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Teens Don't Think CD Copying is a Crime
An anonymous reader writes "An article in the Orlando Sentinel reports on a poll done by the LA Times and Bloomberg. The informal study looked at teenager attitudes towards copying media. Only 31 percent said they thought it was illegal to copy a CD borrowed from a friend who had purchased it. Attitudes about ill-gotten media were less clear, and the article admits than even the legal system is slightly fuzzy on this issue." From the article: "Among teens aged 12 to 17 who were polled, 69 percent said they thought it was legal to copy a CD from a friend who purchased the original. By comparison, only 21 percent said it was legal to copy a CD if a friend got the music for free. Similarly, 58 percent thought it was legal to copy a friend's purchased DVD or videotape, but only 19 percent thought copying was legal if the movie wasn't purchased. Those figures are a big problem for the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, both of which have spent millions of dollars to deter copying of any kind. The music industry now considers so-called 'schoolyard' piracy -- copies of physical discs given to friends and classmates -- a greater threat than illegal peer-to-peer downloading, according to the RIAA."
... hard at work!
This is not the greatest
You want to know what is a crime? I'll tell you what is a crime. It's a crime that these large organisations reap the profits from pressed pieces of plastic onto which are recorded hideous noises that sound like gang-warfare in Harlem and Watts, and then use this money to harass families and children for every last red cent so they can line their pockets.
So yeah, copying a CD is not a crime.
What's funny is that we suddenly have 10 year olds with a criminal record because they took advantage of a service available on pretty much every computer. I'm not putting a dent in studio sales by downloading a movie. They hardly make anything on the DVD sales compared to ticket sales. Didn't they teach us on Sesame Street to share?
The teenage demographic is their prime target. They want these kids to continue to consume the music they put out without questioning it, thusly creating a pattern for them to follow their entire lives.
Thankfully, these kids have decided that it's more reasonable to think that sharing music with friends of yours isn't a crime. This creates panic in the RIAA because if enough people come to think that way, it suddenly won't be illegal. As much as you can say that the law will still be on the books, if enough people are breaking the law, how well does that law hold up?
These kids are just exhibiting common sense, and common sense is the enemy of the **AA's.
The RIAA brought this on themselves with an aging business model where media sells for far more than its worth to many consumers.
IABAL, but I thought that under the default definition of copyright, you can't legally make a copy. That's why the GPL has to spell it out. So, your statement would be more properly stated as "No, it is not legal, unless the Copyright holder of the work on that CD explicitly permits it."
Of course enjoying the fruits of someone's work without paying for it (when they expect to be paid) isn't theft!
Last night I went to see a movie I've been looking forward to all summer. And the cool part was, it was free! You see, the guy who takes the tickets at the theater is kind of old and it's easy to sneak by him. Geez, they're not even going to try to protect their rights! Anyway, it's not theft, because there were empty seats in the theater, so they weren't going to get any money even if I didn't go. And besides, everything Hollywood produces is crap.
Then I took the subway home. It didn't cost me anything because I jumped the turnstile. One of my friends said I was committing "theft" -- obviously he can't think for himself. I mean, the city was running the train anyway, and there were empty seats. Besides, the subway sucks, and they fill the route with lots of stops I'm not interested in (I only want to pay for the stop next to the theater and the one near my apartment).
There used to be a bus line that was more convenient, but the city shut it down, with some lame excuae about not making enough money to justify the expense. That just shows that they suck and don't deserve my money anyway! Fight the Man! Transportation wants to be free!
I probably won't go to that theater any more. I heard they're installing some new "security system" to prevent people from getting in without paying. That really pisses me off! How dare they! It just goes to show how evil they are. And besides, it serves them right if they lose money -- watching movies in a big theater with other people is an outdated business model!
sample size?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Then, finally, show a music executive, laughing, having lunch at some expensive restaurant, drinking fine wine, getting some young artist to sign on the dotted line. "Copyright Infringement" [fade to black] "It's NOT theft."
"
You've got the wrong image, there. You need footage of a teenager actually getting to meet his all-time favorite talent. You know, right there in the green room, for a one-on-one with, say... I don't know, Green Day or Avril Lavigne. The teenager says to Green Day, "Dudes! You guys totally rock. You're like the soundtrack of my life - I listen to you all the time, and I really can't wait for that next CD you're working on. I know you've been working on it all year and everything, but you won't mind if I just rip my copy off, right? I mean, I love you guys, just not enough to actually pay you what you're asking for your work. You know, a buck a song is totally unfair to me, personally, even though I want you to entertain me even more in the future, cuz you guys just totally kill with your songs about The Man and everything. Hey, are you going to eat that extra back-stage food? One of those club sandwiches would go great with my $3.75 half-caffe-double-shot-no-whip-skinny-iced-latte.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I would guess that:
1. Is just wrong. Surely a good fraction of people have tried to market their artistic work at some point. And in slashdot, I would expect that proportion to be nearly 100% given the nature of the audience.
2. With or without any experience trying to sell an artistic work, surely an even larger proportion of the population has at least created an artistic work and can appreciate the effort involved. And surely many can appreciate the joy of seeing their materials being copied, rather than feeling wretched. Not everyone is a control freak, and real artists want their works to be appreciated by as wide an audience as possible, regardless of recompense.
3. Would obviously need to be settled by experiment, but I think the experiment is doomed due to the definitional difficulties (just how much selling of their own materials is required?)
