Yea, because people are stealing!! Take away the stealing and the business model is back to status quo. In fact, if illegal file sharing didn't exist, the record companies would be making a KILLING. How much easier is it to hop on itunes or amazon and instantly download a song then to go stand in line at best buy. Give me a break dude.
But did you/do you feel the same way about cassette copies of albums? And if not, isn't it really the scale of the theft that bothers you, and not any individual act of theft?
i'm not passing judgment on people who copy music, i do it myself. however, that doesn't mean its legal or even justifiable. this is pretty simple. someone produces art and hasn't given me permission to copy it. if i take what is not mine and what the artist hasn't authorized me to take, that is stealing. if you get caught, you gotta pay the price. thats it.
Why didn't you answer any of the question I asked?
You asked one question and it was stupid. "Would you be willing to bet that the individual artists aren't receiving any of the money from these lawsuits?" All of the money that has been received by the RIAA has surely gone to their lawyers...and then some. But if you think that is the issue than you are missing the whole point. This is about deterrence. We download music because the fear of getting caught is minimal. Its risk v. reward. The reward of getting free music outweighs the risk right now by a mile. The RIAA is trying to change that. Publicity for this lawsuit might help.
This isn't about stealing. It's about a business model that is outdated and close to being done.
Yea, because people are stealing!! Take away the stealing and the business model is back to status quo. In fact, if illegal file sharing didn't exist, the record companies would be making a KILLING. How much easier is it to hop on itunes or amazon and instantly download a song then to go stand in line at best buy. Give me a break dude.
Your point is moot since it's only stealing or illegal in your country.
I noticed you said the record companies would be making a killing instead of the artist. How true indeed.
Dude, in business. You don't cry about it and sue when someone comes along and with say the use of technology puts you out of the game.
if illegal file sharing didn't exist
Well, it does. And suing everyone and their mama ain't gonna change that.
Yea, because people are stealing!! Take away the stealing and the business model is back to status quo. In fact, if illegal file sharing didn't exist, the record companies would be making a KILLING. How much easier is it to hop on itunes or amazon and instantly download a song then to go stand in line at best buy. Give me a break dude.
But did you/do you feel the same way about cassette copies of albums? And if not, isn't it really the scale of the theft that bothers you, and not any individual act of theft?
This analogy is not a good one.....
Back in the seventies there were "bootleg" tape companies that MASS PRODUCED copies of tapes and distributed them. These companies/people were sought after, arrested and shut down.
Making one or two copies of a cassette was never a worry.
But the internet allows ANYONE to become instant distributors to a market of millions of people....this is the real issue.
I hear what you're saying, I just wanted to see where keithvanhorn stood on individual use (downloading), which it looks like he did.
But did you/do you feel the same way about cassette copies of albums? And if not, isn't it really the scale of the theft that bothers you, and not any individual act of theft?
i'm not passing judgment on people who copy music, i do it myself. however, that doesn't mean its legal or even justifiable. this is pretty simple. someone produces art and hasn't given me permission to copy it. if i take what is not mine and what the artist hasn't authorized me to take, that is stealing. if you get caught, you gotta pay the price. thats it.
Right, I agree. When my friend made me a tape copy of my first Talking Heads album in elementary school, I had some awareness that we were doing something illegal, and felt a little bad that I didn't have $6.99 to put in David Byrne's pocket. For real. That said, if I hadn't got that copy, I never would have gone on to purchase 5 or 6 legal Talking Heads LPs as my allowance allowed over the next few years.
I think most everyone here agrees that downloading = stealing, but question the severity of the ruling against this woman. She's not exactly bootlegging, right? -- she didn't profit off someone else's music. This is something else, something new, and if it's going to be dealt with legally, there needs to be some new way. She basically got hit with a fine appropriate for a shady corporation pressing illegal bootlegs of (wack, washed-up, and filthy rich) major-label artists, and that strikes me as fucked.
It's a scare tactic intended to make anyone think twice about "sharing music" on ANY scale (even that Talking Heads CD-R comp I might burn for my nephew in the hopes of making him a lifelong fan) -- when we all seem to agree that small-scale sharing in the long run benefits the musicians, if not the labels.
