World Eater:
Happens all the time (I’ve done it several times, myself, and frequently hear of other people doing the same), if for no other reason than that compiling a whole album online, of consistent sound quality, can be a pain in the ass.
I don’t believe you. In my experience, it’s quite common. I’m skeptical of your foundation for this statement. Maybe the aforementioned “motherfuckers” know more about their habits than you do.
Actually, it’s $150,000 per song. Much as I disagree with filesharing, that’s something I’d like to see the RIAA try to defend in court. By that yardstick, if I shoplifted a 12-song album from a record store, the store could sue me for $1.75 million.
I think there are some valid disputes, especially in the case of the people who run the filesharing systems. Are they really liable for actions of people that use their software? Is Google liable if people use it to find illegal copies? Is a library liable if someone borrows a CD, copies it, and returns it?
One thing that nobody has mentioned is that the RIAA is only going after people that have over 1000 illegal files on their hard drive. If you figure that your average CD has 12 tunes on it, that is the equivelant of over 80 CD’s worth of material. We are not talking about a few downloads to determine if you like a given artist. And I would speculate that many of these people actually have gigs of material on their computer, based on the people that I know that are into downloading pirated music. How you can rationalize that this is not hurting artist or the industry in general is beyond me.
I wonder if it’s a point that is being deliberately lost. I read about the girl being sued in the paper yesterday. They repeated several times that she was being sued because she “dowloaded 1000 songs”. But what I gather from other sources is that they sued people who shared their downloads with others on the web. The distinction was not made in the newspaper article at all. And I wonder if the distinction is one that the RIAA doesn’t particularly care to make an issue of, figuring that having people believe that they might be sued only for downloading music might scare them out of doing so.
At any rate, it’s most certainly not the same thing as dubbing your favorite CD onto a tape for your own personal use, as one person suggested. It would be more akin to making 100’s or 1000’s of cassette tapes and standing on a street corner giving them away for free.
The $150,000 figure comes from the Copyright Act (17 USC 504 ©) as the maximum statutory damages for willful infringement. They don’t have to show $150,000 worth of damage to get that money because the whole point of statutory damages is that you don’t have to show actual damage.
And if you shoplifted a CD, you are not infringing the copyright, just committing theft. As some here have pointed out, there is a technical difference.
Well, we have seen 0 evidence that filesharing hurts CD sales. (Negative evidence, actually, but that’s another thesis.]
OOC, are there any provisions for quality and/or format of copy? I mean, remembering a song someone plays for you isn’t making a copy, is it? Even if you hum what you remember to someone else, and they remember it?
Also, it seems to me that the proper term for copyright violations is trespass. You’re not depriving the owner of anything, but you are taking from them a right that they did not choose to give.
Who is the RIAA really working for, the artist or the music companies? If RIAA is so worried about artists getting their due, why do artists have to sue record companies to get royalties they are owed, and why isn’t RIAA a co-plaintif with them?
Oh, by the way, it’s very interesting - very, VERY interesting that nobody has taken note of how the RIAA is finding out just WHAT you’ve got on your PC. You’ll note that no Apple users are affected by this.
My understanding is that anyone who uses Windows Media Player 7.1 or higher allows Microsoft to upload file information on your PC to anyone Microsoft deems worthy of getting it. Apparently this is the spy window from what I’ve read. A nasty little alliance is that one. Of course, as always, it was there in the fine print before you downloaded the Windows Media Player.
I remember reading about it once about 2 years ago, so I checked out the fine print to WMP7.1 and yes, there were indeed paragraphs in there about uploading sensitive data about your PC back to Microsoft. I decided never to use Windows Media Player whilst online ever again at that point - and I only have WMP7.0
Oh please. When someone has a thousand files on their computer, or a few gigabytes, how can you honestly say that this hasn’t hurt CD sales.
When I was a kid, if there was music I wanted, I purchased it. If I couldn’t afford it at the time, I saved up for it and then purchased it. Today though, I could just go get it for free. That is what many people are choosing to do. To me, the “evidence” is in seeing a kid with a hard drive full of songs that he will never even consider purchasing, even though he loves the music and listens to it everyday.
And that is the point. It isn’t that people are using the technology to make better informed decisions on what to buy. It is about them saying “Why should I buy something when I can get it for free” And if you don’t think that millions of kids have that mindset, you are living in a dream world. They will never buy a CD when they can get it for free and use the money for other things that aren’t as easy to steal.
I should note that the EFF has guidlines on how to avoid a lawsuit but posting a direct link could be considered verboten.
Can somebody tell me what the RIAA’s desired end-game is? Part of it seems to be destroying P2P file sharing, but what else is there?
Again, this isn’t about the practices of the RIAA, which I do not agree with. They are obviously protecting their own business interests. But people aren’t downloading files just to get back at the RIAA, they are doing it because it is free and until recently, there wasn’t really any risk of getting caught.
The bottom line is:
Artist makes a product. People who like the product, purchase it, and the artist gets paid.
or
Artist makes a product. People who like the product,download it for free, and the artist doesn’t make a dime.
Of course, you will argue the following scenario though.
Artist makes a product. People download the product to see if they like it. If they do, they purchase product, and the artist gets paid.
Now, if the majority of folks fall into the third catagory, CD sales should be absolutely skyrocketing because of all the new music the people are being turned on to. They are hearing all of this great stuff and rushing out to buy it, right?
or
Do they really need to buy it. After all, they already have it. Fuck the artist. It is their own fault for being signed to the evil label.
The fact is, you can say until you are blue in the face that people really only download stuff to see if they like it. But we both know that many people, especially money strapped youth, will never bother to buy any of it. They feel that they deserve to have it for free. Sorry but you don’t have that right.
