Not even remotely comparable. When you steal an mp3 file, you are creating a duplicate. Both you and the person you copied the music from now have a copy. Whereas the author of the song was paid for (maybe) one copy, there are now two.
When you borrow a book from a library, you aren’t creating a new copy. There was one book. There still is.
Surely you can see the difference.
I forget which album it was, I think it was 1000 Hurts, but the band Shellac gave the CD away if you purchased the LP release, mostly as a comment to how cheap it is to make CDs from a master recording. Of course, Shellac isn’t a huge band or anything, but Steve Albini isn’t a nobody in the music industry either from what I understand.
I largely expect that, whether the record industry fights like hell or not, free music distributed over the internet will likely not go away at all. Some bands I enjoy just put mp3s on their website. DITY bands start it, and it will become more mainstream just like punk morphed into pop-punk which now dots the airwaives here and there. As ever, the underground music scene will be the forerunners because they can do whatever the hell they want. That’s where almost all popular music had its roots: back alley clubs, from blues and jazz to punk and rock and roll.
The big cost of making an album comes from, as I understand it, the original production and marketing. Filesharing is free marketing. The big profits for a large majority of bands, as I understand it, come from touring and doing live shows, and selling their own merchandise there. Filesharing will pretty much not impact this at all, or will increase ticket sales from a larger audience while only slightly impacting album sales (sold at the concerts).
spectrum, libraries didn’t and never will put bookstores out of business, even given practically limitless borrowing/renewal time. There is a market for music. Technology enabled music to grow very large, and technology will also force it to change over time. I don’t think the sky is or could possibly fall on music production. Distribution channels will change, certainly, and the methods in which musicians get funding for their music might shift, increase, or decrease from current values. Frankly, they are my concern, not the recording industry. When bands I appreciate differ from my politics or general worldview, I often stop listening to themafter all, that was part of my motivation for listening to them in the first place.
Number one rule of public affairs: don’t alienate your audience, work with them. If the courts give you a monopoly on the right to reproduce your work, feel free to exercise it, but don’t be surprised when no one hears it or even cares to reproduce it for that reason, too.
Indeed. Now would you care to explain how that’s relevant to the author/artist’s loss of profit?
The guy who borrows a book from the library instead of buying it from the bookstore has caused the author to lose potential profit, because he got all the “use value” he wanted for free.
The guy who downloads a song from the internet instead of buying it from the music store has caused the artist to lose potential profit, because he got all the “use value” he wanted for free.
Why does it even matter whether another copy is made or not, if you’re considering the impact on the artist? The label and artist care about getting paid when people listen to the music, not about limiting the number of copies that exist.
Suppose there’s a new online file streaming service that can play any song for free without making a separate copy. The impact on the artist is the same–many people choose to use the free service instead of buying the album–but only one or two copies exist at any given time. Surely you wouldn’t approve of that service any more than Kazaa!
It’s not specifically about the author’s profit, it’s about the number of books printed and sold or the number of songs printed and sold. Authors and musicians don’t get paid by how many people listen to or read their work, but by how many copies of it are purchased.
It’s all about the copies. If file trading didn’t involve the creation of copies, I wouldn’t care. It would simply be the passing on of a license from one person to another person. If Kazaa deleted the mp3 from person X’s machine when person Y downloaded it, that would be fine by me – because the owner of that content has still been paid for the copy in circulation.
You should have the right to loan music CDs, or books, to your friends. You should not have the right – and you do not have the right – to give them copies. On a small scale, the impact is going to be minor. On the large scale, like on that thievery network Kazaa, you are fiscally raping artists you claim to be “fans” of.
What gives you the right to distribute copies of music in ways that don’t compensate the owner of the music?
What gives you the right to take music that you haven’t paid for and keep a copy?
A person who steals music isn’t like someone who borrows a Tom Clancy novel from the library. They are like a person who borrows a copy of “Patriot Games,” goes down to Kinkos, photocopies every page, and keeps the copy for themselves. That is just as immoral, just as wrong, and also stealing. So is downloading music you haven’t paid for.
The bottom line is that if you want a copy of a song to keep, you owe money to the owner of that song.
