Having fully read the article and read a number of the replies I'm quite amazed at how many people seem to think it is ok to download music, that they are doing no wrong. This idea that because something exists in a digital rather than a physical form means that by copying it you are not harming the industry is crazy.
Imagine you are an aspiring writer and you've written a book in the hope you can quit your job to pursue your dream. Now imagine someone got a copy of that book and distributed it online and everyone read it, no one paid for it, and you still had to work in your crappy job. Sure the money is not the main motivation for an artist, but in our society when we find someone with talent we don't mind paying them (often greatly) so that they can enrich and entertain our lives. Someone else can pack groceries.
If you think an album is over priced or a musician is untalented then don't buy it. But don't download it and claim some moral high ground. Yes the RIAA is rich and powerful, but that doesn't make stealing from them is right. Granted the DMCA goes too far, but using Kazaa all the time won't change that. You can pedantically pick apart some of Matt Openheim's sentences out of context all you like, but if you're listening to music, or watching a movie that you haven't paid for, how can you say with honesty that you are helping and supporting an industry?
Peer to peer technology is great and can be used for legitimate reasons. Let's not be naive though, it's main use is for piracy.
One issue that I haven't seen raised is the issue of a persons working memory, which is basically their short term memory.
A Harvard psycologist called George Miller wrote a paper in the 1950's called 'The Magic number seven plus or minus two'. Basically his research showed that most people can handle seven memory chunks at a time in their short term memory, with an error +/- 2.
So if you asked a random person to remember 3-4-2-7-8-1-9 most people could for a few minutes. Because we're dealing with memory chunks most people would also be able to remember 333-444-222-777-888-111 (with the last bit of memory to remember that each is repeated three times.
This is why phone numbers are seven digits long. So as most postcodes/zip codes are less than seven digits it allows people to remember addresses. If you had a ten digit code it would be very hard for people to remember the address of someone you were talking to on the phone for example and didn't have a pen and paper handy. It is an important social factor to consider that impacts everyone, regardless of your nationality.
Slashdot Mirror
Having fully read the article and read a number of the replies I'm quite amazed at how many people seem to think it is ok to download music, that they are doing no wrong. This idea that because something exists in a digital rather than a physical form means that by copying it you are not harming the industry is crazy. Imagine you are an aspiring writer and you've written a book in the hope you can quit your job to pursue your dream. Now imagine someone got a copy of that book and distributed it online and everyone read it, no one paid for it, and you still had to work in your crappy job. Sure the money is not the main motivation for an artist, but in our society when we find someone with talent we don't mind paying them (often greatly) so that they can enrich and entertain our lives. Someone else can pack groceries. If you think an album is over priced or a musician is untalented then don't buy it. But don't download it and claim some moral high ground. Yes the RIAA is rich and powerful, but that doesn't make stealing from them is right. Granted the DMCA goes too far, but using Kazaa all the time won't change that. You can pedantically pick apart some of Matt Openheim's sentences out of context all you like, but if you're listening to music, or watching a movie that you haven't paid for, how can you say with honesty that you are helping and supporting an industry? Peer to peer technology is great and can be used for legitimate reasons. Let's not be naive though, it's main use is for piracy.
One issue that I haven't seen raised is the issue of a persons working memory, which is basically their short term memory.
A Harvard psycologist called George Miller wrote a paper in the 1950's called 'The Magic number seven plus or minus two'. Basically his research showed that most people can handle seven memory chunks at a time in their short term memory, with an error +/- 2.
So if you asked a random person to remember 3-4-2-7-8-1-9 most people could for a few minutes. Because we're dealing with memory chunks most people would also be able to remember 333-444-222-777-888-111 (with the last bit of memory to remember that each is repeated three times.
This is why phone numbers are seven digits long. So as most postcodes/zip codes are less than seven digits it allows people to remember addresses. If you had a ten digit code it would be very hard for people to remember the address of someone you were talking to on the phone for example and didn't have a pen and paper handy. It is an important social factor to consider that impacts everyone, regardless of your nationality.