There would be an invasion of privacy issue that is totally seperate from file sharing.
People WANT to be able to legally download music one song at a time (and not buy a CD of 15 songs to get the one they actually want). This is not as profitable to the music industry (at least not initially), so they did not give consumers what they want, nor did they change the system. Big Mistake. Piracy became a popular and entrenched alternative.
Um.
No.
The record companies objected just as vocally when radio stations began to play their “property” on the air, for free. So who’s changing what?
People share what they like. This increases widespread familiarity. The increase in sales that that engenders will offset the possible loss of sales to people who would otherwise have paid full price. To what degree, I have no way of knowing. I wish someone would study that question, instead of obfuscating the discussion with self-serving cries of “theft.”
It’s my [completely unscientific] feeling that an artist’s market would be increased just as much–if not more–by filesharing, than it would be decreased by freeloaders. Again, I can’t know that, that’s just my instinct on the matter, based on how much music I’ve personally bought after learning about new artists from friends (and vice versa).
It would greatly democratize the record industry, level the playing field somewhat. THe biggest losers would be the corporate giants; the biggest winners would be independent artists.
Win/win!
Many things can’t be owned. Copyrights and patents are temporary grants of limited control. There’s a large gap between that and the rights associated with physical property. That’s why I don’t like the term “intellectual property”, which is often used in a way that assumes that those rights are permanent and absolute. Copyrights and patents are also comparatively modern inventions, unlike notions of physical property. The idea that music and recordings can be copyrighted is even more recent. Somehow, the civilized world survived for millennia without music being considered something that could be owned and controlled.
I personally want to pay for 1 song instead of the entire CD also. And I think that the record companies have themselves to blame for not providing consumers with the options they want.
However, it still doesn’t change the morality, legality or whether it right or wrong.
Opps, I misread your post.
I remember a bunch of T-Shirt bootleggers in NYC getting arrested. I remember a 14 year old JHS girl getting raided and arrested in her home. I believe its a federal crime but WTFDIK
."The decision whether or not someone buys your argument that it is in their best interest to allow free access is up to the owner of that property. You can argue until you’re blue in the face that filesharing actually helps increase revenues, but it is up to the owner of the copyright to decide, not you.
As an aside, do you think that illegally downloading and copying movies is not immoral?
Mmkay, but theft is a crime becuase it’s prohibited by law. Same with copyright infringement. This has nothing to do with its morality or lack thereof.
In both cases, someone generates a work of art with a specific intended use; someone else copies the work without the owner’s permission and uses it in a way contrary to the owner’s intention; and the justification is that the original owner hasn’t lost anything physical.
It doesn’t matter whether the original image was created for private display or to sell for profit. Either the creator has a right to control access to his work, or he does not.
So radio stations aren’t paying money to broadcast songs? That’s new information.
It’s not new news that the general populace having a chance to hear songs increases record sales. What is new news is that for some reason broadcasting a song to a thousand people over the internet should somehow be free when you are charged to send it by radio waves.
If you think radio and the guy playing Happy Birthday at your local Tex Mex restaurant should be able to do so for free then that’s your right to believe, but so long as paying is the requirement for publicly performing copyrighted material, it is theft to not pay.
Who are these people who say that IP rights are permanent and absolute? Has anyone here argued that the rights are permanent and absolute?
According to Wikipedia, copyrights date back to the 15th century, and patents started roughly the same time. It also says that copyrights on music were enforced for artists like Handel. And in any case, copyright and patent law has been present from the earliest days of our country, including being protected by the Constitution. Seems that we’ve survived very well with centuries of protection of IP, does it not? In fact, doesn’t it seem that the pace of invention and composition have increased exponentially during the most recent half-millenia since these laws have been in place?
I’m always puzzled by this argument that there is a direct link between the violation or non-enforcement of copyright laws and the intellectual creativity of a country. Were that the case, then I cannot understand why China is not the most creative nation on the planet. Patents and copyrights in China are openly, flagrantly, and broadly ignored, and what does modern China have to show for it? Where is the Chinese re-edit of the Titanic movie that made it even better? Where is the remix of Jessica Simpson’s song “A Public Affair” that has Xiaomei’s name in it and, more importantly, makes the song not suck? Where are all those awesome Chinese video games that wouldn’t be possible if the copyright on Duke Nukem or The Sims hadn’t been so blatantly ignored? Where are all those miracle cures that Chinese scientists have put on the market due to the disregard for patents on major pharmaceuticals? Why haven’t the Chinese fixed the Windows OS yet?
But seriously, how can one explain why the countries that observe copyright protection – like the US, France, UK, Germany, etc – seem to be lightyears ahead in creativity compared to countries in which piracy is rampant.
