 12x12cm piece of halftone printed paper, I choose the digital image without pre-print processing, of course!

(emphasis mine)
So... preferring the real thing, that you can browse through anywhere you want (on the couch, in your bed, in the subway), over sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen, is antisocial and immature? Is preferring books over PDFs antisocial and immature too? I wonder what gran'pa would have to say about that...