Nope, don't think you should steal that either, and for the record you are referring to Satalite TV, and I was a paying customer of Direct TV the entire time. I just knew "some people" that could program your card and open up all the closed channels. And no one said I was not a hypocrit. DD
It is theft, but it is also an extreme overreaction by the RIAA. Look, if anyone knows the costs that go into making a record, its musicians. We don't like the RIAA any more than most fans do. But, we also recognize the need to keep our stuff to ourselves. Many of us spent hundreds if not thousands of hours perfecting our craft and pouring our hearts and souls into something purely for your entertainment. Just because it isn't a physical thing you can pick up doesn't mean it is something you can have for free without my permission. It also doesn't mean the RIAA has the right to exploit both artists and fans by acting like assholes in this manner. What they are doing is trying to scare the crap out of people who have done something that is not nearly as bad as what they themselves have done by raping artists for all these years. I'll just say that you should keep in mind the fact that it isn't the big name artists that are being hurt by downloading... - It is the fringe artists first - the people who make music that is critically acclaimed but not tremendously popular - in other words, the stuff that makes the crap on the radio bearable. If labels are hurt by downloading, the respected artists are the first one's to lose their deals, not Metallica or Brittany Spears. - It is the songwriter and/or producer who doesn't tour and relies heavily on songwriting and publishing royalties directly tied to record sales to make a living. Most songwriters make a modest living. Most make less than $100,000 per year and they are the one's being directly impacted by record sales losses because they don't have merchandising and touring to fall back on. - It is the independent promoter, engineer, tech, etc. that works on records that is hurt because they are paid low wages to make great records. The more sales are hurt by downloading, the less opportunities they get to make music and the less they earn. - Most importantly, it is the young artsits that are hurt. As downloading continues, the industry closes ranks and signs fewer and fewer new artists dramatically limiting our choices as consumers. The result is more bad music and less creativity which is bad for everyone. -- I'm sorry that your family is being hit by this, DM. I sympathize because I know how crappy the RIAA is first hand and I recognize their hard line tactics. As Billy Joel once said of the industry VERY sarcastically, "It ain't the Boy Scouts." It is a business founded by gangsters and theives and still run by many of them, so I have ZERO sympathy for them. But, I also see the other side. I've had friends see direct losses from downloading - people who don't make a lot of money and sometimes have to take second jobs to make ends meet. I've seen how it effects their creativity and I've listened as people have told me that the record industry is getting worse and worse when it comes to stretching out and trying new and interesting artists. It is a tough situation all the way around.
this is the most sound advice i've heard on this topic. surely the cost of ALL the music on the hard drive is less than $10K (or, maybe not...?)
Two other groups I should add that aren't mentioned: the independent distributors and retailers. The consolidation of the industry and the jump in big retailers like Best Buy, Target and Wal Mart have destroyed the independent retail and distribution market. What is left is getting killed by downloading. Keep in mind that local and regional distributors as well as local retailers carry a MUCH wider and more diverse range of music than the chains. They also support local music, something big retailers do not. A Frontline investigation reported that, of the some 3000 titles released every year by the record industry, fewer than 300 are carried by the big chains - Target, Best Buy and Wal Mart - yet those three chains represent 90 percent of all record sales in the United States. More than 2500 records never hit the shelves, which is why the independent retailer and distributor is SO important. Places like Cactus and All Records in Houston bring tremendous variety to the local market and prop up young local artists looking for a shot.
How would they ever know that it is because of downloading that they do not make a lot of money. That implies that without downloading, all the people who downloaded their songs would go and buy their CDs. That is just not what would happen. On the contrary, I think it is more likely that a lot less people would even be aware of them at all, if the possibility to download their songs was not there. They would have had to "take second jobs to make ends meet" one way or another. Also, I don't think having more money improves one's creativity. I know you try to see both sides on this, but the argument I quoted doesn't really hold water. I should also say that I have been dealing with the issue for many years from a legal perspective as well as in a recent consulting project where we interviewed big bosses (with ridiculously luxurious offices which make all their whining look even worse) from the music industry, and they are all arrogant assholes who have no clue, all they try to do is use scare tactics - and the legal ground they are operating on is NOT as strong as they try to make people believe. The music industry has only been whining and suing people for many years now, and then Apple comes along and actually creates something the music industry should have been able to create years ago, if they had not been so greedy, uncreative and short-sighted. End of sermon.
