Slashdot Mirror
Why Internet Pirates Always Win
An anonymous reader writes "Nick Bilton writes in the NY Times about how the fight against online piracy is 'like playing the world's largest game of Whac-A-Mole.' While this will come as no surprise to Slashdot readers, it's interesting to see how mainstream sources are starting to realize how pointless and ineffective the war on piracy actually is. Bilton writes, 'The copyright holders believe new laws will stop this type of piracy. But many others believe any laws will just push people to find creative new ways of getting the content they want. "There's a clearly established relationship between the legal availability of material online and copyright infringement; it's an inverse relationship," said Holmes Wilson, co-director of Fight for the Future, a nonprofit technology organization that is trying to stop new piracy laws from disrupting the Internet. "The most downloaded television shows on the Pirate Bay are the ones that are not legally available online." The hit HBO show Game of Thrones is a quintessential example of this. The show is sometimes downloaded illegally more times each week than it is watched on cable television. But even if HBO put the shows online, the price it could charge would still pale in comparison to the money it makes through cable operators. Mr. Wilson believes that the big media companies don't really want to solve the piracy problem.'"
wenches.
I am a Netflix subscriber in UK, yet I get less than half of the content that a US subscriber gets, even though I pay the same. Even when I want to watch the content that is available to me, it is not always easy. For example, I commute to work and that is the best time for me to maybe catch up on a TV series or a film. Yet, there is no easy way for me to access the content that I am already paying for as part my subscription. Streaming doesn't work particularly well on the intermittent 3G connection I get while commuting, so ability to play offline is an absolute must. Yet I find that there is no way for me to do so short of buying the same DVDs that I are already included in my subscription.
On the other hand, I could just pirate the content and it would work everywhere I need to play it without a hitch. So tell me again, how are you doing it right?
Good point! When you outlaw something you make everybody who uses that something an outlaw. I believe history has proven that making popular things illegal simply does not work in the long run. The US, being focused solely on quarterly profits and all, will probably never recognize this fact.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
While high-profile people (politicians, the press) occasionally pontificate about how "bad" piracy is - frequently under pressure from the vested interests who pull their strings, none of the ordinary people actually believe, or care.
The biggest reason that the general public are not on the side of defending copyright is partly because of the adversarial attitude the BIG media adopt, partly because BIG media are not seen as being sympathetic to their artists - who don't get to see much, if any, benefit from additional copyright fee collections, but mostly because ordinary people can't see any benefit to themselves.
If the copyright holders were to take a more sensible, open approach and show a direct link between the copyright fees they collect and real artists (not multi-millionaire celebs) making a living from those royalties - with maybe a small "fee" taken by the media businesses themselves, then I reckon the public would view copyright fees like restaurant tips - directly benefitting the people who merit them, rather than just buying a few more snorts of coke for some anonymous fat-cats.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The thing the article didn't mention is the collateral damage done by these "wars".
The fight against Internet Piracy brings along a whole lot of government corruption, privacy loss, wasted government time and money, etc.
No sig today...
What does an "Internet pirate" do? Capture IP packets and hold the bits for ransom?
The pirate bay is accessible from any geographical zone. No legal provider is. Piracy is my only way to get the US-centric references on Slashdot and Reddit.
Currently, only "piracy" (it used to be called sharing) venues understand what internet is : a transnational network designed to transmit information without geographical discrimination. There seems to be no legal venue who understood that feature. I want to be able to download a drm-less version of any French, English, Japanese version of any movie that is available. I'll pay for that, but I won't pay for something that is of lower quality than what piracy can provide. In particular, I'll refuse to pay for ads. I feel this is an unacceptable "fuck you" to have unskippable ads on a support you bought.
There are lot of laws to change, but not the ones copyright lobbyists focus on. They have to make it easier to make deals for international distribution. Seriously, geographical distribution deals have no sense nowadays. If you want a meaningful frontier, separate rights of different linguistic version, but don't prevent me from getting stuff in original version at the same time that most slashdotters have them available.
Thanks.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I'll drink to that ;)
Privacy is terrorism.
The problems is that those media companies are extremely greedy.
When people tend to say that the prices are high, you get the classic remark that a cost of zero is still more interesting then any price you would put onto a product. But I'm not that convinced. I'm sure there is a certain spot which you can convert people who download to paying customers.
