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Study: MP3 Sharing Not Serious Threat To CD Sales
pkaral writes "The two distinguished gentlemen Strumpf and Oberholzer-Gee have most likely made RIAA executives choke on their lunches. Those two economists at Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill have done the research and the math on how much CD sales are actually hurt by P2P sharing. The answer: A whopping one CD per 5,000 files downloaded. Needless to say, RIAA are already trying to discredit the study."
I feel the best thing about P2P is that you learn about other music that you don't hear on the radio. This is what scares the RIAA the most, not a loss of sales but of a loss of control on what you listen to. If people start listening to independent artists they will no longer just listen to britney spears or limp bizkit or whatever crap the RIAA forces down peoples radio.
Really, all they'd need to do is release BitTorents of the UPN broadcast complete with the UPN logo and commerical breaks. Yeah, people could try to edit out the breaks, but that'd break the official torrent value.
TiVo's already proven that people will watch ads even with the 30 second skip enabled, you just have to get the viewer's attention during the 2 seconds they see the ad before hitting the skip.
I agree with you on this and it could only get worse. When things just started to get out of control is when Napster was pinched. My Dad just started looking at Napster and WinMX at that point. Now he doesn't dowload anything because of the whole napster thing. If this truely had moved beyond us geeks, the potential for damage to the music industry would be much greater. Don't fool yourselves....P2P will affect revenue and it IS stealing. That said, don't make it hard for me to listen to my CD on my MP3 player.
Gorkman
I was looking at my old portable stereo with two tape decks, and realized that the 2nd deck didn't even have a play button. All it had was record, to record from the first tape deck
So, let's think about this -- in the early 80's Sony was making devices whose sole purpose was to record music from other mediums. I will tell you 99% of the time I used that deck to record a tape I had borrowed
The music industry managed to survive a time when they were making devices to copy music (and I'll tell you right now, 10th generation analog copies did not bother me).
A 5th or so generation tape introduced me to what became one of my favourite bands for a long time ... The Violent Femmes. I ended up buying every one of their tapes, then their CD's hen it turned into that.
Nothing has changed in the last 25 years, other than the fact that the recording industry is trying to find excuses to generate revenue through a blanket tax.
They'd have to write an application that downloads the official version, strips the banner ad, then posts it practically instantly. So it would then become an arms race. What banner configuration can the official version utilize that will defeat the automated countermeasure?
The countermeasure would have to be fairly instant in order to compete with the official version because who would want to wait?
Eventually, the banner would manifest like it does during an NFL game, by "tilting" and stretching the media to make room for the banner in different places. Or, just by overlaying the banner directly on the media.
Basically, anyone who does us a favor and strips out the banner is actually doing harm because eventually the banner will have to appear in more and more inconvenient places.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
But don't think this legitimizes copyrighted work sharing. It's still wrong, folks. The fact that it doesn't hurt nearly as bad as the RIAA would have us believe doesn't make it any righter.
In the case of Copyright, it grants the holder thereof a time limited (though it's an insanely long one, all the same) monopoly on the production and the initial distribution thereof for a given piece of literary or artistic work. To duplicate or distribute duplicates is to infringe upon that government granted monopoly. Hence, the term infringement. If I take, say a DVD, and sell it to you, it's not infringement, per rights of "first sale", meaning that Copyright distribution rights only extend to the first sale of the media that a work is placed upon.
You see, contrary to what all the business people have been saying about "intellectual" property, it's not property per se- it's not a tangible thing. Making copies doesn't take the original item away from the owner. It does lower the amount of money they might see, but it does not directly take money out of their hands, nor does it deprive the holder of the so-called property.
Stealing is the taking of something in a manner that directly deprives someone of the thing taken. There's legal terms for this- theft and larceny come immediately to mind.
Infringement is not stealing in any legal sense of the concept- you can apply less than common dictionary definitions for the term or moral arguments to the mix, but you'd still be wrong because there IS a distinction for the whole thing all the same.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The studies referenced to by the RIAA were based on people's sensation about how P2P music sharing has changed their music buying habits, whereas Strumpf and Oberholzer's study was based on purely factual data. I'd be more willing to trust the latter... Ever wondered how precise were those studies on how many sexual partners you had in your life? You get the idea...
Bullshit. TiVO has only "proven" that people will watch particularly appealing ads. once or twice.
But that misses the point--as anybody who knows anything about advertising will tell you, the "coolness" factor of an ad often is only a minor role in its effectiveness. i could probably watch that doritos commercial with that girl at the laundromat all day, but i still don't buy doritos. rather, factors such as repitition and subconscious awareness building are more important.
You make the classic slashdot mistake though: ignoring issues of scale. Beause people watch commercials without TiVo, and because some people watch some commercials without TiVo, then tivo has no effect on commercials. Bullshit. With TiVo and the 30 second skip feature, fewer commercials are seen. Right, wrong, or indifferent, that's the truth.