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Let me stake out a consumer viewpoint...
Perhaps you've got some talent that is vaguely interesting to me...
I don't owe you anything, but I choose to SUPPORT your expression by listening/reading/watching and sharing the news with others...
At some point in the process you are just pleased as hell that anybody cares at all...
Soon your art is broadcast over airwaves onto my property, into my car, on commercials between my kids cartoons, on my elevator and your excerpts are slipped into the pages between jumk mail that's dropped in my mailbox uninvited. You sell your services to advertisers/promoters who are trying to take my money. Your clothes line is produced by third world sweatshops and sells for 3X more than the generic brand. You are trying to sell me a perfume with your name on it (and some pimple cream too) and you have a commercial on the air urging me to imbibe addictive substances so I can get a "free" mp3. You sell pictures of your frigging baby to the news media.
Do I protect your financial interests when my friend asks to copy a song? Probably not...
Wait, you're not THAT artist? You're struggling, selling CDs at your show and living at home waiting for your big break? Ah, then, nevermind, because nobody is copying your damn CD!
ART is not some magic invisible soul cream. If you are selling your art, then you are selling your thoughts. Good luck to you on that, but don't cry about how people are stealing your thoughts. That's just crazy talk. Unless someone steals the plastic you bought and put your thoughts on, then they didn't steal anything from you. A law may say that its theft to listen/read/watch your creativity uninvited, but laws also once valued some people at a fraction of the value of others. Laws are just constructs of the general consensus, and that consensus is changing.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
Being a jew also was a crime, ad even punished by death penalty...
Among teens aged 12 to 17 who were polled, 69 percent said they thought it was legal to copy a CD from a friend who purchased the original.
Man, I just love these kids. Wait a sec, I'll tel you while.
As a quick intro, I'm not even 30 yet, but I still remember the good old days when we used to record dozens of casette tapes with songs from the radio, play it for ourselves, play them on parties, copy it to other friends. Then, if someone managed to get an original tape from somewhere (where I grew up these things were really not that easy to get) we just were just exstatic, everybody copied it and we listened to it till the tape rotted away. We never ever felt we were doing anything that could be labelled as s crime, crime is when you kill someone, not when you listen to music.
These days I buy CDs. I have CDs from most of the bands that we were listening to when we were kids too. If I weren't listening to them on those tapes, I probably wouldn't have bought these disks. If one of my friends would ask me to borrow him a disk, I would do it with no second thought, they would do the same. I know some associations would label us as criminals, still, while I rarely would download music these days, I would still like to know what I'm buying before I'm buying it. I make oggs and mp3s of them to listen to on my portable and on my laptop. If somebody would label me a criminal, I'd smack'em. Still, if I couldn't make a copy or I couldn't lend it to a friend, I'd rather not even buy it.
So, why I love these kids ? Because they are not that brainwashed yet to forget what fair use should mean. In time, they will be, they have no escape. Still, I hope someday someone will realise that drming everything and dog, constraining people up to their necks [well, ears in this case], closing down everything and trying to control and watch everything and everybody is not a solution to anything. Instead of trying to establish even more harder lockdowns, they should just sit down, use their brains and figure out a bussinness model that suits every side - artists, listeners, studios. Yes, I didn't include associations in that list.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Copyright infringement is one issue where personalising it is actually misleading. The biggest reson that copyright infringement is not theft isn't connected to bad analogies with car theft, but with the fact that infringements also act as advertising, and often the infringer wouldn't have bought it anyway.
Strangely enough, the displacement of sales and the advertising effect appear to counter each other almost exactly. However, copyright infringement remains an abuse of trust, so it is still wrong; it is simply mistaken to believe that it leaves the artist out of pocket.
I will say here, to make my position clear, selling pirated goods is theft. What is different? People appear to have a certain sum of money that they spend on music/videos etc; if pirated goods are bought, that money is redirected from the artist or his/her representative, since that cash is no longer in the hands of the purchaser. Accordingly, I would have profiting from piracy be a crime with a fine proportional to the money made, rather than the degree of infringement.
Wikileaks, no DNS
... a crime would be what the majority of the people believes to be a crime.
Screw the FSM - Real geeks believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn
The one problem is that the AHRA really does not apply to computers:
As for computers themselves:
Computers as a whole don't fall within subsection (3) because their digital recording function is not "designed or marketed for the primary purpose of
There was a court case about all this some years back. The RIAA was arguing that computers and computer peripherals such as mp3 players did fall within AHRA. They wanted this to be the case so that they could 1) get royalties, 2) require computer and peripheral manufacturers to implement the SCMS system of DRM that is mandated by the AHRA. In the case, RIAA v. Diamond, both the district and circuit courts found that computers were outside of the AHRA. The cases are worth reading. They even look at the legislative history in which Congress, in debating the law, also said that this law wouldn't apply to computers.
What the AHRA does apply to are Audio CDRs, whether or not you use them in computers or in standalone Audio CDR burners.
Oh, and if you also use those audio CD-R discs for downloaded music, then that would be legal, too!
Of course, if the computer that the downloads go through has RAM or a hard drive that's involved with the downloading, you might still be screwed. The AHRA only protects you against infringement suits with regards to fixation in the AHRA-compliant media. Fixation in other media wouldn't qualify unless you had a sympathetic court that isn't fond of the MAI v. Peak line of cases. The 4th Cir. maybe?
Oh, and jZnat is correct re: how to cite the USC.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.