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Time to Face the Music
Mortimer.CA writes "The Toronto Star has an article up about the ailing recording industry with some possible scenarios for solving the problem(s). Choice quotation: 'We must ask ourselves what Elvis would do to stop the theft of music via the Internet, now so widespread and so brazen that it makes the Baghdad looters look like trick-or-treaters.'"
"Once Net users discover that all they're downloading is a World Wide Web of pain, only the most determined and technologically savvy of them will continue to steal music."
And the rest will be busy filing lawsuits for destructive files causing real damage. There are indeed things that could possibly be done to cause hardware issues, mostly relating to that hardware's firmware, but the legal implications of such an action are the same as they are for authors of viruses. What you'll see is a flood of lawsuits brought by individuals who will swear they've never downloaded illegal files, but somehow or other, this file from the RIAA found it's way onto their system, causing significant damage and downtime.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Free Joe
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
Make better music? Stop hating your customers? I can't tell you how good it made me feel, for example, to hear a few days after purchasing a Nora Jones CD that her producer attributes her success to an "older audience" that doesn't know enough about computers to download music. They even believe their own propaganda these days!
The truth is that despite knowing full well what a computer is and how to use it, I've purchased more CDs in the last year than I ever have. They're almost all from independents, though. There's very little worth buying that comes from the major labels these days. Getting RIAA propaganda as part of the package makes what they're pushing even less attractive.
You can argue that its morally and legally wrong, but that doesn't make it theft, anymore than arson is theft because it is morally and legally wrong. The quote about Bagdad looters is rich, and incredibly stupid as it makes my point perfectly. These people are theives; all these thousands of year old artifacts might be gone forever. But if the looters were copying all the anchient scrolls as opposed to running off with them, they'd still be in the museum.
Any reasonably intelligent person should be able differentiate between infringment and theft, but even here on Slashdot there are numerous people who just can't seem to wrap their minds around it. Try imagining someone who insists that apples are oranges because they both come from trees and start out as flowers, thats what these guys are like.
To those people, before you respond, read these two things over and over until they sink in, and try not to let your minds be thrown into an infinite loop:
That's not a half bad idea actually, if the prices are reasonable. The main reason I wont buy cds it because who wants to spend $20 and get one good song, 16 crappy ones? As soon as the recording/whatever industry realizes that this is the problem (at least to me), and either changes its pricing structure or allows this kind of downloading for a monthly fee, they're just going to bang their heads against the wall trying to stop online music piracy.
I have never seen a convincing analsysis of why CD sales have fallen.
I see one label is shutting down its classical music operation. Are classical music fans really downloading mp3s instead of buying CDs?
Some reasons why CD sales may have fallen.
1. Baby boomers have now replaced all their vinyl with CDs. This is a once off boost to sales and is now over.
2. Popular music is getting tired. There is no innovation and nothing to get excited about.
3. Lack of range. Go into a CD shop or listen to the radio. It is all the same bland rubbish.
4. Competition in other places. A lot of people are spending their money elsewhere: DVDs, whose sales are skyrocketing; mobile phones (texting is epxensive and an alternate form of entertainment).
5. Prices are up. This is both a disencentive to buy because of the poorer value for money, but also because people dislike being ripped off.
Technology has reduced the cost of music distribution but the record companies want to appropriate all those savings.
It is hard to see how this will end up. The media companies will fight tooth and nail, with the help of their wholly owned subsidiary the US congress, but technically it is hard to defeat distributed distribution.
Tim Josling
2. Popular music is getting tired. 3. Lack of range.
Darn right. According to studies by Forrester Research and George Zieman, the 10 percent drop in RIAA labels' revenue from 1999 to 2001 is more likely to come from a slow economy and from publishing 30 percent fewer new titles than from peer-to-peer copyright infringement.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Most MP3 sharing programs employ file identification methods via CRC or some similiar mechanism. So unless record companies can log on enough clients with the same copy of the bogus MP3, this method will not work.
Is it just me, or is anyone else kinda pissed off that they're making a comparison to benign computer geeks swapping music over the internet to looters, theieves and murderers in Baghdad?
This is just my 2 cents on the whole song swapping thing, but I have about 5,000 songs on mp3, most of which are from albums I don't own. Although I'm far from saying the whole thing is ethical (a different bag of worms entirely), I think it's far from illegal.
Although I do have an extensive collection of mp3s, all of varying genres, I also have quite a CD collection. Most of the songs that I download as mp3s are of songs from albums that I would have never purchased. Although I like these artists and their music, I don't necessarily like them well enough to actually purchase their products.
With all that said, I would like to know then how I am stealing from the RIAA? If mpeg layer 3 audio had never been developed, and I had never downloaded those 5,000 some odd songs that I currently have, the record industry would not have seen any more money from my pocket. In fact, if anything they would have seen less. Mpeg layer 3 audio has actually introduced me to a number of artists to which I would have never otherwise listened, if I hadn't downloaded their songs first. That led me to purchase their album!
So, could someone please explain to me how I'm looting and pillaging?
Well, at least I don't own an SUV.