It's not that expensive to produce high-quality CDs. Yeah, it takes a little work, but the investment is not that high (if you're making 1000 CDs, it's about $1-2 per CD, with liner notes & jewel cases). What costs money is the marketing & distribution, and this is where the RIAA really shines. Anybody with a couple of thousand dollars can put out a short run CD, but getting that CD onto Clear Channel stations, MTV, VH1 and every Best Buy, Blockbuster Music, Tower Records, etc. in the country is the hard part. Sure, it's cheaper to put up an album on a web site than to press CDs, but who's going to download it? If I was the RIAA I would be more scared of having independant artists on iTunes & Napster, right alongside Outkast -- sure, they still don't have the massive advertising budget, but the distribution model legitimizes the music to some extent.
Maybe partying will help...
You really need to familiarize yourself with a description of Intellectual Property
Electricity is a product, it is electrons traveling down the wire, work on your car is a service performed.
Taking a cd from a record store is taking an actual product. You copying a file from me is NOT stealing a PRODUCT at all, what if you copied the exact clothes I am currently wearing? Is that considered theft? What about copying the paint scheme off my custom van, looking at my custom made porch swing and making your own the same way, how about getting the same exact hair cut as me? These are examples of intellectual property and may or may not be covered under copyright, trademark, patent or trade secret laws, copying them is a copyright violation. You can not take or steal away intellectual property from someone but it may be possible to make unauthorized copies of it.
Steal an audio cd from Walmart and get caught, potential for a small fine. Download or upload the same cd's contents to someone online, face up to $150,000 fine per song. Do the potential fines appear to be in relation to the crime commited?
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I don't reccomend trying to define stealing in regular dictionary terms, when it's a legal definition that matters.
Alexander Pope wrote a very long poem, called "the rape of the lock". It's about a young woman's suitor trying to take a lock of her hair. He's not even a stalker or a thief, as this is all an elaborate game to impress her with how much trouble he will go to to woo her, and she isn't averse to being wooed, just enjoying the attention. Words can be stretched, sometimes a whole lot.
Here's a few reasons why I'd suggest you reconsider useing words such as stealing for copyright infringment.
1. All theft is criminal. Once, all copyright infringement was always a matter for civil courts only, and even now, only some forms are criminallized, since the late 90's. Was the US wrong for over 200 years before that, and still half wrong?
2. In the US, all infringment is under federal law. The Supreme court has ruled that the 50 states have no right to make or interpret copyright law. If infringment=theft, the Supreme's reasoning on this would limit the rights of the states to have their own laws on theft as well, or the states would need to insist they have te right to pass their own laws on infringment, so that they did not lose the authority to prosecute theft (and possibly other crimes - imagine if a state couldn't prosecute a man for murder, if he shot someone who was engaged in interstate trucking at the time in that state).
3. Federal law carefully puts infringment under a completely different title than all federal laws regarding theft. Titles are broad categories of law, intended to keep very different areas seperate. Appellate courts frequently compare one law to another, if both are under the same title, (for example if a cruel and unusual punishment defense is invoked) but are much more reluctant to compare across titles.
4. The US signed a treaty called Berne. It relates to civil violation of infringment, and by signing it we have agreed with 181 other nations that infringment is primarily a tort matter, as Berne stresses certain parts concern civil law only and have no authority to regulate the criminal laws of the signing nations, and yet bringing the US into compliance with Berne is cited as the base for much of this new legislation since then.
So the reason to call it not theft is, your legislators say it's not theft, the highest court in the land says it's not theft, just about everyone else in the world's governments says its not theft, except North Korea and the People's republic of Yemin and a few similar nations.
Now if you live somewhere besides the United States, the of course only some of these issues apply to you.
Who is John Cabal?
Seriously, thye may genuinely not believe the report, in which case, they should simply say that, but they seem to be a lot more aggressive than that with their refusals.
What if the record companies actually considered for a second, that there was a possibility that this report was actually right! Then the only possible result could be to increase their profits! By just dismissing it as rubbish, they're harming themselves more than anyone else.
[what?]
It re-ignites/increses an interest in music overall more than any other one thing.
If you can't understand why that's a good thing, then I probably can't explain it to you any better.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Well, actually I am in advertising so perhaps I add some thoughts to this. The coolness factor is JUST as important as the awareness building. You see, an ad can be repeated as many times as the advertiser has dollars for, but if it is a shit ad, and nobody is interested in it, you start having people just block it out. This has happened with banner ads. People have started to just mentally block out the space of a page where banner ads appear. While technically it counts as an ad impression, realistically it means one less person seeing the ad.
So while it is important to build in subconscious brand awareness and repetition does indeed play an important role in that, the coolness factor is what gets people to watch the ad every time it is repeated.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Once again, you completely ignore the artists who aren't getting paid because you're not buying their albums.
Riiight. Tell us another, RIAA butt-monkey. The artist getting paid! How fucking funny is that?
And how much does the artist get per CD? I do believe that Ani DiFranco has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the RIAA does nothing but screw both artist and customer, then bend them over again for a good reaming via bought-and-paid-for congressmen.
I could pay $8 for a CD direct from the artist, and even if you take off $2 for shipping and production (vastly overstated, but for you we'll pretend that's the actual cost) the average artist will still earn SIX TIMES what they get paid under the RIAA aegis.
Fuck the RIAA and it's apologists. The middleman isn't worth the price anymore. We can sample the artist's work direct (P2P, wouldn't you know) and buy if we like. And not buy if we don't.
Guess that business model is too complex for folks like you to parse. But in your world everyone's a thief...no doubt a reflection of your own character.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?