It would be good advice, but they have evidence of the actual downloading (and I assume sharing) activity, so the defense "I just copied my own songs" would not hold water - if they were ever to win a case against the so-called "pirates"...
The music industry is full of it. They cry foul when we share their the music but when they get caught lip singing we can't do anything. Boycott "Live" Concerts!
Dont matter if you just happen to have a cd for every song on that computer. The fact is that you were sharing it. There have been many articles in the news about why people are getting busted. If you dont share, you dont even need CD's, they would not know you had those songs on ur computer. When u share you get screwed.
First, think of the guys that write for other artists. If those record sales go down, they suffer. I'm not talking about artists who go out and make CD's and sell records. I'm talking about the people who write for the artists who go out and make CD's and sell records. That is a HUGE difference. As for having more money improving creativity, it doesn't, but the time and freedom you get from being able to make a living as a musician or songwriter DEFINITELY improves creativity and the craft of music. No matter what you do - sports, music, science, sales - it improves when you have the time to dedicate to it. It is the reason why so many bands leave to go on the road and aren't very good but return DAMN good. They were eating, sleeping and breathing their craft. If you have to spend a big chunk of your time doing something else - particularly something that has little or nothing to do with music - your art will suffer. That is just the reality of any craft.
I found this post interesting because it wasn't an attack on the RIAA, but rather an attack on the copyright laws -- a pretty strong criticism on copyright laws for that matter. I respect your opinions, but it amounted to a few conclusory statements without any support. Maybe you can clarify for me. Which part(s) of copyright law inhibits creativity, invention and progress and how do they inhibit? Also how do you suggest changing the copyright laws to provide you a better balance between the public interest and individual rights? By definition, copyright protects works of authorship, such as writings, music, and works of art that have been tangibly expressed. Without copyrights, the argument is that any work of authorship can be sold or otherwise misused without any protection to the original author. To me, that seems to promote (not inhibit, as you suggest) the development of intellectual property. That is, copyrights give one protection for his/her own work, but do not prevent others from developing their own works of authorship. Individuals are provided their rights to their works of authorship, and the public benefits from innovative new works as a result of those rights. Isn't that what promoting innovation is all about?
I've read the article, and it's an interesting historical account of how industries have resulted from violation of copyright law. And Australia was begun as a penal colony, so? I don't see the article giving any sort of legal justification to song downloading. And music downloading doesn't follow the article by analogy, either, because there's no emerging industry that is resulting here, no job creation or added creativity, like cable television or hollywood provided. Napster-type music downloading is more akin to making xerox copies of bestsellers and selling them cheap or giving them away in front of the book store.
Jeff, Beautiful posts. Unfortunately, those that don't see it firsthand will still run screaming, hands over their ears, pretending that it's not happening. To those of you that do download illegally, justify it however you want. But the simple fact is that two wrongs don't make a right. You think you're "fighting the machine". You're not. Jeff pointed out why. The only people you're hurting are the real artists in all of this. In 10 years, when all we're left with is Clear Channel crap, this will be one of the main reasons.
I have yet to see conclusive proof of this. While sales of CDs, etc., have not grown exponentially, they have also not dropped significantly on an aggregate level in the past few years, at least not nearly as much as the whining of the music industry is trying to make people believe. Plus, slight declines in sales could as well be explained by the fact that the products might simply not be attractive enough at the price they offer it for. Basically, if you look at the actual cost of producing and selling a CD, it's not the artists who keep the lion's share, it's the labels. Many labels operate inefficiently and have a very dumb pricing strategy and blame their bad results on downloading, when downloading is not even the cause of their bad results.