Indeed Spectrum - and the weirdest aspect to this is as follows - there’s a dogma which argues as follows…
If I can do this, namely, if I can use Kazaa and download mp3’s and burn my own CD’s and make all the music libraries I want, and never get caught, and never have to pay for it, how can it be wrong? Ergo, the fact that I can get away with it means that those who oppose me are in fact the culprits.
As I explained in my earlier post regarding borrowing a book from a library and having a magical Xerox machine which can make 15,000 perfect identical copies - THAT is where the filesharing arguement falls down in terms of remunerating the artist. Forget the label that the artist is on, just concentrate on the artist alone.
It doesn’t work for me to argue that the artist shouldn’t be concerned about unlicensed song copying because they can make money elsewhere via concerts and merchandising. Such a paradigm is inherently arrogant and diminishes the artist of their lawful rights it seems to me.
As I said - just go back to vinyl. It’ll solve everything.
Well I hope this isn’t referring to me.
Erislover: - oh not at all my friend.
My comment above really applied more to that generic group who I refer to as “youngsters who think it’s all kinda cool to rip off music”.
Most adults I find can distinguish between the various shades of grey involved, but a lot of music websites I’ve visited over the past few years indicates there’s quite a “youth movement” which looks upon file-sharing and song-copying as some form of inalieable right - which it isn’t of course.
I hope that makes sense?
Then why does the industry complain about losing profits to file sharing? You may want to reread Joel’s question.
I think Eminem and Radiohead would disagree with you there, among others. The Eminem Show and Kid A sure weren’t hurting for sales, even though both albums were available on Kazaa for weeks before they hit store shelves.
Obviously, nothing gives you the legal right to do it. I think we all know that copyright violation is against the law.
Ignoring legal rights, what gives the artist the moral right to control the distribution of a song? I don’t expect full control over every piece of information I come up with; why should a musician get it?
How? What’s being “stolen”? The author wouldn’t have made a dime from that person anyway, the person can read the book for free anyway… the only difference is that he doesn’t have to walk to the library to do it.
Mr2001, I don’t represent the music industry, so I don’t give a damn what their reasoning is. I stand with them in principle because I am an aspiring author who will hopefully have a work published in a few months. So thievery like what the music-haters who populate the thieving networks like Kazaa is increasingly weighing upon my thoughts. 0
As for your stupid example: a copy of the author’s work was produced without the author’s permission. The author owns the book, it is his. If you want a copy of it to keep, you owe that author recompense.
To read an author’s work is a privilege, not a right. You have to pay to play, or borrow (not copy!) from someone who has paid, because the author deserves to compensated for every copy of their work produced.
To create a copy of an author’s work without their permission is stealing, because you have absolutely no right to possess or produce a copy of the work without paying the owner of that work. People who do that are just a worthless thieves and should be treated as such.
I’m sick of dealing with thieves who are hellbent on rationalizing their thievery. Oh, little baby don’t wanna pay for his music. Thinks the price is too high. Well too damn bad. If you don’t like the price to something, you don’t get to have it. Complain loudly enough to the legal owners, and maybe someone will hear you and lower the price. Or look for a second-hand copies you can purchase for cheap. But there is no justification for stealing music, movies, books or other forms of entertainment. None. Not now. Not ever.
Well, I happen to earn my living writing software, and I spend much of my free time writing software as well. Yet clearly I don’t side with, say, the BSA.
Ah yes, music haters. I suppose all those Phish “fans” trade concert tapes because they hate the music too. And everyone who posts radio shows to Usenet does it because they hate radio shows.
No, the library owns the book, it is theirs. 
The author came up with the sequence of words in the book, but “owning” a sequence is as absurd as “owning” a length or a color. If he didn’t want other people to have it, maybe he should have kept it to himself.
That’s an interesting definition of “stealing”. What’s next? “Jaywalking” all over the author’s precious artistic rights? 
He has absolutely no right to tell me whether or not I can pass on a piece of information, whether he came up with it or not. If I whistle a tune on the sidewalk, and the guy walking past likes it and starts whistling it too, I don’t expect him to stop just because I want to keep it for myself.
There’s a difference between holding copyright on songwriting, and holding copyright on a performance it needs to be said.
