What Various Studies Really Reveal About File-Sharing

Dangerous_Minds writes "Drew Wilson of ZeroPaid has an interesting look at file-sharing. It all started with a review of a Phoenix study that was used to promote SOPA. Wilson says that the study was long on wild claims and short on fact. While most writers would simply criticize the study and move on, Wilson took it a step further and looked in to what file-sharing studies have really been saying throughout the years. What he found was an impressive 19 of 20 studies not getting any coverage. He launched a large series detailing what these studies have to say on file-sharing. The first study suggests that file-sharing litigation was a failure. The second study said that p2p has no effect on music sales. The third study found that the RIAA suppresses innovation. The fourth study says that the MPAA has simply been trying to preserve its oligopoly. The fifth study says that even when one uses the methodology of one download means one lost sale, the losses amount to less than $2 per album. The studies, so far, are being posted on a daily basis and are certainly worth the read."

Comments

P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know anecdotes don't mean much but...

I was in university (and poor) when Napster became popular and I stopped paying for music. I have money now but the habit kind of stuck and I haven't paid for music since; I know many people who are the same way. I'm pretty sure that P2P has cost the music industry hundreds of dollars from me personally over the last 14 years.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that in CD sales, they lost on me as well.
T-shirt sales, tickets to events and so on are up by a lot. Arguably because I have more money now, but on the other hand, I also found many bands online, where in the past, I didn't exactly buy CDs/merchandising/tickets from any bands I didn't get to know through friends and pretty much heard every song off already.

Not that I go to many concerts of current day pop stars on anything. Its mostly the older guys.

In my opinion, it really is a problem with being stuck in an old medium. CD sales could go well, but they have to add in something extra, like a teddy bear or whatever.

In my case, the revenue has taken another lane, but its not gone. I don't know if it still arrives in the same hands, but making it so that everybody gets his fair share doesn't seem to be the fault of the person spending the money.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cost the music distribution industry, perhaps. What about the statistics on the actual artists?

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Anonymous Coward]

On the flipside, I never used to pay for music at all - ever. I either copied from friends, or downloaded. Now I'm working and have money, and using Spotify Premium (€10 a month) since it came available.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Anonymous Coward]

And for every few albums I've downloaded, I've heard an musician I never would have otherwise, bought their album and gone to see their show when they come to town.

So the mediocre loose... but the talented, perhaps unappreciated, artists who don't get corporate radio airtime win.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[SeaFox]

Yes, but filesharing also means many people were exposed to music they might not have been otherwise, and of those there is a group who despite downloading an album will still go buy it (or buy a special limited edition version for an upgrade) to support the artist they are now a fan of.

Those extra sales will counteract the losses of the "I don't pay for anything" pirates.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Belial6]

When Napster came out, I tried it, and within a couple of days, I found that it wasn't worth my time. On the other hand, once Sony started infecting computers with malware from music CDs, I stopped buying music at all.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Dragoniel]

Precisely because of "free" music and videos I heard many albums nobody I know heard of and saw movies that aren't available in my country and never will be. That's one thing corporations doesn't care about. But there is more - I would never have paid for any music or movies I downloaded anyway, because I can't afford it. So, how much actual money the corporations actually lost? Big fat zero. There goes your numbers. I buy content that is worth buying. Sometimes I download something and then buy it later, because it's worth it. Sometimes I don't - but it doesn't mean they lost money because I didn't - I wouldn't have paid without trying in the first place. Period.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Anonymous Coward]

File sharing didn't cost the Mafiaa cartels anything from me, their own actions have.

I will not EVER pay for their produced/distributed content again, because by doing so I would be helping fund a war on the free internet, lawsuits waged on their own customers, and bought legislation to stifle innovation.

Plus p2p file-sharing gives a better product without bullshit like unskippable ads, DRM, and idiotic FBI warnings on legally purchased media.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[XiaoMing]

This is science at its best. Not only can you not cherry-pick your data to make a conclusive paper, but you also really shouldn't cherry-pick papers to make a conclusion (or vice versa) in life.

Keep in mind that the conclusion you are the living counter-example of is from one study out of many, and that the final study which directly relates one download to one lost sale (the most conservative estimate you can make) arrived at a loss of less than $2/album sold. So that means that even if not everyone were like you, the loss really becomes a sliding scale from $0-$2 per album.

You take all of the papers into account, and a larger pattern does emerge: Yes, any record that goes gold (500k sales) or platinum (1M sales) will see roughly ~$1M-$2M in losses. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_recording_sales_certification )
At the same time, we know that artists are thriving in this environment http://boingboing.net/2009/11/13/labels-may-be-losing.html

What does one do with these conclusions? Well that really depends on who you are: If you're the corporation, you obviously tighten your group and try to squish indie label companies for the sake of the bottom line (and in spite of artistic creativity). If you're the musician, you could "sell-out" because being well known, even if via overproduction and sheer marketing and autotuning, was your life goal, or you can maybe find a nice indie label that will help develop you for you. If you're Fox News, you defend the corporation because they're people too, who cares about our neighbors!

And as the average consumer? Well I guess I'm always impressed by the number of people defending corporations and what they think is "capitalism" in this day and age, when it's really resembling more and more a conspiracy by all the companies to screw over the consumers, rather than a competition to win their favor.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[ausrob]

I'm not sure it's that clear cut. Are you saying that *all* the music you downloaded you would have paid for, song for song or album-for-album? There's quite a big difference between what you acquired for free and what you *might* have been prepared to pay for.

The general consensus appears to be (or.. should be at least) that a downloaded song != a guaranteed sale. Thus the music industry, in stating that every download is a loss of revenue, is a nebulous statement at best.

There's data which suggests that some people, after downloading and listening to a single, have gone out and purchased the associated album; much like listening to a single on the radio might achieve.

There's also a few theories that people downloading tracks have been more likely to attend concerts, buy merchanise.

I'm not sure it's totally safe to assert that p2p/file sharing hasn't had an impact on revenue, but it's also hard to rule out an improvement in sales by the same token.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[phantomfive]

Shut up, shut up, shut up....

Your cognitive dissonance causing you pain, eh?

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[toejam13]

I'm just the opposite. By obtaining music through alternative channels, my CD collection eventually quadrupled in size (now over 300 discs).

One benefit was that I was exposed to a huge number of artists who receive little to no airplay by traditional terrestrial radio broadcasting. I'm not a fan of the soulless generic music that dominates most of the airwaves, so this was a very significant thing for me. When I discovered a new group I really liked, I'd go hit up an online retailer. Their recommendation system would then steer me towards other similar artists I had barely heard of. I'd then go back to the well to grab some of their music. Rinse and repeat.

Another benefit was identification. There used to be a huge number of songs from the '70s - '90s I really liked, but never knew their name. Thanks to an ID tag on a digital music file, I now knew the name of the artist and song and could go buy the album through a retailer. No more mistaking the music of one artist for another.

As online retailers have moved away from 20 second 32kbps previews to song clips of longer duration and better quality, it is just getting easier to use their sites to preview. But nothing beats the convenience of those alternative channels.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[powerspike]

even better. Australian DVD's - which are region locked to prevent us from using oversea's ones (ie paying less then 1/2 what they charge here) still have FBI warnings on them, they can't even bother to put the Australian warnings on them these days!

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was in university (and poor) when Napster became popular and I stopped paying for music. I have money now but the habit kind of stuck and I haven't paid for music since; I know many people who are the same way

Before I was in university I didn't buy a single record, simply because I didn't like the crap that was being pushed through the radio (all radio). Both napster and new friends helped me to find music that I actually like. These days, I go to 3-4 concerts and 2 festivals a year.

Yes, I do download. Still, most of my music collection comes from CD rips, either from friends' or the library (which is legal in my country).

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[scourningparading]

And do you place any value in the downloaded music you have now?

Or rather, do they place enough value in it that they'd pay for it?

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm always impressed by the number of people defending corporations and what they think is "capitalism" in this day and age

It has never been capitalism. Capitalism requires a fully informed and equal-opportunity market. Copyright, by its very definition, has nothing to do with equal opportunity. As for fully informed, well, you need a functioning education system for that.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[NickFortune]

I was in university (and poor) when Napster became popular and I stopped paying for music. I have money now but the habit kind of stuck and I haven't paid for music since; I know many people who are the same way. I'm pretty sure that P2P has cost the music industry hundreds of dollars from me personally over the last 14 years.

I know how you feel. I remember when I decided that records were basically overpriced crap and that I didn't feel like spending any more money on them. And I haven't. Except for the odd requested present, anyway.

Interesting point here is that this happened in the late 80s for me. Long before the advent of filesharing. I didn't need P2P to persuade me to stop buying, and the habit of not buying stuck so much that I don't d/l music either.

So in my case, it's the music industry that cost the music industry hundreds of dollars from me personally. Maybe P2P wasn't the pivotal factor in your own disenchantment either?

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[mrjb]

I'm pretty sure that P2P has cost the music industry hundreds of dollars from me personally over the last 14 years.

I'm sure I've cost the music industry hundreds as well, but for entirely different reasons. The litigation around the Napster thing made me realize what a bunch of scumbags the music industry really are. I've still paid for music, of course. I've got some CDs at charity shops. Others directly from independent artists. At least like that the money is going where I want it to. I've come to appreciate lastfm and jamendo for the rest of my music needs. I'm still listening to all the music I want, but the music industry simply aren't having my money anymore.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[mrjb]

Same in Europe. Not that I mind. The FBI warning is entirely non-intrusive compared to the techno-ridden, flashing, non-fast-forwardable "PIRACY. IT'S A CRIME" clip that we have to put up with if we actually pay for our media. One more reason not to.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[sjames]

Pre-napster, you most likely would have just done without while in university and poor or made a few tapes from friends and perhaps play the radio more. THAT would be the new habit you would have kept even when you had money again.

Of course, you're in a new demographic now that has always spent less of it's disposable income on music than younger people.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Maslaka]

I'm not so sure. I have bought some music, but this has always been if I really cannot find it for free (pirated). Part of it is because it's more convenient and faster, but mostly it is because by doing that I have more money to spend on other things. This seems to be same way with tons of people, so yes, what RIAA and labels are saying about piracy is not that far from the truth. Most of casual piracy is indeed because people can get away with it and "save" money by pirating.

I have also recently looked around iTunes and it seems like they have pretty much everything available, and more, like podcasts and remixes etc. If iTunes works any way similar to the mac app store, then there's no reasoning about convenience either. Buying is just a click away and everything works fast and quickly. Faster than pirating actually. The funny thing is, I live in a country that quite openly sells pirated software, movies and music. You can go to established, huge malls and most stores are selling pirated versions at cheap prices.

I do also go out more to venues and to listen live music (especially if dining out - which is almost every night as it's the way here, most people don't cook at home and want to socialize). However, I don't think it's because I've got better access to free music by piracy, but just because I've grown up and it's usual thing for young adults to do, especially if dating, and especially here.

But piracy really is a huge problem. Something needs to be done about it. I don't think the huge fines RIAA/MPAA puts on people and destroying lives are the right way, but someone needs to come up with better solution to the problem.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[AliasMarlowe]

Same in Europe. Not that I mind. The FBI warning is entirely non-intrusive compared to the techno-ridden, flashing, non-fast-forwardable "PIRACY. IT'S A CRIME" clip that we have to put up with if we actually pay for our media. One more reason not to.

This is one of the reasons I rip a DVD immediately on buying it [*]. All the unskippable trash can be removed and we just get the movie from the media server.

[*] I buy a handful of DVDs per year, but always from the bargain bins where the price is something below euro10. As new releases, they're always grossly overpriced, often around euro15-20 for DVD (or euro25-35 for BD).

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[scourningparading]

But piracy really is a huge problem.

No. It's copying certain data without permission. I cannot fathom how anyone could perceive that as being a much more severe problem than jaywalking. They may or may not be losing potential profit, but that is all.

I cannot see how copying music is a "huge" problem even as someone who supports copyright. We have much, much, much larger problems to worry about, and oftentimes, dealing with copyright infringers is both a waste of time and taxpayer money (at least when it's the government dealing with them).

I don't think the huge fines RIAA/MPAA puts on people and destroying lives are the right way, but someone needs to come up with better solution to the problem.

Laughable. What do you suggest? Even as someone who supports the idea of reasonable copyright laws, I do not believe it is possible to stop.

Through legislation? Again, laughable. That will just make people angry, and likely invade people's privacy, violate rights, and a host of other things.

Laws? Again, won't work. It will just anger people even further, and it's impossible to stop them all.

If you're suggesting that they make a product that can compete with the pirated versions, then that is a much more sound strategy. That means no DRM, good customer support, and hassle-free. But still, there will be those who will not buy no matter what.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Mister Liberty]

Had you purchased all those CD's if P2P hadn't been around?

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[lakeland]

I dunno, I'd say I'm up slightly.

It's hard to say though, some years ago I just stopped looking out for new music - free or paid. I think the principal issue is that I'd rather kill a few minutes playing a brainless app than listening to some new music.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[chilvence]

Thankyou, for stating the obvious :). I know that statement seems sarcastic, but it is the one thing people seem to so easily overlook. Not only is the music distribution industry redundant, the only thing it seems to be good for in my mind is promoting gutter trash like Justin Bieber, which most likely would never fly on its own.

Piracy may not be 100% right, but neither is expecting to get mega rich off the back of the general scumbag population just because you can do something that resembles actual music.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Eraesr]

The question is though, have they lost hundreds of dollars from you because P2P has been available, or because their own distribution methods are really, really expensive and inconvenient for you?

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[geminidomino]

Nah, he's just a Tool fan.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[msimm]

hundreds of dollars from me personally over the last 14 years

Nothing personal, but the only thing this anecdote underlines is the fact that you'd have been a marginal consumer in the first place.

As another (counter?) anecdote: I've spent hundreds of dollars every year for the past 14 years (or so) and like yourself, I'm an avid downloader of music.

Not to parrot popular sentiment, but I believe the music industry is slowly strangling itself with the protectivist measures it continues to take. I don't listen to loads of top "" music but I think as more and more people get 'geeky' the alternatives, which focus almost 100% on the consumer side of the experience, become more and more acceptable.

They could drop margins, shift focus to the consumer, and see what happens. Or they could not, maintain some heavy-handed control...and see what happens.

Oddly, one of the best genres to result from the post-consumer digital pop-music age is bootleg remixes. Which introduces me to consumer oriented music I might no have otherwise listened to. And of course violates copyright.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[scourningparading]

I know geeks (and those with asperger's syndrome) usually think in this kind of 0/1 binary way.

What an excellent way to start a comment. I'm sure you'll get many people to agree with you that way.

Since it's just data and your copy will directly only generate cost of the bandwidth, then there must be no other costs involved, right?

No, and that isn't what I said. In fact, if you read my comment, you would have seen that I said that a download may or may not cause a loss of potential profit. Which is completely true.

But even as someone who supports copyright (Surprise! Just because I disagree with you doesn't mean I'm a pirate.) I cannot understand how you could believe this is a huge deal. The effects can't be noticed by the victim (as they've lost nothing) unless they observe it themselves, nothing is really "taken" in the traditional sense of the word, and the actual effects are not measurable.

Sure, pirate if you must

I've noticed a trend. People seem to label others who disagree with them as the "enemy" (the people completely opposite to them). I actually said that I was in support of copyright. Can you not imagine a scenario where someone on your side disagrees with some of the things you say? I simply thought you were exaggerating about copyright infringement being a "huge" problem.

but at least be honest about it and stop lying to yourself and others.

If you wish to raise your chance of convincing people to agree with you above zero, I suggest dropping arrogant statements such as this. It will just make people less likely to listen to you.

Instead of DRM it means games that are so integrated into online world that there is no way to pirate them.

To me, that is a needless form of DRM. I'll never buy any games like that. I don't need single-player games that force me to be online (either due to conventional DRM or due to services like OnLive).

But if they get a copy of the game, there is no escape. This won't work for music or movies, though. It is more effective for games (due to them being interactive).

However, it is entirely result of the rampant piracy.

I'll need some proof. A citation, in fact.

But of course, there is no excuse for DRM and draconian measures. Punishing innocents for the actions of others is simply unjustifiable to me.

they just got themselves to blame.

This is an attitude that puzzles me. The game companies are the ones making these decisions. If anything, the blame mostly lies on them. They're the ones who implement the DRM and make the software, not the pirates. The pirates may indirectly cause them to change direction, but they still make the final decision.

Do not pretend as if no blame rests on the developers.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[clickclickdrone]

OTOH, I buy lots more music now, a mix of CDs and downloaded tracks from Amazon - mainly the latter unless the CD offers something special. I listen to a radio show in the UK (6 Music) and buy Mojo Magazine which expose me to lots of ideas for new bands to check out.
I used to hammer Napster back in the day but that was mainly to download rare stuff you simply couldn't buy period or was unavailable in my country.
I have sometimes treated downloads as try before you buy - for instance I d/l all of the West Wing before buying it on DVD. Ditto for BSG and other shows. TBH, I probably buy more than I should given my lack of 'me time' as I have about 150 DVDs in the 'to be watched' pile.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Dr_Barnowl]

And concert tickets probably give more to the actual artists than the royalties on their album sales.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Sique]

For me, it's completely the reverse. I never bought much music, I never was on Napster, I don't use P2P except for downloading Linux distributions and similar stuff, I don't listen to music radio stations (and I only listen to radio anyway if I am driving, and then it's mostly news radio), I was never much of a customer to musicians. I couldn't care less about their copyrights, their means to generate income or whatever their business model is. The same goes for movies, my children own many more DVDs than I ever had, and it's still somewhere at the less-than-100-level, and many of them are already scratched and unplayable (children, ey?).

