Slashdot Mirror
Bootlegged Music in Russia
Guppy06 writes "MosNews.com has an interesting article on the thoughts and opinions of everyday Muscovites on the rampant music (et al) piracy in their country. It seems that some of them don't have much trouble justifying it to themselves, with quotes like 'Yes, I know that some of the sellers are here with burned CDs. But they have to earn a living too, I can understand them.' The article also mentions 'In a country where the average monthly salary is about $240, buying the latest album for $15 is a grotesque luxury, let alone spending $600 on Adobe Photoshop or a similar computer program.' Apparently, catchy slogans like 'Listen up, you pirate, I choose copyright!' just aren't working."
15 bucks is a lot anywhere for a cd! personally, i don't think it's justified to spend that much on a cd that maybe has 1 or 2 songs worth listening too.
that's why i like online music stores where you can get singles for $1. something like this could really kick of in russia, not sure what the internet usage is over there though.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
An album costs 25% of a week's pay. The problem may start there. They simply can't do that. Why don't the music publishers price music a little more closely to a country's economy?
http://www.busyweather.com/
It seems that some of them don't have much trouble justifying it to themselves, with quotes like 'Yes, I know that some of the sellers are here with burned CDs. But they have to earn a living too, I can understand them.'
While it's kind of a stretch, it's basically the same as "it's okay to steal a loaf of bread if you're hungry." (With the vendors being the thieves).
What?
People in some countries will argue they cannot afford to legally buy some software because the cost is very high compared to how much they get pain. But then there is nothing to prevent some company from developing software in the country that people can afford because the cost of development is cheaper there isn't it?
Apparently, catchy slogans like 'Listen up, you pirate, I choose copyright!' just aren't working." - what is so difficult to understand? In the former Soviet Republics there are hundreds of millions of poor people who their entire lives lived under opression of a corrupt 'communist' government. Nothing in that society belonged to anyone. Property rights are virtually non-existant. When the president of the Country puts the most famous, richest person in the country into a prison cell for basically just that - being rich and thus dangerous (well Hodorkovskiy sort of was aiming at the president's position) and the company is now going to be sold at 1/10th of the value to the buddies of the president and to those who will share some of the wealth, what the hell do you expect from the people? Respect copyrights? HA!
It also works the other way around - when the people of a country, whose assets were supposedely owned by noone and everyone at once were 'freed' from the regime, and the valuable assets were divided among the top elite who had access to some money and were in power, and the average person was left in the cold with nothing at all, after slaving their entire lives for this regime, these are the people who allow Putin to be the president, obviously he is representative of the population and who is to say that anyone at all in that country would behave differently from Putin given the power, then what do you expect from those people?
Generations of Soviets grew up with assumption that they had to steal from the state because the state stole from them. The sense of someone elses property is nonexistant. Mix this with the fact that making digital copies nowadays is cheaper than buying a loaf of bread and you have yourself a runaway copyright infringement process on 1/6th of the landmass of this planet.
You can't handle the truth.
It's hard to justify the cost of a CD (or DVD, etc) to anyone in any country, if they've done the math and figured out where the $16 to $20 from each CD is going. Break it down and you'll find that about 75% of the points are going to the label in one way or another. Worse, as much goes to pay for advertising and promotion of the CD as goes to all other places (artist, representation, printing and pressing, shipping) *COMBINED*.
I found the best way to deal with this is just to avoid paying. I don't have cable anymore. I ditched it because the terrible programming wasn't worth $110/mo. I also don't buy DVDs or CDs and I don't go to the theater. Few movies are worth $10 per person these days. What, am I going to blow $20 so myself and a date can go watch Eurotrip? Get real.
I've taken the money I would have spent on the MPAA/RIAA/BSA goons and redirected it toward buying USED books. Instead of $30 to buy the latest ridiculous Spielberg rehash (ooh, this time he added three lighting effects in this one scene that weren't there before!) - I can use that $30 to buy half a dozen good reads. I've been working my way through the Top 100 Science Fiction Books of All Time (excluding the ones I'd previously read). Much better value. And when I'm through, I can hand them off to someone else without worrying about the MPAA/RIAA/BSA sending the FBI to break down my door and put me in prison for four years without due process.
