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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."
"Listen up, Russia. You signed the Bourne treaty, so start living up to your side of the bargain by eradicating these large-scale piracy rings or face the coming winter without trade partners."
or
"Information wants to be Free! That CD wants to cost 15 bucks!"
or
"In Capitalist America, nubile faux-lesbian rock groups ignore YOU!"
...EVERY single CD I found in shops were bootlegs. I couldn't believe that people were actually buying them. Some of them were so bad that you could see the inkjet printer lines on the cover/back. Needless to say, I didn't buy any of it, but in some places, people have no trouble with this kind of behaviour.
A blog like any other.
My research indicates that it's legit, and has been online for awhile. According to the copyright laws of the US, you can "import" things from outside the US, even if they violate US law if purchased here. As long as it's legit where you get it, and you import it for your personal use, you're OK. Kind of the same how you can buy bootlegs outside the US and bring them home. Heck, it even gets good reviews
Plus, they have not ripped me off since May, and so far no one has shown how this is illegal.
While I know it's not Soviet Russia, it's damn cheap. You can download an album for $1.50- and it's legit.
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?
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.
those godless communist bastards are preying on our innocent capitalism aryan heros like 50 cent, eminem, and britney... think of the children!!!
Something like this already exists...www.allofmp3.com. Sure, the target audience may be more foreigners than Russians, but the prices at which they sell music equal out to about the same as iTunes, on a Russian salary.
Converted into US bucks - that's roughly 570 dollars a month.
You can't tell me that any attempt by copyright holders is going to 'Stamp out Piracy' with 15 dollar CDs - unless they match the 3.50 'Nice Price'.
Isn't there one person out of all the copyright holders who can wrap their head around that?
I rate this article 4 1/2 'duhs', and rate the clueless morans printing up 'For great justice, make your time Pirate!' posters a +5 Ner.
Accidentally posted anon (and want to be able to see replies):
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 Chinese deliberately steal Western software, videos, and music, make millions of copies of such intellectual property, and then proceed to export the illicit goods into the American market. The pirated copies of, say, Windows XP compete directly against the real McCoy in the American market. The FBI have arrested numerous Chinese for pirating software, music, and videos.
The piracy rate in Russia is 87%. The rate in China (which includes Taiwan province and Hong Kong) is 92%. The rate in Russia is lower than the rate in China; moreover, the Russians do not export the pirated software into the USA to compete against the original manufacturers of the software.
Clearly, piracy in Russia is a problem but is nowhere near as bad as piracy in China.
Because there will be smart opportunists out there practicing arbitrage, i.e., buying cheap music in poor economies and importing it into rich ones and taking advantage of the price differential to earn a profit.
This is one of the reasons why pharmaceutical companies are so reluctant to sell AIDS drugs for cheap in developing African nations. They know almost no one in African countries can pay full price for their drugs, but they're afraid that if they lower the costs of their drugs in these developing nations, people will buy drugs there and import it back into the first world, cutting into the margins they need to cover the costs of development and to underwrite further research.
Shot of a thin gaunt man dressed in an old jacket hawking CD's with Cyrillic lettering in the rain. The rooftop of an Orthodox Russian Church can be seen in the background.
Announcer: This is Boris, a hardworking Russian music pirate. Every day he is on the streets, twelve, fourteen, or even fifteen hours, hawking his burned CDs of the latest hit albums from the US. He even has created his own mixes with high-quality jacket art that caters to the Russian market.
Shot of a fat man driving a Ford SUV and eating from a bag of McDonald's food. In the interior of the SUV, an in-dash satellite radio and GPS system can be seen. In the back is an in-car DVD player.
Announcer (cont.): This is John, an American music producer. Unlike Boris, he has a steady job, including health, vacation, and retirement. He only works a measily 8 hour day, and lives in a 3000 sq ft home, with central heat and air. Unlike Boris, who owns no vehicles, John owns a late-model SUV, which he parks in his own private three-stall garage.
Shot of a typical upscale gated community in the US.
Announcer (cont.): If you buy legitimate music, you are throwing your money to rich Americans who already have the good life.
Shot of a Moscow slum.
Announcer (cont.) But if you buy the latest songs from the Russian pirates on the street, your money stays in the Russian economy, benefitting many more people than just the pirate.
Announcer (cont.): Please buy locally.
I truly can't understand why a blockbuster Hollywood movie with the world's most famous actors, thousands of special effects created by the world's most powerful supercomputers, and a credits list that takes 5-10 minutes just to scroll by on the screen normally costs about $15, while a CD, often with already-released songs, and requiring only a singer, guitarist, drummer, etc., and a sound technician, costs the same amount. *What is up with that?!*
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
Of course, if they lowered the prices for Russia, then we could just buy music and software there for peanuts, and the publishers would be fucked.
They're fucked anyway. And I say good riddance to them. What they did worked before the internet, but it doesn't now. They use mass media to control 13yo girls and buy popularity, they suffer when we use the same systems to get their content free. I'd sleep if there were never another new song recorded, there's so much out there I'll never come close to running out of new stuff to listen to. And the people who're in it for the music will still produce, and the people who want to see live acts, and want to support the acts they like, will still pay.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
I'm not sure what portion of a DVD's cost goes to cover promotion, but 50% of the cost of a CD does. So $10 of that $20 CD you might have just bought will go to cover things like apperances on MTV's TRL, appearances, radio play and other forms of advertising, which are usually handled by the record labels. In addition to that, the labels take cuts in other direct and indirect ways so that something like 70% of the points (a point is about 80 cents) on an album go to the label. The artist themselves usually get one or two points - so from that expensive album, they're getting 80 cents to $1.60. The cost to manufacture the CD and put the music on it and print the sleeve and wrap it is about 1 point.