But nevertheless, the music and movie industries always try to press the matter of copyright onto me, trying to limit what I can do, wanting to monitor every step I do online and applying for new laws and regulations all the way. So lets say to them: Go away! I don't care for your income. I am not interested in your business model, and everything is fine to me as long as you stop infringing on my life! Stop talking about poor artists dying, I am not interested in their works. Just go away and fight your little wars somewhere else where they don't affect me!

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo, all you have listed above is the exact reason why the big labels doesn't like alternative channels of distribution.

Lost sales is the excuse, they can't say "we want to monopolize the market [like all managers want] and chaotic/uncontrolled/democratic channels to make music known are thus our real enemy".

There is lots of copyrighted stuff in youtube, but there you can get ranking by paying a 50 cent army, so it's more like a traditional channel. Not so, the p2p.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[voidphoenix]

So, your anecdote and personal experience trumps the 19/20 studies that the article talks about. Nice. Maybe you should remember that you're one person in 7 billion. I could get snarky and quote your post and asks for lots of citations, but there's no need for that. If you're not a shill, stop drinking the Kool-aid.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[realityimpaired]

This is one of the reasons I rip a DVD immediately on buying it [*]. All the unskippable trash can be removed and we just get the movie from the media server.

That's the great irony of it... the pirates never see the FBI warning and "don't steal this" crap, because it's not part of the main film.

Of course, you do miss out on some of the "unskippable" content that, on rare occasions, can be quite funny. They put an ad for Windex at the start of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, for example... and the ad for Head & Shoulders at the end of Evolution. Shameless marketing, but in both cases, it's pertinent to the movie in question, and actually pretty funny... :) 99.9999999999% of the time it's just annoying crap, but from time to time it's actually worth watching at least some of it.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[nospam007]

"I'm pretty sure that P2P has cost the music industry hundreds of dollars from me personally over the last 14 years."

The personal music taste is getting somewhat fixed when you're around 14 years old. So the music I downloaded was more or less from that period. I bought their vinyl albums and singles several times, since they don't survive younger siblings and teenager's care very much. I also bought 8-tracks of the very same groups for my car. (yes, I'm that old) Later I bought cassettes and CDs of again the very same albums, some of them several times because I always forgot to lock my (crappy anyway) car in these times not to mention that cassettes got eaten by the player regularly.
After having bought some albums up to 6 or 7 times, I really don't have any conscience problems for having downloaded those.
After all it was me that paid for the sex and drugs of these guys in the sixties, seventies and eighties. I don't see why I should also be responsible for their pension plan.
Enough is enough.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[brunes69]

I was also in university when P2P became popular and I also never buy music now. But it has nothing to do with P2P.. it has a lot more to do with the fact that LEGAL music is available for free everywhere now. It is not like it was when we were young and if you wanted to listen to music in your room you had to have a truckload of CDs or tapes - nowadays kids just fire up YouTube or one of the 100 digital music channels people get for free with their TV service.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[tburkhol]

No. It's copying certain data without permission. I cannot fathom how anyone could perceive that as being a much more severe problem than jaywalking. They may or may not be losing potential profit, but that is all.

Did you miss the part of the GP's post where he says pirated versions of software are on sale, cheap, at his local mall? A company, musician, or artist takes a big risk in creating the data you seem to dismiss so lightly. Maybe it takes three months out of their life; maybe it requires years of full-time effort from 20 or more coders, artists and coordinators, but the only way they have to recoup that risk is for someone to give them money. Shareware has taught us that a very small fraction of people who download software will pay for it voluntarily (although certain well-established names clearly have a fan-base that will yield good returns).

Physical distribution channels have losses - breakage, overproduction, theft - that get built into the distribution, and I rather think of piracy (or maybe "redistribution of unauthorized copies for profit") and sharing (maybe "redistribution of unauthorized copies without charge") as an unavoidable distribution loss on digital enterprises. As long as it's a small enough fraction of the income, it's not going to hurt, but you have to be terribly naive to imagine that it's no "more sever than jaywalking." The problem is it's hard to quantify: in a physical channel, you know how many copies you produced and how many you sold, so you can calculate exactly what your distribution loss is. In a digital channel, you only know how many copies you sold and not how many were produced, so you can justify almost any number at all for your distribution loss. The unquantifiable loss makes it very hard to guess how much risk is involved in starting a new, multimillion dollar digital production; makes the loans to support salaries more expensive, makes the venture capital a more expensive, makes failure to release a product a little more likely.

I cannot see how copying music is a "huge" problem even as someone who supports copyright. We have much, much, much larger problems to worry about

Oh, I see: you're not talking about whether copyright infringement affects the quality and quantity of digital products, but about whether copyright infringement is equivalent to genocide in Sudan, earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, or the risk of nuclear war. Yeah, I guess in that context, you could even argue that murder (which claims fewer than 15,000 US lives each year) is a small problem.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[erroneus]

You could say it like that. Or, you could simply say "I no longer feel the need." For decades, I paid for or lived in a home where cable TV was paid for. As life became more difficult, I resorted to bribing the installers when they installed internet and this last go around, the installer wouldn't take the bribe. The result was an eye-opener. I no longer need cable... and I see now that I never did.

In the past, I have bought music... long, long ago. Money has not been lost on me.

Anyway, we know what they know. It's hard to put a price tag on P2P and the internet is what it is. It's a game changer to be sure but the "harm" is to few and the benefit to many... even to the people who are otherwise "harmed." Smart money says "stop giving it to lawyers and give it to strategists." They aren't smart money.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Stirling Newberry]

The vast majority of musicians and composers make no royalties at all, and of the rest, most do not make enough to live performing or composing. Copyright is a benefit to "the .1%" and not very much benefit to others.

I say this as someone who has actually gotten royalties. Artists, in general, must either work for nothing, or sign away their rights as part of getting distribution.

Copyright is about pipes, not content, in that corporate entities get the vast majority of royalties, directly, or indirectly in that they charge recording artists for "services" out of royalties. The pipe owners, as owners of rights of way often do, take virtually all the value of what is moved over them. And in our case are demanding a surveillance state enforce their ownership, as happened, for example, with the railroads in the 19th century. The people who own the pipes should be paid, but not at the cost of basic liberties. If someone cannot be paid without infringing on basic liberties, what they are doing probably isn't worth what they think they should be paid. The problem with making information rival and exclusive is that it more valuable generally as neither, and since it does not have a good physical analog, chain of possession does not make a good proxy for ownership.

What needs to be paid for then, is not really the artists in most cases, but the entire expensive apparatus of creating large artifacts, and distributing them, which means as much crowding out smaller footprint forms of art. There are thousands of people in the recording industry making a good living off of WA Mozart, none of them, however, are WA Mozart. Bartok's estate still gets royalties, but that does not help Bela Bartok. For all the good that the copyright system does most artists, they might as well be dead. However it takes legions of people to control and promote pop art, and without the huge flow of money associated with mass media, they would not exist, and could not be paid. Nor could media moghuls like Murdoch afford to buy and sell politicians. The money does not pay for art, but to support a system which is, at this point, largely about itself.

While the current intensive pop system could not survive without copyright, a knowledge based system can. If our goal was paying artists, the system created would not look anything like the present perpetual copyright with a spy state enforcing it. We also wouldn't ever use the term "intellectual property" because it would be an obvious oxymoron.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Truekaiser]

Or use a player that ignores that junk. vlc, mplayer, xine..

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[fa2k]

Plus p2p file-sharing gives a better product without bullshit like unskippable ads, DRM, and idiotic FBI warnings on legally purchased media.

The music industry isn't that bad in terms of freedom. It's possible to buy high-quality DRM-free music files at sites like iTunes, Amazon, Beatport, etc. The streaming sites/apps are arguably easier to use than both legal and pirated downloads, so they are in a separate category (still not well enough developed licensing that I can trust them as my only source of music). Your point about not supporting the war on the free internet is a very interesting one, but I think the movie industry is much worse, the TV industry seems to be less involved with the internet alltogether, but neither of these even offer DRM-free content. If we only consider the current state, not the previous actions, it almost seems good to support the music industry in comparison to Hollywod.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[betterunixthanunix]

The study says that the "negative" effects are completely balanced by the "positive" effects. In other words, every dollar you did not spend was still spent by others elsewhere.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[dutchwhizzman]

Even if it has influence on music sales, the actual artists don't get significantly less money than before. The main people that suffer are the RIAA executives, the people at the record companies and the physical record stores. The people in the record stores suffer anyway, since legal sales all happen online now, so it's only the RIAA executives and the people at the record company that are the victim of piracy. Why aren't the artist victim here? Because they already got almost nothing out of record sales anyway, with all of the money going to the RIAA and the record company.

The whole copyright thing was intended to protect the artists and it's being used against them, so the only way to solve this is to change copyright legislation to make it work for the artists again. Protecting the little man, not the big corporations is what it's for and how it should be.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[fa2k]

Sorry to reply to myself, but I have a comment about OS support;

It's possible to buy high-quality DRM-free music files[...]

iTunes is not supported on Linux, and works horribly in Wine. Amazon MP3 have downloaders for some old 32-bit versions of Linux, which is quite useless, but their Windows downloader works fine under Wine (it invokes iTunes by default, but that can be disabled). Ubuntu One MP3 is only supported on Ubuntu and Windows! (AFAICT), so no luck on other OSes/distros. Sound can probably be set up to work in Wine or in a VM, but I find it's better to use a native audio player.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[betterunixthanunix]

The music industry isn't that bad in terms of freedom

In the late 90s, the RIAA asked researchers in the security community to evaluate SDMI, essentially a DRM system for CDs that was supposed to be built into every music player:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDMI

Researchers who attempted to publish their work on SDMI, even those who did not agree to the confidentiality requirement, were threatened by the RIAA. Thankfully, SDMI ultimately died and the researchers were able to publish -- after the government assured them that the DMCA protected their ability to publish their work.

So where is the RIAA today? Pushing for every more restrictive copyrights and paracopyright laws. Attacking other countries for not having restrictive copyrights. They have toned down their attacks on file sharers because the attacks were a waste of their money and were losing them whatever public sympathy they had left. The RIAA is as bad when it comes to respecting freedom as the MPAA.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[AngryDeuce]

Or just download all your media and get a superior product for free.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[betterunixthanunix]

Piracy may not be 100% right

I disagree -- it reflects the technological realities of the 21st century. Your statement is on the level of, "Printing presses may not be 100% right..."

What we really need is a system that uses file sharing in a positive way. Songs could include information about when and where concerts will be held, various merchandise for the band, and so forth. Technology has rendered the recording industry and the copyright system as a whole entirely obsolete.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[PopeRatzo]

But piracy really is a huge problem. Something needs to be done about it.

And you created a brand new Slashdot account just to say so.

Fuck off, astroturf. You just made the list.

At least I give you credit for sticking around and making a few random comments on other discussions. I guess you've received some training.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[thereitis]

RIAA's evil tactics have cost them far more music sales than P2P have. Every time I hear an album I'd like to buy, I think "I wish I could buy directly from the artist to avoid paying the RIAA"... and I don't buy the album.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Hatta]

Even as someone who supports the idea of reasonable copyright laws, I do not believe it is possible to stop.

Unenforcable laws damage respect for the law and encourage the arbitrary and capricious use of authority. Your position is even more harmful than that of the copyright maximalists over the long run. At least they try to enforce the law.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Anonymous Coward]

If your work is pirated then it is because the market has valued your product as overpriced for the quality delivered. For many products, specifically those with DRM, the value of the product is zero.

You are not entitled to monetary compensation for simply taking risks.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[bbbaldie]

And fergodsakes get the price down to a album for a dollar or two. I've bought hundreds of dollars' worth of music from Russian sites under those price ranges. Ten bucks for an album is too much. I, the consumer, has spoken.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[V for Vendetta]

You can now get a larger punishment for sharing copies than for killing someone.

Someone? Make that millions. In Germany, causing a nuclear explosion results in the same maximum jail time (5 years) like sharing copies.

Granted, the later is the sentence for doing it "commercially". But that doesn't mean you need to make millions off of it. Given past court (German) rulings, running Google Ads on your otherwise private site or similar little things might be enough to make it a formal business(-like) venture.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[LihTox]

I don't think the argument "we shouldn't deal with this problem because there are worse problems in the world" is very effective. There are 300 million people in America; we can multitask, worry about more than one problem at a time.

Personally, copying music isn't a huge problem for *me* because even if copyright for music vanished tomorrow, at the very worst the RIAA companies would collapse. People would still write and perform music, as amateurs do now, and people (including major companies) would still find ways to make money off of music. Plus we'd still have a half-century of recorded music to enjoy, much more than anyone could take in in a lifetime.

Now I'm not at all proposing that we abolish copyright, and I would certainly feel bad for the underlings who work at RIAA companies who might lose their jobs in the wake of such an event. But the music industry is tiny, economically speaking (didn't I read somewhere that Google could simply buy the music divisions of the 5 RIAA companies with the cash they have lying around?) In short, since this is the *worst-case scenario*, and since rampant piracy is far from being the worst-case scenario, then you're right: this really is not a big problem for society.

Thoughts?

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[ilsaloving]

Just as a point of fact, I pirated lots when I was a kid. Now I have money, and now I buy games.

Except for one thing... Now that I'm willing to pay money for things, I'm ALSO willing to look more closely at the quality of what I'm purchasing. If I don't like what I see, I don't buy it, period. If it's good but too expensive (and yes, I am the sole judge for what I feel is too expensive), I don't buy it.

For example, companies like Ubisoft are on my permanent ban list, because of their idiotic DRM.

The vast majority of my money now goes toward small independant games. One more than one occasion I have not only purchased from Humble Bundle, but *raised* my offer afterwards because of how happy I was with the experience.

If person, like the GP, has the ability to pay and still chooses not to, then that's their choice. But don't paint everyone else with the same dishonest brush. Some of us are simply pissed off.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[bipbop]

Mindawn has been around for a while (I've been using them since 2007 or so). They sell FLAC and OGG and have always worked fine on Linux. If you're mostly into major label stuff, it probably won't have much of anything you want, but they have lots of cool indie/prog.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[bipbop]

it almost seems good to support the music industry in comparison to Hollywod.

Yeah, demonizing the music industry has worked a lot better than the movie industry, even though the movie industry is a hell of a lot more evil. How many people do you know that proudly declare they won't pay for music? Now compare it to how many people you know who decided not to go see Avengers this weekend, because they don't want to support Hollywood.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[gl4ss]

selling DRM snakeoil would happen if there weren't any piracy at all - it's a business of it's own.

but true, it's kinda strange that people would label something that is part of just entertainment as a "huge problem". it's not, it's just hobby shit, money for nothing(and chicks for free). though that is all that isn't related to making food, clothing and medicine. as such it's not something that should have law enforcement and parliaments worried, if you can make money convincing people to give you money in exchange for some bits yeah, you should be able to do it, but you shouldn't really expect that the society helps you with that.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[jedidiah]

When I was in college (and poor) I bought used music from a number of off-campus music stores that catered to poor college students. Used albums could be purchased for as little as $1.

You simply don't need Napster to engage in "payment avoidance".

Are you going to suggest that we overturn the First Sale doctrine next?

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[jedidiah]

The social costs of draconian copyright enforcement is simply not acceptable. It is also highly unlikely that any draconian enforcement mechanism will either be sufficiently effective.

There are simply more important things than movies and bad pop songs.

Corporate rights aren't the only thing to consider here.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[KingMotley]

No. It's copying certain data without permission. I cannot fathom how anyone could perceive that as being a much more severe problem than jaywalking. They may or may not be losing potential profit, but that is all.

While I disagree with my of the new? copyright laws, this line of thinking is seriously flawed. Many things could be rationalized the same way. I'm not stealing your money, I'm just changing the 1's and 0's in your account to mine. Or I'm not doing anything wrong, I'm just printing my own money. No one will notice the perceived difference, so it is ok. You are right, no one notices when one person does it, but when everyone does, everything collapses. That's the problem. Just because someone didn't notice doesn't make it alright.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[jedidiah]

Your remarks are an obvious absurdity.

The OP has precisely captured WHY it is a bad idea to continue pushing for more and more absurd laws. The OP also captured WHY it's a bad idea to do something just because the law allows you to.

It damages respect for the law and your own good will with the people you want to sell things too.

It's much harder to sell something if people have other options and view you as a total ass.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[JustSomeProgrammer]

Because you couldn't come up with my sequence of 0s and 1s without me. If you want to break it down that way why should someone get copyright on a book just because it is a sequence of black dots that make up things we recognize as letters. Or paintings because they are just splashes of different pigments on a wall.

If you want to argue against copyright period argue it that way. The sequence of 1/0s argument is stupid.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[jedidiah]

Before the Internet we had home copying technology, TV, and Radio. Each of these was an effective and legal means of "payment avoidance". The Internet really didn't change anything. It just brought things out in the open. It made what was going on before more visible.