Dor......how do you feel about computer software manufacturers going after big businesses who copy their product and use it for free??
I'm not 100% on free for everyone. I find anything where someone profits from it almost always wrong. Personal use in most instances is fine with me.
thank god you don't make the laws. btw, unless you live in Never Never Land, i can almost guarantee there are laws against file sharing, i.e., stealing. just because a government is not enforcing a law, doesn't mean that law doesn't exist. there are laws in china and russia for copyright infringement.
recent lawsuits (past 5 years) that have been mentioned in the press have greatly deterred me from dl'ing as much as i used to. which was dl'ing single songs of interest to me, not full albums. but in no way am i trying to justify my dl'ing or promote it. it just got to the point where it really wasn't worth the risk.
btw, unless you live in Never Never Land, i can almost guarantee there are laws against file sharing, i.e., stealing. just because a government is not enforcing a law, doesn't mean that law doesn't exist. there are laws in china and russia for copyright infringement.
This was the best I could find in 1 minute.
Canada has a relatively unique provision in the Copyright Act, at s. 80, which provides:
80. (1) Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of (a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording, (b) a performer's performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or(br> (c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer's performance of a musical work, is embodied
onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer's performance or the sound recording.
that law doesn't protect file SHARING, and it was not written with downloading in mind or it would have referenced internet downloading specifically. i didn't read the full article but i am somewhat familiar with the circumstances, and at best, you have 1 or 2 judges interpreting a law to say that it protects downloading. i wouldn't hold your breath in expecting that to remain the law though. in fact, i'd expect the legislature to write a new law, which imposes penalties for downloading as well as file sharing. at least they should do that if they want to be equitable.
Plus, I find this all pretty funny coming from a lawyer who every time he logs into the strut is technically stealing.
I'm guessing you don't have the rights from eastsideboxing.com to steal their bandwidth and use that picture in ur avatar correct? Do they even own the rights to that picture???
Plus, I find this all pretty funny coming from a lawyer who every time he logs into the strut is technically stealing.
I'm guessing you don't have the rights from eastsideboxing.com to steal their bandwidth and use that picture in ur avatar correct? Do they even own the rights to that picture???
You sir are breaking the law...
You're right
And he's admitted as much.
And if he is tried and convicted based on existing laws I'm sure he'd plead guilty and take the lesser of fines.
The thing is that study after study has shown that downloading has very, very little impact on declining album sales. RIAA is chasing after a red herring and making the rest of us pay for their crusade.
C'mon, now--the only thing such studies tell us is that their methodology was somehow fundamentally flawed.
Young people don't pay for music anymore. It's over. I don't know how anyone could continue to deny that.
Faux (and Keith by extension):
I'm really not trying to browbeat people over this. I don't think my perspective is all that contrarian though I also know plenty of people would argue otherwise.
Here's my personal and professional observations:
With the exception of 2002 and 2005, years where I wasn't teaching, I've been around "young people" continually since the mid 1990s. More to the point, I'm around the very young people who are typically presumed to be the demographic that is not buying CDs anymore and instead, getting their music through illegal filesharing. Between my experiences at UC Berkeley and now, Cal State Long Beach, it's my observation (though not empirically based) that these young people are less technologically capable and invested in downloading music than is typically presumed.
Does it happen? Absolutely.
But how much of that demographic is it? I don't think this is a spurious question. In my experience, a stunningly large number of young people have a hard enough time figuring out the basics of word processing and basic web site navigation. That, to me, is not encouraging to the assumption that they have an interest in pursuing filesharing in terms of figuring out what programs to use, how to download, how to upload, etc. There's a small percentage of my students who could probably redesign my websites, balance my checkbook and translate my syllabus into 30 languages online in about the time it will take me to finish this post. But again, that's a small % of really technically capable people. For the rest, they're content with relatively basic operations: checking email, updating their myspace page, etc. And even among those, fewer of them are even that Web 2.0 savvy even though it's touted as the new norm in the age of youtube, facebook, etc.
At the end of the day, given the choice between figuring out how to find 50 Cent's (or Kenny Chesney's) CDs online (illegally) vs. just plunking down the money to buy it from a store or iTunes, my feeling - right or wrong - is that they'll go with the painless option.
