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US CD Sales Increase in 2004
Lindsay Lohan writes "BBC is reporting that CD sales rose by 2.3% in the U.S. in the year 2004 despite the growing popularity of legal digital music downloads through services such as iTunes. On the other hand, a BBC report from last July noted that pirated CD sales have hit a record high. Sounds like the RIAA should be going after the real pirates, not little Susie or Grandma."
stop buying them for christ's sake! now these idiots will believe that the frivolous lawsuits against 15-year-olds were successful.
But by going after little Susie or gramma they can make the claim that they're doing something about piracy...
Oh, and they can't if they shut down a large scale CD manufacturing plant in SE Asia?
Hasn't the Music industry recorded record profits during the years when it CLAIMED that they lost MILLIONS to illegal downloads? It seems like the rise of p2p has coincided with profit increases for the music industry. I won't say it's a cause and an effect. But it's a drop in a bucket to them. Apple's success shows people are willing to pay, just not the inflated, over-hyped prices of the crap cds the RIAA has been coming out with.
And they prove that any drop in CD sales was purely because of the economic slump, when non-essential things like CDs and DVDs are the first things to leave the on-the-spot purchase habits of people.
Or maybe the prices have dropped, making the product more desirable to the consumer.
However, they'll just say that it is the result of their "anti online piracy" actions.
hat would be so un-american
Considering this was reported by the BBC, you are probably right.
just wait untill next week and they'll announce that cd sales are down because of piracy.
they talk with one face to the goverment yelling wolf and with the "everything is so GOOOD!" to the investors...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You say pirate CD sales have hit a record high... and thus the RIAA should be going after them. Umm. That's the same flawed logic that had the RIAA attacking Napster.
What if it is the Pirate CD sales that are the primary motivator behind the 2.4% increase? Come on guys... be consistent. All methods of piracy can have some beneficial network effects on sales. All methods of piracy can ALSO cause lower sales under different circumstances.
It is, in a word, wrong to deify music swapping online, but demonise pirate CD sales. They're both illegal... the only real difference is that one has a profit motive, and the other doesn't. But the actual level of illegality, under current law, is about equal. It's illogical to praise one and not the other, don't succumb to the same stupidity that is rife within the **AA.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Time for a revolution!
That's not the sort of editorial comment I would have expected from Lindsay Lohan.
Little Susie and Grandma don't know how to cover their tracks and are therefore easy targets to make public examples of. The word gets out even if at the expense of PR.
Michalangelo Progr
1) If you think that the RIAA is sitting on its hands and just letting the largescale music pirates get away with ripping them off while only targetting "Susie and grandma" for litigation, you're quite mistaken. They spend quite a bit of money to seek out and take down these largescale pirates. Unfortunately, some Asian countries are more hospitable to the pirates than others, so policing it is a difficult job.
2) It seems to me that the year-long push by the RIAA to associate P2P filesharing with stealing is paying off, though only to the tune of 2% or so. If they can convince enough people that piracy is a crime, then it is guaranteed to boost actual sales of CDs at the expense of filesharing.
People are generally good and are willing to follow the law. The RIAA's push to make people aware of copyright law has finally made some progress, but also consider that music artists have also become generally better lately than they were in say the mid-late 90's. Of course, the increase in sales corresponds more to the anti-piracy push than to the improvement in music quality (Good music can still be pirated as easily as bad music).
The RIAA should just sell their CDs for $5 through shady looking guys on the street.
"Little Susy or grandma" might not be the crux of the problem, but "real pirates" are just as likely to be the guy living next door nowdays. They may not be running processing plants like the mob, but I've seen plenty of "village geeks" selling downloaded movies and CDs. At the call center where last I 9-5'd there were several people with fast home connections and DVD burners who regularly sold downloads to other employees on the floor.
This was not just onesy-twosey stuff. Any given week I'm sure one fellow sold 20 or 30 CDs at five bucks a pop. Multiply this by 1000's of businesses across the country and it's easy to see how it can really add up.
What amazes me is people really cannot tell the difference (or don't care) between a real CD and a POS CDR burnded from MP3s. I would be indignant about the pirates SELLING this stuff, but given these people are buying something akin to a cassette tape all you can really say is "it's their money to waste."
With all the lawsuits and crappy content flying around, the only way I can stock my MP3 collection is to buy CDs and then resell them on eBay! That's two sales right there! Or sometimes I just take 'em right back and tell the dweeb with the KoRn T-shirt that they won't play in my Dell. I bet they resell the same CDs 3-4 times! Burn 'n' Return baby!