SamCassell, I am not claiming that downloading copyrighted songs without paying is "legal". What I am saying is that it is not the same as stealing ("theft") something physical, which is what the music and movie industry tries to make people believe. Their "moral outrage" and "concern about the poor artists" is purely motivated by their own financial interests, they don't care about the artists at all. Maybe this explains it in a somewhat easier to understand fashion than all the Lessig stuff: http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6450_7-5081098-1.html The RIAA lawsuits clarified once and for all By Eliot Van Buskirk Senior editor, CNET Reviews (September 24, 2003) Dinner tables the country over have become sites for conversations about the RIAA and its clampdown on file sharers. Television sound bites and short newspaper items are making a lot of noise about the lawsuits, but their occasional abridgement and misstatement of the facts have made people more confused than enlightened--and, in some cases, downright paranoid about using a computer to access music. It's time to set the record straight, so I'm going to debunk the most-common myths surrounding the latest round in the RIAA's battle against its customers. Myth No. 1: The RIAA will sue you for downloading music. As I mentioned in a previous column, the RIAA is currently suing only users who share more than 1,000 songs. This doesn't mean that it is legal to download copyrighted music without permission of the copyright owner. It's not (see below). At this time, however, it appears that the RIAA is not targeting people who download copyrighted music. They are going after uploaders, not downloaders, which means that as long as you aren't sharing a significant number of files, the ongoing purge will pass you by. Myth No. 2: Downloading music from the Internet is illegal. Although absolutely untrue, this is perhaps the saddest side effect of the RIAA crackdowns. There are plenty of legal places to get MP3s: Epitonic, iTunes Music Store, BuyMusic, Listen.com Rhapsody, and eMusic all offer free and/or legal downloads from every type of artist imaginable. Even the "illegal" networks have plenty of songs that are perfectly legal to download. Some of these have been designated by the copyright holder as such using the EFF's OAL (Open Audio License), or a Creative Commons license. An interesting side note: in this article from the Oregonian, the first person to be busted for online copyright infringement says that after his bust, "[computers] lost their charm for me...[downloading music] doesn't even occur to me now." He was only the first potential paying online music consumer the labels have alienated; recent media coverage of the current suits are sure to add significantly to that number. Myth No. 3: Downloading copyrighted material without permission is legal. In the interest of fairness, I must point out that downloading copyrighted material without permission is 100 percent illegal. When you download an MP3, you make a copy of that file from a remote location onto your hard drive. Copying the song is the exclusive right of the copyright holder, and doing so without permission is an act of copyright infringement. Myth No. 4: Downloading a song illegally is just like stealing it from a store. This old chestnut has been bandied about quite a bit in the past five years, but that doesn't make it true. CDs are physical things, and copyright is an abstract right. As Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote (somewhat obliquely) in 1985, "[copyright infringement] does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud...The infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not assume physical control over copyright; nor does he wholly deprive its owner of its use." There you have it: Infringing on copyright is materially different from stealing physical CDs, according to the highest court in the land (the "thief" in question was acquitted of theft in the case in question, Dowling v. United States). While not definitive, Blackman's statement shows that there is substantial doubt as to whether copyright infringement should be equated with outright theft. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=473&invol=207 Myth No. 5: Every infringing download represents lost sales. The labels love to recite this statistic in various forms, but anyone with an ounce of common sense can tell you that just because someone was willing to download something for free, it doesn't mean they would have bought the song on an album. Most downloaders grab lots of stuff they would never, in a million years, plunk down their hard-earned money for. Therefore, those downloads do not represent lost sales, no matter what the RIAA's public relations team tells the papers. --------------------- I am arguing against Myth No. 4 and 5. Again, I worked in the Internet business for a subsidiary of a large media company which also owns one of the largest record labels in the world. We tried to create a legal music download solution with them back in 1999, but these guys were still so stuck in their old thinking, there was no way to work with these people. At the same time, they were trying to sue us (a sister company) because a few people were hosting MP3s on our free website service. I also worked in a media law institute where I dealt with this, then as I said later on a consulting project regarding it. A lot of what the music industry says is just spin, and a lot of people fall for it. Incidentally, they also hate Apple and try to fight them, because they know that they cannot keep their lion's share of the revenues as it is now if legal downloading is ever supposed to work (because then pricing would never be remotely attractive). So their strategy is actually to openly fight illegal downloading and not really push legal downloading either.
