This is what I suspected.
I wonder why you think this allows you to draw the conclusion you do. Do you really think that when you ask people, “Hey, did you first hear our stuff by stealing it” that they’re going to say, “Yup, that’s right”? If you truly have to click on a “where did you hear about?” box, then I strongly suspect that at least some of the folks who do so just make something up.
So you’re saying that file sharing did this? I don’t believe it for one moment. If people were interested in the music and heard it they would have purchased it. Who is this artists anyway?
The word “theft” doesn’t appear in 17 U.S.C., the federal code governing copyright.
BTW, how does one find out if an old song is still under copyright?
I have no need to download songs, but I like a lot of old stuff like classic Motown, 50’s/60’s rock etc. Cheap bargain bin stuff these days. Does copyright run out on songs? Is there a simple way to find out online?
Case #1 - A man goes to the library and checks out all the CDs of his favorite band. He renews them every two weeks for the rest of his life, so he effectively owns the CD. He has liner notes, a case, and a disc with CD quality sound. How much money does the artist make? None. This is legal.
Case #2 - A man goes into a used record store and buys a CD. He gets liner notes, a case, and a disc with CD quality sound. The artist makes no money and this is legal.
Case #3 - A man gets on the Internet and downloads a song. He has no CD, no case, no liner notes, and the song has been shrunken down with lossy compression. It is not CD quality. Next, he may or may not decide to purchase the CD for better sound quality and liner notes, and, depending on his decision, the artist may or may not make money. This is illegal.
Look, I support artists. I buy the CDs if I like the music. But if you want me to like the music, I have to hear it first, and I’m not going to hear it if the radio stations keep playing the same tired crap over and over again. A 30 second sample isn’t going to cut it, either. Often, I can’t tell if I really like a song until I hear the whole thing several times. MP3s are the only way to do this. Looking at other peoples’ reviews is a pointless waste of time. They don’t have the same taste as me. I’ve seen so many glowing reviews for total pieces of crap that I might as well just buy CDs at random for all the good those reviews do me.
These record companies sure have some gall, too. THEY WERE PRICE FIXING! Their punishment, of course, was to pay back a miniscule fraction of the money they’ve made from their price fixing (gee, you’ll pay me back for one CD purchase. What if I bought 200?). They use lobbyists to push laws through Congress that let them extend their copyrights indefinitely, then slink away like thieves in the night. Then they have the audacity to sue college students for millions of dollars for sharing a few songs. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black…
Billdo wrote:
Absolutely correct. VCR copies of tv shows are allowed for the time-shifting aspect. The courts have ruled that you are allowed to tape tv shows because you do so for the most part to watch them at a later time–you aren’t taping them to make a permanent copy of the shows.
Making duplicates of CDs on the other hand are exactly the opposite. CD’s are being burned not to for one-time listening purposes at a later date, but for archival and repeated listening.
Regarding the iPod. I believe the courts have already ruled on the Rio. I’m not at work, so I don’t have the citation, but the courts ruled in Rio’s favor. The notion was rather convoluted, but involved the fact that music transferred to a Rio mp3 player does not go directly from the cd to the Rio player, instead using software to transfer it from the cd to a hard drive… then to the Rio. The argument was that what resided on the hard drive was not a perfect digital replication of the CD due to all the other programs that also resided on the same hard drive at the same time. The pivotal notion is that it is legal to make a single copy of a computer software program, but it is not legal to make a copy of an audio cd. So once the audio cd is converted to mp3 and resides on the hard drive (with all the other software), it wasn’t considered a duplicate audio cd. Then the audio could safely be transferred to the Rio.
It was really bizarre reasoning, I admit. The dissent was that a computer hard drive could then act as a device to launder electronic media.
This is all detailed in the excellent multi-volume set, Nimmer on Copyright. I can provide more detailed info with cites, etc. when I return to work tomorrow.
Wah effing wah.
Tell me something.
How did the music industry survive before the Internet?
Well, for one thing, 95% of the radio stations in the country weren’t owned by two giant corporations and there was actually some variety on the radio…
Or maybe people downloaded the songs, and decided not to buy the cd because they didn’t like the songs enough, or because they had no convenient way to buy the cd (for example, if they are too young to have a credit card). Your data does not prove what you think it does.