Those numbers don't look so good if you compare the growth in CD sales to the sales of video (VHS/DVD's) software, or to the economy as a whole:
Video: Consumer Electronics Association: DVD Software Sales Benefit: Although movie-ticket sales fell one percent to $9.2 billion in 2003, consumer spending on the purchase or rental of video software (VHS tape and DVD) rose 18.2 percent to $22.5 billion, according to DEG. DVD accounted for 72 percent of total home video spending.
Overall Economy: CNN The economy has expanded at rates exceeding 3 percent for the past six quarters and seems poised to keep growing. The White House last Friday estimated GDP will expand 3-1/2 percent in 2005.
There probably was just better music last year than in previous years. Ok, so maybe only 2.4% better but improvement nonetheless. /didn't buy any CDs last year. Long live iTMS!
The RIAA's members can always lean heavily on their customers' consciences to go legit when they download a 128k mp3 from Kazaa, but if they buy a perfect replica of the album they have no reason to suspect that they will buy a legit copy. Almost every pirated copy that is sold is a sale that has to be totally written off. Few customers would probably even know the difference. With file sharing, there is always the hope that the user will go legit.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
If sales slump, **AA will blame it on piracy, and use it as justification to enact even more legislation to protect their profits.
And if sales rise, they'll use it as justification that their methods are starting to work against piracy, and consequently we need to make them even stronger.
How much higher would the increase have been had piracy not been a problem? No one can say for sure. But you can't state that file sharing has not had a negative effect as a result of a positive increas in sales.
A blog like any other.
Hi Lindsay!! I luv u!!!
I went to your site and "rocked out" to the intro, and then i saw nothing but PINK! My eyes actually screamed in pain. I heard them. I shit you not.
Please Lindsay. Redesign your site... for me?
And show me your knockers. :-)
Electric Monkey Pants
The report, for the country's National Bureau of Economic Research, studied the habits of 412 students.
Hmmmm.... they studied the habits of students. Aren't students usually short on money but have broadband on campus? This is hardly a realistic "sampling" of the population, so therefore cannot be taken seriously.
So which is it?
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
Part of the goal of the RIAA and MPAA is, naturally, to instill fear in those who might KNOWINGLY accept, purchase, download, etc. pirated materials. This creates stigma towards those that do (sort of like anti-smoking ads in the past couple decades).
This affects the demand for pirated materials which in turns lowers the economic viability for pirates.
The real issue for the RIAA / MPAA is getting all the "not sure if it's really wrong, I do it sometimes, I still buy occasional CDs and DVDs but like to try them" crowd over to the "It's wrong." view. Until they can do that, no amount of efforts will slow piracy down because so many people are doing it, and OK with doing it, that there is a serious strength in numbers.
The crux of the matter is, and will always be, people give their money to companies for often irrational reasons. If more people contributed to artists and things they liked and enjoyed directly, we wouldn't need oppressive middle-men grasping at straws to retain their distribution powers.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
I think that file sharing leads to greater purchases of music amongst people who have some money. I know that I download music, but if I see stuff I like in a shop, especially if it is on offer, I'll be much more tempted to buy it if I know it is good, because I want the actual product.
It probably also means that tat won't get bought, and maybe greater sales of music are down to there being better music advertised to the consumer. Instead of pop tat, there is a lot more variety of music advertised these days.
Oh, you mean the guys on the street corners selling the CDs pressed in the large CD factories in SE Asia?
If Pirated CD sales (from large scale CD factories, not burned copies, if you read the article) are becoming bigger than legal CD sales, maybe P2P isn't quite as big of a problem as 21 large scale factories in Russia and many more in SE Asia supplying the rest of the world...
So it looks better to go after pirates here in the US.
Sueing customers and 80 year old Mac owners who can't even install Kazaa, let alone use it to download music looks better than closing a manufacturing plant?
Which record studio hired you??
I would mod your article -1 Redundant. We've been saying that for two years plus.
Did you pay for it? No.
Do you now have it? Yes.
Did you take it without permission? Yes.
Sounds like a textbook case to me.
You can justify your crime all you want, but it still boils down to your decision to deprive someone of potential earnings. They can only afford to create that product (that you pirated) because of the potential to recover their investment.
It's one thing to not understand this. It's another thing to take issue with the word "theft" simply because you're not physically depriving anyone of anything. It's yet another to understand all of this and still believe that you're not doing anything wrong.