Ultimately it doesn't matter if it's radio, MTV, the college record store, Napster, or Pandora. The ultimate effect is the same.

All of this piracy talk is just a big fat red herring to distract from the industry's real problem. They no longer have a means to force us to buy stuff over again. Digital is a terminal format that can last indefinitely.

They don't get to sell me "Destroyer" again.

That's where they're really hurting.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[bipbop]

I think it's also possible that the loudness wars are a contributing factor. Some new music crushed by the studios has an RMS around -4dB (N.B. that's AES-17 RMS, so -7dB if you measure without the offset). Why pay for music you can't enjoy?

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[cpu6502]

It wasn't P2P that made me stop buying music.
It was youtube.
If you can find almost any song you want just by searching youtube or some other video site, why bother downloading anything? Youtube is like radio for me... except I'm the DJ.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Kjella]

Piracy may not be 100% right

I disagree -- it reflects the technological realities of the 21st century. Your statement is on the level of, "Printing presses may not be 100% right..."

Bad analogy, you're comparing a technology to unauthorized use of technology. Obviously digital distribution is the printing presses of the 21st century, but in "piracy" it's implied that the author didn't give permission. Maybe it's the practical reality that through technology the author is no longer able to control the copying of their book, but technology doesn't make morality. Either it's always been right to copy but we've lacked the capability or it's always been wrong and still is even if technology made it easy.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[denmarkw00t]

I modded this up, so I apologize for taking it away (you're still +4 Interesting though!) I didn't really consider replying until I started reading some of the other replies. I would say that my own piracy has hurt the music industry, but then again I'm not sure about that. While I don't shell out for CDs because they'll get ripped and then immediately become either frisbees or coasters, I DO shell out for tickets, merchandise and DVDs (from bands...who the heck pays for movies?!?) I prefer to support bands by buying tickets, because then I'm also supporting local venues and, in some cases, local vendors where permitted. I can't justify buying CDs the way the music industry wants me to - I spent too much money in high school on "music" that would serve as a good soundtrack for a torture chamber (N*Sync, anyone?) There have been cases of purchasing CDs or vinyls for albums I really really enjoyed, but that's only after downloading the album first and really knowing that I could listen to the whole thing front-to-back and be satisfied the whole way through - buying a CD for one, maybe two good tracks is a terrible purchase, but it's the way the music industry continues to work.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Kjella]

It has never been capitalism. Capitalism requires a fully informed and equal-opportunity market. Copyright, by its very definition, has nothing to do with equal opportunity. As for fully informed, well, you need a functioning education system for that.

What? That's never been preconditions for capitalism. Fully informed for example means that every customers is always aware of every offer from any seller at any time and all alternatives with all their pros and cons and that doesn't happen. Every time I go down to the grocery store without a full survey of all the stores in the area including comparing all substitutes I'm operating on imperfect information. It's the kind of idealized condition you only find in textbooks. Same with equal opportunity, it's almost impossible that an incumbent won't have some sort of advantage over a new entrant. Of course neither are ideal for competition but I'd say 99.99% of all markets - even those most would say function really, really well - don't fully fulfill those conditions. It's not perfect competition but you don't find that anywhere but fantasy land.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[geoskd]

Just as a point of fact, I pirated lots when I was a kid. Now I have money, and now I buy games.

Except for one thing... Now that I'm willing to pay money for things, I'm ALSO willing to look more closely at the quality of what I'm purchasing. If I don't like what I see, I don't buy it, period. If it's good but too expensive (and yes, I am the sole judge for what I feel is too expensive), I don't buy it.

I cant agree more. I used to spend a fair amount of money on CDs, but I only bought through "Columbia house" and other cd discounters, and it didn't take long before I had exhausted their inventory. I stopped buying for two reasons. First, I already owned everthing that was priced where I was willing to pay, and getting the music from CDs onto my personal do-hickey player was a royal pain in the rump. I found it was simply easier to go and download a copy than to rip it myself, and forget about carrying hundreds of CDs around.

That is how they lost me. I wont come back because the only place to get everything in one shot is iTunes, and I still cant use their songs on most of my do-hickeys without a pain-in-the-ass conversion. So I download, and once in a while (when I find something truly exceptional), I buy, but not until I have already downloaded a copy. I buy just to make sure the artists gets something.

Movies are going the same way. For the moment, its more convenient to simply buy and have DVD's. I regularly check out the $5 and $8 bins when I'm out shopping, and I still find lots to buy, but I'll be damned if I'm paying more than that for anything other than the most exceptional of movies (like Fight Club ironically enough). Soon, thanks to Boxee and their ilk, my attitude towards movies will come more in line with my attitude on music, and if the movie industry hasn't gotten their heads out of their ass before that time, they will loose my money just like the music industry did.

As for games, I don't play as much as I used to, but the old business model still works just fine for them. I'm not in a position to be trying to play the same types of games on all my devices, so I am content to have my purchase locked to just one machine. Someday that may change, but until it does, the game devs have me by the pocketbook, and I reward them amply for their continued efforts.

If person, like the GP, has the ability to pay and still chooses not to, then that's their choice. But don't paint everyone else with the same dishonest brush. Some of us are simply pissed off.

Amen

-=Geoskd

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Sloppy]

iTunes is not supported on Linux, and works horribly in Wine. Amazon MP3 have downloaders for some old 32-bit versions of Linux, which is quite useless, but their Windows downloader works fine under Wine

Amazon's store can also be configured to snail mail you shiny discs, which work with every OS.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Zaphod The 42nd]

^^^^ This. Also, they can't force you to buy a 13-song CD full of crap with 2 good hits anymore, now that digital distribution and singles sales are so popular. ITunes forced everybody to give up on that one, and now you can buy just the one or two songs you want for .99 cents. They're hurting because they can't take advantage of consumers anymore. That isn't our fault, thats their fault. Its hostile business! They're trying to squeeze their customers instead of trying to serve them. The same thing is happening with video games, they cost waaaaay too much, the pricing is entirely off. They need to make a decision, either we're buying games as a product for $60, which is a lot, in which case we're free to own the game for life, play it offline, no DRM, and we can resell if we want to, because its our property now. OR games are a service, in which case they have DRM, they have limits, they can't be sold or transferred, fine, but then at MOST they're worth about $15-20. You can't have your cake and eat it too, industry! Pick one.

The sad part is, they don't realize its in their own best interest. As soon as companies realize that the business models are broken (see Valve) and they improve them, they'll start PRINTING MONEY. Seriously, consumers are CRYING OUT right now, please, LET me give you money, LET me purchase your products. But companies like the RIAA don't hear it, they just keep going for the stick over the carrot.

Well, Polaroid kept choosing the stick over the carrot when everybody wanted digital cameras. That worked out real good for them. The RIAA is going the same way, they can't adapt to new business models, they're going to die. Its just sad how they're taking the whole industry down with them trying to keep an infeasible business model afloat.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[geoskd]

Because you couldn't come up with my sequence of 0s and 1s without me. If you want to break it down that way why should someone get copyright on a book just because it is a sequence of black dots that make up things we recognize as letters. Or paintings because they are just splashes of different pigments on a wall.

Copyright wasn't created to sustain the creation of art. It wasn't (and still isn't) about making sure the artist gets rewarded for the effort. It was, and still is, about rewarding those entrepreneurs who are willing to take the risk of copying those works and distributing the copies. Creating art was never the expensive part. Making copies so that society could enjoy the art was. Today that is no longer true. No one needs an incentive to distribute the works, people will do it for free. Copyright is an anachronism. The behavior, it was created to promote, now happens automatically and without intervention of any kind. Copyright has outlived the purpose for which it was created, and now serves only to prevent the very activity it was supposed to promote. Ask yourself, if there was no copyright, would society as a whole be better off going forward? The answer is absolutely yes. Artists don't create works for money, they create works because they can't help themselves. They will continue to do it even if they are not paid to do so because it is a part of who they are. If you want to do something good for society, figure out how to make sure that artists get the food, shelter, and tools they need to create, and let the internet worry about how to get those finished products into the hands of the people. That will make the world a better place.

-=Geoskd

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[scourningparading]

I don't think the argument "we shouldn't deal with this problem because there are worse problems in the world" is very effective.

Good thing I didn't make it. I don't think we should be taking down random websites and arresting file sharers for a number of reasons:

1) Impossible to enforce effectively.
2) It's hardly a serious matter (multiple reasons, remember).
3) It does not bring us any benefits.
4) It wastes taxpayer dollars, time, and manpower.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[scourningparading]

Many things could be rationalized the same way.

No, they couldn't (and I didn't rationalize anything). And no, they're not stealing money. Your analogy doesn't even make sense because the pirates aren't even modifying anything of anyone else's; they're copying. If you modify someone else's account without permission, then I could admit you have a point. But that's not the case here.

Just because someone didn't notice doesn't make it alright.

That wasn't the only reason I gave.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[mcgrew]

You know, when you have an FA that shows that piracy doesn't harm the music industry and two anonymous cowards pipe in to say "well, I don't buy music because I can get it free" you can be pretty damned sure they're RIAA shills being paid to write their posts.

I'm shocked that the first AC shill is sitting at 3, interesting when it should be -1, overrated.

The music establishment screwed up by fighting Napster rather than embracing it, and embracing lawless thugs and gangsters when it should have been shunning them. They could easily have used Napster downloads to get people to buy physical CDs (which are superior to downloads in many ways) with their massive marketing budgets, but their fear was that the indies could use it, too. They have radio and all the indies had was Napster, so they painted Napster as evil while promoting thug lifestyles. WTF did they think would happen?

Most people who don't listen to hip hop (and many who do) are honest and will pay, if you offer them something worth paying for. A five or ten dollar CD (what the indies usually charge) will have ten or twenty songs, cover art, a nice case, track listing, higher fidelity, yet costs more per track than the CD itself which has to be manufactured, shipped, and warehoused.

Maybe the music industry should stop promoting thug behavior and stop stealing their artists' royalties and stop lying to everyone and price their wares more responsibly. Or maybe they should just die, neither musicians nor listeners need them any more. It doesn't take a fortune to make a quality recording and get it pressed to CD these days, let alone uploaded to iTunes; the most expensive part is the musical instruments themselves. And the internet is word of mouth times a billion.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[scourningparading]

Did you miss the part of the GP's post where he says pirated versions of software are on sale, cheap, at his local mall?

Not really. What I said still applies to an extent. If they're cheaper, they may not have bought them if they were the original.

A company, musician, or artist takes a big risk in creating the data you seem to dismiss so lightly.

That doesn't make fruitless copyright enforcement a worthwhile endeavor. I'm simply looking at the reality of the situation. The fact that they take a big risk has nothing to do with the pirates as they didn't force them to do anything.

Yes, I believe actual damages were done, but don't exaggerate.

only way they have to recoup that risk is for someone to give them money.

They took the risk themselves; the pirates had nothing to do with that. I do not believe you're hurting the business just because you don't give them money (although I do if there was an actual loss of potential profit).

As long as it's a small enough fraction of the income, it's not going to hurt, but you have to be terribly naive to imagine that it's no "more sever than jaywalking."

I'm sorry, but I simply cannot see copyright infringement as being much more of a problem than jaywalking due to the reasons I've already given. I support copyright, but the mere potential to lose something intangible to begin with doesn't strike me as a serious problem.

Oh, I see: you're not talking about whether copyright infringement affects the quality and quantity of digital products, but about whether copyright infringement is equivalent to genocide in Sudan, earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, or the risk of nuclear war. Yeah, I guess in that context, you could even argue that murder (which claims fewer than 15,000 US lives each year) is a small problem.

In the case of murder, real, measurable damage is actually done. Significant damage to a single individual. No, it's not as bad as genocide, but I was using a cost-benefit analysis. The problem with copyright enforcement (if we're making the government do it) is that it's ultimately fruitless (they'll just easily move to another website), any new laws are typically draconian in nature, it usually ends up harming individuals, and it costs us so much (taxpayer money, manpower, time).

If I had to draw an analogy, it's like if the police were to actively search for jaywalkers and only jaywalkers. That's just ridiculous.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[scourningparading]

If I had to draw an analogy, it's like if the police were to actively search for jaywalkers and only jaywalkers.

Or, rather, they set up an entire division just to do so. That's what all these laws and draconian enforcement measures remind me of.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[KhabaLox]

This won't work for music or movies, though.

See Netflix, Vudu, Hulu, etc. It's basically a license subscription service. I can easily imagine a world where the studios and music publishers concentrate their sales through streaming services. Currently they are clinging for dear life to their anachronistic physical media revenue streams, because no executive likes to see a decline in any segment of revenue (even if it's more than offset by gains elsewhere), but as someone in the physical and digital media industry I can assure you that physical media are not long for this world.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[MurukeshM]

Yeah, I guess in that context, you could even argue that murder (which claims fewer than 15,000 US lives each year) is a small problem.

There is a world outside the US, and many countries in which murder is a serious problem.

If these artists and programmers spend so many hours in to creating stuff, how come they spend so little time in pricing it? Often enough, it's one-price-fits-all. I remember this dicussion on facebook over the PHD comics' movie release, where one American said that if you can't pay $10 for streaming a movie, you certainly can't afford to go watch one in a theatre. Well, guess what? I can comfortably go and watch a 3D movie in 10 USD (and that will cover travelling and food costs for me, too). I mentioned in another comment that my college doesn't throtte traffic or block sites, and I guess they realise that us students downloading and pirating stuff is cheaper than having to buy licenses for all that. You have mentioned the music and programming industry, yet you forgot one of the most bloodsucking cuntish group that thrives on copyright: the scientific publications industry. The rates they charge are exhorbitant. In a country where (I read this in an interview) the cheapest kill cost just over 1 USD, why in fuck's name should I shell out so much for what is a result of patently stupid business practices, carried out by people who live thousands of kilometers from where I live, probably a couple of continents over?

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[scourningparading]

See Netflix, Vudu, Hulu, etc. It's basically a license subscription service.

That isn't really what I meant. He was talking about services such as OnLive being used as a sort of DRM to stop piracy. That works for games because of the interactiveness. But it wouldn't for movies and music because of the fact that once you have the data, you can copy it as you please (even going so far as to record the screen if need be).

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[chilvence]

Blah, neither is relevant.

The Internet is not a printing press, nor a vinyl/tape/rom/cd/dvd/blu-ray factory. If I want to I can publish to millions and all I need is something decent to publish and old fashioned word of mouth. So can anyone else. So providing everyone has a computer (and everyone probably could have, if all the computers that had been thrown out over the years were all properly re-homed), and given that reportedly even Masai tribesmen have mobile phones hitched to their loincloths, the only gatekeeper to this new publishing ecosystem is your ISP. The other guys are like the wizard of oz, they will only remain powerful as long as the general population, artists and fans alike, perceive them to be.

The only reason the other industries thrived is because they provided something that people needed - and they are no longer needed. Things that are no longer needed wither and die. As I said, all they are good for now is scraping the bottom of the barrel with 'talent' shows and serving up godawful patronising shite (I never needed any fucking Justin Bieber when I was 10). The last death throes of an organisation that was only ever tolerated because there wasn't a better way at the time. Don't build your house on sand, bigger they are, yadda yadda etc. Bye.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[tnk1]

While I disagree with my of the new? copyright laws, this line of thinking is seriously flawed. Many things could be rationalized the same way. I'm not stealing your money, I'm just changing the 1's and 0's in your account to mine.

Your comparison might be apt if I could copy the bits in my bank account to create new money as needed. The reason that music file sharing isn't robbery is that the owner is not deprived of the use of their property by it being copied. They *may* have a reduced ability to profit from it, but it's not the same thing as removing someone's savings, which they cannot just print more of (unless they are the government).

There used to be a time where music was made by professional musicians who were employed by patrons. It wasn't always the best system, and it certainly would not have been very inviting for style over substance types who can barely play their instruments, but quite a bit of music was played in the old days and they mostly were able to do it without making millions of dollars and trashing hotel rooms.

Music isn't going to die, but the music companies might, unless they change their tune. If they don't, it's not my problem. They have plenty of money, let them invest it in moving things forward, instead of trying to legislate their profit margins.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[http]

I wouldn't be surprised if half the accounts with UIDs over 1500000 are astroturf accounts. Something happened a couple years back that started blossoming /. accounts at a rate not commensurate with natural growth of the site.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[StikyPad]

Artists, in general, must either work for nothing, or sign away their rights as part of getting distribution.

I get where you're going, and I agree that the music industry is exploitative, but artists will continue to starve with or without them, because here's the things about art: anyone can make it, and great artists aren't in short supply. This is especially evident when you examine the self-masturbatory nature of art critics (and indeed artists) who find validation mainly through concurrence, because of course there are no objective measurements for the quality of a work of art. A pompous art critic fills the vacuum of objectivity with fallacious and circular appeals to authority, and, conveniently, they are the authority. And by getting people to go along with their self-asserted expertise, which is more objectively an expertise in building social connections to gain influence so people will listen to their opinions, they create artificial restrictions on the supply of "good art."