I'll do this though - when I have class next Tuesday, I'll just poll the roughly 100 students I have, just to get a sense of where they're at. And if I'm wrong about my assumptions, great.
Professionally speaking, what studies I have seen all say similar things: the actual drop in sales has far, far outpaced the growth of filesharing, at least at the beginning of the decade. In other words, even in the worst case scenario, where you presume every filesharing incident = one loss of a sale, that alone isn't sufficient, at all, to explain why album sales have plummeted.
RIAA (and others) might be correct if they argue that filesharing has an impact. But the DEGREE of that impact makes a rather big difference here in terms of justifying their current strategy. The panic isn't over filesharing - it's over the overall losses...and so they're looking for causes and finding scapegoats.
i'm not at all computer savvy when it comes to the network/modem/internet connection stuff. but can someone explain to me if i have this correct. they track/monitor you based on the IP address that you were attached to at the time you dl'd a specific form of media?
for instance if you were mooching off of someone else's connection (via wifi, etc) the person owning that IP address would be confronted and "caught" for your actions. no?
because i've read stories of little old ladies who have been notified by law enforcement officials for downloading rap music that they had no idea what the officers were talking about.
Seriously, are y'all glad the RIAA got 20% of a millie off a single mom? Fuck major labels. I'd rather download their bullshit albums and then give Rockadelic Records fifteen bucks on principle.
At the end of the day, given the choice between figuring out how to find 50 Cent's (or Kenny Chesney's) CDs online (illegally) vs. just plunking down the money to buy it from a store or iTunes, my feeling - right or wrong - is that they'll go with the painless option.
hasn't your feeling been proven wrong by the enormous decline in record sales...that just so happens to be coinciding perfectly with the expansion of the internet?
if illegal file sharing is not responsible for the decline in music sales, what is?
btw, i am interested to see how that poll turns out. my guess is that at least 50% of your students will have illegally downloaded music in the past month.
i'm not passing judgment on people who copy music, i do it myself.
what is your point? i haven't once criticized anyone for downloading music. is it illegal and wrong to steal someone's art? i think it is. am i a hypocrite? no. i never said it wasn't wrong.
this isn't even a debate about the moral issues, but the legal ones. artists should be protected....from people like me!
i'm not at all computer savvy when it comes to the network/modem/internet connection stuff. but can someone explain to me if i have this correct. they track/monitor you based on the IP address that you were attached to at the time you dl'd a specific form of media?
for instance if you were mooching off of someone else's connection (via wifi, etc) the person owning that IP address would be confronted and "caught" for your actions. no?
because i've read stories of little old ladies who have been notified by law enforcement officials for downloading rap music that they had no idea what the officers were talking about.
Well, going by the case the women just loss. You can do two things right off the bat.
Don't make your name something that can be tracked back to you. She was "tereastarr@KaZaA" on kazaa. They were able to prove she uses that ID (Not just on Kazaa).
Also. She was sharing. I might be totally wrong here. Let the lawyers on the board chime in. In this particular case. If she didn't share anything, she probably would not have been sued.
Some of you are way off base. Sharing music with your friends is not stealing or immoral. What the RIAA is doing is immoral. Many of you have no moral center.
To say the jury's ruling is fair because she was stealing and thus it is just and fair punishment. And then to turn around and say that you do the same thing just because you know you wont get caught shows the deep depravity of your soul. OK, maybe that is a little over the top. I am sure you are not depraved, just a little hypacritical.
But lets be real here. No music was stolen. The artist still has full possession of their music. Nor was a product stolen. She did not shoplift a cd, or use a bad credit card on itunes. Someone put up a file on the Internet to share the music with others.
No different than playing a record for a friend, driving around with your soundsystem blaring or making a tape to play at a party.
Young people are buying a stupid lot of music. How else do explain this:
"Soulja Boy begins his second straight and fourth non-consecutive week atop the Billboard Hot 100 with "Crank That (Soulja Boy)," but he's facing stiff competition from a former pop princess. As reported yesterday, Britney Spears rockets 68-3 on the chart with "Gimme More" after selling 179,000 downloads, her first top 10 hit since "Toxic" in March 2004."