In fact, I’ve read more than a few historians who argue that the reason China stopped inventing incredible new stuff centuries ago has to do with the fact that the Chinese imperial system did not allow people to make a living by inventing things like the compass, gunpowder, etc. and thus China went into the dark ages of innovations for literally a millenium.
Bootlegging is different.
The only legal action against file sharers I’ve heard about are lawsuits brought against individuals by the RIAA.
What’s new is that now it CAN be free (or cheap). Prior to that, broadcasting to that many people required laying down some hefty capital for a broadcasting station.
I don’t think it’s a moral issue. It think it’s an issue of economic reality. Record companies are in business because they provided a solution to a business problem - how do I, an artist, get my music heard by the greatest number of people? The answer was that the record company had the resources press a quarter million CDs and market and sell them. In return for this, the record company makes money of the sales as do the artists.
The new reality is that it is ridiculously easy to market and distribute your music using the internet but the record companies are still acting like they are the primary marketing channel for getting the music out there.
In fact, it can be debated that the CD is as obsolete as the 8-track or vinyl record. Carrying around an iPod with 10,000 songs is far superior to a single CD Walkman or a display case full of CDs.
I don’t think it’s a moral issue, even if it is a legal one, because I believe that the record companies are clinging to a business model that is essentially outdated and unworkable.
There are some questions though about what is a workable business model. In the future is all music on MP3s (or some similar file format) and completely free? Does the record company simply become a PR and advertising service that get’s paid a percent of what the band earns from touring and radio (or 3D transmogrobeam transmission) royalties? I’m not sure.
The connection I’m on is too slow for me to go and look for the original quote about penalties for copyright violations. However, rest assured, there is a criminal component to copyright violations with longish jail time (10 yrs, iirc) and fines.
Anyway, the point I wanted to touch on was morality. Isn’t morality dependent on the society at large? We, as a society, or even as a subgroup of people on the SDMB can agree on a definition of murder. We (Dopers) accept the criminal definition because we live in a society (at least the US Dopers). So, IMHO, it does boil down to “everybody is doing it, so it must be legal,” aka, the “one billion people in China can’t be wrong” argument.
If we define morality as what is right according to the law, then I definitely see the law changing to allow for file-sharing. However, then, according to this view, it is still largely illegal (I believe it’s still a gray area for the US, but definitely illegal in the EU.)
You might want to peruse the following:
There are other provisions of criminal copyright violation as well.
Copyrights on music have been enforced for at least 300 years. The concept of copyright goes back even further.
Look, the point is that, when all that you could do was maybe copy your album off onto an 8-track or cassette, with some work involved, so that maybe a friend or two had the violation of the copyright, no one really cared; economically it wasn’t making an inroad. It’s the current feasibility of copyright violation, caused by rendering of the copyrighted work into digital files that occasions the interest in the issue. And the unfortunate left-over attitude that everything on the “net” should somehow be free and unregulated causes many people to think that they should be able to do what is easy without legal penalty. This isn’t surprising; look at the number of people who complain about, and regularly violate, speeding laws, people who would otherwise consider themselves quite “law-abiding” citizens. Now, if you have the mind-set that file-sharing of copyrighted material “ought” to be allowed to some degree without penalty, that’s fine. Argue the point. But as long as the activity is a violation of the LAW, it is inherently an immoral act.
Not that our current society seems to give much of a damn about personal responsibility to society as a whole. 
But shouldn’t it be up to the artist to decide which model they want to participate in?
If an artist wants to participate in the old style model, are you arguing we should still be able to listen to that artists songs for free if we choose?
It may sound naive and subversive, but what happened to the idea that musicians, and other artists, draw on a common cultural heritage to create new works, which then become part of that common cultural heritage? Think of all that music that is now credited as “Traditional”. Much it evolved over many years as people used elements of older works or made new versions of them. They didn’t claim to “own” these works. Try that today and you can expect the copyright inquisition from Hell. There is already a fair amount of “underground” art that has to exist in the shadows, because the artist used elements of other works to create something new.
Does that mean that during prohibition it was immoral to drink alcohol because it was illegal? Even though alcohol has been with man for thousands of years and it probably good for you in moderate amounts? When a group of zealots get the majority voice do they dictate morality? Isn’t what is moral a personal choice?
A creator does not have the right to control access to his work. His work is derivative of other works. That is the nature of art. It reflects, builds, comments on and challenges the cultural context in which it is created. That is why work enters the public domain. Copyright is a compromise to give an artist a chance to earn money from his creation for a limited amount of time to encourage creativity. Copyright’s purpose is not to control the public’s access to cultural touchstones.