The publishing industry, by positioning itself as the gatekeeper between artist and audience, has conned artists and audiences alike into believing that not only does it know what good art is, but that artists can and will be rewarded with great fortunes. But while there have been a few artists to land lucrative commissions prior to the recording industry, and more notably, prior to the invention of technology and techniques to make virtually any audio, visual, or literary creation one can conceive, most artists have to work just as hard, or harder, to make ends meet as any other schmuck.

My point in this is not that art doesn't have value, but that the supply is so vast that the only way to really capitalize on it, to not be a starving artist, is to artificially limit supply in some way. And the only way to do that, short of stifling expression (which I would argue only has the opposite effect), is with the system we have now. I sincerely believe the publishing industry as we know it needs to fail, but artists shouldn't be expecting an automatic windfall in the absence of Big Pub. On the contrary, the competition will be as stiff as ever.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[CannonballHead]

most likely would never fly on its own.

Didn't he start on youtube, though?

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[PhxBlue]

But piracy really is a huge First World problem.

FTFY.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Asmodae]

For example, companies like Ubisoft are on my permanent ban list, because of their idiotic DRM.

I agree wholeheartedly, which was why I was flabbergasted when the original Assassin's Creed showed up on GOG.com recently. That means it's awesome and DRM free, and you support guys (GOG) who seem to fundamentally agree with you on how to treat their customers and gamers in general. So if you've been waiting for a DRM free version of the game to try... now's your chance.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[jamstar7]

I know geeks (and those with asperger's syndrome) usually think in this kind of 0/1 binary way. Since it's just data and your copy will directly only generate cost of the bandwidth, then there must be no other costs involved, right? That, however, is far from truth and I find people with this kind of reasoning to be either extremely stupid or lying. Sure, pirate if you must, but at least be honest about it and stop lying to yourself and others.

Amortization. That's the reason your car, your house, everything you buy doesn't cost the national debt. It's because you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to sell something.

Quickie back of the envelope math time.
It costs $100,000 to 'create' a random pop song in digital format, all in. The original will thus cost you $100,000.
Subsequent copies cost you a penny to duplicate it. Or less, if you already have a script covered by that 100K to clone it for you. Thus, 1 million copies will cost you $10,000. So, now you're all in at $110K. The cost of each of those 1 million copies is now 11 cents per. Not 110K.

Amortization. It's a beautiful thing.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggest that the artists stop producing since your stance is that they are not entitled to profit if you think they are asking too much for the work. Sounds like the best solution. Then there will be a very small supply, so only the rich can pay $10k to spend an evening at a music gallery and listen to music behind closed doors.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[mcgrew]

I'd suggest that the law be changed to make copying digital data legal, and make the entertainment industries live within this paradigm, using free downloads to sell physical items. It would have been a lot easier before they convinced everyone that nobody wants albums and everybody wants singles, and that an MP3 is the same as a CD track.

They could also raise the sampling rates 10x and quadruple the bitrate, it would mean huge files that would blow every analog recording away. The present 16 bit 44k samples are "good enough", better than cassette, having no noise (unlike vinyl)and was the best they could do back when CDs were developed. They should take it to the next level.

Don't expect that to hapopen, though.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Asmodae]

It IS a pre-condition for capitalism to have any positive ramifications for society and consumers. Capitalism, when working properly effectively allocates resources, lowers the cost of production, and increases efficiencies at all points in the supply chain. These are all usually considered net positives. When you don't have perfect competition (perfect information, zero barrier to entry, etc.) what you get is monopolistic, rent-seeking, and/or anti-competitive consumer abuse. I.E. all the things about capitalism that are pretty much universally despised. That's the whole point of things like anti-trust laws and consumer protections.

An unfortunate truth is that perfect competition is impossible even for commodities (although we can usually get to a reasonable enough approximation), but it's blatantly side-stepped for things like copyright and patents. Thus now we see, capitalism has produced a very efficient and cheap means of distribution (effectively free), and now we have a bunch of people trying to make laws so they don't have to face the consequences of capitalism.

We're at the point now where I can see this same fight happening for physical goods, what with printable circuits, and rapid prototyping tech starting to become cheap. It seems like the mantra has become: Capilism is GREAT!... unless it actually benefits consumers, then screw it we need our rent!

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[JustSomeProgrammer]

See this is a better argument than 0's and 1's argument. I don't necessarily agree with it, but it is a better argument.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[PigleT]

I have two suggestions:

1) Counter-sue the RIAA for the fraction of broadband spent upstreaming free publicity for them.

2) {Jamendo, etc} {stumbleupon, etc}

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[LihTox]

I was reacting to the phrase "We have much, much, much larger problems to worry about", which of course can be said about most things involving IP, the Internet, etc.

And hopefully you saw the part where I agreed with you. :)

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[PigleT]

You're right that artists invest time to produce a product. Where the remuneration-via-IP argument falls down, however, is in the proportion of sales their agents rob them of in practice - see http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[dgatwood]

If I had to draw an analogy, it's like if the police were to actively search for jaywalkers and only jaywalkers. That's just ridiculous.

No, that's still a poor analogy. Deaths from jaywalking are quantifiable. Jaywalking poses a clear risk to human life in some cases. On the scale of actual damage, jaywalking causes far more harm to society than non-commercial piracy.

It's more like the police creating an entire special crimes division to prosecute the unauthorized sale of lemonade by schoolchildren. In theory, restaurants are harmed because people buy fewer drinks. Therefore, the unauthorized manufacture and sale of lemonade reduces restaurants' potential profit. Further, those unauthorized producers consume and provide resources without paying money back to the government in sales taxes, so the government loses money, too, and they're violating the law. It is in almost every way an accurate analogy; the only real differences are that the composition of a glass of lemonade is not particularly creative and that the copy is not likely to be exact.

The cost to restauranteurs across the nations from these unauthorized lemonade sales is probably huge, possibly even on the order of tens of millions of dollars annually, worldwide, assuming that you quantify every child-sold glass of lemonade as the lost sale of a $3.50 glass of lemonade from a restaurant. Yet although the cost is high in aggregate, the cost per infraction is negligible, and the cost of enforcement would vastly exceed the amount of money you could possibly hope to extract from the destitute kids committing the acts of lemonade piracy.

Now, to take the analogy one step further, I'll describe how the restaurant industry could ostensibly overreact to match the music and movie industries:

• Restaurants could build anti-theft devices into every disposable cup of lemonade that introduces a bad flavor when you carry it out the door. This prevents kids from making taste test comparisons to improve the quality of their copies.
• As kids find ways to disable these devices, the restaurants could create newer, more sophisticated devices to thwart future attempts.
• When kids discover that they can pour the contents into another container, the restaurants could install full body X-ray scanners at the door to detect any concealed pouches of liquids, and could hire full-time guards to monitor those scanners.
• When kids realize that they can conceal pouches of liquids inside their mouths, the restaurants could upgrade to full-body CT scanners.
• When restaurants discover kids with an illegal lemonade stand, they could obtain a search warrant for their parents' houses to search for evidence that the kids copied their lemonade.
• Restaurants could hire lawyers to go to lemonade stands to infiltrate their lines of customers and try to obtain information for prosecution purposes. When the kids and other people in line refuse to tell who the children's parents are, the restauranteur associations could get subpoenas to force them to provide that information so that they can sue the parents. Eventually, though, the judges would realize that the mere existence of a kid with a lemonade stand is not sufficient to prove that his or her parents knew about it, and would begin rejecting the requests for subpoenas.
• Restaurants could hire their own cop-like enforcers to break into businesses and inspect lemonade at random, requiring the business owners to prove that they purchased their lemonade through an authorized channel.
• Restaurants could mandate that all new infants be equipped with devices implanted in their mouths. These devices would search for sophisticated watermarks (specific chemical additives that make it possible to distinguish authorized lemonade from copies), and would refuse to allow the infants to consume unlicensed lemonade.

You get the idea. To describe the current copyright policing in the U.S. as utterly ridiculous is perhaps

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[mcgrew]

Not necessarily. Is a counterfeit Rolex as high quality as a real one? I think digital data should be free, but counterfeit physical goods should be illegal. Nobody has lost anything if you download my book, and you may like it and buy a physical copy. But if you're buying that counterfeit, then I have indeed lost a sale.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[jamstar7]

Yes, and I'm still bleaching my eyeballs.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[jamstar7]

The argument is that although you have the money it doesn't mean that you're a potential customer.

RIAA's position is, if you have any 'disposable income', you need to hand it over to them right now. And if you dare to not hand it right over, they're willing to invest in legislation that will force you to consume their product

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[jamstar7]

Of course, you do miss out on some of the "unskippable" content that, on rare occasions, can be quite funny. They put an ad for Windex at the start of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, for example... and the ad for Head & Shoulders at the end of Evolution.

That Head & Shoulders ad is buried in the credits, and funny as hell. And it shows up on my ripped copy I pulled off my DVD.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[blahplusplus]

"I'm pretty sure that P2P has cost the music industry hundreds of dollars from me personally over the last 14 years."

Or it could be that you were never that interested in music to begin with. (i.e. it's not a priority). People who VALUE music will end up paying for it (if they want more of it). Kind of like how in the game industry even though games are pirated en masse many pirates pay for games they love because they know if they don't those games stop being made.

I think the issue with music is that music was always a 'dime a dozen' and kind of like how machines displaced manual labor in the industrial revolution (devalued manual labor), music has been devalued by technology.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[mcgrew]

Plus we'd still have a half-century of recorded music to enjoy

More than twice that. One of the bad things about current copyright law is that it lasts so long that you have people calling for copyright's outright abolition. IMO only commercial infringement should be illegal (like it used to be) and the life+90 years should be shortened to twenty. Twenty years is long enough for patents, why isn't it long enough for copyrights?

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[jp10558]

Well, maybe if you have a mac you have iTunes, but I won't touch that with a ten foot pole on Windows. I used to buy from Amazon, but last time they required some special software - which I WON'T USE when WinAmp works fine for mp3s. Just give me an mp3 download link... I don't trust third party downloaders from companies - too many CNETs et al...

I had to have Amazon refund me my money and buy and wait for the CD because tech support
a) couldn't tell me why the downloads seemed to do nothing
b) how to download it at all - i.e. they failed to tell me I needed to install an app - I only found this out when I was ranting to a coworker about it.
c) basically totally failed to get me what I paid for.

If I'm paying money, I want an option to be as easy as piracy, not harder...

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[mcgrew]

For example, companies like Ubisoft are on my permanent ban list, because of their idiotic DRM.

It's ronic that the studio's attempt to stop piracy costs them sales when piracy itself has never been shown to cost sales, and may even increase them.

If person, like the GP, has the ability to pay and still chooses not to, then that's their choice. But don't paint everyone else with the same dishonest brush.

Well, see, that's what's wrong with the conversation. People think everyone else is like them. Thieves think stealing is normal (real theives, not copyright infringers) and the only people who don't steal are those too afraid to. Pirates who would buy if they coudn't pirate think everyone else is, too. But considering the data and studies that have been done, it's reasonable to figure that most people are like you and me. Some studies have shown that music pirates spend more money on music than non-pirates.

An interesting study a couple of years ago (sorry, I can no longer find a link) was commissioned by a book publisher who wanted to know how much piracy was costing him. Pirate books take a few weeks to hit the internet, so the researchers looked at sales data to see how much of a drop in sales there was. They were astounded when rather than a drop, there was a spike in sales!

If "nobody would pay to read a book they can read for free" then public libraries would have killed books.

As Doctorow notes, nobody ever went broke from piracy but many artists have starved from obscurity.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[ewibble]

I think counterfeit should be illegal digital or not, it is simply a lie you are selling something as something else. If you by a counterfeit Rolex expecting a real on the you have been cheated. If you know it is a fake well then that is Ok. If you buy some music expecting some money to go to the artist and it doesn't then again that is fraud. Any copy not making the artist money should have to be clearly labelled as such.

I think copyright in a MUCH more limited form may be necessary, but as it stands now it seem that you are being ripped off. People are generally honest, don't look at me that way, they are (not all of them but the majority) otherwise society would just not function. Buy an album for 10s of dollars when it clearly costs cents to produce each item you fell ripped off and are less likely to feel empathy for the seller.

Yes you may say it costs a lot to make a movie but a lot of that cost is due the presence of copyright itself (amongst others, paying royalties for music and stories) paying actors, producers a lot of money because they can demand a lot of money since if they are famous they will ensure that the movie makes lots of money. If movies made less then they would simply be paid less.

If we truly value creativity we must drive down cost of entry, make it less of a risk (by making the cost low) create a truly initiative work, so almost anyone can produce it. We have to stop forcing artists going to big media companies to beg them for a contract, because guess what unless they are already famous you are going to be screwed over. If you do not believe me look at the latest block busters, or TV are they original, for me the answer is a clear no. If anything the low budget movies are where the innovation occurs. 3D version of old movie X, now that took a creative genius to think of that.

Why should it cost $100,000 to produce a song? $500,000,000 million to make a move it is waste created by monopolies. And the studios like it because it keeps the hoi polloi, out. We need to take these monopolies down they are no longer needed.

The best way I can see to do this is make it not so profitable. Buy reducing the copyright to a couple of years, haven't made a profit after 2 years tough.

Far too much resources are being devoted to policing copyright, when someone illegally copies something all it does is distribute money in a different manner (maybe non-optimal). When you take someone to court, or introduce DMR you take up someone time (lawyers, customer of DMR, writer of DMR) the take up real resource that can be used for other things.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Hatta]

They could also raise the sampling rates 10x and quadruple the bitrate, it would mean huge files that would blow every analog recording away.

16 bit 44.1khz recordings are transparent to the human ear. No one can distinguish high res audio from 16/44 audio under blind conditions.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[scourningparading]

Lawsuits*

Like the ones by the RIAA. Legislation was referring to things such as SOPA (which further expand copyright enforcement). Sorry.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[SolitaryMan]

Thanks to Napster, I got to know many obscure but good bands and later went to buy their CDs. Granted, this is mostly because buying a CD was the easiest way to get high quality sound quickly, but still.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[sneakyimp]

While I approve of the cynicism of your post, I think you need to examine your own circular reasoning. You are no different than a critic in boldly claiming that "anyone can make [art], and great artists aren't in short supply." The primary difference between you and an art critic would be that a reputable art critic at least makes an appeal to a history of art criticism. I disagree that great artists are abundant. On the contrary: most art is piss poor and finding good art is thrilling precisely because of how rare it is. I would no more trust you as an art critic than I would someone who draws a Dolan comic every now and then to decorate my house or create the titles for my hundred million dollar movie. I tend to trust professional critics like Roger Ebert or Peter Travers, not because they are on TV or write for Rolling Stone or because Roger Ebert wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but because they do actually manage to say interesting things (q.v. Ebert's feud with Vincent Gallo). Art critics are under the same pressure as artists to gain notoriety and public trust and perform their work with wit and skill. We need these pompous art critics to tear down pompous (and ungodly rich) assholes like George Lucas who think they shit gold and clot our media pipeline with Jar Jar Binks. And here I am playing critic to the critic of art critics. Art itself is a circular business and, try how it may, never quite manages to escape its own circularity and nonlinear nature.

As for Stirling's soundbite:

Artists, in general, must either work for nothing, or sign away their rights as part of getting distribution.

This does not seem true to me. I'm not sure where to start. On the one hand, there are too many counterexamples of fabulously wealthy artists to say that one must sign away one's rights. On the other hand, ever heard of youtube or the pirate bay? Distribution today is free* if you don't mind giving all of your rights away. But then the question arises: have you really given your "rights" away? If so, to whom?

If you really want to cut out the middle man, pay some script kiddie to set up a website for you or build it yourself. This need not be an expensive investment. You could start with OSCommerce (which is FOSS and has modules for digital content sales). Other questions arise in this case:
* How much to charge? $10 $1? voluntary donations? free?
* What are the terms? Can downloaders burn my stuff onto CD/DVD/Bluray and sell it themselves? Can they give it to friends? Obviously, one has no real control here and one must rely on the honor system for any contract adherence.

The trick is apparently to monetize it yourself directly or indirectly (merch, ads, etc.) OR team up with trustworthy individuals who know what they are doing to monetize it for you. If you get screwed, you are partly to blame. My ex-girlfriend used to work for Interscope and related to me a few details regarding Trent Reznor's firing of his manager, the acrimonious aftermath, and then the fact that he released a record for free -- or whatever one was willing to contribute voluntarily -- and made more money than he'd ever made on a label. It's a curious example of old-paradigm-meets-new-paradigm inasmuch as the old machinery built NIN as a commercial entity.

Consider the two extreme alternatives:
1) Sign on with an organized, predatorial team of specialized experts who have managed to monetize a turd like Justin Beiber or the Black Eyed Peas
2) Give your shit away and hope for the best.

Seems to me there's a sweet spot in between somewhere, but who wouldn't want a few organized promoters, marketers, artists, managers, lawyers, and roadies on one's team? What's so puzzling is how both extremes in the whole pirates-vs-mafiaa war seem to be shooting themselves in the foot. MAFIAA sues its customers. Pirates sell ads while giving away the music created by the hard work of their heroes. WTF?

I think that Copyright -- as a piece of legis

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[lgw]

The concept of theft is simply broader than "deprived of the use of their property", and "deprived of the use of their property" isn't always considered theft. You may want to redifine things to feel better about stealing music, but "taking without paying" is the important concept here.