I have about > 90 blu ray movies and a lot of box sets, but I do have my share of "free" stuff. The difference is that the things that I have bought come from sales (5 a 10€) or are imported from the UK and are the prices that I'm willing to pay.
The problem is that the "legal" way is just darn to expensive sometimes. For example I was searching for a particularly blu ray and they asked about 30 euro's for it (40 dollars) which I find way to high for 2 hours of entertainment. Then sorry I just rather take my sailboat and fish it out of the sea.
Unfortunately something that I witnessed is that the entertainment industry also seen the light and while in the beginning they dropped all the languages and subtitles on the blu ray - you know the sales argument everything could fit onto the disc - it seems they know are putting less languages and subtitles on to the disc mainly to discourage import.
I, for one, am not willing to wait a year until a badly dubbed version of season 7 appears here where I live. Fortunately, I can download a rip and watch it without violating anything, but even if I did, it still would have hardly stopped me. There's hardly any damage to be done by this.
Ezekiel 23:20
Making things illegal usually increases the profit margins.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
And if you look at the numbers, prohibition pushes those profits up very nicely. POV means a lot here. If prohibition didn't work, we wouldn't be living under it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
In this context the verb "works" requires an object.
You can't talk meaningfully about whether or not prohibition works unless you specify for whom.
As you pointed out it's working for somebody.
Before we had a handful of channels, and you could select which shows you wanted to watch from them. Then cable came out, and the variety increased, but so did the cost to the consumer, and so an increasing demand for a-la-carte channel selection came about. In some jurisdictions, recent changes have made true a-la-carte programming imminent.
But today, many people have very busy lives, and are often too busy to watch more than perhaps a handful of TV shows each week. It's far from unheard of for people to simply "cut the cord" and do without television entirely, simply because there are not enough programs on the available networks to justify the expense.
I think, therefore, the time is ripe that we need to move even beyond a-la-carte channel selection, and instead directly to a concept of subscribing to individual television programs - where you can choose exactly which programs you want streamed to your PVR, to be watched at your convenience anytime after they are broadcast (or during, of course). Why should a person pay the full price of having HBO available to them 24 hours a day, for example, if they are only ever interested in watching a single program on that station? Obviously, for anything more than a handful of shows on a given network, it would likely become more economical to simply subscribe to the entire station, but in an age where it's not very uncommon to find people who've cut off their cable entirely, simply because they found they were only watching TV a couple of hours each week, I think that this kind of model is going to make a lot of sense.
This would also have the upshot of giving tv show producers a clearer picture of just how many people are actually watching a given television show, basedon subscription figures. Instead of only monitoring which tv stations particular homes that are part of the Nielson group are tuned to at various times throughout the day, and deducing which TV programs that they are watching or recording, and then extrapolating that to deduce what the greater population is watching, they could instead know directly which programs that a potentially much larger demographic watch.
This wouldn't completely eliminate the need for things like the Nielson group, though... which would be capable of monitoring what time of day people are actually watching their televisions... information that would doubtless be of great value to both content creators and advertisers.
Just my 2c. Er... nickel. I understand Canada is getting rid of its penny within the year.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
So? Take it to a board that actually cares. It's off topic. It's trolling. Pick one.
Actually the likeness is accurate. The *AA can't change the game, but they can "cheat" by using a different mallet... However they seem to be misunderstanding how they could profit from this - they spend all their time changing the 'rules' so they get a bigger and bigger mallets, making them slower and slower and hitting less and less moles... in other words they care more about absolutely smashing the mole they target to bits than directly hitting the others. Their idea is that this will be a deterrent.
The idea of the peg-legged moles is best expressed in their own words:
"Arrrrrr!"
They can't really be THAT stupid after all this can they? Sure, the bottom feeders with their trolling and settlements are feeding furiously and all. But if the cable companies realize they need to give it away for free to stay in business, then the MPAA also must know what they need to do to remain relevant and in business... or that they can't.
Call me conspiracy theory nut, but I see this as a pretext to criminalizing and penalizing free speech on the internet. "Of course we never hear from AnonymousX or AnonymousY any more... they downloaded music and video and got busted..." Yeah... that's what happened I'm sure.
