This is horribly off the mark. The ENTIRE point is that the income IS going down because many people are simply getting the product for free, instead of paying the creator and the investor who made the whole thing possible.
So is it OK to sneak into a near-empty theater to catch a movie? Assuming you leave no mess behind, there is no cost to the owners. You’re just ‘sharing’ the movie…
Or how about scanning the pages of a book, and distributing the (readable) images? Still OK?
Sure, it is socially acceptable to steal music online, but accept it for what it is: Theft that we have been getting away with, for now.
I really meant what I said. The problem here is that schools don’t have dedicated network techs on staff, and don’t have a complicated infrastructure available to track individual students. It would just be prohibitively expensive and complicated. You can block certain ports, but it takes next to no skill to change the port numbers. If you wanted to get around that, typically you’d go right to 80, 8080, etc. Not many institutions are gonna block www. Do you know the state of general computer knowledge by teachers up to high-school? Lets just say they’re usually way outclassed. Someone might know where the router is, but that’s it.
Universities and such are somewhat different. The University of Alberta where I go has one of the more advanced security systems in place. Everyone is required to run an ident session to log into most all Windows machines, meaning traffic is identifiable by user. Even with all this, it’s very difficult to differentiate between that one guy downloading the latest Redhat CD image, and that other one grabbing some random DivX over a custom client.
(As an aside, it’s much easier to find someone serving pr0n off an account. Traffic spikes like nobodies business).
Network protocols, programming languages, user environments: They were/are all developed to enable end-users do what they want, however the heck they want. Really, you aren’t going to be able to stop this entirely until you’ve got a total police state going, and you don’t want my opinion re: the U.S. in that regard.
Here’s the problem, Cardinal. The RIAA blindly assumes any music downloaded online would actually be purchased with 100% certainty. They don’t account for the fact that a great many wouldn’t simply buy Emimen’s album if they couldn’t access it online. They don’t factor in the number of people who borrow the album from a friend and dubb it onto a cassette or CD. The bottom line is that it’s impossible to know how much the artists are, in reality losing as it’s impossible to account for any gains enjoyed by the music industry via P2P exposure by people hearing music they would have never heard or bought otherwise.
Cardinal: Uhh, no. File sharing results in an INCREASE of CD sales, as users get to “try before buying,” as it were. No one has been able to demonstrate a causal relationship between file sharing and declining CD sales, not even the record companies. The whole issue is about control over distribution, NOT CD sales.
Brutus: It’s a waste of our time for you to come up with false analogies hoping to eventually hit one that can be considered stealing. I will, however, indulge you for a moment. What WOULD a person who snuck into a movie theater be charged with? IANAL, but I would guess it would be trespassing, NOT theft. Regardless, such a case has little similarity to music sharing. I would maintain that in your analogies, no theft has occured. Stealing a book is walking into a bookstore, grabbing said book, and running off. Copyright infringement is Xeroxing said book and handing the copies out to your friends.
Stealing MP3s is wrong.
These kids did NOT steal MP3s. EVERY one of you is as guilty as these kids, whether you have any MP3s or not. I know Aaron Sherman. I have used his software. All he wrote was a front end to search open windows file shares. You can do the same thing with software built in to some versions of windows. He just makes it more efficient.
Should he be sued for having illegal MP3s on an open share on his computer? Possibly. Probably, even. But should he be sued for doing the same thing as Google? No.
If what Aaron Sherman did is illegal, then every search engine on the internet is a child pornographer.
He wrote a search engine. That is ALL. Any files that were found through it and downloaded illegally are nothing that he has control over.
I agree that music sharing and downloading has a different dynamic than other forms of copyright infringement. A lot of people “preview” music by downloading it, and then buy the CD. But, I know that my co-worker friend (the one who LOVES to download music but scoffs at paying for it) would have to buy music if he couldn’t download it. Sure, he’d get some tapes from friends, and sure, he could go to the library and tape off the CDs they offer there. But he’s got wide and diverse tastes. He just couldn’t get the quality and variety of music he craved by taping from friends’ CDs and from the library. He’d end up buying.
But he doesn’t have to do that, because there is file sharing.
Copyright infringement does often involve a loss of income for the copyright holder. True, we don’t feel so sorry when it’s the RIAA (who has already proven themselves evil with their proposed “hacking into your computer” scheme) but some individuals are really hurt by copyright infringement. Imagine that I make an e-Book and sell it online. Imagine that I make just a little bit of money off of this e-Book (not a hard thing to imagine, I should hope! 
) and the income from this e-Book help pay for my web site, which has a lot of related and useful information. And imagine that someone emails a hundred copies of my e-Book to their friends, so their friends (and then their friends of friends) don’t have to buy my e-Book. How will I finance my web hosting? A lot of people aren’t buying my e-Book, and surely, a few of them would have bought my book, if they hadn’t gotten it for free.
This happens all the time, in small ways, to smaller people. People don’t think about that though—they just want what they want, and if they don’t have to pay for it, all the better. No matter that they may be strangling out the people who are providing the content that they are ahem stealing. They want what they want, for free.