The middlemen will die off: it's only a matter of time, since they no longer add more value. But when the artist offers a song at a given price, and someone says "nah, I'll just copy it and pay nothing" that's certainly theft. Sure, it's quite a minor wrong as wrongs go, but even so: still wrong.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[I AOk]

I'm just the opposite. By obtaining music through alternative channels, my CD collection eventually quadrupled in size (now over 300 discs).

My record collection too reached on the order of 300 CDs, but eventually I stopped buying. That was when almost every single CD I bought wouldn't play on my car's cd-changer, because of the anti-cdrom copy protection, and I had to copy them to actually be able to hear what I had bought, where and when I wanted to.

Soon after, I grew bored on the comercial music that the industry so liked to push, and started spending the money on actual live performances of artists I would otherwise never have discovered.

So, thank you, MAFIAA :)

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[PopeRatzo]

I wouldn't be surprised if half the accounts with UIDs over 1500000 are astroturf accounts. Something happened a couple years back that started blossoming /. accounts at a rate not commensurate with natural growth of the site.

Yeah. Of course, not every >1500000 UID is a sockpuppet. There are some very recent members who are thoughtful, interesting, unique posters. Some I agree with and some I don't, but there is a sense that a human being is behind the words.

But when you see a statement like "Piracy is a major problem. Something has to be done about it or blah blah...", and it's the very first post by a brand new account and it's one of the first few posts in a discussion , the probability that we're dealing with a "Reputation, Inc" astroturfer is very high. This one post really smacked of it. You could sense that the verbiage came right out of some press agent's word processor, so thick is the corp-speak.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[lgw]

CD bitrates were picked by engineers who coimpletely understood what they were doing. There was no compromise in sound quality made - the first CD standards actually had dead space on the disc, becuase they didn't need it all for the target recording length (that space was later reclaimed to allow a few more minutes in a CD - early CDs have a dataless ring near the outside that you can see if you look closely).

There is no point at all in higher sample rates, unless you'e aiming for some non-human market. OTOH, mastering and mixing are a different story - you need a deeper-than-16-bit sample in order to do (inevitably lossy) mixing and post-processing while keeping the most significant 16 bits exactly accurate (you don't need much more, though, just enough to prevent rounding errors from accumulating). There's no point at all in increasing the sample rate, however, once you exceed the band-pass filter of the human ear, further increases are pointless.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[sneakyimp]

This is an attitude that puzzles me. The game companies are the ones making these decisions. If anything, the blame mostly lies on them. They're the ones who implement the DRM and make the software, not the pirates. The pirates may indirectly cause them to change direction, but they still make the final decision.

Do not pretend as if no blame rests on the developers.

I suggest you consider dropping a bit of your own arrogance. Obviously a developer will always want to earn more and a customer will always want to pay less. DRM, as irritating as it is sometimes, can be born of an honest motivation: to limit game use to the person who purchased it. To say there is no excuse for the 'punishment' of 'draconian' DRM is a pretty nice bit of rhetoric but ignores entirely the fact that some DRM goes unnoticed by most (e.g., streaming a movie from netflix) and that unauthorized copying and distribution of games has a critical relation to the profitability of game development and this, in turn, has a critical relation to the desire of developers to make games. You may love your single-player, non-networked games a great deal, but if the prevailing business climate makes these games unattractive projects for developers, you won't have much to choose from.

As for your other post, I think you get a few things wrong:

I cannot fathom how anyone could perceive that as being a much more severe problem than jaywalking. They may or may not be losing potential profit, but that is all.

You don't seem to realize that game development, music, tv, and movies are considered high-risk/high reward investements. In some cases, it's not "potential profit" that is at stake but the very business itself. For every blockbuster game/movie/song/show out there, hundreds go belly up.

I cannot see how copying music is a "huge" problem even as someone who supports copyright.

I have pretty liberal attitudes toward music copying, but believe it's pretty telling that music industry revenues peaked in 1999 and plummeted for years. In fact, music industry revenues are down over 60% from where they were 13 years ago. In any other industry a 65% decline would be seen as a complete catastrophe. Maybe that's not a huge problem for you, but it certainly is for people who worked in the music industry.

Laughable. What do you suggest? Even as someone who supports the idea of reasonable copyright laws, I do not believe it is possible to stop.

Actually, it was legislation (the DMCA) that set the stage for the current legal situation vis-a-vis content sharing. In particular, the safe habor provision of that legislation is what protects companies like Google and the Pirate Bay and Megaupload from enormous civil actions by the MPAA and the RIAA -- that is why they have resorted to suing individuals instead. The DMCA says that these internet companies are not liable for the actions of their users and that has resulted in the proliferation of services that people can use to share copyrighted material freely. A reversal of this provision would immediately result in some colossal lawsuits.

I heartily agree with you that a legal alternative to downloading is the only way forward here. The suits in the motion picture business are screwing this up big time.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[sneakyimp]

selling DRM snakeoil would happen if there weren't any piracy at all - it's a business of it's own.

So true! I can't wait til I can get me some DRM without any of those annoying games/movies/songs attached to it!

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[sneakyimp]

Maybe I couldn't, but a guy in a trenchcoat offered to sell me an infinite number of monkeys that can eventually type anything!

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[sneakyimp]

Copyright wasn't created to sustain the creation of art. It wasn't (and still isn't) about making sure the artist gets rewarded for the effort. It was, and still is, about rewarding those entrepreneurs who are willing to take the risk of copying those works and distributing the copies. Creating art was never the expensive part. Making copies so that society could enjoy the art was.

Um, perhaps you have a source for this? Having recorded professionally, I know that in most cases the recordings (not to mention food, clothing, shelter, and transport for my band) were at least an order of magnitude higher than the first pressing of CDs. But that's just my personal experience.

Copyright is an anachronism.

Awesome! My new band is called the Beatles and I am going to start hiring Chinese musicians to record all of their material....oh fuck that. I'll just print a bunch of their CDs from the masters I have and start selling those!

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[sneakyimp]

It costs $100,000 to 'create' a random pop song in digital format

Who's recording it, the LSO at Abbey Road? If not, you are getting ripped off.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[scourningparading]

I suggest you consider dropping a bit of your own arrogance.

Arrogance? Was what I said somehow false? Are the developers/companies not in any way related to the implementation of DRM?

DRM, as irritating as it is sometimes, can be born of an honest motivation: to limit game use to the person who purchased it.

An honest motivation...

Even honest intentions can hurt others. And there are few instances where DRM does not harm others. It's a method that punishes the innocent and often fails to stop the actual pirates. Ignorance, honest intentions... the end result is still the same.

You don't seem to realize that game development, music, tv, and movies are considered high-risk/high reward investements. In some cases, it's not "potential profit" that is at stake but the very business itself. For every blockbuster game/movie/song/show out there, hundreds go belly up.

Irrelevant. The risks the businesses take don't have anything to do with the pirates. That's something the businesses decide on their own.

The loss of potential profit is related to the pirates, however.

In fact, music industry revenues are down over 60% from where they were 13 years ago.

And? I'll need to see conclusive evidence that it's because of music copying, for one.

But, even then, I still cannot see how music copying is anything more than a minuscule problem. This is mere entertainment, the effects of an individual copying music are completely uncertain and immeasurable, and the only thing that can be lost is potential profit.

My problem? We're getting the government involved, wasting taxpayer money (as well as manpower and time) on something that cannot be stopped, and introducing draconian legislation as a 'solution'.

Actually, it was legislation (the DMCA) that set the stage for the current legal situation vis-a-vis content sharing. In particular, the safe habor provision of that legislation is what protects companies like Google and the Pirate Bay and Megaupload from enormous civil actions by the MPAA and the RIAA -- that is why they have resorted to suing individuals instead.

The safe-harbor is the only decent part of the DMCA. DMCA takedown notices are pure tripe. Large (or medium-sized) websites often get too many to account for, so they need to resort to automated systems. These systems are imperfect and end up harming the end user. Not to mention false DMCA takedowns. I do not believe they should be forced to comply with them.

But you replied to the segment of my comment where I said I did not believe it was possible to stop, so I'm not sure how the DMCA is related. In any case, the lawsuits are often ridiculous, are made without any real evidence, and serve as a front for threats.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[scourningparading]

I think it should be about 10 (after it's released), to be honest. I can't imagine many instances where they haven't made their profit by then.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[scourningparading]

You may want to redifine things to feel better about stealing music

I don't understand why someone must be a pirate in order to disagree with it being called "theft." I don't care for it because it confuses the issue (and those ignorant of what actually happens might get the wrong idea). They're committing copyright infringement. At least with the term "pirate," people will easily be able to tell that they're not talking about the real thing...

Sure, it's quite a minor wrong as wrongs go, but even so: still wrong.

It might be wrong to you and I, but that is by no proven means a universal truth.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Travelsonic]

You idiot. Nobody is entitled to profit. They're entitled to a fair chance to try and profit, that's how every business works - music and movies should be no different.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[fatphil]

> Capitalism requires a fully informed and equal-opportunity market.

In order to squeeze it into their simplistic macroeconomic models, economists must assume capitalism requires a fully informed and equal-opportunity market. However, back in the real world...

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[sneakyimp]

Arrogance? Was what I said somehow false? Are the developers/companies not in any way related to the implementation of DRM?

Your arrogance persists! My post should clearly indicate that I'm aware of developers' role in creating DRM and furthermore points out precisely where I thought you were wrong. Perhaps you should read it again. I'm not trying to insist that DRM is a good thing, but you still blame developers alone for DRM and insist that it's both draconian and punitive in every case. That DRM would be attempted to combat unauthorized copying seems self-evident. It's an obvious response to an unethical behavior by some users. Yes it sucks most of the time and it fails utterly in preventing piracy, but it would be entirely unnecessary if everyone honored the terms of a digital content contract. People don't. So here we are. My point is that it's a two-way street. I'm fully aware that DRM is not necessary for a successful business model but to blame only the company for it is to ignore the elephant in the room: people who ignore the purchase contract (a binding legal document!) and make unathorized copies of games, music, movies, etc. If you don't like the contract, that doesn't mean you are still entitled to the product. I realize that it's futile to enforce this contract in the real world, but in terms of ethics, I believe I'm on fairly solid footing when I say that if you don't like the contract, you shouldn't buy the product. I'm sorry to break it to you, but you do not have an inalienable right to watch Game of Thrones without paying for it.

And, if you are continuing to try and make the point that it's a "miniscule" problem then perhaps you should opt to not consume content that has DRM or content that you do not pay for. That should be a miniscule sacrifice for you. At the same time, I hope that you can appreciate that one doesn't just wake up one day and magically know how to play violin or edit film or be a mastering engineer. For people who have chosen that lifestyle, the collapse of an industry is a serious proposition and has serious ramifications in the real world.

Irrelevant. The risks the businesses take don't have anything to do with the pirates. That's something the businesses decide on their own.

How in your mind do you magically divorce the effect of pirates on the desire of investors to invest in content industries? Are you suggesting that unauthorized copying doesn't affect movie revnues? Or perhaps that people will still invest in something even if it's going to fail?

And? I'll need to see conclusive evidence that it's because of music copying, for one.

Obviously, there is no way anyone could provide conclusive evidence of cause and effect. I suspect it's partly greater efficiency which has reduced revenue numbers (no to press and ship CDs, maintain store real estate, payola for radio douchebags, etc.) and partly a move from album-based sales to single sales, but it is certainly sobering to see an industry gutted this way.

But, even then, I still cannot see how music copying is anything more than a minuscule problem. This is mere entertainment, the effects of an individual copying music are completely uncertain and immeasurable, and the only thing that can be lost is potential profit.

Here is where the arrogance rankles me. When you suck $10B annually out of an industry, that means approximately 250,000 households lose their source of income. Sure they can do other stuff I guess, but the problem isn't what I would call 'miniscule'. It may be "mere" entertainment to you and you may try to rationalize your transgression, but millions of tiny transgressions do add up to a measurable effect.

And, please, stop beating that drum that the only thing lost is potential profit. What's potentially lost is entertainment itself. If no one pays for it, it doesn't get made. If fewer people pay for it, less of it gets made. If you

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[scourningparading]

Your arrogance persists!

How is that "arrogance"? A misinterpretation, maybe, but it's not as if I said anyone was lying to themselves.

I'm not trying to insist that DRM is a good thing, but you still blame developers alone for DRM and insist that it's both draconian and punitive in every case.

I see. So I'm not the only one who is misinterpreting others. I didn't do either of those things. I suggest reading my comments again, because nowhere did I say that pirates weren't to blame at all, and nowhere did I say that all DRM is harmful (In fact, in the post you replied to, I merely said it was harmful in most cases!).

Yes it sucks most of the time and it fails utterly in preventing piracy, but it would be entirely unnecessary if everyone honored the terms of a digital content contract.

And not everyone will honor; that's no justification for punishing innocents with badly implemented DRM.

I'm sorry to break it to you, but you do not have an inalienable right to watch Game of Thrones without paying for it.

I don't believe in inalienable rights to begin with. But really, where did I say that was the case?

And, if you are continuing to try and make the point that it's a "miniscule" problem then perhaps you should opt to not consume content that has DRM or content that you do not pay for.

And I don't. Where did I say that I did?

How in your mind do you magically divorce the effect of pirates on the desire of investors to invest in content industries? Are you suggesting that unauthorized copying doesn't affect movie revnues? Or perhaps that people will still invest in something even if it's going to fail?

Are you even bothering to read my comments? Piracy is related to loss of potential profit. I've said this multiple times.

But some people act like it is the pirate's fault that the businesses took a risk. This is not so. They took that risk on their own, so when illegally copying certain data, they did not incur those costs upon the business. That's what I was trying to say.

It may be "mere" entertainment to you and you may try to rationalize your transgression, but millions of tiny transgressions do add up to a measurable effect.

Am I misinterpreting something, or are you consistently trying to label me as a pirate despite the fact that I've denied this multiple times?

But no, you can't really measure the effects. I don't think I'll ever be able to see how it's a "huge" problem since it's all just potential profit and potential entertainment that's at stake.

What's potentially lost is entertainment itself.

Which doesn't even exist yet. Look, no matter how many potential losses you can think up, it's not going to change my opinion that people are exaggerating the effects of copyright infringement.

You might find that it's harder than you think. Would it kill you to pay a buck for a movie or song every now and then?

Your posts contain a lot of straw men and assumptions about me. I never once claimed it was easy. I'm not even a pirate. Still, you ignore my words and assume that anyone who disagrees with you about anything must be on the opposite side of the spectrum. I just don't understand that mentality. Labeling me as a pirate and spewing forth insult after insult is not going to make me agree with you.

My point was that without the safe harbor provision -- the part you like so much -- the RIAA and MPAA might sue youtube, thereby giving them a powerful incentive to take down all of the content that does not belong to youtube so that people would not be tempted to just call up youtube on their phone when they want to hear their favorite song by [INSERT FAVORITE ARTIST HERE].

I said that it was decent, but that is all.

But I don't care for draconian measures.

After all, it's only entertainment.

Indeed.

It's as someone else said... no one is going to change their opinion.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[devent]

Talking about anecdotes. Napster had somewhat around 26 Million users. Napster did a poll of the users, how many are willing to pay at was price. They come up with:

Polls during that time state that %68 of users were willing to pay up to $14.99 a month for Napster service. That would mean about 25 million paying users accrueing sales of $375 million per month. Not only would the profits have been amazing, but it offered the revitalization the waning recording industry desperately needs today.

But instead to innovate the Music Mafia just bought new laws, like the DMCA. How much more evidence you need to understand that there are who download everything for free, but a large percentage would buy the music if it's offered convenient to them. That is also the success story of iTunes and Amazon, and others.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[sneakyimp]

Are you even bothering to read my comments? Piracy is related to loss of potential profit. I've said this multiple times.

Compare this quote of yours to the other one that I quoted you on:

Irrelevant. The risks the businesses take don't have anything to do with the pirates. That's something the businesses decide on their own.

Would you agree that "loss of potential profit" is a risk?

I suggest reading my comments again, because nowhere did I say that pirates weren't to blame at all, and nowhere did I say that all DRM is harmful (In fact, in the post you replied to, I merely said it was harmful in most cases!).

Admittedly you did not use the exact phrase in all cases in the thread that I read, but you also didn't limit your description of DRM to only some cases either as you can see here:

But of course, there is no excuse for DRM and draconian measures. Punishing innocents for the actions of others is simply unjustifiable to me.

How am I supposed to interpret the phrase 'there is no excuse for DRM' other than to assume that you think all DRM is bad.?

Am I misinterpreting something, or are you consistently trying to label me as a pirate despite the fact that I've denied this multiple times?
But no, you can't really measure the effects. I don't think I'll ever be able to see how it's a "huge" problem since it's all just potential profit and potential entertainment that's at stake.

I apologize for equating you to a pirate. I suppose I do suspect you of consuming entertainment you don't pay for -- if only because of what you've written. I hope that you can overlook my suspicions and read my words as though intended at an ostensible pirate. I used Napster and Kazaa a bit years ago but have sworn all that stuff off. I have no evidence that illegal copying decimated the music industry single-handedly, but I do believe that it is a major contributor. I also believe a similar shakedown in the movie industry is imminent unless the suits can get their act together and build affordable, legal alternatives.

