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The Culture of CD Burning
An anonymous reader points to this "good article from the Boston Globe about the culture of CD burning, and how hard it will be for the RIAA to stop it. Some interesting quotes: 'There's a "sex appeal" to burning CDs, says [Sheryl] Crow, adding that it is a social event for young people, just as listening to 45s was once a social event for their parents.' An interesting one from Hilary Rosen: "I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?' So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people." Seems like at least one musician thinks his A paper is being peddled all over town.
I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too?'
That would be an accurate comparison if people were copying music and then selling them for profit, rather than giving them away for free.
She should have replied: "Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and show it to all their friends as an example of what they think is good writing?" To which I'd reply: Hell, yes. Anything that gets more people to read my columns, articles or books is a good thing for me as an author.
I think the author is out of touch with today's kids.
I'm trying to remember the last time I burned a CD for music, I think I only did it when a friend came over and asked if I could copy CD xyz for them. For the most part, I've just about allways ripped to MP3. Pop a disk in, click start, wait about 5 minutes and presto, with ID3 tags provided by CDDB i've just added their music to my collection.
Most of the kids I know with some computer skills (ages 12 and up) do the ripping thing more often than the burning thing. From a price standpoint you never have to use media other than a little hard disk space. With CD's you have to pay out 50cents for a blank every time you want to make one. Don't forget canada either, i'm sure with the new tariff's imposed on recordable media, MP3 ripping will get even more popular over there than ever before.
Hey, kid, what if you found out that your school has made millions of dollars selling your A paper in stores all over the country, and you got nothing except a contractual obligation to write more papers?
I have to say that's a horrible analogy on her part. If you copy music you are not passing off the music as your own and I sure hope yuo aren't reselling it. A more accurate question would be
'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and read it without paying you? Would that bug you?'
I stole this Sig
Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too?
That should read: Would if bother you if someone copied your paper instead of paying me for the paper I coerced you into giving me?
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Hilary Rosen: "I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'
'What have you done this week?' She might say she bought a sweater because she liked it. So I'd tell her 'Oh, you bought a sweater? Would it bother you if you had to pay for that sweater again if you wanted to tie it around your waist when it got too warm to wear it? Would it bother you if you couldn't tie that sweater around your waist too? Would that bug you?'
''These type of people perceive the risk of getting caught as being nonexistent. It's like a hacker mentality. If there's a way you can hack it, then you should just be entitled to it. It goes with the hacker ethic.''
This makes me so mad. I am not even much of a hacker, but I'd like to be, in the real sense of the word.
I take stuff apart.
I make my computer do what I want it to, even if it wasn't originally intended to do those things.
The hacker ethic is several orders of magnitude more beneficial to society than the RIAA.
Hackers got us on the moon.
Hackers made The Matrix.
Hackers made slashdot.
I, for one, hope the hacker ethic is here to stay, no matter what this prick has to say about it.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway, where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." -- Hunter S Thompson
I like this quote, but I think that Thompson was a little too positive. Maybe he was having an excessively good day.
for the first time, more blank CDs (1.1 billion) were sold last year than prerecorded CDs (968 million).
/. readers are familiar with the great article that showed how silly this belief was, and this Boston Globe article has a very interesting statistic that relates:
How can you draw any conclusions from comparing a product that costs $0.50 per unit to a product that costs $18 per unit? The above sentence shows that people are spending $550 million on blanck CDs and $17.4 BILLION on prerecorded CDs. This is a factor of 32 in favour of prerecorded CDs!
Why do I see everyone saying that piracy is the reason for the drop in record sales? I'm sure most
It's also notable where the people who still buy music are buying it. Chains like Tower and Virgin are down 8 to 9 percent, according to SoundScan, while mass merchants such as Wal-Mart and Target (that is, stores that sell many other products besides CDs) are up 6 percent.
Imagine, CD sales UP in stores that sell them cheaply!
Albhy Galuten, vice president of new media for Universal Records: "I find it incredibly ironic that some people will spend an extra $1,000 on their hard drives just so they can store more music, but they won't pay for the music."
Where does this guy buy hard drives? Seems to me that a 40G HD is $150 Canadian. That's enough to store about 10000 songs, or about 1000 albums. That would cost $18000 dollars to buy those albums new, though, so even if you were paying $1000 for your hard drive, I could still see why you were doing it.
I haven't gotten to the Salon article yet... maybe it will cheer me up.
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
It would not destroy anything. The manufacturers would not be able to stay in business, just like any other obsolete company in a market economy - good riddance. The net gain to society would obviously be enormous. See it as Free Hardware (as in Free Hardware Foundation), people would be getting stuff for free and there would always be some people prepared to make new inventions for the others. Companies wanting to get profit out of that industry would have to rely on giving support and "business solutions". Sound familiar?
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
It doesn't bother me that they get an easier start for their projects. It doesn't bother me because I learned a lot preparing my paper. It's not going to teach me any more sitting on my hard drive.
Are they shortchanging themselves by taking my paper? The professor knows they've seen my paper. She expects them to "carry the ball a little further". Then I get to see my project continued in a way I couldn't.
Perhaps this is off topic now. I just don't think Hilary Rosen knows how to share in an academic environment. Bad analogy.
She was probably the kind of kid who hid library books so no one else could get the information she was using so she could blow the curve for the rest of us.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
in other shocking news...
paper outsold books.
Authors everwhere are outraged.
-xmod2@toolazytoolookupmypassword.com
Imagine that there was a "duplication device" that could clone whatever you put into it - a watch, a TV, a car, whatever. Imagine it only cost $.20 per use. This device could literally destroy our society. Think about how many people would be driving Porche Boxters or (insert your favorite car here) versus how many would actually sell. Your friend bought a brand new HDTV? Now you've got one too! How would any manufaturer or store stay in business? Does this seem bad to anyone other than me?
