As someone whose job includes providing computer technical assistance and helpdesk support to faculty at a fairly prominent professional school in the health sciences (i.e., just about everyone I work for is entitled to use the title “Doctor”), I find your faith in the abilities of users amusing.
The folks I work for have years of post-baccalaureate education, held fellowships, received millions in government grants, won awards, etc., and they daily demonstrate the inability to comprehend such complex concepts as that of “a power switch”.
And jumping from music to video is even worse. Unless you stick with Ipod-centric sites , you have to sift through all kinds of .avi et al crap (no easy freeware out there to convert video file formats)… then you finally find what you’re looking for and not enough people are seeding it… :smack: just not worth it to me.
I don’t dispute any of what you’ve just said. The point I’m trying to make is that if they can download and install iTunes from scratch, add their music/videos, sync exactly what they want etc, then torrents should be a cinch. The people you refer to are a different category IMO.
Some of us just believe that it’s wrong to do. If I’m not prepared to shell out a buck or so for a song, then I’m certainly not going to download it for free just because I can unless the copyright holder has explicitly made it available for free download.
FWIW, that’s why I don’t use torrents- I installed BitTorrent and the first three things I downloaded were viruses. After much checking to ensure nothing got infected, I decided maybe I didn’t need to download free games and music after all.
Without getting specific, it’s even easier with programs that can keep an eye out for new episodes of _____, then download the torrent and launch the BT client all automatically. You might not know a show is even back from hiatus, but there it is when you wake up in the morning.
The issue for a lot of people with torrents is that when you search for a file you usually get thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of results. Some are good, some are bad and some simply aren’t what you are looking for at all. Sifting though and picking the one you want can be a nuisance. With iTunes (and iTunes is easily the crappiest, most intrusive and cumbersome piece of software to ever get mass distribution) you at least have the certainty that you are going to search once and get a couple of results that are exactly of the type and quality that you want. The download is immediate and can be made automatic.
Those are big factors, deal breakers, for people who are busy and on the go. It’s not about having the intelligence or computer savvy to pirate, it’s about simply not seeing the motivation to do so when $1 is well worth avoiding the hassle of delving into the porn and virus laden world of torrents and P2P. You can know that you can open up iTunes and have one stop shopping. New music is promoted to you. New shows are downloaded as they become available. 90% of the time you don’t even need to search since iTunes store has links on their front page. iTunes has music samples for folks that might not know the exact title and artist they are looking for.
iTunes simply has a lot of value added over torrents and P2P and it insulates you from the 4chan world. I say this with full understanding of the fact that iTunes is by far the worst program to use for legally downloading content digitally. Even the worst piece of glurgeware has distinct advantages over Bittorrent.
Piracy: Online and On The Street has the RIAA’s take on the issue. For example, “With investigators deployed in cities across the country, the RIAA is working closely with law enforcement to pull pirate products off the street and to demonstrate that the consequences for this illegal activity are real.” This seems to me as successful as the war on illegal drugs, including the arresting values for cost of bootleg recordings – “global music piracy causes $12.5 billion of economic losses every year, 71,060 U.S. jobs lost…”.
I greatly prefer the legally available downloads, like Amazon’s, but even those need aware buyers, because Amazon seems content to just market what its vendors offer, leaving the end buyers to determine the actual content. For example, One Hit Wonders (“18 Pop Classics From The Stars That Time Forgot”) has 6 Customer Reviews, 5 of which note that the songs are re-recordings. (The 6th has “Good quality and great music.”)
The RIAA could surely improve its fight by having more truth in advertising.
And that’s a valid stance. FWIW, I don’t download music (unless it’s something I literally can’t find anywhere other than a torrent site), for the same reasons you’ve laid out.
Not music, but the same principle. I have a couple sets of bootleg DVDs of TV series which are not in DVD release yet. I don’t like the fact that I had to buy bootlegs, but I wanted these series badly enough to do so. If and when I find out they’ve been legally released on DVD I’ll gladly buy those and dispose of the bootlegs.
You guys are so sophisticated, and my ignorance has been fought. I live in the Los Angeles area and I can confirm that an awful lot of middlemen seem to make a living by somehow inserting themselves between the musicians and their fans. Are you short-circuiting that abominable business structure by mailing checks to the musicians directly?
I’ve sent money via Paypal to a few bands’ accounts. It’s less than the price of a physical album, but more than the percentage they’d get from a typical recording contract.