The United States has signed more than a few treaties which it ignores. The Geneva Conventions being the most recent example (thanks Bush, for Gitmo!).
Sure, but what's to keep people from importing these into the U.S.? Their domestic sales would suffer as a result.
A blog like any other.
Downward pressure on wages (although no where near the levels in russia) has made music a luxury to a large portion of the population. Work for $6.25 an hour, 25 hours a week, and tell me if you can afford a 15-25$ cd.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
You're blurring the lines between stealing and pirating. When something is stolen, the original owner is harmed because they are now missing something. When something is pirated, the original owner is harmed because there is one less person to possibly buy a copy of something. They are both wrong, but are not apples to apples.
If nobody wanted to pay for software, I imagine it would fall to academia, hobbyists, and in-house jobs for corporations.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
There's just something horribly, horribly wrong when IP "owners" are complaining that people won't respect their property when said people cannot even begin to consider doing so. They're dangling food in front of the faces of the hungry and complaining when some of it gets snatched away. That thought just makes me ill.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
My Karma is "bad" ...
The thing is i couldnt care less. If they "flamebait" comments like this, im actually proud to have "bad" karma. I have no idea where are the moderators are living, but when a heavily centralised goverment with a not rocket scientist leader to say the least thinks he knows better whats good for the world rather than following international "standards", then when someone points it out, shouldn't be considered flamebait.
To stay Ontopic a bit, if you look at the russian music market, from a production perspective, then "illegal music pirates who endanger the world order" are actually competition. Competition with low prices. And how does the industry react? Not wanting to fix the issue, they shout "pirates" and "crime", instead of being competitive (which they could be). Why everyone's "pirating" music in russia? Yes, because its cheaper than buying it in a music store. But if you look at the figures, this is totally irrational. Around 1-5% of the price of the cds goes to the actual artist. Well, if the music industry would be smart enough to realise things, they would go competitive. It would mean lowering prices to their 1/5. Giving around 10%-20% of the price to artists, and having the benefits of mass-production, the recording industry would still stay competitive. The only reason they are not doing this is just out of pure greed and short sightness. They can keep this state up for a while, but not on a long term. Eventually someone will figure out a way to pay artists while getting round the music industry.
Now you can hit the -6, Flamebait, Troll, reason of Apocalypse, etc button to rate my post.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I always find it interesting that if you don't follow the party line and say it's the copyright law's fault and intellectual property should be free you get a zero mod. This is about getting something for nothing. It really is that simple. Deal with, you're just looking for an excuse for taking something you want without paying for it. Zero modding should be reserved for off topic not because you want to kill the messenger. I have never once heard anyone point out a reasonable model for producing film/music/software and giving it away for free. There's a small amount of software and such being produced for free but it represents a small percentage of what people use every day. The material you wish to pirate comes from somewhere and those people deserve to be paid for their work. If you don't want to pay then don't listen to the music or use the software or watch the film. For software use only open source free software, for music listen to the radio and for films watch broadcast TV or get cable. Trust me there are alternatives and those alternatives are reasonable and involve people being paid for their work. Mod away, you only prove my point.
The thing I find most amusing about the effort to stop piracy is this.
The entertainment industry spends millions upon millions upon billions of dollars just trying to figure out what sells well. Omnipresent advertising saying how good something is, cover art designed by teams of marketing experts and run through focus groups. Music designed and tailored to appeal to people at the most fundamental levels.
Now you take this product that companies have literally spent millions on in an effort to make it the most desirable thing on the planet. You take that same item, and put it in the middle of a population and price it so 90% of the people are not going to be able to afford it.
Then you are surprised when all of the effort you put into making the product irresistible actually works? Even people with scruples have a breaking point, where they just throw them away. The products are designed to break you down and make you do something you were not planning on in the first place - it is all too easy for the human mind to turn that impulse to taking instead of a purchase, especially so if the purchase is not a practical option anyway.
That's why iTunes works so well. It's a great channel for that impulse to be satisfied fairly cheaply (for a US or UK citizen). But in Russia, they'd have to price stuff at, well, AllOfMp3.com levels. And that might even work except I have to imagine that the percentage of people with decent internet connections is somewhat low. So street vendors and a whole industry springs up to take up the slack and cater to the impulses that the media companies worked so hard to induce.