I love these articles because they are so misleading. I don't believe there is a strong correllation between sales and piracy. Sales are higher because the economy is doing better. Could they be even higher if there were no pirating? Perhaps, but I would consider it a small subset of people who would have bought something but didn't. Most people downloading stuff would never have bought it in the first place. If the record label lowered their prices that would also increase sales. Thus lower prices == piracy. ;)
The fundamental flaw is that in order to exaggerate their losses they come up with absurd calculations like loss = num_files_shared_last_year * retail_price. That is absurd.
I was watching C-SPAN last night and saw the confirmation hearing of U.S. President Bush's new Commerce Secretary. He was asked by Sen Gordon Smith (R-OR) how he would handle the copyright violations and IP issues that are crippling our innovative entrepreneurial spirit. I believe thre new Commerce Sec nominee has been CEO of Kellogg company. Wasn't that the company who was price-fixing cereal some time ago? Does anyone remember?
I think the rise in movie profits has more to do with the change in the format from VHS to DVD, all the movie companies are re-releasing all their classic movies onto "special edition" DVD's and thus people are buying them.
however Cd's havent changed format and there's no reason to buy all your old favorites again. Maybe when DVD-A or SACD takes off we'll see a big spike in music sales too.
Does Lindsay run a Linux box?
Are there more hot girls like her running linux?
Maybe it's time to finally try that new pickup line of mine: "What's your distro, baby?"
Sounds like the RIAA should be going after the real pirates, not little Susie or Grandma."
Oh, oh, I know -- I know! {raised, waving hand}
The reason they aren't going after these "real" pirates is because they are in nations who's legal systems have no incentive to stop the flow of pirated American, European and Japanese media.
It really makes me sad to see this kind of uninformed tripe in a headline. It brings out the general ignorance of the masses in these threads.
"She got some big ass titties"
MY SECRET DIARIES
No,
They will talk about how good the effort is going in stopping P2P.
And most likly ignore the fact that CD sales are tracking the economy fairly well.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I just got back from a trip to South-East Asia, and in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos it was rediculous how every single music store sold bootleg CDs. Mostly stuff downloaded from the net (lots of 'best of' with tons of typos), but in high-end/high-quality cases. Especially the stuff I saw in Louang-Prabang (Laos). They were dirt cheap, $2-$5, and I heard they were even cheaper in VietNam, although I didn't make it out there. If you want even more flagrant copyright violations, when I had satelite tv in Cambodia they were playing Swordfish on one of the channels and it was the exact same DivX screener that I'd downloaded when it first came out in theatres...with the same animated logo scrolling across the top right and everything. How crazy is that?
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
picture
Pretty much all you need to know to understand why CD sales dropped for a few years, then rose again in 2004.
But by going after little Susie or gramma they can make the claim that they're doing something about piracy...
The real question is what are they doing about music quality. Inundation of Britany Spears and the Backstreet boys have made me care much than less.
I have not bought a CD in 2 years. I HAVE, however, downloaded iTunes entire albums and countless singles. There's no point when I'm just going to put it in my mp3 collection anyway so that it's portable.
The REAL question(s) is (are) 1)what are record companies doing about the QUALITY of music such that we'd actually care about purchasing them in the first place? 2) The only "CDs" I've recently bought are Dvd-audios. Am not sure of any current way to rip 5.1 surround sound to mp3 or any other compression format, so how does piracy apply here?
I know that if I would ever actually want to own a hard copy of anything, it would be a Dvd-audio or maybe an SACD. What's the RIAA have to say about that?
*cricket*
-- (Score:i , Imaginary)
I don't exactly think the world of the recording industry, and it's a good point that there's a huge fallacy in their argument. I don't think it's a very serious one because most people in the financial world probably consider it a loss if they were expecting money and it doesn't come, and it's getting very picky to start complaining otherwise. Whether or not that was because of piracy is much more contentious.
If we're going to talk about fallacies, however, it should also be acknowledged that pointing out a fallacy doesn't exactly disprove the recording industry's claim that it's making less money than it should be in a fair market. (Trying to prove it isn't easy, either, and the recording industry isn't better than anyone else.)
A profit doesn't automatically mean increased sales. It could as easily mean that costs have been cut, possibly even as a reaction to forward thinking about whatever effect piracy is having. Realistically, most businesses simply have to aim for a profit whether they think it matches their ideals or not. It may also mean that money has been gained some other way such as through partnerships or creative accounting.