I guess baby boomers are sending Soulja Boy and Britney Spears to the top of the chart while young folks are downloading Bruce Springsteen and Rolling Stones which explains their declining sales.
MAYBE IF A MAJOR LABEL'S MARGINS WERE LESS THAN 7500% I'D GIVE A FUCK.
HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO MAKE A CD? ABOUT $1.05 I RECKON.
Come on man, I can't tell whether you are joking but surely you know theres more to it than that if you are not.
UK e.g copy & paste
The money that the label receives is dictated by the dealer price. The dealer price is the price the store pays for the CD. Here are some approximate guides to the relationship between dealer price and retail price. Please note that these are by no means definitive, and the retailer often dictates the price. A dealer price of ??5.90 would retail for ??8.99 A dealer price of ??7.99 would retail for ??12.99 A dealer price of ??8.89 would retail for ??13.99 In many cases the dealer price is discounted to attain a lower retail price. For each CD sold the label has to pay the distributor 20% of the dealer price. In the case of the chains they also get a 15% file discount, which is also deducted from the money the label earns. The remainder is then passed onto the label.
i'm not passing judgment on people who copy music, i do it myself.
what is your point? i haven't once criticized anyone for downloading music. is it illegal and wrong to steal someone's art? i think it is. am i a hypocrite? no. i never said it wasn't wrong.
this isn't even a debate about the moral issues, but the legal ones. artists should be protected....from people like me!
This is your moral argument? That the law is good because it protects artists form moral non-hypocritical people like you.
if illegal file sharing is not responsible for the decline in music sales, what is?
Soulja Boy and Britney Spears?
And just to add, it's not like there's one silver bullet answer here.
I don't think declining disposable income is the explanation - I do think the CHOICES being made on how to dispose of that income are relevant.
It's interesting but one of the arguments made about an era of digital music is that music has moved from being a primary cultural force to a background one. The argument goes: we're surrounded by music like never before...but in a sense, one reaction to that is simply to move it to the background. Call it an aural wallpaper.
To put it another way: we take it for granted. (We not being Strutters though)
That attitude actually helps to explain both the growth in file-sharing AND declining music sales. So, in other words, increases in file-sharing and declines in music sales are both products of the same set of causes - a change in the relationship between consumers and musical content.
Mark Twain's plans to compete with copyright "pirates" (in 1906)
By Ken Fisher | Published: September 26, 2007 - 08:26PM CT Mark Twain was a brilliant author, philosopher, and humorist, but he was also a man made quite nervous by copyright. Copyright didn't bother him in principle, of course. It benefited him greatly as one of the leading writers of his day. What bothered him about copyright was the fact that it would eventually expire, leaving his heirs without a way to make an easy buck. Twain didn't want perpetual copyright, only something that would cover his children's lives. He noted on more than one occasion that the grandkids should fend for themselves, but for Twain and his daughters, he sought to combat "the pirates."
Twain has been criticized for his pro-author views on copyright, which oscillated throughout his career between degrees of hatred for publishers. How he responded to the impending expiration of his copyrights is, I argue, quite genius. Twain concocted a scheme whereby he would augment his existing copyrighted works on the eve of their entry into the public domain in order to create a new, copyrighted work. The original work would pass into the public domain, but Twain reasoned that the newer, augmented works would outsell public domain materials if they offered something extra. In short, he speculated about trying to create value from his older works that would be copyrightable. Related Stories
As this 1906 New York Times article notes (which I found catching up on Boing Boing), Twain "looks upon the copyright law as pure robbery." His objection was simple: he knew that his works would likely continue to be popular long after their (then) 42 years of copyright protection expired. Maybe this wouldn't have bothered Twain much were it not for the fact that he was convinced that public domain works were nothing more than free source materials for publishers to pick up, print, and make money on (without paying an author). Twain feared that publishers would continue to print his works without paying him, and thus they'd continue to rake in the dough while his heirs got none. And, as Twain once noted, while authors die, "publishers" don't. For their efforts, Twain called them "pirates," for they did as true pirates do: "take" things that aren't "theirs" and profit from it.