We *ALL* do it and if a few of us doesn't it's because they are idiots. When it becomes criminal to do what everyone does, then everyone becomes a criminal. See where this is going? "Felony filesharing!! You can't vote!! You can't work!! You can't live a decent life like the rest of us superior beings... go back and work for your slave wages under our justification."
Only when supply is limited and transport and distribution is perilous.
There is a finite (albeit large) supply of drugs at any given time and the transport and distribution is expensive and the penalties are severe. By contrast, since data is copyable, there is an unlimited supply, and while there are some perils in distribution in the form of law firms attempting to find the most egregious pirates, the average software pirate is unlikely to face peril even if known.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Yes, it's true that making content legally avaliable online would reduce piracy, but profits for content producers would be lower anyways. There're still no traditional TV broadcasters or movie producers that make more money online than with their traditional business, and there's no lack of experiments.
The crude truth is that the entertainment industry - especially movie, music and TV-show producers - simply need to realize that their profits, margins and salaries will never be what they used to be in the past. People, or "the market" if you prefer, don't want to spend the same amount of money they used to spend in the past for intangible entertainment products. It has been an overvalued industry for 70 years, with overpaid people and overgenerous investments. Now things are being rebalanced, sorry.
I find it shameful that PhDs in medicine who studied at top colleges for 10 years and save human lives make 100K a year, while drunk and drugs-addicted hollywood actors can make 10 millions per movie. It's unethical, ridiculous, unfair and now also unsustainable from a business perspective. The only sad thing is that the capitalistic system has postponed for decades what is happening now, and this proves how malfunctioning it is.
"That's why we have 'regionalism' for DVDs."
and why I made a LOT of money buying off brand china DVD players and region unlocking them. I made $150 off of a $99.00 DVD player on a regular basis LG was my favorite as it took me less than 20 minutes with a "upgrade" CD. I think half the DVD players in Dearborn,MI were ones I modified and sold.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They've finally alienated the entire political spectrum. I don't know a single conservative writer, thinker or activist that supports strong IP rights anymore. They've over-played their hand to the point that mainstream opinion on the political right is that they're the quintessential corporate Fascists over things like SOPA (conservative and libertarian publications were even more strident than the left over SOPA). If anything, the fact that so many people in Hollywood support big government policies and politicians while demanding the destruction of property rights and the Internet's infrastructure in the name of IP protection has made many of them think that our country needs to bankrupt all of them.
It's ironic how often I have to clear my nytimes cookies so that I can read their stupid newspaper. I guess a true Pirate would script that.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
On one hand we have a profitable entertainment industry (that people love and feed) who want to retain their profits
On the other hand we have a large group of people with a deluded sense of "entitlement":
- i shouldn't have to wait because I'm international
- i shouldn't have to watch advertising
- i shouldn't have to buy a whole cable package
- i shouldn't be limited to what device i watch it on
So lets be honest, we (and myself included) pirate because "we want", we know there is almost no chance of being caught and view it as victimless.
The NY Times article is interesting but is not going to change any of those fundamentals ...
The one thing that will change piracy is either technological block (which is unlikely) or the music model of cheaper prices. Music piracy decreased dramatically since the Napster days because of single track pricing and better infrastructure.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That threw me at first, too, but judging from the rest of that comment, I think the AC just made a typo. It's the only thing that makes sense. He probably meant "The majority of Pirates pirate because they can't afford to buy the products," intended to spell "cant" without an apostrophe and didn't hit the T hard enough.
AC should get an account, he'll never see your response.
Free Martian Whores!
HBO is owned by Time Warner cable. HBO costs $15 a month. Time Warner won't let HBO do a standalone subscription online because they would lose the sweet money from cable subscriptions and partner agreements.
If HBO were allowed to charge a subscription fee for access to HBO GO without subscribing to cable, I would pay it as would many others.
The reason they won't do this is because HBO GO relies on the delivery infrastructure of cable and satellite providers exclusively.
I have never seen a company so unwilling to sell their service to a market of people willing to buy.
This is why we need communications regulations and a stronger FCC.
They're using their grammar skills there.
HBO's online offerings are only available to subscribers in the United States who are also customers of a specific list of cable/satellite TV companies.