Obviously, we’re all allowed to whistle our favourite tune in public. And we’re all allowed to quote a famous passage from a famous book too.
But I suspect only the most obtuse amongst us would argue that it is also right and proper to hold a copy of a book in our hands which is a fake - like one of those Chinese fake copies of a famous music album. It can be done of course, and most likely you won’t ever get caught - but there’s something inherently wrong about having a counterfeit in your hands.
In this context, to have a CD in your hands which contains a shitload of songs which you downloaded off the net and never paid for, well… in the context of doing the right thing, it’s just not cricket in MY personal opinion - so I’d never do it.
But if a band offers me an mp3 of a live performance at some gig? Or if a fan offers me said mp3 and the band is openly happy about such mp3’s - that’s great.
The line (for me) which is improper to cross, is to make copies of the original album available on the web via services such as Kazaa. Effectively, you’re doing the Chinese counterfeit thing except that no money is changing hands. Certainly, the artist isn’t getting compensated - and that’s why I personally feel uneasy about doing it.
If you don’t like the shape of the market, don’t sell your product in it. After all, isn’t this why people with the money move out of poor neighborhoods?
Ok, so there’s no justification. Now, why didn’t that eliminate filesharing? I’m glad you feel like you’ve got the moral highground, but it sure doesn’t seem to make the impact you think it should.
might have been mentioned before (I skimmed the last couple comments as Ive got to get to work), but I remember reading an article in Rolling Stone (I think it was) a couple years ago when this first started being a problem where the complaint was that the major expenses came from the MARKETING of the records. That is the labels spent millions putting up ads, working on coverart, etc etc. so that you (the consumer) would go “hey, that looks neat” and buy it. But what (they said) happened was that the consumer said “hey neat” and downloaded it at no profit for the Label. I dont know if they are sticking to that arguement still though.
On a side note, you do NOT get 100% copy when you download a song from any file sharing site. You get a (roughly) 10% quality copy. MP3s compress the music file by loosing anything that the program thinks you couldnt hear.
And secondly, I would be very curious to see just how much of the recording industries losses include what they’ve spent on lawyers and in hunting down file swappers.
Here’s the thing.
Copyright law is not a universal moral law, like “Thou shalt not kill”. It is a law designed for a particular time and place, with a particular technology level.
Before the printing press, before radio, before television, before movies, before vinyl records, there was no copyright law. Why was that? Because making a copy of something was a laborious process. The only way to make a copy of a book was to take out the book and write out another copy of the book by hand, word for word. The medieval world had no conception of copyright, it would have been absurd. Anyone who had the time and money could copy a book, in fact it was considered moral and pleasing to God to do so, since it meant that the book you copied was more likely to survive. People didn’t write books with the expectation of making money from them, they wrote books for other reasons.
Why did we come to have the expectation that people could and should make money by writing books? Because the printing press made it easy to create copies of books. Suddenly anyone with a little capital could make as many books as they wanted. People started making books to SELL. In the manuscript world, there wasn’t a market for books, since they were fabulously expensive, and even if you wanted to buy one you’d have to find someone willing to sell what might be the only copy of a book they’d see in their lifetime. If you wanted a book you wouldn’t BUY it, you’d arrange to have someone create it for you, which means that you’d have to be fabulously wealthy or be the Church.
But the printing press changed that. Suddenly books could be cheap, and you could make as many copies as you liked. And you could make money by selling books. The increase in books produced created a new class of people…authors who created books with the express intention of creating copies of those books for sale, in order to make money.
But how could an author make much money if anyone could create a copy of their book, and sell it themselves? It gradually came to be seen that an author somehow OWNED the words that they created, and that anyone copying the words was doing something wrong. Because otherwise, there would be no incentive for authors to create works for sale. And we recognized the immense value of commerical writers, the market for books created many more authors by several orders of magnitude over the manuscript age.
So writers were granted copyright, and no one else could copy their work without permission, for the life of the writer. But why copyright? The goal is to allow writers to make a living writing. Why not pay authors by how many times a book is read, and allow free copying of the book? Well, because controlling copying was the only technologically feasable method. You could track where a book was created, you could shut down businesses creating and selling unlicenced copies. But how could to find out what happened to a copy of a book once it was created? A person purchasing a book could read the book out loud to a crowd of people every day, or they could put the book on the shelf and never read it. Or they could lend the book, or sell it, all perfectly legal, and in most eyes perfectly morally.
