I am as anti-RIAA as some on here, but I want a cite on this.
You described high CD prices as an invalid excuse. That suggests that having the prices at that level is in no way equivalent to copying files. That suggests that you consider very real stealing of money as in no way equivalent or worse to copyright infringement.
Not to mention that your defense of the RIAA suggests that you consider entertainment copyrights as being more worthy of protection than other copyrights or patents, such as the RedBook CD Audio standard and the ‘Compact Disc’ label associated with it, which the members of the RIAA violate en masse.
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000336.html
Similar bills have passed in Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wyoming.
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It is an invalid excuse. You don’t get to justify your wrongdoing by pointing at them and saying “they started it.”
Have I really been defending the RIAA? I simply state that theft (in the form of copyright infringement) is wrong.
Marc
Actually, you do, depending on the country. (But then, of course, it isn’t a wrongdoing to begin with) Example: In Germany, the management/owner of an apartment building has extensive duties in the field of maintenance, repair and quality of life. If you, as a renter, complain about a certain problem reducing your quality of life and the owner fails to remedy the problem, you are entitled to slashing your rent by a fitting percentage. Because the product delivered (the living quarters and conditions) were inferior in quality to what you paid for them, you are entitled to cut future payments while the problem persists.
Take a look at the prices for your standard singles and tell me what you pay for is what you get with a straight face.
One has to wonder how you want to show you’re not defending RIAA when you’re parroting RIAA rethorics 1:1.
As was pointed out, copyright infringement is distinct from theft. Hiking prices, however, is quite analogous to theft when it is justified by nothing but greed, in that the money spent is entirely lost to the customer without him getting anything in return, and without him being able to generate profit with the money in any other way.
Totally aside from that, contrary to what the RIAA wants to make you believe, neither file sharing nor CD-ripping is automatically copyright infringement. There are plenty of reasons why someone might want to get MP3s over the net for tracks to which he actually owns the CDs, such as for example recently having moved and having the CDs still boxed up somewhere. The RIAA has moved to prevent you from doing that, AND has moved to prevent you from making your own copies. As the myMP3 case shows, the RIAA does consider even listening to MP3s of music you bought a CD for as copyright infringement. And it does consider that copyright infringement independent of the country or applicable law. More, they claim that just because they can’t sue you for making personal copies, they don’t have to provide you with the opportunity to do so…and that worldwide.
RIAA claiming that XYZ is copyright infringement doesn’t make it so. Neither does RIAA claiming that copyright infringement is theft make it so. The RIAA has been caught lying time and again. The RIAA has prevailed solely against highly inferior opponents, and through heavy lobbying and political pressure. Whenever the RIAA took on another industry, such as Sony, they fell flat on their nose, because the others could lobby just as well. The RIAA’s case is not a legal one, their successes in court were largely based on a)the court buying RIAA arguments that were demonstrably false, and b)the court expanding its jurisdiction overseas by abolishing the seat of action as the basis of jurisdiction, in favor of the seat of a partial effect again under RIAA pressure. The case against file sharing is largely a political one, based on sheer economic influence on the legislative and judicial branches of government.
The case against file sharing, as it constitutes itself at the moment, is a case not for intellectual rights, but against national sovereignty and customer rights.
Let us talk about intellectual property. Scientists generate a lot of intellectual data. Do they get paid per copy? No. If they write a lot, and what they write is good, they rise in reputation and thus might achieve a higher pay. At the same time, they are DEPENDENT on being able to copy other scientists’ writings to a certain degree. The spreading of knowledge is one of the most fundamental paradigms of science. Yet the strengthening of intellectual property ‘rights’ is depriving scientists more and more of the basic tools they need to conduct their business. For that reason, scientists -not just in the electronics and informatics fields- are seriously concerned about the lobbying for more rights the RIAA is doing. You see, although they are the authors of their publications, they are not the copyright holders. The publishers of the academic journals almost as a rule insist on copyright transfer. Thus, strengthening the rights of copyright holders actually punishes the authors, since it reduces their access. ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4193292,00.html ) See also http://www.aau.edu/intellect/State2.4.03-1.html and http://www.aau.edu/intellect/Copy12.18.02.pdf as well as http://www.aau.edu/intellect/Boucher10.2.02.pdf
But I guess it is more important that the guy from Metallica can get Harley number 25 in his garage and Hillary Rosen can buy a brand new Mercedes than that we find a way to tackle HIV, SARS, leukemia or other diseases. It is obviously imperative that record industry managers and one-hit-wonder artists drive fast sports cars. It is entirely inconceivable that they just get a regular salary.
Very well put. I think describing downloading as “theft” is unnecessarily emotionally charged language. Theft is easy to define in the concrete, and completely nebulous in the abstract. Using that descriptor here is, I believe, and attempt to grossly over-simplify, in order to place a value judgment on it. I think that’s an absurd and distracating waste of time.
Downloading music (or “file sharing,” if you prefer the grossly oversimplified rhetoric in the other direction) can be wrong, without being theft. Personally, I agree with the sentiment that an artist should control the distribution of his, her or their own work. The reality is that, for the most part, they only control it insofar as they agree to allow their record companies to distribute it however the companies see fit. With few exceptions, it is these companies who are making noise about downloading, not the artists themselves. Nevertheless, any artist who feels that he/she/they are being injured by file sharing has a point. Some fraction of their audience, however small or immeasurable, is downloading when they would have been buying. Failure to give someone money, however, is not the same thing as stealing it from them. I cannot steal imaginary or potential wealth. The theft of intellectual property argument is a bit of rhetorical trickery, too. I can only steal intellectual property if I am claiming it as my own. No one downloads a song and then claims they recorded it, as their own original work. Artists retain their intellectual property, becuase everyone knows the work is theirs, paid for or not.
On balance, I would describe file sharing as wrong, or at least on shaky ethical ground. Most of the arguments in favor tend to be based on the “yeah, but the record companies are bad, so they don’t deserve my money” premise. Whatever. Those recordings were made with real money, and with the intent that they would generate real money in return. Nothing wrong with that. The files are being distributed without the consent of the copyright holder. That’s pretty clearly illegal, and if it goes against the wishes of said copyright holder, does them injury. Whether you agree that they have a right to be upset is not the point. If they are upset, as a result of you doing something prohibited, you are doing something wrong, and there is a victim.
I have no trouble at all defining this as “wrong,” without needing to lean on the crutch of calling it “stealing.” Surely we all have big enough vocabularies that we needn’t define every illegal act with the same word.