Which doesn't even exist yet. Look, no matter how many potential losses you can think up, it's not going to change my opinion that people are exaggerating the effects of copyright infringement.

Thanks for letting me know.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[scourningparading]

Would you agree that "loss of potential profit" is a risk?

Yes, but not the one I (or some others) was referring to. The one I was referring to is the initial risk and investment (actually making the product). Some people blame the pirate for that.

How am I supposed to interpret the phrase 'there is no excuse for DRM' other than to assume that you think all DRM is bad.?

I don't like any DRM, but there is some that is better than others (like Steam). And by "nowhere did I say that all DRM is harmful" I meant towards certain users. For some it could be harmful, and for others it could not be. Like Steam.

I suppose it couldn't be helped that you interpreted it that way.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[bzipitidoo]

You make a number of assumptions.

That DRM would be attempted to combat unauthorized copying seems self-evident

Well, no, that's not self-evident. The problem is not that there is unauthorized copying. The problem is that there is such a thing as unauthorized copying. There is no reasonable way to control or regulate copying. Time and again, we've seen that trying to control copying is a waste of money. They spend millions on DRM schemes that are so laughably insecure that one 16 year old kid can quickly crack them. They shouldn't have even tried it-- it's not possible to make an effective DRM scheme, and they should know and accept that fact of nature. Meantime, we, the public, are supposed to help finance such idiocy by buying expensive, obsolete media that's had the price jacked up even more to pay for DRM that actually reduces the value by occasionally inconveniencing us? Nothing doing! Nor do I appreciate the implication that I would be a low down, dirty thief if not prevented, and I should accept DRM to help me stay honest. Copying is NOT morally wrong! Then they have the unmitigated gall to impose even further by, for instance, forcing DVDs to play a bunch of commercials? The War on Piracy is an abysmal failure, and it's long past time for us to cut our losses and end this war. Legitimizing copying makes moot DRM and all your talk about rights, transgressions, and shameful ingratitude. That's right, not only let Pirate Bay, Youtube, and Joe Citizen copy with a will, encourage it!

When you suck $10B annually out of an industry

Yes, that's one of the usual objections. Artists will starve if they can't charge money for copies. We won't have anyone making movies, performing music, writing books, etc. Not true. The answer to this problem has been said many times: Change the business model. Don't try to make money from control and sales of individual copies. There are other ways. One of them is called patronage. There's also advertising, endorsements, and live performances.

Now, I suppose your next objections are that patronage is untried, and it can't possibly work, or be fair. On the contrary, patronage has been around for centuries. Patronage worked for artists such as Mozart. And today, we can do it so much better. As to the objection that it doesn't work, reflect that copyright has big problems. Patronage doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than copyright. That's easy. Indeed, we do have some patronage in place now. For instance, Canada has a levy on blank media. Yet the music industry, by the very act of continuing to sue people for copyright infringement even after the levy was in place, said that wasn't good enough. The problem really comes down to one of greed. We could haggle over the price, but the industry has done its utmost to confuse the issues, deny reality, and bargain in bad faith. We'll just have to drag them kicking and screaming into the present. Or kill them. Won't bother me a bit if that happens. I'm tired of the stench of these dinosaurs. We won't accept horrendous waste in order to prop up obsolete business models.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[drkstr1]

Because you couldn't come up with my sequence of 0s and 1s without me. If you want to break it down that way why should someone get copyright on a book just because it is a sequence of black dots that make up things we recognize as letters. Or paintings because they are just splashes of different pigments on a wall.

Copyright wasn't created to sustain the creation of art. It wasn't (and still isn't) about making sure the artist gets rewarded for the effort. It was, and still is, about rewarding those entrepreneurs who are willing to take the risk of copying those works and distributing the copies. Creating art was never the expensive part. Making copies so that society could enjoy the art was. Today that is no longer true. No one needs an incentive to distribute the works, people will do it for free. Copyright is an anachronism. The behavior, it was created to promote, now happens automatically and without intervention of any kind. Copyright has outlived the purpose for which it was created, and now serves only to prevent the very activity it was supposed to promote. Ask yourself, if there was no copyright, would society as a whole be better off going forward? The answer is absolutely yes. Artists don't create works for money, they create works because they can't help themselves. They will continue to do it even if they are not paid to do so because it is a part of who they are. If you want to do something good for society, figure out how to make sure that artists get the food, shelter, and tools they need to create, and let the internet worry about how to get those finished products into the hands of the people. That will make the world a better place.

-=Geoskd

This is a beautiful and well written comment on the root of the IP property debate. I hope it will be modded higher than 2 when i come back to it and read it again, and again.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[sneakyimp]

There is no reasonable way to control or regulate copying.

Sadly, I agree with you here. Not even the notion that such copying is unethical* or that one is not helping to patronize one's favorite artists seems dampen everyone's enthusiasm for acquiring music without paying for it. We all do love free stuff, don't we?

For you to assert that an attempt at DRM is not a natural response is a bit disingenuous, I think. It's an obvious reaction a manager of a content company would have to the idea of piracy: "can we stop it somehow?" A natural response from a developer (whose job might be in jeopardy) would certainly be, "well we can sure try!" I have no intention of defending any particular DRM scheme. I still assert that to attempt some kind of DRM was an obvious choice and would also point out (as mentioned elsewhere) that many games have adopted some social aspect today which obviates the old sell-by-the-copy profit model. Hate this must-be-connected aspect of games all you like. It's both a natural evolution of DRM and also an obvious example of how an industry under pressure twists and writhes in order to preserve profit streams under downsizing pressure. The presence of DRM (and all its negative aspects) is a symptom of content industries stung by a new reality: Digital content can be infinitely distributed and easily copied world wide and no one is forced to buy it any more. I wouldn't presume to prescribe whether you should or should not accept it. I would hope that you perceive it as somewhat inevitable -- sort of like the way people can be expected to panic when leaving a building on fire.

And yes I find the whole Bluray concept kind of sad and also kind of despicable -- certainly the ads and the fact that there seem to be PAL and NTSC variants and never the twain shall meet. Douchebaggery, for sure. I believe you are correct in your assessment that the business model is broken and tracking individual copies is a lost cause, but I wonder more than a bit at how you glibly dismiss the halving of a 10B industry with a wave of your hand. I imagine you'd feel pretty different if it was your industry. On the other hand, I'm always ranting about how download is the way and these physical media things are so stupid, so I can feel you a bit here.

As for letting Pirate Bay and Youtube copy content rampantly without remuneration for the artists, I strongly disagree. If anybody should be ponying up for this content it is a profitable commercial entity whose popularity rests so heavily on the ostensible value of this content. If Joe Citizen wants to give a copy to his/her BFF and significant other and book club and whoever else or wants to pass it on to generations of offspring or whatever then fine. For Kim DotCom to drive 10 Ferraris he bought selling ads on top of other people's hard work? Is that OK? I don't think it is.

And yes I agree that people will still write books and make music and write video games no matter what. We've all got our hobbies.

As for new business models. Hm. Advertising? Endorsements? I can't wait to hear new songs come out with product placements in them. Imagine V-I-A-G-R-A sung to the tune of Gloria. Or albums interspersed with advertisements. I can't stomach Spotify. I also wonder if perhaps you have too narrow a conception of copyright in dismissing it so completely. Part of the notion of copyright is that an artist has control over their work. Imagine Stairway To Heaven released by Led Zeppelin on Monday 8 Nov, 1971 and then released again by the Monkees Friday Nov 12? Or suppose Radiohead doesn't want OK Computer used to peddle Lenovo Computers? As you can imagine, it could be a very different world if commercial entities are allowed to copy/broadcast/appropriate copyrighted material without any regard to the rights of the creators.

As for patronage, I like that idea! How about the people who consume content actually send some money to the people who make it? Wouldn't that be a

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[jamstar7]

I was giving an example in easy nice round numbers. 10K was a bit low, so I went for the order of magnitude to show what the costs would be on a 100K song.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Pentium100]

Capitalism is like Communism - both are great in theory, but suck in practice, because they assume things that will never happen in reality (perfect information for capitalism, people not being greedy for Communism).

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[drkstr1]

I think the GP made a valid point though. Can you condone piracy while being against printing counterfeit money? It seems like both are victimless crimes on the individual scale, with large consequences to the status quo when carried out in a large scale.

Disclaimer: I am a pirate and against the principle of a copyright, but also like playing devils advocate.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[bzipitidoo]

There is no reasonable way to control or regulate copying.

Sadly, I agree with you here.

Very good, except I think you are wrong to be sad about that. Sharing makes the world a better place! What has been much more damaging and destructive is the notion that we should and could treat ideas like physical property. That we should apply concepts meant for scarce things to things that are not scarce has cost us all greatly. We've spent millions on futile enforcement, mean spirited lawsuits and court cases, and bullying of 3rd parties into costly data collection, web site blocking, and other useless enforcement activities. We've squashed more artists and scientists than we've helped because we've been too willing to entertain accusations of infringement that were a mere cover for the real motive of hindering fair competition, or simply grabbing loot as patent trolls attempt to do. A DMCA takedown notice is too easy to abuse, and leapfrogs some important due process. We should have been putting those resources towards building a viable replacement for copyright.

Worst of all, progress has been slowed. No one can know what technological advances we could have had if not for this campaign to preserve and strengthen monopolies we shouldn't want to live with at all. Maybe we could have had a better OS than anything we have now, and this would have made software development easier, and enabled more research. With that, could we have had a cure for AIDS 15 years ago? Or cancer? Maybe Steve Jobs would still be with us? How about a battery good enough to make the electric car viable? We'd be a lot further ahead in dealing with global warming if we had that. One thing we could have had is the digital library. We could have and should have digitized everything years ago. Well, it's coming at last, though slowly.

As for letting Pirate Bay and Youtube copy content rampantly without remuneration for the artists, I strongly disagree

Ah, but I did not say they should not be compensated. Let's have rampant copying, with remuneration! Can we do that? Yes, I think we can. We won't remunerate by forcefully extracting a fixed amount of money per copy, we will find another way. And I think there's no choice about it. Copyright in its current form cannot be made to work. The Internet is what has really killed copyright, but don't discount sneakernet empowered with massive hard drives and flash drives. The only reason copyright works at all right now is sufferance. Even as Big Media in an ongoing act of stunning hypocrisy vilifies the entire world population as a bunch of scurvy thieving pirates, it is by the grace of many of us, our choice to pay for a copy even when a free one is readily available, that copyright still functions somewhat.

I'm so glad you solved this intractable business problem.

You're not yet a believer, I see. Sure, there will be problems with patronage, if we go that route. Not least is there will undoubtedly be many ways to con the system. We can resolve enough of them to make it work better than copyright. But first, we have to get started.

Imagine Stairway To Heaven released by Led Zeppelin on Monday 8 Nov, 1971 and then released again by the Monkees Friday Nov 12?

What's wrong with that? Why can't we have a culture in which such an action is not seen as a despicable attempt to cash in on someone else's work, but powerful homage to the greatness of the original artist? And set up a system in which Led Zeppelin would be paid handsomely if that happened, and without hurting or otherwise hindering the Monkees? The Monkees aren't claiming they wrote the song, they're just covering it. In any case, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

I also wonder if perhaps you have too narrow a conception of copyright in dismissing it so completely.

I also wonder if I

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[drkstr1]

Astroturf? Did you actually read the entire post? Paranoid assholes like you are far worse than any Astroturfer, paid poster, or whatever the fuck gay net-lingo you want to use. Sad too, because for the past 15 years I considered you one of the sane ones around here. Look in the mirror and see the dickhead you've become.

In his defense, it seemed like an a astroturf to me too, and i would consider myself to be a very perceptive person. I think us autistics (although only slightly in my case) are pretty keen on picking up unusual behavioral patterns within a population. At least that is to say, the post indicated a belief that the poster did not in fact believe to be true.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[drkstr1]

I think your argument would carry more weight if it didn't carry the undertones of a bigot. Just sayin'...

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[drkstr1]

Your argument falls on deaf ears for those who believe a profit model should not be dictated through law, but rather an ability to provide continued value to a target market. Face it, the music distribution business is dead. Only the artists are creating value, and that value will persist with or without copyright. Do not be fooled, only the business to sit between the artist and consumer is dead. Art in itself is very much alive and thriving.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Saint Fnordius]

You're right, it's anecdotal. And really, is it any different from when I was in the university in the 1980's and we copied to cassette tape? Or how I listen to the radio rather than buy the newest hit single? I kinda sorta doubt you would have purchased the albums. And considering that you posted as an anonymous coward, I also kinda sorta doubt that you are interested in seeing my reply in the first place. Er.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[mcgrew]

I think counterfeit should be illegal digital or not

If you're talking about commercial piracy, I agree.

If we truly value creativity we must drive down cost of entry, make it less of a risk (by making the cost low) create a truly initiative work, so almost anyone can produce it.

And it's happening, thanks to tech! Already musicians are telling RIAA labels to fuck off (I know two of them personally) and are producing their own recordings. They shot Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning for a couple thousand dollars, and it's far better than much of what comes out of Hollywood (if you haven't seen it, DL it from the BT stub on their web site, it's hilarious).

Buy reducing the copyright to a couple of years, haven't made a profit after 2 years tough.

Well, two years is way too short IMO. Asimov didn't make a dime from the Foundation trilogy until Doubleday bought the rights from Gnome Press ten years after it was initially published. But the current length is just insane. There is absolutely no reason whatever why the LOTR books or Foundation or a Jimi Hendrix album should still be under copyright, let alone Steamboat Willy.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[mcgrew]

The math doesn't add up, so I suspect that their tests were faulty in some way. At 15kHz, a tone I can even hear and I'm 60, there are only three samples per wavecrest. With only three samples there's no possible way to diffrentiate a square wave from a sawtooth wave from a sine wave.

The link you provided mentioned noise levels, this puzzles me. Digital sound should have no noise at all. Perhaps the above mentioned aliasing distortion could be percieved as noise?

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[mcgrew]

That's a stretch. Ask any fifty year old black person what they think of hip hop and the ghetto culture and you'll find that they agree with me, and will phrase it more strongly than I did.

You know that the hip-hop was mainstreamed by rich white businessmen, right? They did the black community a grave disservice when they introduced "gangsta rap."

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[geoskd]

Awesome! My new band is called the Beatles and I am going to start hiring Chinese musicians to record all of their material....oh fuck that. I'll just print a bunch of their CDs from the masters I have and start selling those!

You'll have just as much trouble selling them for profit as the legal copyright holder is having. The price point is still too high. The copyright holders can cut 90% of their costs by stopping the insane marketing they currently use. That level of cost could only be justified when the margins were better. Short answer, You'll be hard pressed to make money selling content. It's too cheap to make and distribute, and our world would have to get a whole lot stupider for us not to take advantage of that. You might make a reasonable argument for increasing funding for the arts through government, but guaranteeing an artificial shortage of supply for the benefit of a few is not the way to go.

As a side note, the Beatles music is ancient. There is no valid reason in the world (even under copyright) that these works shouldn't be public domain by now.

-=Geoskd

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[fatphil]

> The present 16 bit 44k samples are "good enough", better than cassette, having no noise (unlike vinyl)and was the best they could do back when CDs were developed. They should take it to the next level.

What bollocks. 16bit @44kHz is demonstrably (i.e. provably) as good as the human ear will ever need. Anything more than that per channel is either a waste of bandwidth, or snake-oil, depending on your perspective.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[mcgrew]

the first CD standards actually had dead space on the disc, becuase they didn't need it all for the target recording length

The drawback wasn't the length allowable on the disk, it was the speed of computers' CPUs.

The point of a higher sample rate is the fact that the closer you get to the Nyquist limit, the more aliasing you have. A 15kHz tone only has three samples, far too few to be able to discern a sine wave from a sawtooth wave.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Hatta]

The math doesn't add up, so I suspect that their tests were faulty in some way. At 15kHz, a tone I can even hear and I'm 60, there are only three samples per wavecrest. With only three samples there's no possible way to diffrentiate a square wave from a sawtooth wave from a sine wave.

Whether you can distinguish sine waves and square waves at 15khz isn't really the question. It's whether you can distinguish a square wave at 96hz from the same square wave after a high pass filter and resampling to 44.1hz. You can't. The experiment has been done, the data is in, and the result is consistent with what we'd expect from Nyquist's theorem.

The link you provided mentioned noise levels, this puzzles me. Digital sound should have no noise at all. Perhaps the above mentioned aliasing distortion could be percieved as noise?

The noise is the sampling error. When you try to fit a 24 bit number into a 16 bit number, you're going to have to round. This introduces some noise. Minimizing this noise is the entire reason mastering is done in 24 bit. When you mix in 24 bit and convert down you only get noise once, when you mix in 16 bit you get some noise every time you perform an operation.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[lgw]

The neat thing about the Nyquist limit: if there are no frequencies in the source above 22 kHz, all of the aliasing will be above 22 kHz with the 44 KHz sample rate. (Real-world bandpass filters aren't perfect, thus the 10% slop above the 20 kHz human limit.) This is why audiophiles natter about "fast transients": effectively 20 kHz square waves (or complex waveforms that look like one in places).

