Sony and the RIAA

[Beware_of_Doug]

@Dead Badger

Most people download because it is free, and when you present people with a choice between paying and not paying with a minimal chance of getting caught, they will tend to go for the free option. And in the time saved by not walking to the shops, they will go on the internet and loudly protest how they’re only “sampling” the work, and fully intend to buy it later at their leisure. No matter how many scenarios you care to concoct in which a wholesome and lovely person downloads music that they can’t live without for the 7 days until it’s released in the shops, if you pretend that this represents the majority of filesharers, you’re simply deluding yourself. For every Beware of Doug, there are umpteen people who just don’t feel like paying for Razorlight or whatever.

Don’t make me out to be any paragon of virtue either, DB. What I do is just as questionable, really. It amounts to hijacking corporations’ intellectual property because it also happens to be my (and everybody’s) cultural heritage.

Under current laws, there is no such concept as cultural heritage, at least not inside the span of one person’s lifetime. Music, movies, etc., are simply property, and it’s the owners’ right to do whatever they want with property, from taking it all public domain to tossing every known copy down a radioactive mineshaft.

[Dead_Badger]

@mhendo

If you’re going to argue, as they have often done, that buying something like a CD is made up, in large measure, of buying the right to play something, then the question of how much of the cost is for the physical product and how much of the cost is for the intellectual property and work behind it, becomes relevant.

But I don’t think any good really needs to have its retail price justified by the costs; the price will be determined by what people are willing to pay for it. The RIAA may well point to all the other costs that go into their business, but in the end it’s an irrelevant argument which serves solely to defray some of the criticism that goes their way. In the end what you’re paying is determined by how much you personally value what you’re paying for, not how much what it’s printed on is worth, or how much it cost to promote. Unit cost is a factor, but it only alters the price point at which a company maximises profit; the shape of the curve is determined by how consumers value the product.

Nothing about current copyright law should really lead consumers to believe that by buying a CD, they’re buying the right to listen to the work in perpetuity on the medium of their choice. So when they pay a retail price, they should base their judgement of value on that fact.

Your example is fine, and a label might get a lot of nice press for instituting such a system, although I’m not sure it would be practical. It might be fairer, it might not; ultimately it’s up to me whether the convenience of having the new format is worth the full retail price. After all, I still have the LP, and presumably still have a player (dauerbach’s protestations to the contrary, turntables are still extremely common thanks to their suitability for DJs). The existence of CD players doesn’t make my vinyl any less convenient, and it has no bearing on the decision I took way back when to buy the LP - I knew what I was getting, and I knew what I was paying.

The RIAA makes some specious, self-serving and frequently outright stupid arguments when fighting its corner, of that there’s no doubt. But when deciding what to pay for CDs, the RIAA are the very last people consumers should listen to. And they certainly shouldn’t be duped into assuming that they’re buying more than they really are.

[Tuckerfan]

@Charlie Tan

As I understand it, filesharing is the boogeyman the RIAA (and its co-organisations in other countries) is using to explain lower profits. The change from vinyl to CD was like oprinting $$$ during roughly 15 years. Many people went out to re-buy what they had on vinyl and wanted to play on a cd, and the record companies found new ways to re-package old stuff and sell at full price. We had TV commercials over here, selling “The Greatest Swedish Hits by Elvis Presley” topping the compilation chart, selling @ $19.95 while older compilations were gathering dust in the bargain bins and not moving at a $2.99 price tag.
A lot of this stuff only needed packaging and promotion and the shareholders and execs got used to making easy money.

It’s not as easy anymore, but filesharing is not to blame, rather, it’s a market that’s increasingly fragmetized (is that a word?) where we see the same trends as in movies: Record companies tend to back up a few really big names, pour a lot of money into marketing and hoping that album swill sell like hell (as they do for opening weekends for movies). Radio stations play along as it is easier to front sell “The new song from Madonna” whereas selling “The new song from Moist van Lipwig” is much harder, no matter how good the song is.

In the end, RIAA is squeling, but their own figures state that record sales in the U.S. has dropped from $ 12.2 B to $11.5 B annually in the last ten years. $700M is a considerable amount of money but considering the noise the RIAA is making, it’s nowhere near as bad as they make it out to be.
So yes, there is a long time downward trend, 0.6 % annually. Is filesharing to blame? Partially, I suppose.
But maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with how they distribute. It might’ve something to do with what they produce and put their markeing efforts into.

Cite to RIAA statistics (pdf).

This commentator agrees with you, that filesharing isn’t the biggest source for the decline in music sales.

Well, you know, people have been writing about the decline in CD sales for a long time, and this year it appears to really have accelerated. And this sort of pattern, where a slow decline accelerates into a rapid decline, is very typical of what happens. You know, the forces start to feed on themselves. Tower Records goes out of business, there are fewer record stores. There’s less interest in finding new artists, because there’s less of a market to put them into. It’s the exact same kind of thing you see, you know for example, at Kodak with film — old analog, old-fashioned film. You know, it went down slowly for a few years and then finally, it just kind of has just crashed. Because all the forces . . . you know, there’s fewer places to buy film and develop it and all that.

[1010011010]

@Dead Badger

I think it’s clear that we’re only talking about the filesharing of copyrighted works here

Just to beat the horse a bit more, we’re talking about filesharing of copyrighted works without the rights holders’ permission. There is nothing inherently illegal about filesharing copyrighted works, either.

@Dead Badger

the price will be determined by what people are willing to pay for it.

O RLY? YA RLY!

Don’t worry. They’ve learned their lesson

[Dead_Badger]

If labels are guilty of cartel action in setting retail prices, then this should be tackled through the appropriate laws. And look! it has been. This has no bearing on whether people should feel warm and fuzzy about breaking copyright laws.

And yes, you really showed that dead horse. Are there any other buttfuckingly obvious distinctions you’d like to make? Or did Bono personally phone you up and say you could download Beautiful Day?

[Tuckerfan]

And if Atty Gen. Alberto “I have no memory, but we don’t torture people” Gonzales has his way, file sharing will get you life in prison.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has proposed legislation that would make the DMCA look almost just. Among other things, the law would make attempted infringement a crime, and send some infringers to jail for life. C|Net’s intrepid Declan McCullagh does a great job calling attention to highlights from the legislation, which Gonzales has dubbed The Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2007 [PDF].

If this legislation becomes law, here are some things you could look forward to: 1-10 years in prison for attempting to engage in copyright infringement that would bring no profit to you (i.e., trying but failing to copy Doctor Who DVDs for your girlfriend); prison for life if you endangered someone by using pirated software (if a hospital got somebody’s medical records confused while using an infringing copy of Windows, for instance); being wiretapped by law enforcement investigating cases of attempted copyright infringement (now that your efforts to infringe Doctor Who DVDs for your girlfriend have been discovered, your cell phone has been tapped).

Yeah, that’s a good idea. :rolleyes:

[Dead_Badger]

Yeah; in cases where by using pirated software, the defendant “knowingly or recklessly causes or attempts to cause death.” These trivial little details, eh?

I think we can reasonably assume that anyone sharing music less lethal than Bon Jovi is safe from this law, but then again actually bothering to read laws before assuming the worst is just so boring, isn’t it?

[Tuckerfan]

@Dead Badger

Yeah; in cases where by using pirated software, the defendant “knowingly or recklessly causes or attempts to cause death.” These trivial little details, eh?

I think we can reasonably assume that anyone sharing music less lethal than Bon Jovi is safe from this law, but then again actually bothering to read laws before assuming the worst is just so boring, isn’t it?

Hey,even 1 to 10 years for failing to pirate something is still absurdly harsh.

[Dead_Badger]

@Tuckerfan

Hey,even 1 to 10 years for failing to pirate something is still absurdly harsh.

You’ll find that’s for criminal copyright infringement, which involves showing either wilful infringement for profit or large-scale infringement. Johnny Cantaffordtheshins does not fall under these provisions.

Maybe 1-10 years is too harsh for criminal copyright infringement. Maybe the scope of what constitutes “criminal” copyright infringement is too broad. But statements like “file sharing will get you life in prison” are just ludicrously hyperbolic to the point of being outright untruths.

[1010011010]

@Dead Badger

And yes, you really showed that dead horse. Are there any other buttfuckingly obvious distinctions you’d like to make?

ryah: “Filesharing is not illegal. Making copies of copyright material is, or more precisely making copies of copyright material without the copyright owner’s permission is, no matter which method is used. There are many legitimate use for filesharing e.g. distributing Linux or software updates. The assumption that filesharing is illegal per se I find quite annoying.”
DeadBadger: “I think it’s clear that we’re only talking about the filesharing of copyrighted works here, without every poster having to explicitly state this.”

See what you did there?
Are we to infer it’s always illegal to file-share copyrighted works, that GPL software isn’t protected by copyright, or both?

Considering the number of people I’ve come across that don’t understand that there are conditions where it’s perfectly legal to file-share copyrighted material, I wouldn’t describe the distinction to be “buttfuckingly obvious”.

@Dead Badger

Or did Bono personally phone you up and say you could download Beautiful Day?

Island Records controls the copyright to most of U2’s work.

[Dead_Badger]

@1010011010

Are we to infer it’s always illegal to file-share copyrighted works, that GPL software isn’t protected by copyright, or both?

Only if you’re a fucking moron with the comprehension skills of a lemon.

Eh? Oh.