It occurs to me. The RIAA wants to crack into systems and insert viruses. Deliberate infecting is considered a terrorist act, so the RIAA was planning a terrorist act.
Whine on. Your peers are paying for their crime, there’s now precedent on the books, and more justice is soon to follow.
And kid yourself not. The figure of 3 gigabytes of stolen content average per user (which is disputable, but I digress) is so because it’s not really peer-to-peer; it’s incredibly hub-and-spoke. 4 hubs have now gone under (hooray!), and every other hub is nervous. If you’re a spoke you don’t fear, you just whine about your so-called freedoms lost. Cry me a river.
Conspiring to commit a terrorist act, a very serious offense or at the very least seriously offensive.
You sound like the only person whining here.
It’s not stolen content, it’s duplicated. If you have counterfeit money you don’t have stolen money though you do have an instrument that allows you to steal other stuff.
I really don’t see why people are so keen to defend the RIAA. They are an outdated and parasitic organization that does little real work of it’s own but instead skims from artists (and if they arn’t preditory, why does my local music mag have a weekly collumn devoted to ‘how not to get screwed by lables’?) and consumers. It is only still in existance due to monopolistic practices and huge campaign contributions.
Ask yourself, why isn’t it independent record lables that are fighting this fight? Why isn’t it artists without financial ties to the RIAA? Why is it only the RIAA that is concerned with this?
Because the RIAA knows its time is up. But instead of moving on like most industries have to when their situations change, the RIAA just lobbies its business practices into the law. The RIAA is has more lobbiests than just about any organization in America, and it’s working. But no business has some god-given right to make a profit. You don’t get to choose whatever you want to do and expect there to be laws passed to make it profitable. Other people in the music business have found perfectly good ways to make money in the age of peer-to-peer. I have my sucpiscions that the group Tatu tailored their marketing directly to file-sharing. So why is the RIAA so special?
Lets say I decide I want to make my money skywriting. I go to a remote place and spend hours drawing elaborate pictures in the sky. I buy the land below the drawing so that I can charge an enterence fee to people that want to look at my drawings. Then lets say the invent super high powered goggles that allow people from the nearby city to look at my drawings without paying. Do I rethink my plan for making money? Not if I’m the RIAA. If I’m the RIAA, I try to get the government to ban the goggles, start lawsuits against people looking my direction and try to pass laws saying I can look through people’s home movies and photograpsh to see if they ever glanced my way.
And if I had the money of the RIAA, the government would convince people that it was a matter of morals and justice. Pah.
Oh please. Don’t parse it. When you illegally duplicate intellectual property that the creators were trying to sell (to make some money, which will help reimburse them for the investment of time and resources it took to create the thing to begin with) then you are stealing.
EasyPhil, I believe that you download music (or listen to it at B&N) and then buy the CD. Because I do the same thing. I am really big on having CDs. I always will buy the CD, if it’s available. Always. And I always like to have the original book, not a xeroxed book, if such a book is available.
But not everyone is like you and me. My co-worker friend, for instance, who explicitely eshews the concept of “paying for it”. He won’t do it. He’s not interested in the idea of the Apple Music store, because that would require him to pay for music. And he’s not into paying.
He’s not the only one who feels this way. Do you think that it’s right for a person to possess GBs of music, while not possessing one single solitary commercially made CD? They never buy any music commercially? If enough people did this, how would the people who produce the music afford to continue to keep producing it?
And, I brought up my e-Book analogy earlier. What if I produced an e-Book (and I might—it’s been suggested as a “tie-in” for a website I created), and I wanted to sell it, to help pay for my web hosting fees? I have a web site that has some useful information on it. I pay for this web hosting with my own funds. So, let’s say I try to sell an e-Book (PDF file, universally accessable to anyone with Adobe Acrobat Reader). So let’s say that someone gets a copy of my e-Book, and then distributes it to a whole lot of people who might otherwise be tempted to buy the e-Book themselves. But there’s no need to do that now, since the copy they were given is indistinguishable from the “legal” purchased copy.
So why would people buy my e-Book? Guilt? A feeling of obligation? Yes, perhaps a few people would buy the e-Book after the fact. But a WHOLE LOT wouldn’t. You can bet on that. So, if I couldn’t sell enough e-Books to pay for my web hosting fees, I may just pull my website offline. Because it’s too expensive to maintain, and the people who are giving away free copies of my e-Book are in large part responsible for that, by cutting into whatever meagre earnings my e-Book might have made.
I think such a scenario is possible, and in fact probably likely. And to be honest, it’s a reason why I’m not going to go to the expense of producing an e-Book. Why should I go to the expense and effort to produce a very nice formatted e-Book, just so everyone else can take it for free? Why bother?
“More justice is soon to follow?” Bill H., you sound like a Nazi.
I simply couldn’t take the chance this thread would make it to page 3 or beyond without this accusation!
::Burns CDs in protest::
Should i burn my VCR, too? I’m illegally copying copywrited material. So is TiVo. Digitally, even. And Amazon.com has sample pages of books. cant have that. And i could go into a bookstore and read the book without buying. Must ban bookstores. I sing songs in the shower. Can’t have that, they’re copywrited! RIAA needs microphones in my shower! and cameras to make sure i don’t do copywrited dance moves. And i can’t remember lyrics, since they are copywrited. So no remembering things for me.
rjung: You’re not stealing. You are, at worst, comitting copyright infringement. BIG DIFFERENCE. It doesn’t affect the income of the artists, so the worst you can possibly claim is that it undermines their nebulous right to control the distribution of their works. Ooh boy, whole lot of bad karma right there.