The trick about the "fast transients" is: your ears can't tell the difference either! That's why 2 samples is enough. The human ear doesn't have perfect fidelity at 20 kHz (17 for me at my age), that's instead the maximum frequency at which any waveform can be discerned - the physical mechanisms in the ear simply don't move fast enough to capture the "fast transients" above 20 kHz that sellers of audiophile gear want you to worry about.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[drkstr1]

Well then I would call that 50 year old black person a bigot as well (note: I intentionally did not use the word "racist").

Anyways, I'm sure it wasn't your intention to be a bigot. I just thought it was odd that you segmented your population by music choice in order to frame your argument, and I can be a bit snarky after a couple glasses of Scotch. At the very least, it was poor science.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[sneakyimp]

You'll have just as much trouble selling them for profit as the legal copyright holder is having.

And yet people still do this and still make money at it. I find it curious that you neglected to comment on what I consider a totally unethical act. Suppose it's not the Beatles but a brand new artist? I.e., someone who hasn't made it yet? And further suppose that it's someone famous stealing an idea from an unknown artist? I hope that you can appreciate the completely unbalanced power dynamic in that situation. Copyright as also about the little guys. How would you like someone taking credit (and profiting) from your ideas when you make nothing?

The price point is still too high

What price point do you refer to? Is $.01 USD too high to own a song? Must all songs be free? If everyone who acquired a song paid one penny, one would only need to sell one million copies to fund a world-class recording (with no profit, however). This assumes a world-class recording costs $10,000 which is actually fairly low assumption. World-class studios cost a few thousand dollars per day. You might have a band of 3-5 guys plus recording engineers, mastering engineers, etc. working for a few days to get it right. I'm fully aware that this level of cost might no longer be a sustainable business model, but offer these figures here so that you have a better idea of the cost involved to make a recording. If you reduce the cost by 90%, you are still talking about $1,000 to record the song (and quality will suffer accordingly) and you'd need to sell 100,000 copies at $.01 to just break even. If a song costs a dime (a fucking DIME for fuck's sake) then things start to get more reasonable. The problem is that nobody supports microtransactions this small. I believe the minimum fee for a credit card transaction from the payment gateway is about a quarter. How about a dime for a song? A quarter? You can pass it on to your kids. Share it with your buddies.

The copyright holders can cut 90% of their costs by stopping the insane marketing they currently use.

Upon what is that based, Mr. content industry analyst? Picture the previous scenario where a small-time band trouble themselves to record a song for $1,000. How does anyone know that they have done so [tree/forest]? Marketing! We have to tell people. For small bands, you might buy an ad in your local (dead tree) zine. Or perhaps buy an ad on facebook? You'll definitely spam your Facebook wall with the fact you have new songs. I *seriously* doubt we'll be able come up with $9,000 for marketing when we could only afford $1,000 for the song itself. In the case of big-time bands (and Justin Beibers) you may be correct -- the marketing budgets are enormous. The perverse thing about this is that marketing on that scale actually generates demand that otherwise would not exist. I hate this as much as anyone, but marketing brainwashes sheep (tweeners and parents and all sorts of losers) into actually *buying* something. I don't think this new paradigm really jeopardizes big ugly cheesdicks like Beibers and GaGas.

I think my point here (one I can't really prove) is that countercultural music will suffer in this content-is-free environment.

Short answer, You'll be hard pressed to make money selling content.

At first, this seemed ludicrous to me. Having had some exposure to MBA types, I'm casually acquainted with the concept of commodification and have always been told that content is the one thing that really resists commodification. Money is in content they said. And markets tended to bear that out -- margins have historically been lower for hardware manufacturers and commodities producers. And yet I started thinking about it and digitally encoded content is utterly commodified if there is no restriction on its distribution. This is a compelling notion. There may be only one Mick Jagger, but we can make exact error-free copies of

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Zanothis]

I have pretty liberal attitudes toward music copying, but believe it's pretty telling that music industry revenues peaked in 1999 and plummeted for years. In fact, music industry revenues are down over 60% from where they were 13 years ago. In any other industry a 65% decline would be seen as a complete catastrophe. Maybe that's not a huge problem for you, but it certainly is for people who worked in the music industry.

Have you considered the possibility that the business of music distribution has changed drastically? In 1999, the primary form of music distribution was still CDs, 12-15 songs, take it or leave it. Is it possible that people were only listening to a fraction of the CD and that most CD purchases were made in order to obtain a single song that was quite popular with the bonus of some other songs that you may or may not also enjoy? Now, the consumer has the freedom to purchase only the songs that they want, leading to a drop from ~$13/sale to ~$1/sale. Add into that the fact that the music industry did everything in their power to resist digital distribution, giving Apple the first large bite at the apple (pun not originally intended). So now, the consumer may pay for only those songs that they feel are worth their money and they must also give some of the profits to Apple.

This is not to say that piracy hasn't played a role in the music industry's decline. But I would argue that the financial losses due to piracy have been largely over-hyped.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[sneakyimp]

This is a very reasonable point you make. If you read the article I linked, there is a graph specifically detailing digital single sales revenue which doesn't really factor until 2003 when the decline was already in effect for about four years. In reality it's probably partly the availability of songs a-la-carte and partly piracy. The financial reversal, whatever the cause may be, is striking. [q.v. Michael DeGusta's adjusted graph]

It may well be overblown. I believe the industry will recover. Legal alternatives to piracy like iTunes look extremely promising. Still, I find the lets-do-away-with-copyright rhetoric pretty simplistic and those who espouse it seem to have no inkling of music industry economics (at least historically speaking). I find the self-styled copyright revolutionaries who feel entitled to free content to be especially grating. And, like everyone else, I find the suits and fat cats at RIAA and MPAA to be delusional, short-sighted, and in many cases downright evil (David Geffen is a good example).

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[mcgrew]

all of the aliasing will be above 22 kHz

You misunderstand aliasing. All digitally sampled data is aliased to some degree. Aliasing is the difference between one sample and the next. With photos it shows up as a "stairstep effect" if you zoom in. With audio, the higher the frequency the fewer samples per wavecrest. When you reach the Nyquist limit you're at less than one sample per crest and it will show up as audible noise, so before sampling, all frequencies above the limit must be filtered out.

If you have an analog tone generator you can hear it for yourself, a 15kHz sine wave will sound different than a 15kHz sawtooth wave, but you won't hear a difference with the same tone sampled at 44kHz.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[lgw]

So on the one hand, the math says otherwise (se below). On the other, the hardware isn't made from spherical cows of uniform density. With a properly mastered digital track, a good DAC, and good headphones, you should hear the difference (to the extent you can hear it in the first place). You don't typically find good DACs in portable or computer gear, partly because there aren't any good, cheap, low-power DACs (the good ~$20 ones suck down way too much power).

It's worth noting that you can't actually hear a sawtooth wave at 15 kHz to begin with, you can (with perfect hearing, not my 17 kHz limit) hear a barely-sawtooth-shaped sine wave. With undamaged hearing you can hear a sine wave at 20 kHz max, so you can only hear a "sawtooth wave bandlimited at 20 kHz", which above 5 kHz or so is a heavily aliased approximation. That heavily aliased approximation can be "perfectly" reconstructed by 40 kHz sampling. Really.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[TranquilVoid]

This is why I think that it is only a matter of time before non-commercial copying is legalised and an alternative creator compensation system becomes everyday reality.

You may be correct however it's a little sad that we have to change the law not because we realise it's incorrect but because it's now so easy to break it that we can't stop people.

A similar situation is speeding. It's very easy to break this law - all you have to do is move your foot a couple of centimetres. Most people agree that speeding is wrong yet most people do it.

Such is humanity, generally good and generally corrupt.

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[TranquilVoid]

I think it should be about 10 (after it's released)

The 70/90/whatever years thing pisses me off, but if I stop to think about it is effectively 10. My armchair reckoning says that 95% of infringement happens with material under 5 years old. Of course that leads to the question of why media companies pushed for such extensions in the first place...

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[mcgrew]

That heavily aliased approximation can be "perfectly" reconstructed by 40 kHz sampling. Really.

With only three samples? How?

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[Anguirel]

Here you go!

Re:P2P had no effect on music sales?

[TranquilVoid]

People who VALUE music will end up paying for it (if they want more of it).

Not really, there's a whole spectrum of value across music listeners. Fanatics are often collector-types but fanatics are a minority and they aren't always this way. Further the product is virtually or actually identical between piracy and legal sources so someone can value the 'real product' (the art that's on their screen or coming out of their speakers) without that valuation driving them to purchase.

To be fair to your argument, I know you are saying that 'true' music/film lovers will buy the legitimate product not because of quality but because they understand the market reality. First, this has to be an even smaller number of people than the collectors especially since the target audience of most of this stuff is relatively young. Second, the casual consumers are still valid consumers. Just because they consume less and appreciate the nuances of the product less does not mean they should be exempt from paying for it.

The real question is would society purchase more books/videos/music if piracy was somehow impossible. I tend to think so from my experience of friends and colleagues. Almost to a man they do it with a sort of 'guilty glee' because it's free. There seem to be a lot of people on Slashdot who pirate out of principle but I don't know any personally.

I think the issue with music is that music was always a 'dime a dozen' and kind of like how machines displaced manual labor in the industrial revolution (devalued manual labor), music has been devalued by technology.

I think technology has legitimately devalued music distribution which has illegitimately devalued music itself. It is dime-a-dozen but that's still 1/12 of a dime. Piracy is not part of an ideal free market (and neither are the monopolistic practices of the media cartels).

Facts.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, people don't care about them, regardless of the number of studies you do, the degrees you wave around in their faces and the clearer the data. Our mind actively ignores all information that conflicts with our current worldviews.

A fact lots of well educated people don't seem to understand regardless of the number of studies showing this effect.

Re:Facts.

[Alan R Light]

"A fact lots of well educated people don't seem to understand regardless of the number of studies showing this effect."

Obviously this fact conflicts with their world view. I have observed this effect in action, however, on multiple occasions, sometimes to comical effect - such as people believing I said the direct opposite of what I actually just said.

Re:Facts.

[jkflying]

Unfortunately, the fact that you're an atheist puts you in the minority of people who are willing to change their mind...

Re:Facts.

[erroneus]

Oh no. We get it. We ALL get it.

I think the most impressive study related to human belief and behavior was the one where a single test subject was placed among a group of actors all giving the wrong answers to questions. The test subject ended up answering things incorrectly with the group and even believing in the wrong answers. This test has been run many, many times with fairly consistent results. (I'm not going to say what I would have done if tested, but I'm pretty sure it would have resulted in huge amounts of stress and would have warped my sense of reality for a while.)

But. The more facts are repeated and demonstrated, but more of a crowd can be developed. Just as in the case of "The Pirate Party" the crowds are growing and it will eventually defeat the mainstream.

Sure, demonstrating the facts once is pretty useless. Twice... yeah, still useless. But dozens of times? Not quite so useless. The masses are hard to sway... but not impossible.

Cost who?

[surd1618]

Pressing millions of copies of a musician's studio-crafted single-- highly exploitative practice that took the hard work of the most compliant musicians they could find. The musicians who manage to game the music industry are just as rare, per capita, as the consumers who actually seek out what they want rather than what they are force-fed by media outlets. This has been true for sixty years.

I have paid musicians for copies of their music that came with personalized notes, or shout-outs that included my name, or logo-printed kazoos, and lots of actual art included. A few artists have come up with products that people might be into e.g. Beck putting a bunch of custom stickers in one of his albums instead of cover art.

Basically I think that the record-funded music industry has been the anomaly, not the corrective factor that the internet introduces into the industry.

Re:How about a study that shows....

[spire3661]

You assume that the current framework is ethical. Rationalize mind abuse all you want its still mind abuse. Copyright holders assert far too many rights, one of which is that once they let the cat out of the bag, they presume they can stuff it back in anytime they desire. Maximization of profit is not a strong enough reason to allow the current abusive system to continue.

Re:Low standards

[spokenoise]

Congratulations! You have just pointed out what both sides are doing except one side has far more money and publicity power and the other has 10 million internets until the first side buys your government and then the other has no internets.

Re:How about a study that shows....

[sowth]

...that sending bot generated DMCA complaints and other fraudulent complaints of works they don't own is disrespectful to the copyright holder and the author's free speech.

Sugar coat it however you like... rationalize it, justify it, whatever you do... it's still a violation of the rights of the real author.

Same goes for questionable lawsuits against writers of communications software.

Re:How about a study that shows....

[The1stImmortal]

First of all, I happen to agree that distribution against the author's wishes is somewhat disrespectful.
However.

• - Something being merely disrespectful has rarely stopped people actually doing something. This applies to both individuals and companies.
• - It is reasonably rare these days (at least in big-business copyright trade like pop music, pop cinema etc) that the person(s) who actually created a given work is/are the same as the people earning the majority of income from the work, or doing the marketing, setting distribution terms etc - and of course often also seperate from those initiating legal actions
• - Authors rights are hardly inherent natural rights - they are social rights. That is, the existance, and continued respect, of Authors' rights is dependent on society and culture (and increasingly, on business culture). Should society generally move in a different direction in terms of considering authors to have rights over their work, then it's possible that Authors' rights will diminish or cease to exist. It is possible we are seeing such a movement in social/cultural perception of a social right occuring

Now, there are other issues implied in your post. For instance, those who control copyright in a work may act at odds with the wishes of the author, or even at times at odds with the legal owner of the copyright. Even when technically legal, this is itself a form disrespect that should be fought (though whether the fighting is done by breaking the law or by changing the law is an open question)
Also, there is the question of inappropriate influence. Compared to the size of the "copyright industry" (by which I mean primarily film and music, and to an extent software, where the product is copyright-enforced artificial scarcity), there is an argument that inappropriate levels of political influence are exerted. Possibly this is due to the "fame" obsession in the general populace - ie, perceptual bias.

Re:Low standards

[Fluffeh]

Cherry-picking sympathetic journals...

Sorry, but this really smacks of the True Scotsman fallacy. Yes, research can be skewed - but if you are using researched funded by the RIAA or MPAA etc, then it is just as likely to be as skewed as you claim these to be, thereby making the comment redundant in itself. How about posting a few links to legitimate research done by neutral parties with no interest either way, instead of simply dismissing these?

Re:Low standards

[phantomfive]

It does require you look at the actual data and work done inside the paper, to make sure it is scientifically sound, instead of just trusting the researcher's conclusions.

Unfortunately, TFA did not do that. I hope someone else is less lazy than me, and looks at the studies to see what potential problems there might be, or if they are sound.

Re:Low standards

[interkin3tic]

Cherry-picking sympathetic journals while not even addressing the obvious correlation between piracy and decreased music sales is intellectually dishonest.

And rejecting studies just because of where they were published, without any contrary evidence, would be intellectually lazy...

Re:Low standards

[Samantha Wright]

I think the obvious correlation between piracy and global warming is clearly the bigger issue here. It has not been proven conclusively that there has been a causal relation between piracy and the music industry!

Re:How about a study that shows....

[scourningparading]

... that file sharing content that one does not own or have received any distribution copying rights to is disrespectful to the rights that are supposedly granted to the copyright holder?

Such a study would be useless. People already know that copyright exists.

Furthermore, what if people don't agree that they should have these rights to begin with, and don't care if they're "disrespectful" towards them? Laws aren't always just.

Re:How about a study that shows....

[DurendalMac]

And I may not disagree, but that sure as hell does not justify the lying, fraud, thuggery, bribery, and the rest of the long list of nasty things the **AA organizations have done. I daresay they've done far more damage overall than people downloading a few tracks.

Re:Thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

You appear to be confusing correlation and causation.

The drop in music sales has also been contemporaneous with the introduction into common use of the oxazolidinone class of antibiotics, but I doubt you would be as keen to draw a causal conclusion in that case.

Re:How about a study that shows....

[sjames]

It is a granted right, not an inalienable natural right. It is supposed to be a bargain struck between the public and the artist. Through deeply unethical manipulation, the law no longer reflects such a fair and balanced bargain. It's little wonder that a growing portion of the public no longer respect it.

Re:Low standards

[caitsith01]

the obvious correlation between piracy and decreased music sales is intellectually dishonest

What's intellectually dishonest is asserting that there is an "obvious correlation".

A few points about music:

1. Supply is effectively infinite. There is always something new you haven't listened to yet. You could never consume it all in one lifetime of non-stop listening.

2. Copying music without a licence does not in any way imply that you would buy the relevant music. At most, it implies that you were sufficiently interested to invest about 10 seconds of your time and about 10 cents worth of bandwidth to "check it out".

3. Copying music without a licence does imply that you are interested in listening to music generally. The more you copy, the more interested you are. There are studies showing that the biggest "pirates" tend to be the biggest spenders on music.

4. In my experience, there is an extremely strong correlation between people copying music and people buying music. Specifically, many people now essentially "try before they buy". For example, someone might download an old Radiohead album. If they have any taste, they will be blown away by its quality. Next time Radiohead release a new album, they will be far, far more likely to buy it than they were before.

5. Most people have a reasonably hard limit of how much spending on entertainment they can "justify". Because the supply of new music is near infinite, people are likely to spend up to their limit on music and then copy thereafter (not as neatly as that, but psychologically).