Interestingly enough, there was a science-fiction short story published in Analog more decades ago than I care to admit exactly along those lines. I don't remember the title, but in the story, some alien race dumped a matter duplicater and the plans for it on the human race, with the apparent intent of causing human society to self-destruct. Instead, the humans worked out the obvious solution: since anything could now be duplicated, the only thing that has value is unique originals, and the way to make a living is to design and create unique originals of things.
I think of this story a lot whenever the debates over digital copying and copyright infringement comes up. The Internet + computers are that matter duplicator, as far as anything digital (music, software, books, data) is concerned. The only question is, how do you get people to pay you the necessarily hefty fee for the unique original when they can wait for someone else to buy the original and get a copy for free? It used to be that the guys in charge of the "matter duplicators" (printing presses, film duplicators, record presses) charged a fee for each duplicate to cover the cost of buying the "unique original" (the manuscript, artist's studio tape, composer's score, etc.), but when everyone owns a "matter duplicator" (computer), who buys the original?
---dragoness
> Imagine that there was a "duplication device" that could clone whatever you put into it - a watch, a TV, a car, whatever. Imagine it only cost $.20 per use. This device could literally destroy our society.
Destroy, indeed. It would fundamentally change our society, but that's a far cry from wholesale destruction. Firstly, why should I cry about stores going out of business because we no longer need them? Because of all of the poor workers who don't have jobs any more? If they're the ones you're worried about, let me ask you, why would any of these poor people need their jobs any more? They'd use the machine to get what they need and want, just like I would. We'd all have to find jobs that don't involve manufacturing or transport (of goods), or we'd need to restructure society to compensate for not needing to make anything (although unless you had a REALLY BIG MACHINE you'd still need labor to build things like houses and cruise ships and spacecraft and such), but I can't see that as a bad thing on the balance. I mean, Porsche wouldn't make any money selling Boxsters any more, but people would still need the roads maintained, and there would always be a need for teenagers pumping gas. To extend to the digital music world, no artist would be able to sell CDs, but there would still be a huge demand for concerts (which is where the real money is in the music industry, anyway).
> Why doesn't the same logic apply to digital music? Sure CD's are way over priced, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go steal! Sorry to rant but I'm tired of people trying to justify what they know is not right!
The same logic does apply to digital music, but that's tangential to my problems with these people. The uses to which I wish to put my content are completely legitimate, but still I run afoul of their howling complaints that I'm stealing food from the mouths of these artists' children. For example, I want to watch DVDs on my high-powered Linux box. I bought the DVDs from my local Best Buy, and I don't copy them, but I'm not allowed to create, buy or use a DVD player for Linux because of the DMCA. For another example, I own a very high quality CD jukebox, which is attached to my multi-thousand dollar sound system. Because they say CDs need to be protected, they produce CDs which will not play on my CD player (note, not a computer, but a friggin' CD PLAYER!) and don't bother to warn me that they won't play, and won't let me return them if I should buy one and find that it's a coaster. For a third example, I can't play said same CD in my computer, but they provide digital tracks for computer use. Only, if you'll remember, my machine runs Linux, so I still can't listen to the tracks, because they require Windows Media Player. Again, finding my way around this so I can listen to a CD that I bought legitimately has been outlawed by the DMCA, so I'm stuck.
I'd be very interested to hear how any of this qualifies as justification for doing something wrong. It seems a lot more that a bunch of record companies and movie studios got together and decided that they could make a lot more money by enforcing a badly outdated business model on me, without any real concern as to whether they're screwing me in the process.
Virg
Hilary Rosen reminds me of a dog that pisses on the food that's left over after it's done eating.
"I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'"
Well, disregarding the fact that taking the paper and getting an A devalues As and punishes the person who is doing the cheating (neither of which is pertinent to this discussion), my answer is "No, that wouldn't bother me at all. I would be glad to have helped someone."
If I get an apple and Johnny gets an apple too, that's a good thing, not a bad thing. For me to get an apple then burn the tree so Johnny can't get one is not helpful, it's not wise, and it's not right. It's also not terribly important right now while the apples are pop-music, but when we're talking about medical software that could save someone's life, or, in the not so distant future, code for a nanofactory that makes food or housing, it becomes very important.
The day is not so far away when these laws, which we make to satisfy piss-ant small-minded corporate drones who imagine that they have a right to profit by punishing others, will affect how many children in the world die of hunger and exposure, or how many people live in squalor and die of malaria.
That we should treat their arguments as anything other than the temper tantrums one would expect of a two year old is inexpressibly infuriating. Have we really learned nothing from millenia of two-bit dictators suppressing the masses for no reason other than it makes them feel important?
If someone takes my A-paper and represents it as their own work, then that's /fraud/ and it does bother me. (Note that I'm refering to fraud in the abstract/conceptual sense of what fraud really IS, not the concrete sense of what /legally/ constitutes fraud). However if someone takes my A-paper, says "someone else wrote this", and they get their A, then more power to them, because quite simply, that paper is not my property.
/DIFFERENT/.
Similar reasoning can be applied to CD burning. If I burn a CD for a friend, and scrawl the title on it with a Sharpie and slip it in a paper sleeve, that's one thing. It's another thing if I make a master, and start running them off at a pressing facility, with perfect copies of the CD art and liner notes as well, and pass these off (for sale, in the market) as legit. Now, I'm not going to say here that one is moral and one isn't (although you can guess what I think), I'm just saying that on a certain moral level, these acts are