30-60 seconds is not enough, unless that is the length of the song. I have been burned too many times by buying albums based on one song I liked, and I am certainly not going to buy albums based on 30 seconds I liked. The solution is simply to let people download reduced quality copies of the songs.
I don’t see why it annoys you, because it is true. I hear about albums by knowing the artist from previous albums, from reviews, and from hearing songs on movies and TV. I download songs from the album to see if I should buy it. Notice that I didn’t hear about the album by downloading it, but I bought the cd because I downloaded the songs. People are becoming less and less willing to buy cds blind, with no option to return them if they don’t like them. And they are right in feeling this way. It is not a fair business model.
Actually, we have an option for just “internet”. So people can use something a little more ambiguous than admitting to “file sharing”. And we get e-mails everyday saying “I downloaded your song, can I have the lyrics?” People don’t seem to have any qualms about admitting they’ve dowloaded the tune.
But so many people have already said that they have downloaded music for free – so clearly they are interested in the music, they just aren’t interested in paying for it. Anytime you do that you are depriving a songwriter of their royalites and thus their paycheck. One more time: songwriters get paid almost exclusively through royalties typically about 8 cents a song per song sold.
If 10,000 people download the song instead of buying it, then the songwriter doesn’t get the $800 that could go toward rent. Downloading the song for free (or copying it from someone else in anyway) is like grabbing someone’s paycheck in the parking lot and ripping it to shreds.
If you worked all week and never got a paycheck would you stay with your employer, or move on?
I have seen download stats for a couple of our artists. From one site alone, a few thousand people dowloaded one song over a relatively short period of time. We talked to the site owner who apologized, removed the MP3, and let us see the download stats – it was all quite friendly, she’s actually very cool and had never thought that it was actually affecting anyone. So yeah, we can actually get a pretty good idea of how much an artist actually loses that way.
I’ll add a “person it hurts” that hasn’t been discussed.
Retail record (CD) stores are becoming non-viable as a business. There are a lot of reasons for this - the increased cost of mall square footage, the increased market share taken by discount retailers (Target, Wal-Mart) or big box retailers (Best Buy, Circuit City), the increased market share of e-tailers, smaller margins than existed (I remember paying more for an album when I was in high school twenty years ago than I do now). But one of the reasons is that the market itself is smaller due to the proliferation of file sharing. Even the big box and discount retailers are scrambling because they are losing market to illegal file sharing technologies. And this means a loss of jobs and income - not to big recording stars, but for the people who sell music at Musicland.
It isn’t really a new problem - back in the dark ages when I was in high school, everyone just taped their friends stuff. But the easy of file sharing technology makes it possible to copy a complete strangers stuff - without taking a lot of time and across distance - so what was a problem that had a small impact is becoming a problem with a much larger impact.
Current copyright terms are Lifetime of the creator/artist/author + 70 years (this is for individuals, I think corporate copyrights are somewhere in the neighborhood of 110 years, but I’m too lazy to find a cite). They were increased a few years ago from life + 50 years by the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act, which recently was allowed to stand by the Supreme Court in the Eldred vs. Ashcroft decision.
I don’t know how old you are, but it’s fairly safe to assume that any of the music you mention will be ‘protected’ by copyright for your entire lifetime.
Surely this is the ‘limited terms’ specified in the Constitution. :rolleyes:
Why? By the time they realize that they like it, they already have a copy of it on their hard drive that can be burned to a CD that they can listen to anywhere. I would love to believe that people download songs, find out they like them, erase them from their drive, and purchase a legitimate copy. I just have never met anyone that actually does this. More often, they find out that they like an artist and then download the rest of the material.
People have come to the conclusion that they somehow have a right to free music. They think it is an appropriate way to screw the big bad record labels and they have no remorse whatsoever that they are, in fact, screwing the artists and the songwriters in the process.
All of this talk of “It’s not theft” and “This helps the artists” is a bunch of crap. You are taking and using property that is not yours and depriving someone who made a substantial investment of any chance of a return. Justify it in your mind however you want, it is still wrong.
But it’s not theft because no one is “taking” anything. People are “making illegal copies.” They are two different things.