It's a fallacy in itself, however, to start suggesting that just because a profit has still been made, piracy isn't having an unfair effect on the industry... which is what the grandparent and a variety of other people seem to be claiming.
I despise the way that the bulk of the recording industry works, and the amount of FUD that they tend to spread in attempts to get themselves noticed. But there's so much FUD going on in both directions that it's often even hard to tell if there's credible evidence either way. Wherever that evidence is, though, this isn't it.
I have been thinking a bit about the economics of piracy lately. Anyone who knows a bit/lot ;) about economics, please comment.
:)
Now, when were talking about digital media, the price to reproduce the good is very close to 0. So we can think of the song/movie/whatever information as being free to reporduce. Now, the RIAA/whoever sets the price of the song/movie to something that is much higher than 0, causing a price floor. If I remember correctly, in my micro-economics class, the teacher said that when you introduce a price floor, black markets emerge. Does this "justify" the online piracy or at least explain in economic terms why it exists?
Of course, I could be confused and have it all wrong
Can your karma go above being Excellent?
The economy was up in 2004... therefore CD sales were up as a matter of trend. As the economy improves, so does disposable income and sales of just about everything.
Did you pay for it? No.
Do you now have it? Yes.
Did you take it without permission? Yes.
So anything you get for free is stealing. I can think of a lot of examples where this is not the case. Say I recorded a show off CBS. I would still answer the same to all three of your questions.
Hate you break you out of your little black and white world there, but when you talk about copyright it is just as infringing to forward an email without permission as it is to download a song, singing "Happy Birthday" in public is legally actionable and girl scouts pay a fee every year to sing campfire songs together. In the real copyright world it is just as infringing for me to make duplicates of my parents wedding pictures or to copy a photo out of my high school year book. In the real copyright world my four year olds scribbles are instantly copyrighted and her preschool teacher better have permission before she duplicates them. I bet you personally have infringed copyright hundreds of times in 2004, but because you disapprove of the way I do it, I'm a theif and a pirate.
Tell you what. If they come up with a copyright system that makes any sense, then I'll respect it.
I won this debate nearly six years ago, and we're not having it again. So go home.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Do they still have it? Yes.
Sorry to "take issue with the word 'theft'", but it is significant, both in a legal and moral sense. Legally, theft is defined as taking something with the intent to permanently deprive the owner of it, therefore downloading music is not theft. It is copyright infringement, which is a very different legal concept.
Whether or not downloading music actually deprives the record companies of potential earnings is also far less clear than they would have us believe. It is only depriving them of earnings if the downloader would otherwise have bought the CD.
From personal experience, I think the vast majority of illegal downloading is in circumstances where the downloader would not have bought the CD anyway, either because they consider it too expensive, or because they were downloading it simply to try it out, on the chance it might be good. In some cases, they like it go on to buy the CD (I have certainly done this several times).
Do you now have it? Yes.
Did you take it without permission? Yes.
Did you see the sign? Yes.
Did you understand the sign? Yes.
Did you drink from the "Whites Only" water fountain? Yes.
It's yet another to understand all of this and still believe that you're not doing anything wrong.
Yeah, that's called civil disobedience. Happy Birthday to You should be public domain by now. Sharing copyrighted files without making a profit only became illegal seven years ago when the No Electronic Theft Act was signed into law. By comparison, prohibition lasted 14 years.
Don your Elliot Ness attire. Keep busting those average Joes. Personally, I hope your kind stays the course. I hope RIAA legal activity mushrooms. Once you piss off enough regular people, this becomes a campaign issue and the majority is clearly not on your side. Go RIAA GO! :-)
Wow - it's a pity you weren't around when they decided to build those damn profit-stealing things called libraries.
You would've shown them, right?
A person/entity has the right to the earnings from its labor; they do not belong to society to meet some vague notion of a "greater good". Society might be enrichened if Jimmy Buffet performed concerts with no admission charge, but the decision to do that is his. It might benefit the "greater good" if Oracle gave away their database, but it is their choice to do so. Frank Lloyd Wright built homes that many consider to be great works of art, but he definately did not do so for free.
The creator of the work, or the entity that funded its creation and gained control over it, has the right to decide how others may use it. The controller may decide that all are free to appreciate it for no charge, or may set a price which individuals are free to choose to pay or not use the item. But society at large is not free to declare that it wants access to a given item for free and therefore take control (or possession) of the item from its owner or creator (emminent domain notwithstanding).
If you choose to create paintings and give them away, write GPL code, or provide free medical assistance to others, more power to you; I think it's great. But don't try to insist that all others also do so, or insist that one answer fits all circumstances.