Twain's solution would have been ridiculous in actual practice. He imagined printing portions of his (then unpublished) autobiography intermixed with his older works, in new binding. The result would be a copy of, e.g., Tom Sawyer that also had the introduction to Twain's life printed on the bottom half of each page. As the old Times article points out, the idea was to tie moments in Twain's autobiography to scenes in his works. To be sure, it's a very creative approach to creating a "new work." It doesn't prevent the original from passing into the public domain, but the author is free to try and create competing works for his benefit.
Twain was no hero of copyright, having in his later years become a staunch advocate of extending copyright against the "pirates." Twain so distrusted the publishers that he even said that such "pirates" were the true beneficiaries of the copyright law, since the law eventually delivered to them via the hand of the government all the world's literary treasures, which they could print without paying the author or heirs.
In any case, like so many things Twain, the story brought a smile to my face as I thought about how ingenious the man was in the face of a challenge, even something like copyright terms that he found unfavorable. While he stumped for copyright extensions (which eventually did come, obviating the need for his schemes), Twain was at least on to one important point: you can and must compete with "free." In Twain's situation, "free" was the threat of publishers who could use his works without paying him. Today "free" takes on a new level of meaning, since so many copyrighted works can be shared without an intervening publisher. Yet the point still stands: Twain understood how the value of copyrighted works could change over time, and he imagined a scenario in which he would creatively try to enliven old works to renew their commercial aspects to compete against works that would not benefit him commercially. Much has changed since 1906, but not the need for intelligent vigilance or business ingenuity.
Yea, because people are stealing!! Take away the stealing and the business model is back to status quo. In fact, if illegal file sharing didn't exist, the record companies would be making a KILLING. How much easier is it to hop on itunes or amazon and instantly download a song then to go stand in line at best buy. Give me a break dude.
But the internet allows ANYONE to become instant distributors to a market of millions of people....this is the real issue.
but the old school cassette dudes were making money off of it...downlaoding and uploading doesnt provide any monetary gain for the "criminal"...if someone "buys" a boot cassette, then they have proved they were in the market for said music and purchased it, but downlaoding something doesnt mean you actually would have bought the thing in the first place if a downloaded option wasnt available...how can the RIAA prove that this file sharing is hurting business? At least with pirates and bootlegs there is an actual, tangible product exchanging hands for $, you can derive a number from it...but not so with downloading...how many downloads are just, "I wanted to see what it sounded like, I didnt like it and I deleted it"?...a lot I bet, those people had no intention of spending $20 to find out, so where is the lost revenue?
I think the burden of proof lies on the music industry to prove that each download, on a song by song, album by album basis, hurt sales of each particular release...not just a blanket suit for all of musicdom...
Comments
i'm not passing judgment on people who copy music, i do it myself. however, that doesn't mean its legal or even justifiable. this is pretty simple. someone produces art and hasn't given me permission to copy it. if i take what is not mine and what the artist hasn't authorized me to take, that is stealing. if you get caught, you gotta pay the price. thats it.
Your point is moot since it's only stealing or illegal in your country.
I noticed you said the record companies would be making a killing instead of the artist. How true indeed.
Dude, in business. You don't cry about it and sue when someone comes along and with say the use of technology puts you out of the game.
Well, it does. And suing everyone and their mama ain't gonna change that.
I hear what you're saying, I just wanted to see where keithvanhorn stood on individual use (downloading), which it looks like he did.
I'm not 100% on free for everyone. I find anything where someone profits from it almost always wrong.
Personal use in most instances is fine with me.
Right, I agree. When my friend made me a tape copy of my first Talking Heads album in elementary school, I had some awareness that we were doing something illegal, and felt a little bad that I didn't have $6.99 to put in David Byrne's pocket. For real. That said, if I hadn't got that copy, I never would have gone on to purchase 5 or 6 legal Talking Heads LPs as my allowance allowed over the next few years.
