Probably true. When I was in Tokyo back in the early 90’s, it seemed like everybody had little TVs set into their dashboards, and I wonder sometimes why it’s taken so long to catch on here. But then, in Tokyo traffic nobody seems to ever manage to drive faster than 4 MPH, and I’d also imagine the Japanese can be trusted to not watch the news when they are driving 55 MPH.
But you just know here in the States, there’ll be a Mothers Against Driver Distraction, or some such thing.
So is it OK for me to shoplift food from the supermaket as long as I also buy a bunch of food there?
In Soviet Union, car reads liner notes to YOU!
Poor analogy. Have a think about it and you might be able to work out why.
I’d say it’s kinda like if the grocery store lobbied congress and got a law passed saying you have to buy your groceries from them, and they don’t actually have to label any of their products so you’re not sure what you’re buying, except you’re pretty sure it’s food, and you also can’t grow your own green peppers, because your green peppers are exactly like the green peppers the store charges you $2.00.lb for, and you’d be “stealing” their potential profits.
I know, I know, not the best analogy. I’m famous for bad analogies, but I enjoy making them anyway. 
Oh for fuck’s sake please for the love of God don’t turn this into ANOTHER stupid debate thread with all the same arguments and rebuttals we’ve all heard a MILLION times before. Just get out. Please.
Hah, sucker! My dentist has this terrific file-sharing system…
The OP kind of invites such a discussion, doesn’t it?
Yeah, but what if everybody did everything? And then jumped off a bridge? :rolleyes:
I suppose, but if the person who is convinced that File sharing is stealing, period, wants to know more, they could always read an older thread. Why? Because, as others have said, the discussion has been done to death .
It seems like no one ever comes into these threads and admits that they illegally download music and don’t buy CDs that they otherwise would. I know they’re out there though. My sister bought a ton of CDs before she discovered file-sharing, and then stopped buying them and just burned her own when she wanted actual hard copies. One of my close friends loves music and has an extensive MP3 collection, but as far as I know doesn’t own a single CD.
It could be the whole “younger generation” thing Manda JO was talking about. My sister was in her teens when she discovered file-sharing; the above mentioned friend of mine is 20. But there are enough younger people on this board that I’d guess at least some of them must fall into the group of non-CD-buying illegal music downloaders.
So now we need to have seperate threads. One for people that agree with YOU and one for people who don’t?
The OP, such as it is, is simply a link to an article that seems to refute the charge that illegal downloading causes people to not buy any music. The article, after a survey in which I’m sure everybody told the truth, states that the people who admit to stealing the most music, also buy a lot of music.
This fact, somehow, PWNES! the RIAA.
My analogy is simply that the op seems to think that it is ok to steal a product if it turns out that you also buy the product.
For instance, lets say I see the new BBQ flavored chips from Lays. Now I don’t know if I would like it. I do like chips and I do like BBQ but I’ve never had this particular brand of chips so, I steal a bag. Turns out, I like them so I buy some more. This somehow forgives my stealing the first bag.
If you don’t know if you won’t like the cd then,
Buy a single.
Go hear the band in concert,
listen to a radio station that plays albums
in short, do all the things people did before there was file sharing. Before one perrson could upload a song and people all over the planet could then download it.
But the fact that I disagree with you Ooner does not mean I have to get out.
The problem is, it’s a horrible analogy.
If you are selling two bags of chips, and I take one without paying you no longer have that bag of chips. Even if I buy the other bag, that first one is still unaccounted for.
Digital music, however, is data. Information. Intellectual property. Not physical property. If I download a song, you still have that very same song. If I then buy that song on CD, there is no unaccounted for song. Information is based on user, not how many copies there are. I could have 15 copies of one song, but since it’s only me that’s listening to it, I need only buy one copy. This is why ripping CDs you own into MP3s for your personal use is legal.
That, of course, gets into intellectual property rights, but that’s a whole 'nother argument. Downloading a song is not at all the same as taking a bag of chips out of the store.
That costs money still. Most bands don’t release singles. Most record stores don’t carry singles. Singles don’t give an accurate representation of whether one would like an album. Singles provide none of the information about similar bands/recommended music that the file-sharing community does.
Bands don’t all tour. Bands don’t always tour to every city. Bands are not always available to see in concert any time of day every day of the year. Concerts are expensive.
Good luck finding one.
Or take advantage of the wonders of technology and be a better music fan and customer for it.
And that’s the fucking end of my participation in this shit. This isn’t Great Debates, but it seems like every single time anyone mentions filesharing both sides just leap at the opportunity to trot out the exact same bullshit arguments and do the whole thing to death. At this point, you’re just shitting in a thread that was quite interesting before it went with the filesharing debate formula which is boring and generally worthless by now. Not to mention predictable. Now instead of an interesting discussion we’ll have a move to GD, followed by 3 pages of argument about the difference between physical and intellectual property.
Thanks a bunch, man.