That doesn't really help the subscriber in Australia or Europe. Why are those customers unable to stream/download content that their American counterparts can? Why are the same shows delayed by days or weeks in non-US countries?
The present copyright regime allows for strip mining of public demand and turning it into bonds and equities, it does not pay creators for the most part, except to the extent they are advertising delivery vehicles.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
What never comes up is that most pirated content gets paid for, eventually. I say 'most' because content that is out-of-print will of course not get paid for.
But BigBlockBuster movie comes out in theatres on the big screens; if you download it, you can see it now on your smaller screen and not pay for it. I can see you do this for a movie that is mainly people talking to each other, but not for a movie like the Hobbit, Star Trek "2", etc. It's up to the creator to make it interesting to go out and see it on the big screen, not because that's the only option you have, but because it's so AWESOME. That requires quite a bit of "umdenken" on Hollywood's part.
If you have what's here the Movie Network package (mine includes HBO Canada), once that movie is premiered on TMN, you paid the creators through your subscription dollars. At that moment in time, the 'damage' is undone: you watched the movie on your small screen, and you paid for it. After that, it will appear on a premium cable channel you might subscribe to (pay or pay again). Then it will appear on the regular OTA channels (carrying fee and/or advertising dollars generated through products you buy). After that it will appear every now and then on various channels, again advertising dollars.
Unless you're really off the consumer radar, eventually some of your money will end up with the creators of content, like it or not (i.e. Uwe Boll movies on Netflix).
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Because enforcement costs them nothing.
The cost of achieving an equilibrium between legal and pirated content online depends on the marginal cost of the enforcement needed to secure that one additional copy. But since that costs them (essentially*) zero, their response is to have the gov't pursue everyone.
*Lobbying for SOPA and PIPA is relatively cheap, considering what a Congressman goes for in the used market these days.
Have gnu, will travel.
HBO's online offerings are only available to subscribers in the United States who are also customers of a specific list of cable/satellite TV companies.
That doesn't really help the subscriber in Australia or Europe. Why are those customers unable to stream/download content that their American counterparts can? Why are the same shows delayed by days or weeks in non-US countries?
Good point. The region concept for content is complete garbage. I've got a friend who recently moved from the US to Greece. He's having a hell of a time getting content over there. I believe he finally resorted to using a VPN provider.
it's not that we are cheap. it's that we want what we pay for. my example:
i started watching White Collar on netflix last year. netflix had seasons 1 & 2. after i was done, i realized that season 3 was already halfway done airing. there was no way to watch the first couple of episodes, and i have a subscription to comcast (95% of its offerings). "i'll wait it out", i said to myself. low and behold it's now 2012. i see a commercial for season 4 coming to tv in a few months. "great! that means season 3 should be available, so i can catch up in time". nope. i even had a subscription to hulu plus this time. so here i was forking over money to 3 different subscription services and not 1 will give me what i want. hulu's website eventually got season 3, in low bitrate, website only streaming. (side note: these idiot companies can't even realize that streaming == streaming. they have to have different licensing for computer and phones/consoles/other devices. that is fucking retarded.) anyway, i found they were also streaming from usanetwork.com in slightly better quality. i did cancel my hulu plus, because they weren't giving me what i wanted. after watching about half of the episodes on the website, i stumbled across them in the comcast hd on demand folder and finished them up in the quality i have been paying for. what did learn? i'm paying way too much for way too little. next time, i am going to just torrent the stuff. after all, i am already paying for them, so why the fuck not. i'm surely not going to pay dvd prices for itunes' drm shit that i can't lend/sell/etc when i am done. if they are going to remove what i can do with the stuff, they are going to have to be a lot cheaper that $1.99/episode. it's not even a matter of convenience anymore with the ubiquity of the internet these days.
...
government is the source of all problems in the market!
without government around, the large players will treat small players and consumers nicely!
free market fundamentalist WHARGARBBBLLL...
(the last remark should indicate that i am being facetious to those who are humor impaired)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
i guess what i mean is that anything i could have dvred should be available in the same quality for the entirety of my subscription. that is not asking a whole lot. throw some commercials in it and the content providers get paid. (side note: one of by biggest beefs with comcast's on demand stuff in when the commercials during the show are for the show i am watching. man! that show looks really good. maybe i should wat...oh... fucking derp. no wonder this industry has so much idiocy.)