Walmart sells Garth Brooks 6 CD box set for $41.88
Why can you get Garth Brooks cds so cheap?
Incorrect: He doesn’t add any “burden” to anyone; there’s zero marginal cost to the record label for his illegal copy. The costs of recording the tracks, manufacturing the CD, and marketing the band have already been paid. Whether he makes one digital copy or a thousand, no one has to pay a cent more.
Intellectual property isn’t a zero-sum game, it’s entirely possible for the file-sharer to gain more than the record company “loses”. As Jefferson said, “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me,” which is as true of any intellectual product.
True, but you have to consider the different ways that books and music are used. You can get all the value you’ll ever need out of a book by borrowing it from the library for two weeks; most people don’t read the same book over and over. Music is consumed differently. The bottom line is, the library gives you nearly all the benefits of owning a book for free, and file sharing gives you nearly all the benefits of owning a CD for free.
So music didn’t exist at all until the past couple centuries?
How about this: I download an album, like it, keep it, then go out and buy two more albums from the same band. That’s at least $140 I never would’ve spent if not for Napster and Kazaa.
And BTW, you know at least one person now. I downloaded some Evanescence songs, liked them, then bought the album. I still have the copies I downloaded, but since I bought the album now, I can legally have MP3 copies (see RIAA v. Diamond).
If the publisher tries to convince you that you aren’t really buying the words, just licensing them, then yes! You shouldn’t have to license them twice.
The point is that the industry can’t have it both ways. Either you’re paying $15 for a physical product, in which case you can make as many copies as you want but you have you pay full price when it breaks, or you’re paying $1 for the media and $14 for a license to use the music, in which case you can’t copy the music but you don’t need to buy more than one license.
There’s a difference between “loves the music and listens to it every day” and “would buy the music if he couldn’t listen for free”. Thanks to the miracle of satellite radio, there are dozens of songs that I listen to every day and enjoy, but I wouldn’t buy them at $15 per CD.
Do you really think a high school kid with 1000 songs on his hard drive would spend over $1100 to buy all those CDs if not for file sharing?
Indie sales are up. The Eminem Show and Kid A went up. People buy the music they like, not the music the RIAA’s marketing machine wants them to like.
Destroying used CD sales, for one.
Because it’s true. Because it’s FACTUAL. CD Sales were at their highest BEFORE napster was shut down, and fell along with the gradual shutdown of napster.
The evidence that CD sales aren’t hurt by file sharing is undeniable. (Well, clearly not, because yahoos are still running around denying it…).
Yep, that’s the theory. But the fact of CD sales and filesharing rates demonstrates that while this sort of thing probably does happen, it is entirely swamped by the buying habbits of people who fileshare first, and then buy the stuff that they like.
Well, clearly, they ARE using it to make better iformed decision. Or at least something else is happening. Because the fact remains that CD sales shows a positive correlation with filesharing.
If your theory of how fileshares are all (or mostly) taking rather than trying, they correlation between CD sales and filesharing would be negative.
Or in otherwords. When reality contradicts your theory, it aint reality that’s wrong, dude.
Can i just make a general point without further inflaming the main argument?
The point is this:
We can point all we like to rising and/or falling CD sales and their alleged relationship to file sharing. But all we will ever find is a correlation; we have no concrete evidence of causation either way.
If CD sales drop, there are many factors other than file-sharing that might be to blame. Conversely, if CD sales rise, it does not automatically mean that file-sharing is having no effect.
In response to those people who say that filesharing is clearly copyright violation. I say
CITE?.
Or, rather This is not true. In actual fact, the law has not yet spoken on this issue.
To those who say filesharing is theft, I say. go buy a clue. The law has very clearly spoking on this issue. Copyright is not property, and thus copyright violation cannot be theft.
It’s a different law, with completely different rules. Among those rules, are a series of guidelines intended to distinguish ‘fair use’ of copyrighted materials from infringing uses.
Making a copy, or even sharing a copy isn’t automatically a violation of copyright law, context matters, and the contextual rules are pretty complex.
The basic rule of thumb is that copying that is necessary to make use of a licensed copy is protected for sure. Copying that does economic harm to the copyright holders monopoly is definitely not protected. And everthing in between is a mess to be sorted out in the court of law.
So the issue with filesharing is this: IF sharing represents economic harm to the copyright holder, then its illegal. But if it doesn’t, then it may or may not be depending on other (even more arcane) rules protecting fair use and free expression vs. the copyright monopoly.
All of the evidence to date suggests that filesharing doesn’t result in economic harm. This is despite the fact that many people, including those on this thread have articulated theories showing how the harm would happen. In actual fact they cannot show aggregate harm in real life.
The most probably reason is that filesharing results in more try-before-you-buy acts than download-instead-of-buy acts. But, fundamentally, it doesn’t matter why there is no evidence of harm. The fact remains that there is no evidence of harm.
And without evidence of harm, filesharing falls into the category of fair use, at least until some court comes up with a definitive theory of why it doesn’t.
Of course, there is no proof either way. However, there is a great mass of data suggesting that filesharing doesn’t harm CD sales, except when suppressed.
Only in theory. In practice, downloading music takes from musicians and recording companies a percentage of the profit they should reasonably expect to be theirs for the work they have done (and to which they are legally entitled).
This depends.
Looking at the songs I have downloaded, there is not one that I like enough to go out and buy the CD in order to have it. Not one. I downloaded them because it was free. Considering on most CD’s there are 2 good songs and about 10 lame ones, there is not one song I have on my computer that I’d pay $18 for. In my case, nobody is losing any money, because I was never planning on buying from them to begin with. If I couldn’t download it, I simply wouldn’t have it at all because I’m not about to go out and buy it.