Bother, said Pooh, as he called in an air strike.
It's now clear and obvious (as it always was in spite of the FUD), that the intent of the music and motion picture industry (and the larger media conglomerates that own and manage them) has never been to prevent piracy. In fact it's not even about maximizing profits.
The behavior is perfectly consistent with the abuses against all IP being waged by corporate entities and their legal minions, in the pitched battle to own, control, restrict, and monopolize all human knowlege, invention, and the freedom to create. In a world that has substantively shifted to an information economy, the owner and controller of all IP is king.
We're all quick becoming pawns in a war between human freedom and self determination, and corporate design. The science of shaping opinion, controlling the masses, and disinforming entire nations for fun and profit is run riot directly over the ethical and social designs of our forefathers. We are confronted with the conundrum of the successful operation that kills the patient, and in this scenario, you and I are the patient. Either, collectively as a people, we get some backbone, and a whole lot more intelligence, or we can expect to obsolete ourselves in the next several decades.
This is simply one more expression of our own ignorance, the worst of our animal nature, run amock. The beast that blindly grabs for the reins of all human enterprise is without foresight, mind numbingly stupid, infinitely self absorbed, and manned by men with the conscience of politicians. It's up to us (that would be not only the person writing these words, but also the people reading these words), to lay down new laws, build new barriers to barbarism, and set the stage for the next 200 years of human development. The alternative, is a furture shaped a lot like the fossil record for all of us naked apes.
Genda
This drivel gets modded up as insightful?
So, basically, what you're saying is this: You think that you have the right to determine whether or not you should pay for someone else's IP, AFTER you've already garnered the benefit of it? Or, are you saying that you think that you have the right to benefit from it for free, because you think that it is crap?
Ah, I get it - either stance is in strict accordance with the beliefs of the pro-piracy (Whoops, I'm sorry: Pro-copyright infringement - I need to learn to be more politically correct around here) faction here on Slashdot, and one of them got mod points.
"...on a sidenote, I've spent more on CD's this year, than any year prior, and I made less than the year prior (by a good margin)"
So? What's your point? You spent more money on non-essentials this year than last, even though you made less money? Are we supposed to congratulate you? Feel sorry for you? What?
Finally, I note with no small amount of cynicism that the URL you link to is "Copyright Matthew Minix 2004". If you are the copyright holder, then that's more than a little hypocritical, don't you think?
I swear, it's posts such as yours that force me to believe in God - there's no way they could happen by chance. It HAS to be a test for the rest of us, there's just no other explanation.
And I think, with some re-wording, that I just made up my new sig... so I suppose I should thank you for the inspiration.
look, music is intellectual art. Its something someone made because they wanted to. Now I won't say there haven't been people that just want to write a song to make a gold single and buy a house with that, but I will say that most artists start at least to do it for reasons other than profit. Our western capitalist culture is very picky about the reward we give for art and vise versa. Music is built up by the record lables, the RIAA, so that it can get out, but only for a profit, because if they fail then the business fails. What this creates is a mindset of THX1138, to buy and work and buy and nevermind anything else, even the motives or quality of those actions. Thus we get pop music and all the bad crap out there, but people gobble it up because someone tells them to. The industry doesn't even NEED to tell people that they have to buy anymore, that step is done with. Its a very easy advertising strategy to say "The must-have album of the year!" "You need this CD!" "An album no XXX fan should live withou!" People are already used to buying crap like it was a reflex. Someone made a great point about a price floor. When the RIAA gets greedy is when the pirates come in. Remeber when they complained about naptster, it wasn't that nothing was selling...it was that they made (and this is a hyperbole for the sake of argument however is true on the right scale) 10 bazillion dollars instead of 12.5 bazillion dollars. "Well excuse me Mr. fat cat rich RIAA CEO. I'm so freakin sorry. I should be buying your price fixed CD for $20 at boarders books&music when it cost you maybe a buck to produce." Ya right.
"Oh but Mr. Pirate, you are cheating the poor artists out of their hard earned money. They produced the art you love so you should pay them for it."
Again, please. The artists get a dime per CD...maybe. I'd rather burn the CD and send the artist the dime!
The big corporations (who give money to government to get legislation...yes, it is that easy) are screwing the consumers because they already spent tons of time and money breeding a culture that does nothing but spends. Why? Because they can.
Well, hobbes and locke were wrong. Not everyone HAS to succumb to the same social contract as everyone else to make it all work. I can get by simply by burning my music, screwing the corporate entity and sleep just fine.
There is a sliding scale to right and wrong. There is grey in between the black and white. Stealing billions by pulling a fast one on the public is more black than white, and stealing a CD from those giants is more white than black. They are both grey, both wrong, both right. You can thank capitalism to that, well at least the american version of it.
Make music to be appreciated, appreciate the artists and see them when they come around to play. Thats where they get their money. Revolt against the corporate. Give your business to small labels that don't gouge the public and don't produce crap just to sell it. There are things we can do as a consumer force.
Pirates of the Carribean DVD... $18.
Pirates of the Carribean Soundtrack... $18.
That is why few purchase CDs anymore.
The recording industry cut production by 20%, hacked away all their low-volume artists, yet saw an 11% gain in sales during the HEIGHT of the Napster boom.
We never heard an explanation for that. Hmmm.
No one questions the RIAA on these issues. The big labels cut all their dead weight, low-volume artists, cut production, yet saw an increase in sales?
I have a friend that works for a niche label, and he saw the changes coming, and was happy to sign some of these lower-volume artists as it strengthened their catalog. Some of these artists were considered out-of-reach for the niche labels. And many of these labels saw their sales skyrocket, compared to what they had been before. Admitted, they weren't going to compete with Sony or the other big labels.
Yet the RIAA claims that they were losing billions due to pirates... when the worker bees at the labels tell us that they use the P2P info to see what's interesting to the listeners, and they report increased sales on those artists? Smells like serious smoke and mirrors by the RIAA. Face it. The RIAA is using this situation to try and dictate legislation rather than adapt.
I think that, more than anything, we've seen a lull in "talent". Face it. We've not seen a Michael Jackson or a Nirvana. No blockbusters out there... and it's been awhile. Justin Timberlake? Britney Spears? Ashlee Simpson? Forget it. No talent hacks with fantastic marketing juggernauts behind them. That's it. They are products of technology. Lip-sync and auto-tuners. Fancy dancing with a lot of costumes. There's so little that's interesting music. REM and Dave Matthews haven't had knockout material in a few years. U2 is ok, but not what they were in the late '80s until the mid '90s. Name a rapper that's tearing up the charts? Hmmm. Still thinking...
The copyright infringement we're talking about here is not civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is not just the act of non-violently disobeying unjust laws. True civil disobedience also requires that you break the law publicly and accept the resulting legal consequences. People who practice civil disobedience usually call attention to themselves breaking the law and insist that law enforcement arrest them and enforce the unjust law. When people are punished for breaking an obviously immoral law, the theory goes, the government and/or society will be shamed into changing it.
If the law is broken secretly or the lawbreaker attempts to get out of the punishment, the powerful moral logic of civil disobedience breaks down. It becomes easy to accuse the protester of breaking the law just for personal gain rather than for the greater good. If he or she breaks the law openly from the beginning and requests enforcement of the unjust law, he or she is immunized from this line of attack.
If you want to practice civil disobedience against current copyright law, you should copy some tracks (like Happy Birthday) that you believe you have a moral right to own and you should alert the authorities and the media. Force the RIAA and the FBI to arrest you. Accept the ridiculous fines and jail terms that come with the crime, and thereby show everyone the ludicrous and immoral nature of the law.
Don't, however, copy 100GB of songs off of P2P networks secretly and call it civil disobedience. It's not. It's just lawbreaking.
It all came to him free, via the station, via the record labels who were trying to pimp their latest product. Multiple copies of stuff. He had no use for them so he'd give them out to his friends, thousands of CD's a year. The sad part is, all this shit got charged back to the bands in marketing/promotional fees. The labels could have sent 1 CD to the station but no, they'd send a box full, it was all waste.
Here comes the corroboration to your story.
Half the stuff this guy played during his shows, he downloaded off Gnutella. I watched him do it and occasionally I did the downloading for him. The station didn't have all of the stuff he wanted to play (he had kind of a specialty show), and the labels weren't sending free 10-packs of promo CDs for the stuff he wanted to play. So he downloaded it and played it. And the PD and station manager didn't give a shit, they pretty much encouraged him to do it. And nobody ever got on to the station about it, either.
I wonder how many radio stations out there are pulling their playlist off Kazaa these days because the labels won't send them what they want to play, but instead are sending them boxfuls of CD's that they DON'T want to play or don't know what to do with.
Wait, did I say record labels? I meant independent promoters! Totally different entities, there is no payola anymore! Yeah! That's it...