The Recording Industry Soldiers On Against Illegal Downloading (from the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/17/opinion/17SAT3.html (need to pay to get the article) By VERLYN KLINKENBORG In the past few weeks there have been some mixed developments in the recording industry's battle against illegal file sharing. On the legal front, the industry began a new round of international lawsuits against foreign file sharers. A misguided new bill authorizing civil charges in file-sharing cases is making its way through the Senate, and a bill criminalizing copyright violations over peer-to-peer networks has been passed out of committee in the House. The Justice Department has established an Intellectual Property Task Force to look at ways to crack down on violations. Meanwhile, a Canadian judge has refused to force Internet providers to give up the addresses of file sharers. His ruling effectively makes the sharing of music files legal in Canada. But this isn't just a legal battle, of course. It's a battle of information and ideas. A new book from Lawrence Lessig called "Free Culture" makes a forceful, cogent defense of many forms of file sharing. And — perhaps worst of all from the industry's perspective — a new academic study prepared by professors at Harvard and the University of North Carolina concludes, "Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero." This directly counters recording industry claims that place nearly all the blame for declining CD sales on illegal file sharing. Without condoning the theft of intellectual property or the violation of copyright, it's still possible to find a great deal of common sense in Mr. Lessig's arguments in favor of balancing "the protection of the law against the strong public interest that innovation continue." As it stands, the position of the recording industry and its ally, the movie industry, is simply to shut down innovation. That is the clear purpose of the file-sharing bills pending in Congress. That has been the entertainment industry's reaction to all new distribution technologies since Thomas Edison. But the recording industry's interests are not synonymous with the public interest. The industry assumes that the main reason people engage in file sharing is simply to get free music. For many people, certainly, that is its main appeal. But file sharing — like the new generation of legal music-downloading services, including Apple's wildly successful iTunes Music Store — is also a direct response to a number of unpleasant realities in the music business. As long as the recording industry lives and dies by the blockbuster, music listeners will be looking for ways to see deeper into the music catalog. For some listeners, file sharing has become a way to experiment — to try out new music without first shelling out $16 or $17 for a CD. There was a time when radio gave listeners a chance to hear lots of new music. Thanks to conglomerates like Clear Channel, those days are dead. The recording industry needs to catch up to music lovers, and soon. Punitive tactics protect the industry's legal rights, but by themselves do not address its deeper problems. Some recording companies have realized this and begun to use file-sharing data, which offers an immediate reading on consumer interest, to hone their marketing. One or two companies have even begun to post paid versions of songs on file-swapping networks simply for exposure. The industry's tactics in the battle against file sharing look to many people — including many artists — less like an effort to protect copyright and more like an attempt to continue the industry's control over the distribution of music. The resources of the industry could be better spent if, as the authors of that recent study suggest, it is waging war against a financially negligible problem.
interesting take Jackie. I tend not to buy into the whole 'it's about the writer and small artist' bit. Most downloads are likely Britney Spears, Eminem and U2. Not the small guy. And the Walmart/Bestbuy Clearchannel bit will certainly have a greater impact on the ability for emerging artists to have their work distributed. Yet the RIAA doesn't harp on this, now does it! But...it is stealing, no? Maybe not physical theft...but using their work without their permission. And if someone has greater than 1000 files being shared, it must have SOME impact on sales. Nobody would buy ALL the songs they download, but certainly they would download a few that they otherwise would have purchased. Still find it very odd that they can't go after the ones who make (and profit) by creating the means to share (Kazza, etc) (spare me the legal discussion on this -- just seems to make more sense than going after the Donny's mom!) Hard to feel sorry for the RIAA. They make tow truck drivers appear saintly. Donny: was your relative sharing more than 1000 songs???