I think most everyone here agrees that downloading = stealing, but question the severity of the ruling against this woman. She's not exactly bootlegging, right? -- she didn't profit off someone else's music. This is something else, something new, and if it's going to be dealt with legally, there needs to be some new way. She basically got hit with a fine appropriate for a shady corporation pressing illegal bootlegs of (wack, washed-up, and filthy rich) major-label artists, and that strikes me as fucked.
It's a scare tactic intended to make anyone think twice about "sharing music" on ANY scale (even that Talking Heads CD-R comp I might burn for my nephew in the hopes of making him a lifelong fan) -- when we all seem to agree that small-scale sharing in the long run benefits the musicians, if not the labels.
thank god you don't make the laws. btw, unless you live in Never Never Land, i can almost guarantee there are laws against file sharing, i.e., stealing. just because a government is not enforcing a law, doesn't mean that law doesn't exist. there are laws in china and russia for copyright infringement.
This was the best I could find in 1 minute.
Canada has a relatively unique provision in the Copyright Act, at s. 80, which provides:
80. (1) Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of
(a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,
(b) a performer's performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or(br> (c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer's performance of a musical work, is embodied
onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer's performance or the sound recording.
Also, you could check out these.
http://www.news.com/2100-1027_3-5182641.html
http://www.news.com/Canada-deems-P2P-downloading-legal/2100-1025_3-5121479.html
And thank god you don't make the laws. You'd have it so it would be illegal to listen to a song or sing the lyrics without paying for the right.
Those laws already exist......everytime a jukebox/strip club/live band plays a published song they have to pay a fee by law.
I'm guessing you don't have the rights from eastsideboxing.com to steal their bandwidth and use that picture in ur avatar correct? Do they even own the rights to that picture???
You sir are breaking the law...
You're right
And he's admitted as much.
And if he is tried and convicted based on existing laws I'm sure he'd plead guilty and take the lesser of fines.
Faux (and Keith by extension):
I'm really not trying to browbeat people over this. I don't think my perspective is all that contrarian though I also know plenty of people would argue otherwise.
Here's my personal and professional observations:
With the exception of 2002 and 2005, years where I wasn't teaching, I've been around "young people" continually since the mid 1990s. More to the point, I'm around the very young people who are typically presumed to be the demographic that is not buying CDs anymore and instead, getting their music through illegal filesharing. Between my experiences at UC Berkeley and now, Cal State Long Beach, it's my observation (though not empirically based) that these young people are less technologically capable and invested in downloading music than is typically presumed.
Does it happen? Absolutely.
But how much of that demographic is it? I don't think this is a spurious question. In my experience, a stunningly large number of young people have a hard enough time figuring out the basics of word processing and basic web site navigation. That, to me, is not encouraging to the assumption that they have an interest in pursuing filesharing in terms of figuring out what programs to use, how to download, how to upload, etc. There's a small percentage of my students who could probably redesign my websites, balance my checkbook and translate my syllabus into 30 languages online in about the time it will take me to finish this post. But again, that's a small % of really technically capable people. For the rest, they're content with relatively basic operations: checking email, updating their myspace page, etc. And even among those, fewer of them are even that Web 2.0 savvy even though it's touted as the new norm in the age of youtube, facebook, etc.
At the end of the day, given the choice between figuring out how to find 50 Cent's (or Kenny Chesney's) CDs online (illegally) vs. just plunking down the money to buy it from a store or iTunes, my feeling - right or wrong - is that they'll go with the painless option.
I'll do this though - when I have class next Tuesday, I'll just poll the roughly 100 students I have, just to get a sense of where they're at. And if I'm wrong about my assumptions, great.
Professionally speaking, what studies I have seen all say similar things: the actual drop in sales has far, far outpaced the growth of filesharing, at least at the beginning of the decade. In other words, even in the worst case scenario, where you presume every filesharing incident = one loss of a sale, that alone isn't sufficient, at all, to explain why album sales have plummeted.
RIAA (and others) might be correct if they argue that filesharing has an impact. But the DEGREE of that impact makes a rather big difference here in terms of justifying their current strategy. The panic isn't over filesharing - it's over the overall losses...and so they're looking for causes and finding scapegoats.
for instance if you were mooching off of someone else's connection (via wifi, etc) the person owning that IP address would be confronted and "caught" for your actions. no?
because i've read stories of little old ladies who have been notified by law enforcement officials for downloading rap music that they had no idea what the officers were talking about.
