Which means unless you have the original disk that any copies of it ripped to your MP3 player would in theory be illegal.
What harms the sale of music today is the nature of the digital process. the quality (value) of the music remains intact over time and can easily be replicated in virtual space for free. vinyl records are just the opposite. The second they are played the quality is degraded by dust particles and record wear.
How many people can say they own all the music they listen too?
¿Que? Every song on my computer and phone is paid for, or was given to me by the artist.
The video game industry is pretty annoyed by the used game market, which is considerably larger than the used CD market. Blockbuster, GameStop, and EBGames pretty much run their entire business model around buying and reselling used games. The game publishers don’t see dime-one from the resale, but they can’t make a fuss about it because Blockbuster, GameStop, and EBGames are the largest buyers of new games.
New video games cost $50-60 now, and most people get at most a month of enjoyment out of them. They’re not like DVDs where you can go back a few years later and enjoy them just as much. The entire situation pretty much invents the used game market itself. Sell your 1 month old game for $20 back to the store, use that money toward a newer game.
And the game stores love it too. The markup on a new release game is never more than $3, whereas they can mark up a used game by $10 or more.
You didn’t buy it. You licensed its use from the owner or the owner’s agent.
The difference between licensing a specific use and ownership is the absolute key to all issues on copyright. It seems also to be the one that is least understood.
A standard publishing contract for a book has pages of clauses about rights that are licensed by the publisher on behalf of the author. Book rights, audio rights, film rights, foreign rights, braille rights, electronic rights. The author gives the publisher a share of money to market these rights. The author retains all ownership of the original work. When the contract expires the author still retains all ownership and can license the rights elsewhere. And even while the contract is in effect, the author can license all rights not included in the contract.
It’s no different in music, although the details vary somewhat and I’m not expert enough to list all the details. But that’s why you can never say that just because you bought one version of a song in one format that you own the song or have rights to use the song in any other format. You licensed its use for that format.
In practical terms, people can and do move music from format to format because enforcement is impossible. In the same practical terms, people who paid to buy an album in vinyl have to pay again to buy that album in cassette and pay again to buy that album in CD and once more to download it to an iPod. Why? To put it in capital letters: You didn’t BUY the music; you LICENSED the use of it.
Unless you completely and thoroughly assimilate that difference into your bones, you cannot understand why artists and writers of all kinds are so upset by these issues.
And I wish people would stop thinking we’re all multi-millionaires.
Me too. What do you suppose the percentage is in a class of high school kids?
Heck, I wish people would stop thinking we’re all multi-thousandaires. :smack:
Good point.
I was going to say that I thought you might have interpreted Magiver’s question oddly, but…
OK… and here I was thinking I was legitimately format shifting the CDs that I had paid for onto my iPod because that is what I’m legally entitled to do under our (recently revised) Copyright legislation. (NZ Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Act section 81A)
Is there not a similar provision in US Copyright? 
They also recently revised the Copyright Act here in Australia to legalise format-shifting, taping stuff off TV, and declare parody/satirical use a “Fair Dealing” of the work, which is definitely a step forward, IMHO.
Apparently not, which surprised me too.
My daughter’s friend works at a big box bookstore. I asked her about this and she said the stuff that is stripped is recycled now. They have a big industrial sized shredder and everything must go through it. In my younger days I used to dumpster dive behind bookstores to retrieve stripped books and magazines and sell a bunch of it at a local swap meet.
No way.
So why not stop complaining about the users ripping you off, and start complaining about the publishers ripping you off?
Telling confused users that they didn’t buy the album, they bought the rights to an album, and they’re ripping you off because they didn’t pay you 10 different ways is ludicrous. Copyright law wasn’t handed down from Mt. Sinai, it was created by human beings for a particular purpose. That purpose wasn’t to make sure that creators became rich, it was to advance the useful arts and sciences. And since it turns out that people like money, if you figure out a way for people to make money by advancing the useful arts and sciences, then we get lots of people doing that work.
When things change and they get money but retard the useful arts and sciences, or they get nothing when they advance the useful arts and sciences, then things are broken and must change.
Copyrights and intellectual property rights aren’t natural rights, they are human created rules created for the purpose of making society better. It isn’t morally wrong to drive on the left side of the road, except that it turns out that unless everyone picks a side and sticks with it, the roads are useless. It isn’t morally wrong to make a copy of a work, except that unless the guy who wrote the work gets something for his effort, he’s going to stop making more.
Ignoring Lumur’s more general rant about copyrights, Yeah, why aren’t you sitting around being angry at the publishers? If you add up all the money they’ve withheld from you, i’m sure it’s way more than your share of the sales lost to piracy.
I think this attitude is penny wise and pound foolish. About three months ago, I picked up a used copy of Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. After reading it and greatly enjoying it, I went to the local B&M bookstore and bought the rest of his novels new…and I also bought a new copy of OMW. I sold the used copy back to Half Price Books, where I hope someone else will discover that s/he loves this author.
I will take a chance on a new author if I only have to pay three or four bucks for one of his/her books. I’m not so willing to spend ten bucks or so on a new writer.
Yeah, what have the Romans done for us? :smack:
Publishers don’t withhold money from writers. They are essentially contractors, who get paid for services they provide.
Publishers edit, proofread, and copyedit books (three different things). They set them into print, doing all the design work necessary. They hire artists to do covers. They print, bind, and warehouse the books. They contract with thousands of bookstores all over the country to sell certain numbers of books and then ship the books to those bookstores. They have bookkeeping, accounting, warehousing, shipping, and liaison departments to keep track of all this. They do the paperwork and file the book with the copyright office. They have tax departments that calculate sales and royalties, and send out 1099 statements at the end of the year. They publish promotional catalogs of all their books and distribute those widely. They create and purchase advertising for the book. They set up promotional opportunities, interviews, readings, and talks.
That’s for the main version of the book. Then there are what are called subsidiary rights. The publishers go out and look for other publishers to do mass market paperback editions. Or audiobook editions. Or electronic editions. Or non-US editions, in a variety of languages. Or book club editions. Or sell film options. Or large-print editions. Or special library editions. The list goes on. Each of these is a specialized field and the publisher must be knowledgeable about how to approach each and every one. Then after the sale, all the payments must be garnered, recorded, passed on to the author, and added to the main edition for accounting and taxes.
The publisher must continue to do this for many years, as long as the book is kept in print, sending out royalty statements twice a year, along with checks and 1099 forms, forever if necessary.
And the publisher does all this out of its own pocket, because the author gets an advance upfront when the manuscript is turned in and the publisher gets nothing until the money starts coming in from the publishers’ efforts.
Sure, you can do all of this yourself. It can’t hardly take any time or expertise, could it? That way the publisher gets nothing. And its deserves nothing, because it doesn’t do anything, right?
That is your argument, isn’t is? The publisher just withholds money from the writer for no reason at all? I should be angry at the publisher, not at the pirate, who doesn’t do any of this stuff but actually does me a favor by making my work available free for the taking to anybody who wants it? The publisher is just a parasite and the pirate is my friend?
:smack:
I remember Garth Brooks’ crusade about used CD sales. Once Napster came around, people pretty much forgot about that particular issue.
So what % of the revenue the publisher sees do you end up receiving?
If anything those stupid seals discourage me from buying new. But mostly the price discourages me.
Those seals that used to run around the edges of CD cases and were a pain to remove - I thought they were for anti-theft purposes (couldn’t easily rip open a case and remove the disc) after the use of cardboard ‘long boxes’ was discountinued.
If they were supposed to guarentee ‘brand new freshness’ of the CD, they didn’t have any such effect on me at the time…