And please don’t think that because I’m pointing this out, I’m condoning any sort of activity, because I’m not.
Hi, I’m jweb. I do this, and have done this on several occasions (although I’ll purchase the CD before I delete the ‘stolen’ MP3 from my drive). But as I noted in a previous post, once I buy the CD the first thing I do is rip the tracks to MP3 format.
I won’t be a hipocrite and say that I have purchased the CD for EVERY song that I’ve downloaded. But if I don’t like the song, I’ll generally delete it off my hard drive eventually. Why would I waste HD space for something that I don’t care for?
I think there’s a larger percentage of people that download music as a means of making a purchasing decision than you woule like to believe. Unlike some things a CD doesn’t have a 30 day money back guarantee, additionally there’s no option for a person to obtain a single song that they want even by paying for it. I’m willing to bet that an artist could charge less than $1 dollar for a hot tune, offer it up for download from the net and probably realize more money from the ensuing sales than any other distribution method. The industry if it were smart and not so monolithic could change the way they distribute music and realize much larger sales. The downside to this is the effect on the retail channel, but that would need to change radically as well.
Perhaps they got that idea because of the devices that play “free” music i.e. radios, cable and satellite tv. This downloading phenomena is no different from taping stuff you like off of the radio and playing it at your convenience and sharing with your friends. The only problem with it now is the notion of “original” or “high” quality, if the quality of downloaded music was radio quality, I don’t think there would be as much of fuss as there is now. It isn’t really about whether or not someone is paying for music they’re listening to it, it’s more about the notion that someone has a high quality recording that they didn’t pay for. If the single recording was available for a reasonable price I think people would pay for it.
I guess we can agree to disagree then. As I pointed out in my cites earlier, the Department of Justice considers this activity to be “theft of intellectual property”. That seems pretty clear to me. And as was pointed out by someone else, the theft occurs when someone doesn’t receive payment from goods received. Even if it is only a copy, it is a copy that the recipient has no right to have in their possesion.
Wrong. The artist made his royalty for the CDs when the Library purchased them.
Wrong again. The artist, once again, made his royalty when the first retail purchaser bought the CD.
You are wrong in both instances, the artist makes the royalty during the first purchase of the CD by a distributor or wholesaler.
It’s not that I wouldn’t like to believe it, it’s just that, in my experience, I have never known anyone IRL to actually do this. Doesn’t mean that it doesn’t occur though.
**
I am by no means trying to suggest that the current system is flawless. Far from it. The industry needs to keep up with the technological advances and they have been woefully inadequate at doing so. BUT, as a songwriter, I have to be concerned when artists are not getting compensated for their work, primary because people have a beef with the system in place. The artist just wants to make a living at their craft. That is a hard enough accomplishment, even if there wasn’t the ability to illegally copy music.
And for the record, I am not against the concept of being able to download individual tracks for a small fee. I think it should be worked out though so that there is still an incentive to buy the complete CD, rather than purchase each track individually. I remember 45’s being priced at about $1.25 when I was a kid and that seemed like a fair price. Say, for arguments sake, it was $1.75 per download, a 10 song CD would cost you $17.50 to download. Then, if you could purchase the same CD for $15, which included the liner notes, lyrics, etc…, perhaps people would be willing to take that route.
I also wouldn’t be against you having the ability to download a low quality version of a song for free to see if you like an artist before you make a purchase. It would have to be a low enough quality though that it wasn’t a substitute for owning the higher quality legit version.
In order for either of these ideas to be feasable though, the problem of illegal downloads still has to be addressed and curbed. The only way I see that happening is by substantially increasing the penalties for doing so AND enforcing the laws in a way that people seriously reconsider whether it is worth the risk to engage in illegal activity. Right now, nobody really worries about being caught and therefore, some people literally fill their hard drives with music that they never intend to purchase. That has to change in order for a new system to work in a way that makes everyone happy.
I think that the technology of being able to download music to your home computer is a wonderful thing. I think the ability to rob an artist of the compensation that they deserve is awful and needs to be stopped. People don’t realize that it can be a substantial investment of time and money to get music to the point that it is of a quality you are used to hearing. And as pointed out earlier, if there is no reimbursment, then the artist is forced to look for another line of work. Then everyone loses.