Seriously, are y'all glad the RIAA got 20% of a millie off a single mom? Fuck major labels. I'd rather download their bullshit albums and then give Rockadelic Records fifteen bucks on principle.
HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO MAKE A CD? ABOUT $1.05 I RECKON.
hasn't your feeling been proven wrong by the enormous decline in record sales...that just so happens to be coinciding perfectly with the expansion of the internet?
if illegal file sharing is not responsible for the decline in music sales, what is?
btw, i am interested to see how that poll turns out. my guess is that at least 50% of your students will have illegally downloaded music in the past month.
what is your point? i haven't once criticized anyone for downloading music. is it illegal and wrong to steal someone's art? i think it is. am i a hypocrite? no. i never said it wasn't wrong.
this isn't even a debate about the moral issues, but the legal ones. artists should be protected....from people like me!
Well, going by the case the women just loss. You can do two things right off the bat.
Don't make your name something that can be tracked back to you. She was "tereastarr@KaZaA" on kazaa. They were able to prove she uses that ID (Not just on Kazaa).
Also. She was sharing. I might be totally wrong here. Let the lawyers on the board chime in. In this particular case. If she didn't share anything, she probably would not have been sued.
To say the jury's ruling is fair because she was stealing and thus it is just and fair punishment. And then to turn around and say that you do the same thing just because you know you wont get caught shows the deep depravity of your soul. OK, maybe that is a little over the top. I am sure you are not depraved, just a little hypacritical.
But lets be real here. No music was stolen. The artist still has full possession of their music. Nor was a product stolen. She did not shoplift a cd, or use a bad credit card on itunes. Someone put up a file on the Internet to share the music with others.
No different than playing a record for a friend, driving around with your soundsystem blaring or making a tape to play at a party.
Young people are buying a stupid lot of music. How else do explain this:
"Soulja Boy begins his second straight and fourth non-consecutive week atop the Billboard Hot 100 with "Crank That (Soulja Boy)," but he's facing stiff competition from a former pop princess. As reported yesterday, Britney Spears rockets 68-3 on the chart with "Gimme More" after selling 179,000 downloads, her first top 10 hit since "Toxic" in March 2004."
I guess baby boomers are sending Soulja Boy and Britney Spears to the top of the chart while young folks are downloading Bruce Springsteen and Rolling Stones which explains their declining sales.
Soulja Boy and Britney Spears?
Come on man, I can't tell whether you are joking but surely you know theres more to it than that if you are not.
UK e.g copy & paste
The money that the label receives is dictated by the dealer price. The
dealer price is the price the store pays for the CD.
Here are some approximate guides to the relationship between dealer price
and retail price. Please note that these are by no means definitive, and the
retailer often dictates the price.
A dealer price of ??5.90 would retail for ??8.99
A dealer price of ??7.99 would retail for ??12.99
A dealer price of ??8.89 would retail for ??13.99
In many cases the dealer price is discounted to attain a lower retail price.
For each CD sold the label has to pay the distributor 20% of the dealer
price. In the case of the chains they also get a 15% file discount, which is
also deducted from the money the label earns. The remainder is then passed
onto the label.
This is your moral argument? That the law is good because it protects artists form moral non-hypocritical people like you.
And just to add, it's not like there's one silver bullet answer here.
I don't think declining disposable income is the explanation - I do think the CHOICES being made on how to dispose of that income are relevant.
It's interesting but one of the arguments made about an era of digital music is that music has moved from being a primary cultural force to a background one. The argument goes: we're surrounded by music like never before...but in a sense, one reaction to that is simply to move it to the background. Call it an aural wallpaper.
To put it another way: we take it for granted. (We not being Strutters though)
That attitude actually helps to explain both the growth in file-sharing AND declining music sales. So, in other words, increases in file-sharing and declines in music sales are both products of the same set of causes - a change in the relationship between consumers and musical content.