I was thinking more along the lines of the Iraqi Information Minister. Tremble in fear, infidels! The RIAA will overcome! 
On the other hand, the morality of it gets a little muddled when you are only ‘stealing’ because the RIAA lobbied the government for a copyright extension on something that was about to revert to public ownership.
The morality gets a little muddled when record companies jigger the books to screw over artists.
The morality gets a little muddled when the record company manages to pass insidious laws by sneaking them into bills through paying off a copy editor who modified a bill that had already been signed to change the content of it, rather than just correct spelling. Content that gave record company the ownership of artist’s intellectual property.
The morality gets a little muddled when the RIAA attempts to have passed legislation that would not only exempt them from anti-hacking laws, but hold them financially blameless for any damages they might cause from said hacking.
The morality gets a little muddied when the industry gets copyright extensions that allow them to hold on to their back catalogs, and then they don’t print the work and prevent us from legally listening to it at all.
While file sharing may be wrong, I’d be careful using loaded words like thief. There are no white hats here. The RIAA is one of the more powerful lobbying forces in Washington, and much of the ‘property’ they own they got by manipulating the government in their favor.
And while it technically pay be theft, I think there’s a hint of civil disobedience.
yosemitebabe, I understand your feelings about producing something that can be easily copied. It all depends on your market niche and the demographic that would be interested in you e-book. Personally, I would produce it anyway and offer it for sale on my site as nothing in this world is guaranteed. I used to sell software and I never used copy protection on it, but then again my product wasn’t very hot though I did make money on it.
yosemitebabe: But here’s the problem. Downloading music is NOT stealing. No amount of RIAA propaganda can make it so, because there is a fundamental difference between walking into a Tower Records store and running off with the latest Britney Spears CD and downloading that same CD on the Internet. Now, to make this issue even more complex, you’re assuming that CD sales decline in a file sharing environment. Why? No one has yet shown a causal relationship. The closest the RIAA can come is “CD sales declined n% thanks to file sharing. And oh yeah, there’s that economic recession and crippling unemployment, but just ignore that.” For every person like your coworker, there’s $biggernum that say “Hey, this band is cool, I think I’ll buy their CD!”
Also, the free distribution of e-books model of economic support HAS proven viable. I suggest you ask Cory Doctorow and Roger Williams about their experiences.
I’m not being a snot here, but I find that difficult to imagine. Does anyone have a cite for that?
Yeah, but it appears that Apple is at least somewhat limiting what you can do with the music after you download it. For anything like this to be successful, they’re going to have to stop trying to embed any limitations in the system. Just let the song file be downloaded, and then let the person do whatever they want with it. They must be preventing the buyer from taking the files out of iTunes in order to enforce restrictions like
and
Just let people have the file when they pay for it, and save it, move it, whatever they want. Otherwise it’s not as good as files obtained through illegal file-sharing. If we’re going to actually pay for the songs, then we should get to use them like any other file.
You’re the one who claimed the artists were losing money. The burden of proof is on you.
Uh, Alereon is the one claiming that ‘file sharing’ leads to an increase in CD sales. Can we see some cites for that?
Especially against Disney. Those guys, I can understand civil disobedience against. Disney flaunts every bit of what the consumers are complaining about, in their commercials. “You better buy Bambi now, because after May 15th, it’s going to be locked away in a secret vault hidden in our warehouse at an undisclosed location somewhere in the depths of the Mariana Trench, where it will be placed in an unmarked crate and stacked randomly amonst other crates, kind of like in Indiana Jones or Citizen Kane (which you won’t be able to get either.) The surviving animators of Bambi will be killed so that any knowledge they retain dies with them. All existing prints other than the one in the vault will be burned. In fact, Disney enforcer squads will be checking all of your homes with our government granted police powers to make sure you don’t have any older copies of Bambi, burning the ones we find.”
I’d like to see somebody download Steamboat Willie on KaZaA then report his own theft, so we could have a Scopes Monkey Trial over the pure undiluted evil that is the Sonny Bono Act. Let the public see what jerks Disney really is, and maybe the tide of public sympathy starts to drift away from these huge media conglomerates.
Unfortunatly, there really isn’t a counterpoint on the music industry’s side. I mean, who’s really downloading songs on KaZaA for which the copyright dates back to the 1920’s? There are some people who only use file-sharing to get rare jazz recordings and stuff they couldn’t otherwise actually buy, but that isn’t who the RIAA is concerned about. They’re worried about that guy who will download a couple songs from the new Blink 182 or Britney Spears or (insert untalented popular band here) CD and realize how lousy it is before he wastes the RIAA price-fixed cost of $18 to buy the thing.
Let’s get the copyright protection scaled back down to a Constitutionally reasonable period, like 40 years, enough to protect the work for the artists’ lifetimes but not enough to give the record company this ironfist control over the art in perpetuity. Then we can archive all the songs for which copyright expires, to preserve them, and allow them to be freely distributed.
Heard television industry folks on NPR not long ago complaining about Tivo. Appearently, they are very concerned that people will edit out the commercial breaks from TV shows without watching them. This, they claimed, was stealing TV.
Ya see, the advertisers buy time on the networks so that people will watch their commercials and maybe buy their product. Therefore, by watching the show, you are essentially contracted to pay for it by watching the commercials. Not watching the commercials is taking without paying, ie stealing.
We are going to see more and more of this as we enter the digital age more fully.