But why would it be moral to lend to book to a friend, but immoral to make a copy of the book and give it to him? Why is it moral to sell a book to a used book store? The author gets NOTHING when the book is sold on the secondary market. Yes, no one has made a copy. But who cares? The point is that the authors get nothing. Creating unlicensed copies is one way that people can access an artist’s work without compensating the author, lending and reselling are others. Reading and rereading over and over is another way.
But I can already hear the objections. “But they didn’t make COPIES!” Yes, they didn’t make copies. But why is the copying of the work the essential moral problem? I understand why it is the thing that is illegal. Copying is illegal because it is the only thing that can be controlled, all the other ways are technologically impossible to control.
Controlling copying was a proxy that allowed authors to have some sort of renumeration for their work. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked pretty good, despite libraries and friends and used bookstores. Nothing could be done about those things, and so they never were associated with doing wrong. And artists never worried about them because there was nothing to be done about them anyway.
But now we have come to a problem. Computers have made copying a work trivially easy, and have made distributing the work trivially easy as well. Meaning that our previous laws that ignored copy sharing, lending, reselling, libraries, etc, but tracked copying and sales of copies are now ineffective in their role as an imperfect but reasonable way for authors to get some financial benefit to their work.
Again, let me repeat. Copyright and Patent and intellectual property laws are there, not because people can really “own” ideas, but because we wanted some sort of system to reward people for producing ideas, and this was the best we could do. I’m glad Charles Darwin came up with the theory of Natural Selection. But does/did Charles Darwin OWN the idea of the theory of Natural Selection? No, of course not.
My point is that the focus on copies misses the point. OK, I can’t make copies of a CD, but I can lend the CD to friends, and I can play the CD at my house and let my friends listen. What if I placed my legal copy of the CD on a server, and anyone who wanted could access the CD and listen to the music from the CD anywhere in the world. I’m not making any copies. The people listening aren’t making copies. Yet they are listening to the music for free.
Or we can imagine that I write a perl script, that writes a copies of a copyrighted music file to my hard disk. I leave the script running for a few days. I come back and check the logs, and I’ve created 27,000,000 copies of the file, then I format the disk and erase the copies. Suppose an artist should be compensated with $1.00 per copy of the file. Have I really stolen $27,000,000 from the artist? I agree that under our current laws I would have broken the law. Creating a copy is stealing. But I argue that I have done absolutely nothing morally wrong, or at least nothing more wrong than creating one copy would have been.
In the first case, I allowed music to be heard by many people for free, yet I didn’t break the law. In the second case I created millions of copies of the music, and even though no one heard it I still broke the law. Yet it seems to me that in the first case I harmed the creator of the music, and in the second case I didn’t.
In other words, the laws as they are currently written don’t work as an imperfect but generally useful way of compensating people for producing intellectual property. They wouldn’t have worked in the manuscript era, they worked in the printing press, radio, and vinyl record era, and now they don’t work in the computer and internet era.
We need a new system for compensating the creators of intellectual property, one that is not tied to “copying”, since copying is trivially easy in the internet age. A system where anyone can create copies of files, anyone can share copies of files, and yet “content providers” (don’t you love that phrase) still get paid somehow. Maybe for music we’ll eventually have to come to the agreement that recorded music is equivalent to freebie giveaway advertising, and that people can only expect to be paid if they give live performances. Or maybe we’ll agree that everyone with internet access pays $10.00 a month into an artist slush fund and collected by the ISPs, and artists are paid out of that fund based on how many times one of their files gets played that month on every computer in the world, and no one copies files because they are all listenable for free on the ISP servers. Or some other method.
But the current system is untenable. It makes no sense that someone can listen to an album once and throw it in a drawer, and another person can listen to the same album 3 times a day every day for years, yet they both pay the same flat fee, and the artist gets the exact same compenstation. It makes no sense to criminalize something so trivially easy as copying a music file. It would be like making it a crime to look at the Empire State Building without a license, because the owner of the Empire State Building owns the rights to the appearance of the Empire State Building. We could make the argument that anyone who appreciates the way the Empire State Building looks owes some compensation to the designer and owner of the building. But it would be practically impossible to enforce, and doesn’t conform to our common sense ideas of intellectual property.