Now THAT to me is funny.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
First, the United States has not signed all the Geneva Conventions.
Second, the Geneva Conventions are in some ways absolutely absurd. For instance, prisoners are supposed to be guaranteed athletic uniforms. In a lot of ways the Geneva Conventions are a reflection of a 1920s notion of how gentlemen ought to act to each other in a state of peace; they do not speak very much to the modern state of the world or to the modern state of war. Let's not forget that Geneva was drafted in the post-WW2 period by diplomats whose military experience and notions of 'the laws of war' were shaped by WW1.
Third, Geneva sees the world in strict black and white. For Geneva to apply, you must be either a civilian or a uniformed soldier in the service of a recognized government. If you're neither a civilian nor a uniformed soldier in the service of a recognized government, Geneva considers you to be a spy and entirely outside the protections of the Geneva accords.
So think about this: the detainees captured during combat operations in Afghanistan are not civilians. (Some may be, and we desperately need a legal process to determine who is a civilian and who is not; but I do not believe the majority of them are civilians.)
The Taliban were not the recognized government of Afghanistan. Only one country in the world recognized their government as being legitimate, and anyone who suggests that the opinion of a generalissimo dictator (i.e., Pakistan's Musharraf) lends credibility to the Taliban-as-government idea has no credibility at all.
Thus, no Taliban fighter could be considered a soldier under the Geneva Conventions. Even if the Taliban were a recognized government, they'd still fail because they didn't have uniforms. (A pedantic point? Sure. But that's law for you; law is nothing more than the rigorous application of pedantism.)
Not only that, but the Taliban committed gross breaches of the laws of armed combat. They mixed in with civilians; they militarized noncombatant areas; they targeted medical personnel; they engaged in military operations against civilian targets. Under the Geneva Accords, they can be summarily executed for this without judicial process. After all, they're not in uniform, not in the service of a government, and not civilians--they're spies. Kill 'em without trials. It's legal.
So when you start talking about Geneva, start thinking long and hard. Do you really want us to treat them in strict accordance with Geneva? Or do you want us to treat them in accordance with some nebulous 'standard' which far, far exceeds Geneva protections?
If you want Geneva, fine. But don't go about talking how awful it is that Bush isn't strictly adhering to Geneva without understanding just how horrible Geneva allows us to be. I'm no fan of Bush, but I have to give him this: he's not summarily executing people in Gitmo. And under the law, he's allowed to.
(Addendum: None of this is an argument to abandon Geneva. I'm only suggesting that we acknowledge Geneva's many shortcomings and understand what it actually says, not what we wish it to mean. If I had my way, NATO would agree on uniform standards for prisoners, both regular and irregulars, with severe penalties for violators. I don't trust the UN to form a new Geneva Convention, given that Geneva is fundamentally a human rights issue and Libya's the current chair of the UN Human Rights committee.)
If the music industry cannot be competitive while paying all their overhead (as bloated as it might be) and giving the artists 1-5%, how could they possibly stay competitive while raising their prices another 5-15%?
So, hypothetically, say that Sony Music gets lean and mean and somehow manages to lower its CD prices by 50%, while increasing the royalties to the artist (to give everyone a warm fuzzy feeling when they buy a CD). That'd set a price at $4-8, which is *still* priced way out of realm of affordability for the average Russian, and cannot possibly compete with a guy on the streetcorner charging next to nothing! Let me repeat: a company that actually has to pay royalties to the artists *and* pay the salaries of all the people working to produce and distribute that music CAN NOT "compete" with someone who contributes 0% to the artist or the company that produces the album.
Are thieves that steal car stereos and resell them on the black market "competition" for stereo manufacturers? Competition would entail actually creating their own alternative to what the RIAA produces, as crappy as it might be, and selling it at lower prices. That's not what's happening.
That said, the current music industry is definately outdated and past its useful life, and artists will eventually find a more direct way to get their music out. Unfortunately, even if they're charging $0.10 for a track or $0.50 for an album, some low-life will STILL find a way to profit off of that without paying anything to the artists. Portraying bootleggers as legitimate "competition" is flat-out wrong.