...
marijuana, alcohol, lsd, mushrooms, etc., should be legal because they do not easily addict (although you shouldn't use drugs that produce strong hallucinations without a babysitter, and the irresponsible assholes that do will mean these drugs will stay illegal)
but strongly addicting and inebriating substances (this excludes nicotine, because it is not strongly inebriating), such as heroin, cocaine, meth, etc., when made easily and freely available, become the "solution" to many more people for the average problems of life, to the point they can no longer maintain a job and a relationship, and the "solution" becomes a much larger life destroying problem
of course, you can still get these drugs, but there are financial and distribution barriers to acquiring them, which means these drugs destroy far less lives than if they were legal and freely available. the war on drugs will never be perfect. that's not the point. marijuana should be made legal and the highly addicting and inebriating substances should be focused on more effectively. to simply keep the addict population as low as is possible. that's the point
also of course, for those who are addicted, HEATH CARE, not incarceration, is the key to rebuilding destroyed lives
but i will never understand, and never respect, the blind idealistic opinions of people who only consider the evil effects of prohibition on society, and do not consider the far greater evil effects of highly addicting + inebriating drugs themselves on destroyed lives. and for those of you who say it is your right to destroy your life if you want, you don't ever do that in a vacuum, you drag your family, friends, community, and random innocents who you hit with your car while inebriated or you wind up stealing from to support your habit (right, like government should hand out free drugs, like i want my tax dollars to bankroll your empty life: no i want to bankroll your recovery)
no one has infinite willpower, everyone has moments of weakness, and most people don't act with responsibility (especially in regards to drugs, since that is the whole point: escape from responsibility and the stress). and when something like cocaine or heroin or meth becomes more easily available during those times of weakness we all have because some magically thinking society made them legal, you have introduced a permanently hobbling deficit on many more people's lives. if you don't understand this phenomenon, stop talking about drug policy, as you know absolutely nothing about drugs, or are being dishonest in the service of your own blindness on the subject, perhaps even your own addiction or addictive personality
more than war, slavery, government brutality: drugs have destroyed more human lives in the history of homo sapiens. understand that, or understand nothing about the subject
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You go off the rails the moment you acknowledge the fact that this material is available on DVD. The fact that it is on DVD means that it is already in a format suitable for streaming.
If not for other laws that try to strip us of our personal property rights, the technology to "build our own iTunes" would be commonplace. We would not need Amazon or iTunes because we could all do for ourselves with minimal fuss or effort.
It's like Music CDs: it's already digital.
If that list of yours seems rediculous then I suggest it is only because you have no understanding of what's being discussed here.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_(mean_physical_harm_and_mean_dependence).svg
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the solution is NOT "to take the regulating power away from the government"
the solution is to have genuine effective regulating power. i didn't say it was easy. the opiate of corporate cash makes it hard
but take away regulating power, and then nothing remains between the monopoly/ oligopoly and complete subjugation of the consumer and domination of the market by abuse of smaller upstart competitors by the big players
i never understood this insane idea that so many people have:
"the government is sick so let's kill the government and reward all power to the disease that sickens it"
seriously?!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Wow no sense of humor. To make things worse, you are using DEA's death in the line of duty as an attempt to score some political points within a geek forum. I'd think it would have been more appropriate to talk about how the current administration seems to be kowtowing to the MPAA/RIAA.
Anyway since you did bring it up and you act like Obama authorized the killing of the agent and all investigations of organized crime weapon smuggling are completely safe. I'd like to point out that DEA agents have a dangerous job and we should be thankful that we have people who are willing to endanger themselves to keep the rest of us safe. Sometime miscalculations will be made and people get killed. We need to learn to differentiate the difference between authorizing the program at large, and making decisions out in the field. Time magazine did a very interesting article on the subject, you can google it.
The problem I have with your assertion is that I haven't seen any evidence that another president would have done anything differently. Fast & Furious was started under the Bush administration. This fact doesn't absolve Obama since he reauthorized it but it does show that both party administrations would have continued the program. Obama has the misfortune of (1) a major fuck up happening during his watch and (2) an opposing political party looking to manufacture any scandal possible to discredit his presidency.
