I’ve been boycotting them for several years now for purely personal reasons. After having to work with them for about five years now, I have yet to meet a member of the Sony Corporation whose skull I have not wanted to cave in with a baseball bat. Every last one of them has been an indecisive sack of dogshit who expects to be waited on hand and foot 24-7. These are people who will schedule a meeting for 7pm, show up at 9, and then sit there and hem and haw and dither for 10 FUCKING HOURS! If there was ever a group of people who made me wish I had a flamethrower, it’s them.
If you offered me a PS3 or a 65" Bravia for free, I would refuse. I’d rather fill the living room with my son’s used diapers than with anything bearing the Sony logo.
First off, whether you’re stealing a product or buying it, someone else is always going to be deprived of it, especially if the demand is high enough. And second, downloading a copy of anything isn’t going to deprive enjoyment of another, but it is illegal. Therefore it is theft.
It would be deliciously spiteful to have a choice set of Sony Music quotes about hypothetical lost sales from downloaders… and then a list of all the Sony Electronics products you could have bought for your $18K home theater. “These are not hypothetical lost sales.” with pictures of the finished project with all their competitors’ kit.
Unlawful depriving someone of their lawful property is theft.
Copying does not deprive the original owner of their property.
Copying is in some cases unlawful.
It still does not satisfy the definition of theft.
One could coherently speak of the "theft"of the right to copy, itself. You aren’t stealing MP3s, because you aren’t depriving the original owner of their copy, but you are depriving the rights holder of the exclusive monopoly to authorize copying.
Some say depriving, others say revoking. Viewed from within the framework of social contracts, the only reason we grant patent and copyright is to promote the growth of the common culture. The actions of the RIAA, Disney, and other large media corporations look like an enclosure campaign openly hostile to the public domain and the intended purpose of the rights we’ve granted them. If they are, in effect, in violation of the social contract that balances encouraging creators and enriching the culture, would it not be proper to revoke the rights we’ve granted them under the auspices of that contract?
It seems that Wikipedia agrees with you. And while I’ll concede that Wikipedia is not the last say on things and I didn’t bother to read the case they cited, I’d have to be persuaded by a better cite and argument than “NO”.
The outdated model is the production and distribution of physical media.
The modern business model consists of offering a music catalogue online.
They so far have been reluctant to participate in the new model because they’re convinced a competitive online offering would undermine their old model faster than the new model could be capitalized.
It’s far from sure his daughter is guilty of the precise infringement the RIAA claims. The RIAA’s methods of determining who is infringing are… uh. Technically poor.
Some say that whenever others say crap like that it makes some laugh. Social contracts? We grant copyright so that artists will get paid for their work and not be ripped off. They aren’t under ANY obligation to do anything with their work they don’t feel like. There is no inalienable right to view or enjoy another person’s work without paying whatever they want for it. If they make absurd demands for their works you then have to move on and find someone more reasonable to deal with. Then if someone goes ahead and steals that work…ahem sorry ‘deprives them of their copyright’ then they can attempt redress under the law as is their right.
Of course that being said I think only idiots use copy protection (which is useless) and litigation schemes to protect an outdated business model (which is a stupid waste) instead of pouring more resources into providing content that people want to pay for but that doesn’t give any individual the right to choose to ‘revoke’ anyone’s copyright over anything.
And just to put copyright infringement in perspective, for all those who think this is so awful: Assuming you can read, how many have either borrowed or lent a book that was bought to someone else. It is an identical kind of copyright infringement that everyone who buys books that do not need to be colored in engages in. And you might not believe this, but at least where I live there are many large buildings where one can get all types of copyrighted material for FREE.
And the record companies need to realize that properly used, free access to copyrighted material can help them. Someone at work burned a copy of “The Eminem Show” for me, said I had to listen to the whole thing just once. There is not a snowball’s chance in hell that I would ever have listened to that if I had had to pay for it. Well now I own everything Marshall has done, including two copies of “8 mile” because my wife bought the PG rated version for my birthday, and since that is essentially an instrumental, I had to go out and buy the real thing.
And when the home theater is done, I think I will take a picture of it and do just that.
It’s not really ironic at all. In that case, Sony defended a use of their product as being allowable under Fair Use provisions. Now, they are trying to defend their product from uses which quite plainly do not fall under Fair Use. Unless you believe that downloading a copy of a work that you haven’t paid for is Fair Use, there’s really no irony here whatsoever.
There are many, many reasons to dislike Sony. Their desire to protect their intellectual property rights is not one of them, nor is it in any way inconsistent with their prior actions.
YES! Thank you. The record companies have done a good job of framing copyright infringement as theft simply by the force of repetition. If we keep in mind how and why people and students in particular download music I think the difference between the two becomes very obvious. Every downloaded song does not equal lost potential profit for the record companies and artists. Especially on university campuses where files can be shared on high-speed networks, many students download the entire music libraries of other people as a way of sampling different types of music. This is music they never would have purchased otherwise but might now (or go to live shows) having discovered an artist or two that they like.
It is not uncommon at my university for students to download 20 gb of music and delete most or all of it within the next couple of weeks. To equate every downloaded song with lost profit or even lost potential profit is foolish. Downloading is our “radio.” The means by which we discover new artists and decide what to spend money on. To suggest that we blindly pay $20 for a cd knowing that at many stores you cannot return an opened product is to live in the past when consumers had no power or choice.
Downloading is also our way of sharing music which people have been doing for ever either through lending albums, making a mix cassette or playing a cd for a friend. I don’t understand why such a big deal is being made of it now. People are still paying for music: look at iTunes. It’s just now we only pay for music we like, music we want to support.
No, that would not be a better analogy. We are talking about one person obtaining one copy of copyrighted material without buying it, for their personal use. The fact that music is more amenable to digital reproduction and widespread borrowing is irrelevant.
Yay, it’s the Bleeding Stupid Analogy club again! Ah, familiar friends.
I think it’s more like if you put a hamster on its wheel powering a stereo, letting it have lunch breaks of not more than five minutes while a greased midget entertains Keith Richards by doing backflips to the strains of Ave Maria, simultaneously transcribing Chris de Burgh lyrics with the word “cock” substituted for every line in which an imperilled lady is mentioned. How’s that?
Jesus Christ, if you can’t see the difference between a library and a P2P system in which unlimited copies of an original work are made, you should really limit yourself to talking about the actual case at hand. Much more analogising and you’ll sprain something.
In the case of borrowing a book (from a friend or from the library) there is only one physical copy. It’s legal for me to loan a CD to a friend also. It is not legal for me to run off a copy of the book and then return it to the library, nor is it legal for my friend to burn a copy of the CD and return the original to me. The personal use exemption applies only to a product already legally purchased.