That’s fine. But then you agree that some crime has been commited, be it theft or copyright-infringement or whatever. And ya, the analogies were weak, but that is because of the nature of the Internet. Never before has ‘copyright violation’ been so easy for so many to commit so frequently.
Wa wa wa wait. So you’re saying…obtain work from unauthorized source and don’t pay, but the copyright owner doesn’t not get the money that you didn’t not pay…or payed not to the unholder…
Uh, you’re going to have to clarify this.
JRootabega: I’m saying that there’s no net effect on the income of the owner of a work due to copyright infringement, and that’s why it’s not theft. If I go to a store and steal a book, I have caused a direct loss to the publisher and bookstore owner. If I go to the store, buy a book, then make Xerox copies for my friends, the effect is the same as if they chose not to buy the book.
And if they didn’t want the xeroxed book, they’d throw it away, right? Because they had no interest in it. In which case, no harm done. They didn’t want the book, so they didn’t read it, didn’t enjoy it, didn’t benefit from it.
But, if they were planning on buying the book, and would read that book eagerly, savoring every page, but because they had a friend who xeroxed off the book, they don’t have to buy it…how is that not hurting the copyright holder? He would have made a sale, had not the xeroxer person gotten to his potential customers first and convinced them, “Why buy the book when you can get it for free?”
Boohoo, I don’t feel sorry for the poor multimillionaire artists who aren’t getting my dollar. The popular music industry is getting ridiculous, and I think this whole mess is the grassroots way of saying that we’re not going to pay for it.
I’m all for supporting indie artists, and I have a limited amount of money. I buy my Saves the Day CDs and steal my popular stuff. Chances are, I’m not going to buy the pop CDs anyway. Plus, I discover all the best new independent artists when my friends send me their mp3s. That’s free advertising- and when I buy their CD, they’re making money legitimately from the file-sharing consortium. Booyeah! That’s exactly how it should be.
They could just as easily borrow the book from a friend, the library or depending on how fast they read hang out in a Barnes & Noble or Borders book store and read the entire book without paying for it.
But EasyPhil, they couldn’t keep the book in their collection and pick up the book, to savor every page whenever they saw fit.
If they read it at B&N, the copy stays at B&N. THey have to return the book eventually to the library, or pay for the book.
With the xeroxed copy, they’ve got a copy, in their possession, at all times. To read again and again, consult whenever they need to, whatever. And for that sort of continual access, they were expecting to buy the book. I mean, people do still buy books, you know. But because they had a friend who cut them off at the pass, and said, “Don’t buy! I’ll make you a xerox!”, they didn’t buy.
If everyone did this, (and if you don’t think it’s “wrong”, then I assume you think it would be OK if everyone did it) then how would the publishers afford to publish books? How would the authors support themselves?
I read an article recently (it was posted on Fark) about how while the RIAA whines about declining CD sales, indie record labels have seen their sales jump, mostly because their CDs are a lot cheaper and people like their music better. Can anyone link the article?
I think it’s interesting that most of the people that are against file sharing are the big established bands, like Metallica, while most of the proponents of file sharing are smaller bands. One might think that smaller bands would be hurt more by downloaders, since a lost sale to a small band would hurt them a lot more than it would hurt Metallica, yet it’s the other way around in terms of how they think about it.
And, for good measure, the oft-quoted Courtney Love on fiel sharing:
You can try to justify it all you want with handwaving about how the music company is “ripping people off” with high prices, or how you’re only grabbing MP3s for albums that you’d never buy anyway, or how it’s really helping the artists because it’s giving them free publicity…
…but in the end, if you’re getting something for free that wasn’t intended to be given out for free, then you’re stealing. And as Steve Jobs said last week, “that’s bad karma” – and bad karma will bite you in the ass eventually.
(Yeah, I used to do my bit of illicit digital file-swapping, long before anyone knew what an “internet” was. But then I grew up…)
yosemitebabe, if I like or need a book that much, I will buy it even if I had access to a xerox copy or my friends copy. If I’m not that interested in it, or unsure and a friend was saying how good it was and allowed me to borrow it I’d read it and return it and if I liked it, I would buy it. I think for the most part that’s what’s happening with MP3’s. People are downloading stuff to determine if they like it and some of what is downloaded is listened to one time and never again. In this context it’s no different than taping something off of the radio which isn’t illegal. Ah, but yes, there’s the quality issue. I just dusted off a tape that made from a Jazz station here in NYC when it first actually played Jazz, it’s easy listening, same ole shit over and over now. The tape is killing! I’m getting maximum enjoyment out of it, years later. Oh, and the quality differential compared to a 128 encoded MP3? Negligible.
I thought you were an atheist, rjung. There’s no such thing as Karma. 
Almost forgot to mention…
I just bought a CD from Borders only because I was able to listen to every track on the disc at one of their playing stations.
You can listen to music on the radio and record it for later listening in your home, on the go, in your car and it’s free. Downloading of music in MP3 format is the new radio where you choose what you want to listen to and when.