:)
The reason they can afford to make DVDs for so cheap is probably because they've already factored the cost of promotion and other expenses into the movie itself and that is usually recovered in the box office long before it hits store shelves.
That and the fact that I'm sure they've conducted expensive research that has surely shown consumers are willing to spend six hours worth of pay on a CD or DVD, but not anything more than that. $20 for a CD and $30 for a DVD might be the price break after which people begin to stop and think "wait, do I really want to dish out this much of my income for a movie I'll only watch one time?".
I would find the cost of both DVD an CD to be acceptable if you were paying for the right to posess and view the content whenever you wanted for the rest of your life. But if your media is lost, stolen, damaged or wears out (or there hardware to play it is no longer made), then it's a rip off to have to pay for it all over again.
Just imagine you're some Star Wars dork and you payd $30 for three star wars movies on VHS. Then you spend $30 on each for laser disc. Then you spend $30 each for DVD. Then someone stole those DVDs or they were damaged while you were moving out of your dorm and you had to spend another $30. That's $480 on just three star wars movies over time - and your life isn't even half over year. Just wait until the next "big amazing format" comes out and you have to upgrade again if you ever want to watch those movies.
The best thing I've ever done is just give up buying DVDs and CDs and going to the theater. I have far more money in my pocket and can get more entertainment for the buck by purchasing used books at half the price.
I'm originally from Brazil, and go back every once in a while to visit family. The minimum salary there is on the order of $100/month, and piracy is also an everyday fact of life. My cousin tells me that when you buy a PS2 there, it comes pre-modded and with software to play DVDs from any region as part of the bundle; you actually can't buy a PS2 without it. Of course, the reason for this is because Sony never officially released the PS2 in Brazil (according to my cousin, this is because they knew that piracy was so prevalent as to make legitimate sales there unprofitable). For comparison, whereas a pirated game is roughly $10, an unpirated one is nearly $100.
Don't wrestle with pigs; you'll both get muddy, but the pig likes it.
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."
And regarding the possiblity of iTunes and company, Russia hasn't invented broadband yet. They're still using pulse-dialing for their phone lines, for crying out lound. (If you don't know what pulse-dialing is, go ask your dad. Or your grandpa.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized!
Really, I'd rather pirate The GIMP than buy it for $600.
I'll sell you a legitimate copy the GIMP for $600 if you ever change your mind.
as just 1$ a day you can help sponsor a RIAA Music Producer. With your help we can get them another Porche for the garage, that flat they have always wanted in the Bahama's, you could even help cover the cost for the private school tuition of their childeren, and other things their own goverment can not proivde.
..
So please give generously help make the life of a RIAA Music producer better today.
----
Seriously tho the Russian guy on the street, and that is where most of them are, have had the shit end of the stick for the last 60'something years, and now the people up on high are pissing and moaning cause someone wants to listen to some tunes....
get your prioities straight people!
0.80 to 1.60 goes to the artist? Please. My friend's dad has put out 16 cd's since the late 60's/early 70's. He's still putting them out today, and he gets about 10 cents per album. This is common from others I've talked to in the industry. Luckily for him, he's just one guy. A band of 4 people have to split those profits. Selling a million records does not make you a whole lot of money.
Interestingly enough, it's the shows and appearances that make them the most cash, not the records. Unfortunately, you can't sell many records without the backing of a big label because of the stronghold they have on the industry. Most artists would give their records away for free if they could gain more fans that way, then they would make even more off shows and appearances. But the record label charges for the albums, and it's impossible to get radio play on any popular station if you're independent. The record industry is a scam, and all signed artists know it. That's why you see some artists starting their own labels, both to make more for themselves, and to sign other bands and do the same to them. Dre, Eminem, Metallica... they all have their own labels, and they are all rolling in cash. But you've gotta be a superstar before you start a credible label or you will be ignored.
It would be nice if some big names that have made their money got together and started a campaign to take down the labels, or at least start some kind of change for the better. Maybe come together and start their own label that didn't screw their talent and is not part of the 4 letter organization that we all love to hate.
I was born in Odessa, Ukraine ... which damn close to russia :P (I lived there for 11 years)
and just about EVERYONE tries to make a living ... you know those plastics bags that every store gives u in US? in Ukraine you came with your own bags! or you bought plastic bags :-\ (you'd wash them, too)
college students re-sell Turkish made ripoffs on markets because after going to a uni, there isn't much hope for them to earn an honest/legal living ...
just my 2 bytes
Since I am working and living in China I am used to the huge amount of DVD piracy here.
We had some korean customers coming to the China office and over dinner we offered to take them to a good quality and very cheap pirate DVD store.
The two koreans looked at eachother and then one replied:
"Why buy DVDs when we can download for free ?"
I guess the piracy industry is getting killed by Kazaa and eMule these days.
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.)
I've posted this URL several times in various threads where music industry-artist relations come up. I'm a semi-pro (not sure what may formally qualify one to be called "pro"..I've made a living at it for significant periods, but not exclusively, so I include the "semi" tag) musician myself, and can attest to some of the facts in this excellent piece. Worth a read.
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.