For every person, there is a threshold over which they will tend to buy a copy rather than use the library/Kazaa.
With books, you have to walk/drive to the library, you get a used book of dubious condition, you have to worry about late fees etc, you cant read it whenever you want.
With Music, you need to spend a minimal amount of time looking for it, there is meant to be a unnoticable loss of quality and you dont get the accompanying cover art.
The argument is that the threshold for movies is much lower thus more people would be inclined with putting up with the hassle. Plus the fact that Libraries have been around forever wheras file sharing has just started out. Better the devil you know…
I just want to make one point. While copying CD’s directly is a lossless operation, creating MP3’s is NOT. Sharing CD quality files on KAZAA is not really done. MP3’s are encoded at varying bitrates - which dramatically change the sound quality (high frequencies are usually the 1st to go). IMO, MP3’s are generally equivalent to tapes. Some people do encode their files at a high bitrate, but that results in a larger file. For someone using a slow dial-up connection, this is deffenetely an issue.
Also, downloading an entire album using Kazaa, IMHO, is a pain in the ass! You get files encoded by various users, at different bitrates, and at different volumes. Piecing together an album that will sound like the original is a pain. There are plenty of other avenues available for downloading entire albums, but for the most part, p2p is not the answer.
Great post there Lemur866 - always nice to be reminded of an historical perspective. Indeed, I’m pretty sure I’ve written similar sentiments in the past but for some reason in this thread I’ve been approaching the subject matter from a different angle - probably because of the wording of the OP.
Just one thing though regarding the potential situation in the future where the actual album tracks are just given away free, and an artist makes there dough from live performances?
Well, ultimately, the problem with that is this… major labels sometimes (not always) pour a truckload of money into an act at a marketing level. I’m thinking now more a band like Pink Floyd than say Britney Spears. If it weren’t for market awareness by EMI in the early mid 70’s - we might not ever have known about Dark Side of the Moon - which is undeniably a studio album Tour de Force. But the Floyd weren’t real big Live Gig addicts either - maybe 10 shows a year tops. Hence, given your scenario, the Floyd would never have made much money at all, and most of us would never have heard DSOTM - which would be a shame if it were to happen in the future I suspect.
You might have a point, but until the law is changed to reflect today’s circumstances, it remains the law and must be obeyed as such.
Anything else is just a lame-ass justification.
In the same sense that we “must” not exceed the speed limit, or cross the street when the sign says DONT WALK, or drink alcohol before age 21. I’ll confess that I’ve done all three of those things, but pardon me if I don’t feel I’ve violated any moral code by doing so; illegal is not the same as immoral.
The big problem with laws is when they do not properly reflect the social consensus. If a significant percentage of the population does not agree with the premise or the reality of a law, you have an enforcement problem for that law, and, more damagingly, you have diminishing respect for the law on a broader front. Instead of being seen as a means of regulating equitable societal behaviour, laws become seen instead as an instrument of compliance originating from unrepresentative groups in society. This is true of a number of laws governing so-called “consensual crimes”, and is also true of the proposed new legislation for regulating digital copying being pushed by some legislators whose zeal is clearly running well ahead of their limited understanding of both common sense and technological reality.
The fundamental issue is that the music industry model deals in iconic “frozen” performances which it packages and sells on a limited reproduction capability basis. When unlimited reproduction becomes possible, the whole model collapses because there are a limited number of performances to go around, so the market becomes saturated and demand slumps.
The unlimited copying capability of pure digital artifacts is a technological Pandora’s Box that has been opened and we cannot seriously expect to close it. I watched software companies in the 1980’s spend lots of money on copy-protection schemes, all of which were defeated in short order. I remain unonvinced that any of the proposed Digital Rights Management schemas will not be broken.
The visionary answer (which is going to be hellishly painful for a number of industry players) is to adopt the Grateful Dead/Phish worldview (not a new one, long common in improvisational music circles) that every performance is different, and move to selling larger numbers of unique performance variations. For artists just starting out, the rules are simple: