Martin Hyde, just remember that concerts sell recordings, and recordings sell concert tickets. If you have a hit, you take a tour and increase your popularity and hit sales. If you tour, your music sales will increase from people who saw you on the tour.
That they were distributing the file seems to give a pretty clear indication that they did believe that they had the right to distribute.
Except that what is devaluing my product is my own product that was taken from me without my consent.
So you want it to be that everyone will have to rely on donations?
Copyright infringement is theft. It’s not prosecuted as theft. Those are two separate things.
Let’s look at all those words in the name “copyright infringement”:
Copyright - The right to make copies
Infringement - Cutting in on, or more specifically “cutting yourself into”
So you are cutting yourself in onto the right to make copies where you didn’t used to have that right. The difference between cutting yourself in on a share of X that isn’t yours and stealing a share of X that isn’t yours is purely a matter of semantics. There’s no meaningful difference between a rat standing on a block of cheese to eat at it and carrying off a hunk to eat back at his own home. Either way it wasn’t his to eat at.
But hey, if you would rather me use the verbs like infringe, transgress, and cut in on I’m fine with that. It’s just rather roundabout.
Except that it does deprive the person of the item. The act of “infringing” causes it to cease having value. True it makes it cease having value to everyone on the planet at the same time, but that’s not a large issue. Copyright is a magical item that only exists so long as no one infringes on it, but the instant they do, the original owner no longer has it.
Nonsense. Do you seriously think every person who breaks the law is simply mistaken about what the law is? Speeders are just misreading the speed limit signs, drug dealers somehow haven’t gotten the memo about the whole War on Drugs thing, and so on? I hate to break it to you, but people knowingly violate the law all the time.
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It wasn’t taken from you; you still have it. It wasn’t copied from you either; it was copied from a CD or from another file sharer. You, the copyright holder, aren’t involved in the file sharing process.
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Obtaining the copy isn’t what devalues your product anyway. Distributing that copy to your potential customers is, because it means they already have the thing you’re trying to sell them, and thus they’re unwilling to pay you for another one. In that regard, it doesn’t matter where they got it - it would be equally devalued if they bought a used copy, or taped your song off the radio, or if they just decided they didn’t like it.
I don’t know how you managed to get that idea from what I wrote. The answer is no, obviously.
Paying someone to provide a service is not a donation. I want musicians to get paid for writing and recording music, rather than for making copies, since anyone can make copies but only a musician can make the original recording.
Not at all! There’s a very important difference.
In the latter case, the share of X that you took is gone and no one else can have it. That is the fundamental essence of stealing, and without it, there is no theft, period. But in the former case, nothing is missing, because you created an extra share for yourself.
No, what causes it to cease having value is that your potential customers already have one of what you’re trying to sell them. It doesn’t matter where they got it.
Yeah.
I have a lot of albums I bought second-hand, completely legally. And yet, by doing that, I gave no royalties at all to the original artist or production company. So am I a thief?
I think one of the best responses to this case is this guys: “The problem isn’t the verdict. It’s the penalty.”
The industry has set the rules, or more precisely lobbied Congress to use rules the industry suggests. So they write them, grease some pockets, make some deals, & get their rates voted in with force of law by legislators with too many divergent concerns to pay enough attention to what they just did to copyright law.
Yes, America is exactly that corrupt.
Kind of. I’m sure someone who is more versed in the business can make more sense, but the major labels these days usually work like this: they sign the band and give them some kind of advance. The band uses this advance to live on while they work on their album. Meanwhile, the label pays for studio time, producers, engineers, cd cover artists, video directors, PR people, radio play, and the like. When the time comes to sell the disc, the label takes the vast majority of the sales and doles out a small portion to the band. The problem for the band, though, is that all of the stuff the label paid for out front (everything from the advance to all of those other people, studios, advertising, etc) is then paid back by the band out of their tiny piece of the pie. In the end, it’s unlikely a regular major label band would ever make any money because it’s unlikely they’d ever recoup the costs incurred on the front end without selling TONS of records. Meanwhile, the label rakes in the dough.
Here is a description of the game by Courtney Love from some years back that is pretty interesting.
I thought the chainsaw example above was good, but just to litter the ground with examples, consider the following series of scenarios:
A) My friend is really eager to go purchase Album X. Before he goes, I tell him “Don’t bother. I’ve heard that album, and it’s utter crap.” Taking my advice, he changes his mind and decides not to purchase it. As a result of my actions, the record company loses a sale it otherwise would have had.
B) My friend is really eager to go purchase Album X. Before he goes, I tell him “Don’t bother. I’ve heard that album, and you should buy my own Album Y instead.” Taking my advice, he changes his mind and decides not to purchase Album X, instead giving to me money in order to purchase Album Y. As a result of my actions, the record company loses a sale it otherwise would have had, plus I have made a commensurate profit.
C) My friend is really eager to go purchase Album X. Before he goes, I tell him “Don’t bother. I own that album, and I’ve gotten tired of listening to it. Here, you can have mine.” Thus, he now changes his mind and decides not to purchase it, as I am giving him my own disc for free. As a result of my actions, the record company loses a sale it otherwise would have had.
D) My friend is really eager to go purchase Album X. Before he goes, I tell him “Don’t bother. I own that album, and we can just share it. We’ll pass it back and forth between us, whenever one of us feels like listening it.” Thus, he now changes his mind and decides not to purchase it, as he has access to my disc for free. As a result of my actions, the record company loses a sale it otherwise would have had.
E) My friend is really eager to go purchase Album X. Before he goes, I tell him “Don’t bother. I own that album and I can burn you a copy.” Thus, he now changes his mind and decides not to purchase it, as I can give him a copy of my disc for free. As a result of my actions, the record company loses a sale it otherwise would have had.
Putting aside, if it can be done, issues of legality (I think we can agree A) and B) are legal and E) is illegal, in the status quo), as well as of morality (I think we can agree A) and B) are morally ok, but would disagree on the various others), which of these are essentially theft and which are not? What is the relevant difference between them (that is, relevant in terms of determining whether it falls under the specific category of theft)?
If Jammie Thomas is paying legal fees for this case, then she has made an awful decision. Spend a few thousand to settle out-of-court vs. pay more than that in legal fees and spin the wheel to pay even more.
BTW, the appeal will challenge the notion that downloading is automatically (massive) distribution. This is the crux of the settlement and I wonder why they didn’t focus on this the first time around. Did the jury instruction prevent that?
I don’t buy into the word “theft” as once you use the term in this context you get nitpicked to death. But the fundamental difference between E) and the rest is that it involves the infringement of a property right, namely the legally enforceable intellectual property right which gives a copyright holder a monopoly on entitlement to create copies (subject to the usual minor exceptions).
No, the licence the original purchaser obtained by buying the album included an entitlement to re-sell it.
What does this have to do with the OP which involves someone making or facilitating copies?
Heh. You think that it is not effectively appropriating someone’s property rights if you do something with their property that only they are entitled to do, as long as you accept you’re not entitled to do what you’re doing?
You’re funny. For a minute there, I thought you were serious.
So you are saying that your objection to the Thomas verdict would disappear if the RIAA members sued more often, so that people who are breaking the law were more certain to be hit with these penalties? :dubious: 
Face it. You are unhappy with the result because you believe that people should be able to violate the law on copyright with either no potential liability, or with some relatively small liability (much like a speeding ticket).
It has to do with the argument that infringement is bad because it deprives the copyright holder of the income that they’d get from selling another copy. Buying a used copy doesn’t put any more money in their pocket than downloading an illegal copy does.
I notice that you avoided the word “claiming”, which was the very thing that I objected to. Now that’s funny.
Indistinguishable, and others that are using the passing-around-the-record or resale examples, in all of your cases, there is only one copy. You are not duplicating the plastic or artwork. Your version of sharing is no different from a library copy, which has pretty much been established as acceptable.
The trial was about offering a product so others could easily make additional copies. After the copy was made, the original was still available and did not get deleted so others could copy it again. And those that made the copies might have purchased one if the download was not available.
Where I differ from the RIAA stance is they claim ALL downloaders would have purchased a copy and I suspect VERY FEW, if any, would have, and even those that did might not represent lost sales, as some songs might not be available on the current legal market for any price.
It seems strange to fuss over the number of copies here, when the justification for limiting copies in the first place is to make sure the artist gets paid. If he’s not getting paid, isn’t that just as much of a problem no matter how many copies there are?
Indeed, why is a library copy acceptable? Every time someone checks a book out of the library instead of buying a new copy, that deprives the author of one more sale and devalues his property a little more. Isn’t that what you’re trying to avoid?
I’m against both draconian penalties and the entirely freakish and random nature of its enforcement. Frankly speaking, I’d be happy to see copyrights abolished or drastically reduced in scope. But I can see your point of view and I’d be willing to compromise somewhat if that were possible. 
If they scaled down the penalty by a factor of 100 and increased enforcement a hundredfold, that would be closer to a just result.
Well, now we get somewhere. 
But then ask yourself: would the result be to discourage copyright infringement? Here I will draw an analogy to speeding; we all know it is against the law, lots of people get ticketed for it, but everyone does it, in part because the penalty is so relatively limited and the chance of being caught never can increase to a significant portion of the times we do it.
So, to continue the analogy, would you risk a speeding ticket if the result of the ticket was, say, a $1000 fine? Note that some people in Virginia are facing this exact situation. I suspect you would think twice about it, even if you knew the possibility of getting caught was only, say, 1%.
So, looking at the illegal infringment of copyright by unlicensed sharing of music files: what penalty do you think would be sufficient to prevent the illegal conduct? Would scaling back as you propose be sufficient (in the case in question, that would mean she ends up paying a $2,200 judgment)?
I agree that it is more just to have a penalty that is more easily and readily applied (it shouldn’t be a crap shoot).
So you’d argue that if I chooses to sell a particular licence to which certain rights attach (such as a right that includes a right of resale with no further payment to me), then it can’t be bad if some other right of mine, that I do not choose to sell or give away, is infringed? Does that actually makes sense to you? Just because I don’t choose to try to make a buck out of every conceivable commercial opportunity available to me, that doesn’t mean I have no entitlement to be able to enforce my legal rights when I want to.
And that leads me to this:
Is it really so hard to understand the idea that just because there are certain limits on one’s rights, or because one chooses to sell or give away certain rights, one still has an entitlement to enforce, when one wants to, those rights that one does have?
Pfft. When Sage Rat talks of an infringer “claiming the work of someone else as your own” in this context, I’m sure he doesn’t mean that the infringer is shouting the claim from the rooftops, or asserting it in a court of law, or even thinking of their claim as legitimate in their own mind. What he means, obviously, is claiming in the practical sense of acting as if the work were one’s own by conducting the acts (ie copying) that only the copyright holder is entitled to do.
To interpret Sage Rat’s comment in any other way makes no sense unless of course what you are trying to do is confuse the issue as a form of rather dubious rhetorical technique.
Claiming that Saddam had WMDs was more real and meaningful to the majority than the actual reasons for the Iraq invastion. That doesn’t make Dubya’s use of the former any more justifiable.
In response to Princhester’s last post, though not to any particular thing in it, just to the general impression I got from it:
We have, in the current state of things, adopted the principle that people have a right to control the duplication and distribution of their works, the exact bounds and nature of this right being codified in a somewhat complex mass of laws. And so long as we agree that this right exists, which is to say, so long as we agree to grant this right, then, yes, there is such a thing as unauthorized copying and this is an infringement/violation of someone’s rights. Enforcing this right means taking measures to prevent such unauthorized copying.
However, this is all contingent upon that particular right being granted in that particular way by us. It’s by no means necessary that a people grant, in such a way, strong rights to an author to control the duplication and distribution of his work, and what the protesters of the status quo are saying is “Hey, maybe it was a silly and unfortunate idea to grant such a right and/or to try to enforce it. Maybe we should modify or revoke this right, for reasons such and such…”
Is there anything necessarily wrong with such a proposal? Is there any great reason why we should continue to accept the existence of the rights collected as “copyright”? As far as this goes, discussions of the existing illegality of copyright infringement are irrelevant, since nobody denies that copyright infringement is currently a crime and a violation of currently legally granted rights. But discussion of the “But company X morally deserves the money they would have made were it not for the copying” argument in favor of copyrights have already taken place in this thread, and are highly relevant to this issue. A variety of posters have pointed out what they consider to be flaws in this argument. What other strong arguments can be put forth in service of the very granting of copyrights in the first place? I can see tradition, and I can see the “Artists will not have incentive to create works if they cannot gain payment through tight control on copying and distribution of those works” argument. Anyone care to discuss those, or propose other such arguments?
No. See, they don’t choose to offer that right of resale, and many of them would love to sell a CD that you were legally prohibited from reselling… but they can’t. We recognize that buying and selling used CDs is OK, even if the copyright holder would rather prohibit it because he’d make more money that way.
So my question is, if the desire of the copyright holder to squeeze out a little more profit isn’t considered important enough to override consumer freedom in that case, why should it be in other cases?
Of course not, but that has nothing to do with what I wrote. I’m asking why this particular limitation on those rights is considered acceptable, even though it has the same negative consequences (from the copyright holder’s perspective) as infringement, while other limitations are considered unacceptable. If avoiding those consequences is the goal of copyright, then none of those limits should be acceptable.
Well, good thing you’re around to interpret his posts. It’s too bad you apparently have so much trouble interpreting mine.
It’s both.
What makes you think porn companies are not suing people? Names like “Playboy,” “ALS,” and “Perfect 10” are quite common in case captions. In fact, lawsuits brought by porn companies have often been groundbreaking in the development of Internet law.
Yes. That’s the whole point of statutory damages. Congress has decided in advance what the appropriate award is. Statutory damages are often intended to be punitive. But they are different from punitive damages, because the legislature has used the political process to arrive at the sum. Courts give deference to such legislative decision-making.
If you don’t like the price the seller is charging, then your option is to refuse to buy. It’s not, “Well, I don’t like your price, so I’m just going to take it for free!”
No, when you buy a record album, you are not buying a license. You are buying tangible goods. And under the first sale doctrine, the owner of tangible goods legally obtained may dispose of such goods as he or she wishes.