Instead of focusing like a laser asking "what if" and pretending that another president would do something different, how about looking at both candidates and asking "who's the better choice overall". The republicans appear to be afraid of this comparison. Which is unfortunate, since I remember a time when a candidate won the election by a landslide with a platform of change and hope. Now we have both candidates campaigning on fear, uncertainty and doubt.
It's bad enough the presidential election is a contest between the lesser of two evils. Don't add false dichotomies to the election rhetoric.
Anyway I find it sad that Obama's opponents are focusing so much on an operation that resulted in a death of one DEA agent. I guess they want to distract us from a previous republican administration decision that killed and maimed thousands of US soldiers, and resulted in large amounts of currency and weapons to be unaccounted for in a hostile country. Sadly the current operations aren't the first time.
While we are on the subject of the supposed outrage from the right, here's some food for thought. The most revered republican president (Reagan) sold weapons to the enemy of the state (Iran) and then tried to cover it up. They were using the proceeds to fund the Nicaraguan Contras. In their attempt to cover up their shenanigans, they shredded countless documents and lied to congress. The central figure of the scandal (Oliver North) was herald as a hero for carrying out the plan and sacrificing his military career to cover it up. The whole scandal landed him a job at Fox news.
My final point being beware of taking one political party's bullshit as gospel.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
No, pot is illegal so the tools for the war on drugs can be sold.
(Puts tinfoil hat on)
It already is. A top 5 album in the UK will typically net you £5k-£10k, less than minimum wage if you only produce one a year. If you're lucky to have two hit albums in a year then it's better than working as a waiter, but not by a lot.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
no, arguing with A.L.I.C.E. would make more sense
furthermore, computers may some day persuasively mimic an intelligent person, but i propose a corollary to the turing test:
no computer could ever sound as stupid as a genuine human moron. genuine human-style stupidity is far more difficult to fake than human intelligence
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There are no higher values than peace, justice and praise of God in Judaism.
Not that you know anything about it, other than that you hate Jews. Now do you.
I don't know about this. For the bigger artists, yes, that seems to have been the deal; the record companies basically take all the money from album sales because of their usurious interest-rate "advances", so artists really don't make much money on those, and make real money doing tours.
However, for independent artists, the math is probably very different. Remember, if you're a big band like The Rolling Stones, everyone knows who you are because of decades of promotion and album sales, so when you play a concert, thousands of people line up to buy tickets. If you're some little local band, no one's going to pay a dime to see your concert; at best, some local restaurant will pay you $250 to play a gig there one evening. Divided 4 or 5 ways among the band members, that's not exactly a lot of money. However, many times, local performers will sell their own CDs after the performance for $10 or $15. It's cheap these days to have your own CD professionally made in quantities of 1000 or so, and it's not that hard to do the recording yourself with a PC and get decent results; you don't need some ridiculously expensive recording studio like you did decades ago, and even if you do want to go that route for better quality, it's possible to rent time at studios. So these small-time artists probably make most of their money selling their own independently-produced CDs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Deal
so much of the argument about regulation and monopolies in the USA is just so many Americans unfamiliar with their own history in the Gilded Ages.
Just read your history folks. The USA is currently repeating history because we seemed to have forgotten our lessons the last time we had little regulations and large corporations were allowed the trample our rights and our livelihoods. there was a backlash, as people were poisoned, abused, and impoverished. it seems we now have to do go through that backlash all over again, because so many fools distrust the government so strongly, and don't even think about the real threat: corporations
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hell I'm finding out that it is frankly cheaper to go into one of the indie studios than it is to even record yourself with the PC. We have a nice 16 track digital recorder and when you figure in the mikes, the time required to get a decent mix, any gear you may have to rent, frankly its cheaper to go into the studio as there are plenty of indie studios that charge anywhere from $35-$60 an hour and that includes having a good engineer running the board.
So while I agree that its cheap to go DIY and sell your own CDs and shirts there is a point where DIY becomes the worse way to go. i've heard CDs done by musicians with a PC and those done by the smaller indie studios and frankly the indies sound a hell of a lot better than the DIY CDs. Just because you are a good singer or guitarist does not mean you're a good mixer or engineer.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.