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Recordable Media a Bigger Threat Than Filesharing?
Matilda the Hun writes "The Register is reporting on the RIAA claims that recordable media is more of a source of piracy than P2P networks. From the article: 'The RIAA's chief executive, Mitch Bainwol, last week said music fans acquire almost twice as many songs from illegally duplicated CDs as from unauthorized downloads, Associated Press reports. According to Bainwol, in turn citing figures from market watcher NPD, 29 per cent of the recorded music obtained by listeners last year came from content copied onto recordable media. Only 16 per cent came from illegal downloads.'"
When you are talking about significantly large amounts of data (hundreds of GBs to TBs) it is actually faster and cheaper to put it on a hard drive and FedEx or (insert your favorite delivery company here) and ship it. Bandwidth is not free (even for those in Universities where a portion of our indirect costs go to pay for bandwidth) and when you factor in time required to transmit GB to TB of info, it is much more efficient to use "sneakernet" or "shipnet".
This of course is leading many folks who deal with large databases to look at options such as moving the application to the data rather than pull data through the network. What does this mean for the media companies? It may eventually have an effect rendering the methodology much like that of the current TV/radio paradigm in that large repositories of media will be constantly available waiting for an application to travel to the database to query and assemble your media request.
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ASCAP was lobbying for a similar tax in the '90s on Digital Audio Tape (DAT). Propably the argument against adding it for burnable CD/DVD media is because it's so often used for data... thus the numbers... to justify their position.
Start a happiness pandemic
100% of piracy is a result of people/companies releaseing copywrited works.
Whether it's recordable media, p2p, thumb drives, magic crystals, or something else, the cat is out of the bag, and there's no going back. Time after time after time efforts to counter the problem are thwarted very quickly. Honest people are going to be honest, (but with the try before you buy advantage) and bad people are going to be bad.
This reminds me of the story of Sisyphus. It's time to stop pushing the rock up the hill and start looking for new business models!
Jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/
Because Phillips makes CD recording equipment for consumers which allow you to pop a CD in your player and record it on another drive in the same device.
And they don't sue Philips for contributing to "piracy" because Philips as a company is bigger than the entire US music industry.
From the Philips Web Site:
Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands is one of the world's biggest electronics companies, as well as the largest in Europe, with 159,709 employees in over 60 countries and sales in 2004 of Eur 30.3 billion.
Whereas GLOBAL music sales were worth $32 billion USD in 2003.
Same reason they don't sue Sony for making the same sort of consumer devices.
Why the massively larger tech industry feels compelled to bow down before these morons is beyond me. Tell them to take a fucking hike.
The Mob certainly is telling them that.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
As much as I like finding the middle ground, it's shit like this - mis understanding the argument - that makes it harder
But the parent is correct, none the less. How often do you reply with a clarifying comment when some does use the "infringment isn't theft" red herring in order to change the topic away from the fact that they're pirating anyway? I'd love to think that you're just as adamant about shouting down pirates as you are about people who argue about the semantics of the word "theft."
From my personal observations here and in other venues, a lot of people too cheap to pay the artists they claim to like what those artists are asking for their work immediately trot this and other falacious defenses, no matter how ridiculous. They won't confront the heart of the matter, which is that they're hypocritical in the extreme. It doesn't matter what they think about where the industry is or should be heading, what matters is that the at least some musicians still prefer a business arrangement whereby they are paid for the music they sell, and if you don't like that, you're welcome to listen to them on the radio or just choose entertainers that aren't looking for income from the sale of their recordings. It doesn't matter whether or not those artists will eventually be shown to be wrong about how not charging for your work will still somehow pay the bills... for now, they've asked that you pay, and they have the law on their side. If you don't like their choice of that arrangement, then you don't like them, and of course wouldn't dirty your ears with their music. Unless of course you're a hypocrite, which surely you're not.
But a whole lot of other people are, and many of them hate to get pinned down on it. They then frequently try to change the subject to imply that, hey, it's only infringement. Besides, they wouldn't have purchased the music anyway, it's all terrible Corporate Sound anyway. Um, other than the fact that they went out looking for it and got hold of it... which means they value it in some way, and thus value the artist who created it and asked that they pay for it. They just don't value the artist enough to show them that little bit of respect, that's all.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Outlawing (or severely restricting) recordable media is likely going to be a lot harder for the RIAA than it was for them to buy laws against online file trading.
It's easy to convince a bunch of middle aged senators that those evil computer hackers are stealing the labels' music because they typically don't have the greatest understanding of computers. But I'd be surprised to find even one US senator who has never copied an album onto a tape or received a copy from a friend. They will see that recording onto CD is the same thing, and will be a lot more reluctant to try to outlaw an activity that they know people have been doing for a long time.
Since the home tape recorder did not kill the music industry and in fact helped it, legislators will have a much harder time buying the argument that recordable CDs will kill the industry.
I stopped using CDs years ago. I now have a 200 gig external hard drive, and when that gets too small I'll buy a 500 gig one. If I want to pirate something I'm going to damn well do it, and I'll do it 30 gigs at a time while I go eat a burrito with my friend.
These clowns need to start charging much lower prices like the guys over at allofmp3.com. They don't have to match those prices, but $1/song is stupid.
I WANT TO PAY FOR MUSIC! And I'd rather have it be completely legit than have to go to some quasi-legal Russian site. But they can shove their high prices where the sun don't shine.