6. IIRC there is evidence that the rise in on-line copying has actually improved music sales.

7. Music isn't like a car. You don't download one album, then not want another one for 10 years.

Three stories in a row?

[Grayhand]

Seems like a lot of wasted space. The bulk of the Slashdot community will never change their opinion and the other side won't change their opinion. The arguments are always the same so why is the subject matter worthy of three posts in a row? Yes they are slightly different but the responses aren't. We might as well run three posts in a row on Evolution verses Creationism. I'm not trying to troll but it seems like the whole thread ends up being redundant and we're into the second decade of the debate. There just has to be other tech stories to cover. There's lots of cool stuff going on in the maker community. Things like the Cube bringing slick professional 3D printing at an afordable price $1,299. http://cubify.com/cube/index.aspx Or a $249 vacuum former kit. http://www.phlatboyz.com/Phlatformer-Kit_p_10.html It just seems there's more happening in the tech world than limiting copyrights and the downloading fight. If some one comes up with a fresh slant on the subject I'm thrilled to hear it but the two sides are so far apart I don't see any compromise in the near future if ever. Just saying to the editors can we keep it to a couple of stories a day and space them out a bit?

Re:Three stories in a row?

[scourningparading]

The bulk of the Slashdot community will never change their opinion and the other side won't change their opinion. The arguments are always the same so why is the subject matter worthy of three posts in a row?

I often wonder why I even waste my time replying. There's often nothing factually incorrect about the comments in question. They're just differing opinions.

But I just can't help myself...

Re:Three stories in a row?

[Asmodae]

Are you implying that other news (in particular the Maker community) is not related? Currently they're still in the 'build the computer at home' hobbyist stage. In a few years where the tech and sophistication has increased dramatically such that basic parts and even some consumer electronics can simply be 'printed' at home for super cheap/free, this copyright fight will be very much in the same place as music/movie businesses are.

Re:Thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

So in summary:

Line of support #1: correlation without causal evidence. Based on what you've provided, the decline could very well be caused by the decreasing influence of the moon's gravity upon the earth as it slowly deorbits. "Don't thank me - thank the moon's gravitaitonal pull", as it were. Furthermore, I posit that as I have aged, my flatulent output has been steadliy increasing as music sales decline. Coincidence?! You decide.

Line of support #2: anecdote. Apparently, if you 'know plenty of people', why, that ought to be enough proof for anybody. What with only 7 billiion or so other people on this planet you presumably do not know, your 'plenty of people' that you know surely covers all the bases.

Line of support #3: projection. Since you do or think a certain thing, everyone else must be doing and thinking the same thing. Another term for this is narcissism, but that's putting it nicely.

Line of support #4: lack of use of iTunes music card. I'm not even sure what logical fallacy this falls under, but then again, I'm fairly sure this proves nothing. That's no worse than your other points, though.

Does that about cover it?

Please educate yourself on the meaning of 'evidence' and 'science' and then reassess your thoughts. These words do not mean what you think they mean; that much is obvious.

Re:How about a study that shows....

[Joce640k]

First of all, I happen to agree that distribution against the author's wishes is somewhat disrespectful.

Nobody is more disrespectful of the artists than the record industry.

The record industry has a long history of fiddling the accounts so the artists make approximately zero from record sales. If P2P has any effect it's to skews the accounting so the record execs make less. The artists will still make approximately zero, ie. it doesn't bother them much.

Who are these guys?

[Anonymous Coward]

Open up google and put in the following line:
"T. Randolph Beard" "George S. Ford" "Lawrence J. Spiwak"

Doing a quick google search using the names in the article shows something interesting. Articles on telecommunications, wireless, net neutrality threats, and a bunch of other stuff. What also pops up is this strange organization called Phoenix Center.

T. Randolph Beard (Professor of Economics, Auburn University)
George S. Ford (Chief Economist, Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies)
Lawrence J. Spiwak (President, Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies )

Do another google search with the following line:
site:www.phoenix-center.org pdf

This shows a whole bunch of articles behind this strange organization.

Re:How about a study that shows....

[Joce640k]

Yep.

And lets not forget the record industry isn't really very big. Gross yearly revenue is single digit billions of dollars. To you or me that's a lot of money but in the scheme of things it's a drop in the ocean. The amount of government time they've wasted over this is probably worth more, we should just buy them out and get it over with.

Their profits are a tiny fraction of the value of the Internet, it's certainly not worth wrecking the Internet for such a small amount, but that's what they're doing.

It's very hard to research

[Hentes]

Given the creative accounting of the entertainment industry, it's impossible to get meaningful numbers for a research like this. But then again, until they become frank with society, they shouldn't ask for any legislatory help from society either. The right thing to do would be to tell the entertainment industry to come clean with their numbers, otherwise no copyright enforcement law will be based on an informed decision. If they refuse, then just let them die, assuming they really are dying.

This agrees with "The Case for Copyright Reform"

[Christian Engstrom]

As a Member of the European Parliament for the Swedish Pirate Party, I have just published a short book (108 pages) on copyright reform together with Rick Falkvinge, who is the founder of the first and Swedish Pirate party.

The studies mentioned here seem to paint exactly the same picture as a number of studies that we refer to in that book. File sharing is not hurting revenues for the cultural sector. When we look at statistics for the last decade, with rampant file sharing on the internet, we see that more money is going into film, music, books, games and other culture than ever before, and that a larger portion of it is going to the artists and other creative people involved (as opposed to middle men such as the big record companies).

Two weeks ago we had a book launch for "The Case for Copyright Reform" in the European Parliament, and I have distributed a paper copy of it to each of the 754 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament).

Now all that remains to be seen is how many of my colleagues in the parliament will actually read it, but that's another story. ;)

If you are interested in checking out the book, you can download "The Case for Copyright Reform" (for free, obviously) from http://www.copyrightreform.eu/ You can also order a paper copy at cost price via print-on-demand, if you prefer that.

It is time that we start looking at copyright legislation in a fact-based manner, as opposed to the IPR fundamentalist way that has been dominant in this policy area so far on both sides of the Atlantic.

There is a better way.

Re:This agrees with "The Case for Copyright Reform

[Giant Electronic Bra]

So, got a schedule for the big world takeover? Really, I haven't seen even the faintest sign of fact-based ANYTHING in this country since 1980. Things are starting to go seriously wrong...

Re:How about a study that shows....

[erroneus]

You're painting this picture a little wrongly.

The war on drugs, alcohol, adultery and entertainment piracy fail primarily because the conflict too heavily with standard human behavior. Humans are exactly less than we idealize and we have flourished and prospered because of it.

Sure, it's true that copyright and rights holders are "wrong" and abusive, but it begs the question about why and how it is wrong -- the true core of what is wrong about it. It's the fact that it conflicts with the factors of human behavior and true human values that makes it wrong.

One of the most significant factor contributing to the rise of humans and technology is the fact that we NEED to share. It's not merely a want or a wish of the good-hearted, but an instinctive need just the same as our need to have sex and children and all that. It's not enough to say that knowledge wants to be free, it's that it needs to be free. And entertainment is just another form of knowledge... don't kid yourself.

And to push against human nature and especially human need is... well... it's just bad.

Re:How about a study that shows....

[erroneus]

That is a very interesting point. It needs to be explored. If it can be shown that the current intellectual property pursuits are a drain on government and the economy... oh wait, I think they already know that too.

That's why all of these "self-policing" laws are being made. The DMCA and many laws like it and the worse ones which keep coming are all designed to help make it easier to remove content. They almost completely remove due process and certainly avoids the courts interference.

Don't forget mixed tapes

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was a kid I used to make mixed tapes off the radio. Doing so has been and continues to be perfectly legal. Making mixed tapes certainly cost a lot of tape/cd sales when i was a kid. I don't particularly believe that recording radio streams over the internet is particularly different in that regard. Don't forget that, wrt demographics, you also just started aging out of the age group that tends to purchase lots of music so that would negatively impact your music purchases as well as napster/technology.

Re:Low standards

[Anonymous Coward]

7. Music isn't like a car. You don't download one album, then not want another one for 10 years.

I once downloaded a Justin Bieber song, and I don't want another one for at least 10 years.

Re:How about a study that shows....

[Hatta]

Copyright holders have no "rights". They have temporary privileges granted for the purpose of promoting the common good. When those privileges become contrary to the common good, they should be revoked. We are long past that point.

The deliberately misnamed "copyright" infringes on several inherent natural rights, e.g. free speech and property rights.

Re:How about a study that shows....

[EzInKy]

Sure, but out of respect I'll let you go first. Would you start with justifying why how one expresses an idea is a protected right in the first place?

Re:Low standards

[EzInKy]

I eagerly read your post looking for citations proving your claim of "obvious correlation between piracy and decreased music sales" and was very disappointed to find none! Certainly, since you say it is obvious, there has to be something you can provide to back up that assertion.

Re:Low standards

[EzInKy]

This is no time to be lazy!! You have decided to join the fight in one of the hottest and most controversial slashdots topics. Certainly you can afford to expend a little effort here!

Should artists (or anyone else) be paid like this?

[Covalent]

The question I'm always left asking is this: "Should artists be paid for recordings?"

In days past, performers made money for performing. They still do. There were no recordings on which to profit.

If ALL music were free as in beer and free as in liberty, surely artists would make less money. But would they go bankrupt? Many would still be multi-millionaires from concert ticket sales and merchandise alone. These would be the same artists with or without iTunes and CD sales.

So I ask: Should artists be paid for recordings? I think the answer is "No."

Lost sales is all your library or only some?

[swb]

Have you even estimated how much music you would have bought had you actually been more-or-less required to buy it?

It's one thing to have built a ridiculously large music library with non-paid downloads, but if you had to pay for it, how much of that library would you actually have paid money for?

I would consider what you *would* have paid for it vs. just some estimate based on how much music you actually have, as what you would have paid for is probably 25% of what you actually have, which more closely tracks or legitimizes what amount to actual lost income for the record industry.

I'd personally love to see a data-driven study of people with large music collections and as to how much they actually listen to their library. My guess is that people with large, non-paid libraries don't listen to much of it, having acquired it because it was easy & free.

Re:Low standards

[phantomfive]

lol it's the topic where pretty near everyone is a retard, and people get modded up for saying the dumbest things. There, my contribution is to call everyone a retard.

Re:Love for piracy

[tqk]

What I see here is that people have discovered "hey, I can download stuff for free" and then just make up all sorts of excuses like "RIAA suppresses innovation" to desperately justify what they are doing.

What I see here is your lack of reading comprehension. Some of us despise the *AAs for what they're doing to legislatures the world over. We despise them for their Hollywood accounting schemes that leave the real artists in debt to the distribution companies. The IP maximalists are making money hand over fist, so much so that they can afford to buy legislation favorable (they believe) to them, yet they're equally convinced that piracy is destroying their gravy train. They're like children running around with their fingers in their ears shouting, "Lalalalalala ..." They don't listen to reasoned arguments, and anyone who disagrees with them is assumed to be a pirate, by definition.

Some of us advocate boycotting everything even remotely related to the *AAs, hoping they'll just die and wither away troubling the world no further. The anti-piracy crusade these middlemen are on is immoral and abusive to artists and fans and to legal systems the world over, and I for one can't wait to see the back of them.

I won't buy their stuff, I won't steal their stuff, and I won't consume their stuff. I'm looking forward to the day the artists wise up and stop falling for their spiel. The artists don't need them when the Internet can do their distributing and marketing for them, and we certainly don't need the secondary effects of the anti-piracy crusade they're pushing.

Astroturf & sockpuppets

[EnergyScholar]

I was wondering whether someone was going to call the poster out for being an astroturfing sock puppet. While it may, or may not, be the case in this particular example, it shows that people are becoming more aware of the problem. This is a good thing.

I would like to point out that the marketing firms that provide astroturf/sockpuppet service have grown more sophisticated that has our awareness of the problem. For example, a competent sock-puppeteer will create the accounts YEARS in advance and fill them with occasional post so they look like real accounts. They now routinely create entire online ecosystems, including false debates & discussions, where they play multiple the critical roles with different accounts. Watch for this!

Re:Love for piracy

[Brannoncyll]

What I see here is that people have discovered "hey, I can download stuff for free" and then just make up all sorts of excuses like "RIAA suppresses innovation" to desperately justify what they are doing.

Do you like to unnecessarily pay for things you can get for free?

Re:Low standards

[Brannoncyll]

Cherry-picking sympathetic journals while not even addressing the obvious correlation between piracy and decreased music sales is intellectually dishonest.

And rejecting studies just because of where they were published, without any contrary evidence, would be intellectually lazy...

I'm not sure about that. It seems clear to me that a high degree of bias is likely from any report paid for by an interested party. Such documents then require much greater scrutiny in their facts and interpretation. Perhaps going to great lengths to analyse these documents for misinterpretation or skewed statistics would be warranted if there were not hundreds of other publications presenting results based on the same data but from an unbiased perspective. Its not like the numbers that these reports are based on are secret.

Re:This agrees with "The Case for Copyright Reform

[Beardo the Bearded]

I'll bookmark your comment for later.

Re:First...

[Eponymous Hero]

how ironic... at least he posted as AC...

Re:Thoughts

[brit74]

> Line of support #1: correlation without causal evidence.
Pirate logic seems to be "never blame piracy for anything". Stop working out and start overeating, you get fat. Hey, hey - it's just "correlation not causal evidence". I think the fact that music sales peaked exactly six months after Napster was released and has declined 60-70% in the intervening 10 years, leading to the lowest music sales in forty years is a bit suggestive.

> Line of support #2: anecdote. Apparently, if you 'know plenty of people', why, that ought to be enough proof for anybody. What with only 7 billiion or so other people on this planet you presumably do not know, your 'plenty of people' that you know surely covers all the bases.
Yeah, that makes sense. You have to test any theory on 7 billion people in order to be sure. Give me a break. If someone drinks antifreeze and they drop dead - hey, it's not proof of anything unless we get 7 billion other people to do the same thing.

> Line of support #3: projection. Since you do or think a certain thing, everyone else must be doing and thinking the same thing. Another term for this is narcissism, but that's putting it nicely.
Resorting to insults, huh? I like how you walk about "science" and "evidence" and then use personal insults against people you disagree with. I heard the most important science debates in history were settled with personal insults. Also, it's funny how everyone I know who's a big fan of piracy also stopped buying stuff. Again, more of the "never blame piracy for anything" nonsense, and throw in some personal insults just to screw the conversation.

> Line of support #4: lack of use of iTunes music card. I'm not even sure what logical fallacy this falls under, but then again, I'm fairly sure this proves nothing. That's no worse than your other points, though.
Considering that I'd be more likely to use a gift card to buy music than pay actual money, yet I still don't even bother with the gift card, I think it shows how easy access to music undercuts any desire to pay for it.

> Please educate yourself on the meaning of 'evidence' and 'science' and then reassess your thoughts. These words do not mean what you think they mean; that much is obvious.
How about if you cut the crap and admit that you like free shit and you have to rely on talking shit about anyone who disagrees with you.

I dont believe any of it

[Alimony Pakhdan]

Running small labels since before Napster has taught me that the freetards of the entitlement generation are no Robin Hoods, they take from the rich as well as the not rich.Every study seems to represent either the big industry or freetards POV and none of them seem to have any sort of rational methodology or business impact calculations.

statistics don't tell you everything

[issicus]

just because something has been downloaded doesnt mean its really been used. Its like collectors cards, some people just like to collect stuff. I doubt im the only one who has dled something and never played it.

Ancient Middlemen and the Commodification of Music

[unclefishbits]

Has anyone mentioned Louis CK and, now, Jim Gaffigan's successful $5 sales from their own websites? I think we see the future.... The middle man is the middle man as needed, but technology creates efficiencies. Online Travel Agents were good for hotels when distribution was a problem, but now, distribution is not the same problem and they are quickly becoming dinosaurs in lieu of new technology to create a simpler path to booking. Just the same, distributors of music were a necessary middle man, and like so many, retarded the process and made it inefficient. Record labels are dinosaurs. As soon as bands start selling direct, and "fame" is less about marketing dollars vs tried and true, grinding it out for a decade on tour, in a van, and building a real fanbase (instead of buying it).... it will be a warm and wonderful world of art and music, instead of commodification of art, and industry for profit. The labels did it to themselves by not following logic or data. The lies and secrets didn't help. I really hope they are paying attention to this.

Re:Should artists (or anyone else) be paid like th

[TranquilVoid]

How about other forms of IP?

Authors: should university text book writers be paid only for reciting?

Movie producers (the 'artist' here is a more nebulous concept): should they be paid only for cinema screenings? This fits with your musician example on the surface but consider if cinema operators were legally allowed to screen copies.

What this shows is that we (at least you from your post, not everyone) have some notion that artists should be able to potentially profit from their creations somehow. I think the textbook example shows an example where it would be virtually impossible. Similarly, consider a future where perfect holographic recording and broadcasting is possible on your smart phone. This would threaten the viability of live music performances too.

Your argument appears to be that artists should not be able to profit from recording (or control that right) because they can profit from performance. I have to admit I'm conflicted. The question is whether an artist should have the right to control copies of their creation (and if so for how long). You've brought up the interesting notion of why. Do we grant that right to allow profit or for deeper reasons of ownership?