I leave you with this. Which I found interesting.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/200...ht-in-1906.html
Mark Twain's plans to compete with copyright "pirates" (in 1906)
By Ken Fisher | Published: September 26, 2007 - 08:26PM CT
Mark Twain was a brilliant author, philosopher, and humorist, but he was also a man made quite nervous by copyright. Copyright didn't bother him in principle, of course. It benefited him greatly as one of the leading writers of his day. What bothered him about copyright was the fact that it would eventually expire, leaving his heirs without a way to make an easy buck. Twain didn't want perpetual copyright, only something that would cover his children's lives. He noted on more than one occasion that the grandkids should fend for themselves, but for Twain and his daughters, he sought to combat "the pirates."
Twain has been criticized for his pro-author views on copyright, which oscillated throughout his career between degrees of hatred for publishers. How he responded to the impending expiration of his copyrights is, I argue, quite genius. Twain concocted a scheme whereby he would augment his existing copyrighted works on the eve of their entry into the public domain in order to create a new, copyrighted work. The original work would pass into the public domain, but Twain reasoned that the newer, augmented works would outsell public domain materials if they offered something extra. In short, he speculated about trying to create value from his older works that would be copyrightable.
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As this 1906 New York Times article notes (which I found catching up on Boing Boing), Twain "looks upon the copyright law as pure robbery." His objection was simple: he knew that his works would likely continue to be popular long after their (then) 42 years of copyright protection expired. Maybe this wouldn't have bothered Twain much were it not for the fact that he was convinced that public domain works were nothing more than free source materials for publishers to pick up, print, and make money on (without paying an author). Twain feared that publishers would continue to print his works without paying him, and thus they'd continue to rake in the dough while his heirs got none. And, as Twain once noted, while authors die, "publishers" don't. For their efforts, Twain called them "pirates," for they did as true pirates do: "take" things that aren't "theirs" and profit from it.
Twain's solution would have been ridiculous in actual practice. He imagined printing portions of his (then unpublished) autobiography intermixed with his older works, in new binding. The result would be a copy of, e.g., Tom Sawyer that also had the introduction to Twain's life printed on the bottom half of each page. As the old Times article points out, the idea was to tie moments in Twain's autobiography to scenes in his works. To be sure, it's a very creative approach to creating a "new work." It doesn't prevent the original from passing into the public domain, but the author is free to try and create competing works for his benefit.
Twain was no hero of copyright, having in his later years become a staunch advocate of extending copyright against the "pirates." Twain so distrusted the publishers that he even said that such "pirates" were the true beneficiaries of the copyright law, since the law eventually delivered to them via the hand of the government all the world's literary treasures, which they could print without paying the author or heirs.
In any case, like so many things Twain, the story brought a smile to my face as I thought about how ingenious the man was in the face of a challenge, even something like copyright terms that he found unfavorable. While he stumped for copyright extensions (which eventually did come, obviating the need for his schemes), Twain was at least on to one important point: you can and must compete with "free." In Twain's situation, "free" was the threat of publishers who could use his works without paying him. Today "free" takes on a new level of meaning, since so many copyrighted works can be shared without an intervening publisher. Yet the point still stands: Twain understood how the value of copyrighted works could change over time, and he imagined a scenario in which he would creatively try to enliven old works to renew their commercial aspects to compete against works that would not benefit him commercially. Much has changed since 1906, but not the need for intelligent vigilance or business ingenuity.
but the old school cassette dudes were making money off of it...downlaoding and uploading doesnt provide any monetary gain for the "criminal"...if someone "buys" a boot cassette, then they have proved they were in the market for said music and purchased it, but downlaoding something doesnt mean you actually would have bought the thing in the first place if a downloaded option wasnt available...how can the RIAA prove that this file sharing is hurting business? At least with pirates and bootlegs there is an actual, tangible product exchanging hands for $, you can derive a number from it...but not so with downloading...how many downloads are just, "I wanted to see what it sounded like, I didnt like it and I deleted it"?...a lot I bet, those people had no intention of spending $20 to find out, so where is the lost revenue?
I think the burden of proof lies on the music industry to prove that each download, on a song by song, album by album basis, hurt sales of each particular release...not just a blanket suit for all of musicdom...
He's not talking about artist. He's talking about copyright holders.