No, Zebra, but the fact that you can only seem to argue this issue with false analogies means that your participation is not going to help us any. Your potato chip analogy is once again quite wrong, as are all analogies to any physical good, because a piece of music is not a physical good and doesn’t function the same way. If all you’ve got to offer is irrelevant comparisons and shrill moralistic yelling, then I suggest you spend some time considering your own position. It doesn’t appear to be based upon reason.
Just to play devil’s advocate, though - spending more money on digital music hardly seems like proof that downloaders actually purchase more music. It seems to prove that folks who download a lot of music are also more likely to do their music purchases in digital form, which makes perfect sense - if someone’s computer literate enough and sufficiently commited to listening via iPod and WinAmp, then they’re probably likely to buy digital music. It doesn’t prove that they buy more music overall, though. My dad doesn’t download music illegally, and he also doesn’t purchase digital music. That’s because he doesn’t listen to music through his computer. It doesn’t mean that this research demonstrates any kind of link between p2p trading and purchasing. I’m not inclined to put any stock in what this says, because it appears far more likely to me that the correlation is simply due to how much people use their computers for music.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the case that those who ‘steal’ music also purchase more as a result. Obviously I’m not the only person around who buys most of my music based on what I’ve downloaded previously. And like many others, I buy a lot more music because I can listen to it first. The question is whether us good traders overwhelm the amount of bad trading - p2p as a replacement for purchase - as least for an economic analysis of the impact upon the labels. Of course, like others, I’m inclined to think that they don’t care nearly as much about that as they do about the fact that this represents a loss of control over the music industry. Payola is the norm, nowadays, especially with the media being more and more heavily owned by single corporate entities. The labels had a period of unprecedented power over music once the delivery of music to the public was controlled by large corporations. p2p means they lose that control, and I suspect that’s the true issue they have with it.
Good God, your analogy sucks. Comparing physical objects with digital media is like comparing apples to oranges…or, more specifically, comparing apples & oranges with a JPEG image of apples & oranges. When you copy a song or a DVD or anything like that, it does NOT affect the original. You seem to suggest that downloading a CD somehow makes that CD vanish from the company’s inventory. Which is stupid. It doesn’t happen. Now, if we someday invent a method of instantly making an exact copy of a bag of potato chips w/o affecting the original, we might have something to talk about.
Now, about your so-called “options” to downloading:
Buy a single.
They don’t make singles anymore. Have you set foot in a music store lately??
Go hear the band in concert
Which costs 5x the price of the CD, more if you include gas & parking.
listen to a radio station that plays albums
Which don’t exist. Even so-called “classic rock” stations and those JACK-FM clones don’t play every single track from any given album.
in short, do all the things people did before there was file sharing.
You mean, go back to typewriters and slide rules and leaded gasoline? Hey buddy, technology is moving forward, if you don’t like the trolley then don’t buzzkill my ride.
There is no shrill moralistic yelling on my part. If you look at my first post in this thread I pointed out how it makes perfect sense that people who steal the most music also buy it, as they are enthusiastic about music. If posting my opinion is shitting on the thread, well, tough.
Of course the article was just about digital music, not CDs, which many people in this thread talk about.
Fine, you have problems with the food analogy, Fine, point them out. Yes, chips are physical and a downloaded song is data. Or a copy of the data. You insist that since the origianl copy still exisits then no theft has occured. Or at least no theft like I have described. Fine. I disagree.
There are cd singles still in stores. Of course I can visit the Virgin Mega-store in Times square and that’s probably a little better stocked than your average mall. They also have 100 cd listening stations where you can hear the entire CD before you decide to buy it. Most of the ‘hit’ music up there. But wait. You can buy CDs on line. And OH MY GOD! You can listen to part of the tracks online. A little place called AMAZON dot COM. Every heard of it? In short there is no end to legal alternatives to finding out if you would like an album. But then again, I’m an old fart and back in my day, you could talk to the person at the record store and they would know what an album was like or they would put a copy on the store turntable and let you hear it.
The fact is that the owners of the intellectual property have every right to controll what they own. You don’t buy the IP rights to a song when you buy the CD. There is also no universal ‘right’ to like every song on a CD. The arguement that “I may not like the other songs” does not wash. If you like Stacey’s Mom and you have to own it and you choose to buy the CD and you don’t like any of the other tracks, well tough.
The survey in the article in the OP was also based in England, not American. So we don’t know if the same is true about American music downloaders although I would grant that it probably is the same. As far as purchasing digital music goes.
And my Chip analogy is not terrible.
It illustrates the thought process that the OP and others seem to want to justify.
I don’t know if I will like this.
I’ll steal it to see if I like it.
I like it, I’ll buy more of it. This makes step two OK.
That’s the analogy. It is a good analogy.
Of course it makes it ok. If you’re buying more albums, that means that the RIAA won’t have a reason to be complaining about losing sales anymore, and that is what the OP was getting at.
And yes, your analogy was ridiculous. :rolleyes: