"I think it could be argued that you're sending some data... Its just that their client happens to apply some algo to it that happens to put it together in the style of a MP3/OGG or something else."
This would be about as useless as a child pornographer arguing that all they did is send JPEGs; it was the client who just happened to put it through a JPEG decompresser.
The laugh test applies to this one. If you're using a tool to break copyright law -- any tool -- the particulars of the storage mechanism don't mean much.
"There was an earlier/. article where a fellow showed that economically the nation is better served by shorter copyrights."
Interesting... my understanding is that the US is in favor of long copyrights because our IP is one of the only things we have left in this information age -- as Neal Stephenson put it: music, movies, software and high speed pizza delivery. I would like to see a dissenting viewpoint; does somebody have a link to that earlier article?
"The fact that Yoko Ono can be a near-billionaire for John's shaking his head and playing music should reveal how far gone copyright has become. Under the old-old standard (14 years plus 14 years), the Beatles' music would have all been public domain already."
This actually serves as an excellent example of how many people believe that strong copyright equals economic power. Yoko's sitting on all that cash and she's a U.S. resident. More to the point, she spends that money in the US and pays taxes on it. You're right that if we rolled back copyright to the 18th century standards, we'd all get to have all the free Beatles music that we want. The invisible hand being what it is, the economic benefactors would be whomever could provide it to us the most cheaply. The Beatles catalog would be available on CDs imported by Chinese corporations, and downloadable from countries where bandwidth is cheap. That whimpering sound you heard might not be Yoko softly crying in anguish, but the slow death of the USA's information-driven economy.
Having a strong economy isn't the end-all, be-all, and perhaps the unwashed masses don't really care about big-picture things like this -- so perhaps cheaper Beatles music is better for society as a whole in the short term. But, here's the thing: cheap Beatles music would not affect my life one bit. I can already buy the Beatles catalog in its entirety for a small fraction of my paycheck. It's not like it's air or water. But clean air and clean water are important to me, and I rely on the government's help for those. If a rollback to a 28-year copyright system resulted in a 1% reduction in the GNP next year because our entertainment money started going toward Russian download sites and Chinese CD pressing plants, we might not notice the effects right away, but those points add up. We might all be boiling the frog slowly while we enjoy our cheap Beatles music.
"I RTFA and others to try and find out if this woman actually did try to SELL the music (not the kind of "piracy" I am guilty of on a daily basis) but I could find nothing. I don't know where the OP who are so against her are getting their info. Can anyone please confirm if she is being sued for downloading music or if it is a much more serious case of "real piracy"?"
You've misunderstood the relevant definition of the word "piracy." It's much more broad than you thought. E.g. dictionary.com:
the unauthorized reproduction or use of a copyrighted book, recording, television program, patented invention, trademarked product, etc.: The record industry is beset with piracy.
Note that there's no requirement that you sell it.
See also the Wikipedia disambiguation page for the word "piracy" : it refers to "copyright infringement," and not "copyright infringement for profit" or "the sale of pirated goods."
I hope this helps. To beat the enemy (creators of intellectual property) we have to be smart; misusing words (either deliberately or otherwise) doesn't help.
"This should have been thrown out. I say this because if she is honest and there was never Kazaa software or other p2p software on her machine, doesn't that automatically make her innocent?"
You see, that's the thing: she wasn't honest. One of the things that nailed her was her use of the same "Tereastarr" username on all of her accounts, including the Kazaa account that was in use at her IP address.
She also plays with words a bit. She states that Kazaa wasn't installed on her new hard drive. That's not relevant, as she got her hard drive replaced after the infringement occurred. Your statement that there was "never Kazaa software on her machine" is incorrect; it was on her machine before she replaced the hard drive.
Have the record companies gone after truly innocent people who weren't pirates? You bet; I'm sure of it. But Jammie did it. She's a poor example of a defendant for us to be rallying around.
"Well, if you think paying $20 for a DRM'ed CD full of crappy, with low-audio quality music at the same price that a vinyl disc in the old times is NOT a ripoff, then I ask what the fuck are YOU on."
I'm curious where the $20 came from. CDs haven't been priced at $20 in the US for years; the average price of the top selling CDs on Amazon is around $10 or $11. Did you really think CDs cost $20 when you wrote this, or did you inflate it to make a point?
I'm also not sure what you mean about "at the same price that a vinyl disc in the old times". LPs hit a high of $13 - $15 before their demise in the mass market, but that was in era of the late 80s and the early 90s. I suppose if you ignore the effects of inflation, then CDs are about the same price today (actually, a few dollars less), but remember that the $13 you paid for an album in 1990 would be more than $20 in today's dollars -- so, music prices have fallen by about 50%.
The Trent Reznor quote you provided was in response to over-inflated music prices in Australia, where they are considerably more expensive than they are in the US. What did you mean that this is "proof" that the RIAA isn't representing the artists? Are you aware that the RIAA doesn't have anything to do with retail pricing in Australia? And, this is the big one -- what's the point? Everybody knows that the RIAA represents the interests of the labels. But the troubling thing is that tou seem to be using it as justification to pirate music in the USA, as well. Is this correct?
"I'd also be careful of any of the "statistics" the RIAA puts forward, especially when they consider "lost revenue" to mean "the money we could have earned if every tune downloaded was paid for" - this reasoning is as flawed as it is irrealist."
Can you cite an example? I've seen plenty of examples where Slashdotters incorrectly claim that such a study makes such an assumption (ie. Straw Man fallacy), but what I'm looking for is an actual study that was based on this flawed reasoning.
"Actually, this study just confirms common sense. People who are interested in music both DOWNLOAD and BUY CD's. Duh. One would EXPECT a very strong correlation between the two. All this study has down is to show that the positive correlation driven by interest is larger than the negative correlation of p2p (presumably) decreasing CD sales. It has not in any way shown that this correlation does not exist."
Great point. To amplify this, there's the factor which researchers call "social desirability", in which the subjects being interviewed tend, as a group, to give answers which they think are "right" or which they think the researchers want to hear. An oft-referenced example is the asking of men and women how many sexual partners they've had. Heterosexual men report higher numbers than heterosexual women due to the social implications; one does not need a master's in combinatorics to see how this cannot match up with reality.
This is significant to this situation because many people don't really want to acknowledge that piracy has replaced sales for them. And if they do, they come up with stereotypes to anneal any potential guilt: artists aren't paid enough, so it's OK. Artists are paid too much, so it's OK. Record company employees are bad people, so it's okay. The record industry business model is moribund, thus it's OK because it's simply manifest destiny. And so on.
Thus, in short: I think a certain number of respondents in the P2P group are simply lying about the number of CDs they purchase. I have no idea of the magnitude to which this skews the results, but for me, this study is no more reliable than many studies which show that P2P usage does result in fewer CD sales.
"Contrary to common practice, KC owns the copyrights to their work."
It's more common than you might think. Plenty of musicians own the publishing and performance rights to their work. If they don't, the rights are often owned by a management company that's not connected to a label.
The interesting thing is that this difference between distribution rights and publishing rights was a major hitch in online music sales getting off of the ground. Record companies couldn't simply put legacy stuff up for sale without breaking the law (as we apparently see in this EMI case); they had to get permission from the singer and/or songwriter or their agent or heirs. As recently as a couple of years ago it was common to find eight of ten tracks of a CD available for download; the other two were held up because, say, the lyricist for that song wouldn't give permission.
A common reaction among P2P users at the time was "Well, if the [bad word here] record company won't make the music available for legal download, they deserve what they get and I'll exercise my God-given right to have the entire Turtles catalog for free." But ironically enough, it was often the [bad word here] artist who was holding things up.
Nowadays, virtually all new recording contracts include digital distribution clauses. But as EMI has found out the hard way, there are still a few holdouts.
He was correcting an earlier post claiming that the RIAA named themselves thusly to avoid bad press, presumably from lawsuits. The GP was explaining that for most of the RIAA's existence, it's been responsible for rather mundane things like certifying gold and platinum record sales and publishing the equalization standards. Ever seen one of those gold records framed in a black shadow box? It has a big "RIAA" label on it. Remember the "RIAA equalization curve" term from your analog hi-fi days? The very same RIAA.
You appear to be very concerned with accounting chicanery on behalf of the record companies -- as well you should be, particularly if you are a signed artist. But I am not sure how it is germaine. And your "puhleez" and your hostile tone seem misguided here.
"Hmm... I guess I must not be keeping up with the changing definition of Pirate -- my immediate thought was, "wait a minute, the people mass producing the discs with the old code can still do so; the old code doesn't cease to be valid...." Then I realized you were talking about people ripping a legally purchased video to a DRM-less format, not people mass distributing discs for profit."
It hasn't changed. The definition is pretty broad. e.g. dictionary.com:
to use or reproduce (a book, an invention, etc.) without authorization or legal right: to pirate hit records.
Of course, I know that many people have their own definitions. If I understand you correctly, the definition you favor includes only those who are mass producing (presumably counterfeit) discs. This presumably means that if you're ripping the occasional DVD or downloading the occasional torrent, you're not really a "pirate" according to the definition you choose to accept. Fair enough -- but it's important to understand that the word's actual definition does encompass what you're doing.
For what it's worth, the Wikipedia disambiguation page agrees with the dictionary. Wikipedia being the democratic, egalitarian free-for-all that it is, if you have a spare moments, why not update that page and change "Copyright infringement" to "mass distribution of discs for profit"? It's apparent that your definition is not the widely accepted one, but I could very well be wrong.
"That sounds like a lot of work. I think I'll just use another ISP.:P"
I believe that is what Comcast wants. With fewer folks like you on their network, their average bandwidth consumption per customer goes down, and they have to process fewer DMCA letters.
I know, I know -- we all only use it for Linux distros -- but you see my point.
"a rat is a rat anywhere in the world... and we all know what happens to rats. america promotes the culture of 'telling on someone', ratting on your friends to save ur ass, or make money. please dont admire a rat."
Meanwhile TorrentSpy is right up there with Mother Theresa, eh?
This is all wrapped up neatly with a nice pretty bow as long as you don't consider for a second that TorrentSpy is in the very profitable business of helping people get stuff without permission. If you try to explain that TorrentSpy's charter was to provide better access to Linux distros or other material that doesn't infringe on others' rights, then you are lying. They're in the business of piracy, and business is good.
"Trying to sow FUD about file sharing through this etymological fallacy only proves the *AA's level of desperation, and your defense of their crimes against language only proves you're a tool. "piracy" applied to file sharing is the same as a godwin: it's making a mountain out of a molehill."
I was a software pirate (cracking as well as collecting) in the 1980s; I wore the badge proudly. As do the millions of fans of The Pirate Bay. The homonym (or, if you prefer, homophone) has existed for several centuries now; much longer than you, I or the RIAA have been around.
I think it's you who are splitting hairs. Software/movie/music piracy is piracy; acquiring your warez via "file sharing" vs. the old-school methods doesn't make it anything else. It's still got the look, demeanor and distinctive quack. File sharing is simply the latest technological tool that allows you to trade warez. The net result is the same.
"I'm sorry, but, if it's FREE, then it's not really PIRACY."
Popular understanding of the term "copyright" is that it refers to one's exclusive "right" to how something is "copied" (hence "copyright"). Does your understanding differ?
Putting on my Nostradamus hat for a second (although I will not write this as a quatrain), my guess is that we'll see your argument a lot more in the future. Many pirates claim that they have a moral allowance to pirate music because it's outrageously priced at a buck a track, and claim (disingenuously, of course) that they'll start buying when the price hits ($_CURRENTPRICE - $_ARBITRARYVALUE). When that day comes, I suppose the argument will be "Well, now it's practically free, so if I just help myself to the torrent, it's not really piracy now, is it?"
Good explanation of the AHRA, but the original poster is Canadian.
"Basically, his point was this - if he's paying royalties on every player, recorder, and blank music cd he buys to compensate for the piracy he is assumed to commit, then shouldn't he have the right to commit said piracy? In other words, if you are going to be punished for a crime whether you commit it or not, then why should you be punished again when you actually do?"
That's stretching it way too far. Here in the US we pay taxes and levies on countless items. Our firefighters and policemen are paid courtesy of the taxes we pay; our roads are maintained courtesy of taxes we pay at the pump. But smart people know that this doesn't give us the legal or moral right to commit arson or to go at the road with a pick axe, no matter how we try to spin these taxes and levies as "punishment" for these crimes.
I think the Canadian levy is completely lame. Music is cheap enough; they don't need a socialized music system. And, it's unfair, as the money goes to Canadian artists while Canadian music is likely a fraction of the music pirated by Canadians. But the original poster is a self-serving whiner who is apparently uncomfortable with acknowledging that he pirates to save money.
"I pay a tax every time I buy a blank CD. If that doesn't that give me the right to "pirate" my MP3's then what is it for?"
You know as well as I do that only Canadian artists get the money. Radiohead is not a Canadian band.
Pirate all your music if it feels like the right thing to do -- but don't think that the levy gives you any sort of moral justification to do so, and don't believe for a second that the levy goes the bulk of the musicians whose work you pirate.
"It seems only that the RIAA has sued 'usenet.com'. Apparently the RIAA thinks this is the end of the matter, and usenet.com, being a private entity, will settle everything, for everyone?"
I'm not even sure where you got that idea. They're going for the precedent. Once they got a ruling that one of the P2P services was illegal, they were able to shut down several more. They're looking for that first domino amongst the Usenet feed providers.
Re:Ahh crap-DISMANTLE ONE SERVER AT A TIME
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RIAA Sues Usenet.com
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"The truth is that the RIAA truly believes that they are more important than absolutely everybody else in the world!"
When it comes to protecting the rights of their members, yeah. The AMA is more important than everybody else in the world regarding the interests of the doctors who are its members; the Ferret Protection Society is more important than anybody else in the world when it comes to ferret rights, and so on.
Pick a cause, and you'll find somebody who's defending it. Even causes we don't like.
"We have already seen that most of those that pirate music still purchase CD's - in fact we consistently see that those that pirate music are the *highest* purchasers of music."
Yet piracy is exploding, while CD sales are dropping.
I think there's a bit of confirmation bias going on here -- we want to feel good about piracy, so we keep repeating stuff like the above. When somebody tells us that their piracy has led them to purchase more music, we remember it. When we meet somebody who (like many of my friends) acknowledges that they stopped buying music once they discovered that they can simply get it for free, we tend to forget this fact quickly, as it is not congruent to the "pirates purchase more music" meme.
My grandmother does not pirate music. She does not buy music, either. My brother now pirates 100% of his music, but might have bought a CD once or twice in his life. There you have it -- non-pirates buy zero music, and pirates buy some music. We can use this as evidence that pirates purchase more music, but it's intellectually dishonest.
"Do you really think Amazon is making $4 on an $8 digital download sale? I don't think so..."
Nope; as I covered in my first sentence, they make 15 points on the sale. I'm highly confident that my estimate is accurate to within a few points. This in itself rules out going too crazy with the pricing; I used the $4 / $8 to make the math simple for my little rant on net margins and elasticity. So to address your last point, I don't think Amazon will be having steep price breaks on sales.
Agreed that there are likely others like you for which the point that they leave P2P behind is perhaps $4.00 or so for an album. But the record industry doesn't have to go that low. Let's say for sake of simplicity that the record company's total amortized expenses per album are just $1.00 beyond the royalties (obviously not a real-world situation; a lot of work goes into producing and marketing an album). But anyway, mechanical royalties are mandated by law to be $0.08 each for the composer and lyricist; more if there are performers who aren't either. If you assume that the total royalties paid out are $1.50 per album plus that buck for expenses, then the record company nets $1.00 if they sell that album to Amazon for $3.50, or $4.50 per sale if they sell the set of MP3s to Amazon for $7.00 (which Amazon would in turn sell for $4 or $8, if you follow).
This means that the record company would have to sell 4.5X as many copies at a $4 Amazon price as they would at an $8 Amazon price. In other words, the curve would have to show much, much better than unit elasticity, and I don't think that the music market even approaches unit elasticity, particularly now that the cost of an album download isn't much more than an hour of minimum wage pay.
So -- is music overpriced? You, a focus group of one, think so; that's perfectly valid. And there are probably many more people like you. But are there really 4.5X more people out there who'd buy at $4 than who would currently buy at $8? Highly unlikely, and the reason why an album's worth of CDs presently costs $8.00, and not $4.00, is likely due to the fact that research has confirmed this to be the case. And the game here isn't getting the most customers; it's getting the most money.
"Why can't they charge much less and make up the profits on volume?"
Well, first -- if by "they" you mean Amazon, my highly educated guess is that Amazon is making 15 points on the sale. They don't have much room to move.
Many people tend to put too much faith in unit elasticity: if you cut the price of oranges in half, you'll sell twice as many; double the price and you'll sell half as many. The real world seldom works that way, so lots of research is done on pricing theory. My industry (computer peripherals) does it, countless others do it, and it's a safe assumption that record labels and Amazon do it, too -- despite the fact that every Slashdotter just knows that music is overpriced and sold at obscene profits.
Putting costs of production aside (assuming that they have the ability to sell at any price and make a profit), it might simply be that they do not believe that they will double their sales if they sell albums at $4 rather than $8. I know it certainly wouldn't be the case in my situation; I would not spend appreciably more on music if prices were lowered. I buy all the music I could possibly want on iTunes (and I'll soon be trying Amazon). My interest runs out before my budget does. And, as nonsensical as this might seem, there are millions of other consumers just like me.
When you step closer to the real world and take into account the costs of sale, elasticity becomes even more of an issue. If (say) that album has a cost of sale of $3.90, then they'll make a dime per sale at $4, or $4.10 per sale at $8. So even if they double their sales by cutting the price in half, their net revenue would still drop by 95%. In this scenario, sales would need to increase by about 20X to make the same amount of money, and that's very unlikely to happen.
"That's neither here nor there as its legal to download and upload music thanks to the CD tax."
Misinformation like this is contributing to the problem.
Canadian consumers pay a private copying levy on some recordable media; notably CD-Rs.
Copying copyrighted music is legal in some circumstances; in particular, single copies, for private use.
The consensus in legal circules is that downloading is thus allowed under the private copying exception. As Michael Geist (who knows far more about Canadian copyright law than anybody here) puts it, "downloading music in Canada for personal purposes is arguably legal as it is compensated activity covered by the private copying levy." (emphasis mine.) But there is no law that states that downloading is legal. It's yet to be tested in court, and I don't think it ever will be, since the money is in chasing after the distributors, not the people doing the private copying.
As you've demonstrated, this doesn't prevent folks from trying to claim that uploading is legal. The most common argument is that since the default operation of P2P software is to automatically redistribute what's downloaded, then if downloading is a legal act, then anything that happens (including the redistribution) as a result of the downloading must, in turn, be legal. However, this would not even pass the laugh test in court.
"Like I said, I'd be willing to pay up to $0.10 each. I think, given the kind of distribution they can achieve with such low prices and the internet, they would do just fine."
Are you sure about that? Legally mandated royalties in the USA are $0.08 each to the composer and lyricist; that doesn't even include the royalties to the performer if they didn't happen to write the song.
There are two pieces of popular wisdom around here that may cause some problems with your plan:
If your plan includes playing the "greedy artist" card and getting the law changed to allow lower statutory royalties (or running your operation out of a country which does not recognize US copyrights or which allows for lower royalty payments), keep in mind that many people believe that artists are already screwed by low royalties.
If your cost per sale is higher than your selling price, you can't make it up in volume, no matter how many you sell.
If you still believe that it's possibly to legally sell tracks in the US for $0.10, make money, and be fair to the artists, perhaps you're right, and there is big money to be had. Why not try it yourself? You could totally undercut the rest of the market.
Either way, it sounds like you'll be sticking with allofmp3 for the duration.
Slashdot Mirror
"I think it could be argued that you're sending some data... Its just that their client happens to apply some algo to it that happens to put it together in the style of a MP3/OGG or something else."
This would be about as useless as a child pornographer arguing that all they did is send JPEGs; it was the client who just happened to put it through a JPEG decompresser.
The laugh test applies to this one. If you're using a tool to break copyright law -- any tool -- the particulars of the storage mechanism don't mean much.
"There was an earlier /. article where a fellow showed that economically the nation is better served by shorter copyrights."
Interesting... my understanding is that the US is in favor of long copyrights because our IP is one of the only things we have left in this information age -- as Neal Stephenson put it: music, movies, software and high speed pizza delivery. I would like to see a dissenting viewpoint; does somebody have a link to that earlier article?
"The fact that Yoko Ono can be a near-billionaire for John's shaking his head and playing music should reveal how far gone copyright has become. Under the old-old standard (14 years plus 14 years), the Beatles' music would have all been public domain already."
This actually serves as an excellent example of how many people believe that strong copyright equals economic power. Yoko's sitting on all that cash and she's a U.S. resident. More to the point, she spends that money in the US and pays taxes on it. You're right that if we rolled back copyright to the 18th century standards, we'd all get to have all the free Beatles music that we want. The invisible hand being what it is, the economic benefactors would be whomever could provide it to us the most cheaply. The Beatles catalog would be available on CDs imported by Chinese corporations, and downloadable from countries where bandwidth is cheap. That whimpering sound you heard might not be Yoko softly crying in anguish, but the slow death of the USA's information-driven economy.
Having a strong economy isn't the end-all, be-all, and perhaps the unwashed masses don't really care about big-picture things like this -- so perhaps cheaper Beatles music is better for society as a whole in the short term. But, here's the thing: cheap Beatles music would not affect my life one bit. I can already buy the Beatles catalog in its entirety for a small fraction of my paycheck. It's not like it's air or water. But clean air and clean water are important to me, and I rely on the government's help for those. If a rollback to a 28-year copyright system resulted in a 1% reduction in the GNP next year because our entertainment money started going toward Russian download sites and Chinese CD pressing plants, we might not notice the effects right away, but those points add up. We might all be boiling the frog slowly while we enjoy our cheap Beatles music.
Of course she didn't. I haven't seen any posts from anybody who claims that she did... can you point me to an example?
"I RTFA and others to try and find out if this woman actually did try to SELL the music (not the kind of "piracy" I am guilty of on a daily basis) but I could find nothing. I don't know where the OP who are so against her are getting their info. Can anyone please confirm if she is being sued for downloading music or if it is a much more serious case of "real piracy"?"
You've misunderstood the relevant definition of the word "piracy." It's much more broad than you thought. E.g. dictionary.com:
Note that there's no requirement that you sell it.
See also the Wikipedia disambiguation page for the word "piracy" : it refers to "copyright infringement," and not "copyright infringement for profit" or "the sale of pirated goods."
I hope this helps. To beat the enemy (creators of intellectual property) we have to be smart; misusing words (either deliberately or otherwise) doesn't help.
"This should have been thrown out. I say this because if she is honest and there was never Kazaa software or other p2p software on her machine, doesn't that automatically make her innocent?"
You see, that's the thing: she wasn't honest. One of the things that nailed her was her use of the same "Tereastarr" username on all of her accounts, including the Kazaa account that was in use at her IP address.
She also plays with words a bit. She states that Kazaa wasn't installed on her new hard drive. That's not relevant, as she got her hard drive replaced after the infringement occurred. Your statement that there was "never Kazaa software on her machine" is incorrect; it was on her machine before she replaced the hard drive.
Have the record companies gone after truly innocent people who weren't pirates? You bet; I'm sure of it. But Jammie did it. She's a poor example of a defendant for us to be rallying around.
"Well, if you think paying $20 for a DRM'ed CD full of crappy, with low-audio quality music at the same price that a vinyl disc in the old times is NOT a ripoff, then I ask what the fuck are YOU on."
I'm curious where the $20 came from. CDs haven't been priced at $20 in the US for years; the average price of the top selling CDs on Amazon is around $10 or $11. Did you really think CDs cost $20 when you wrote this, or did you inflate it to make a point?
I'm also not sure what you mean about "at the same price that a vinyl disc in the old times". LPs hit a high of $13 - $15 before their demise in the mass market, but that was in era of the late 80s and the early 90s. I suppose if you ignore the effects of inflation, then CDs are about the same price today (actually, a few dollars less), but remember that the $13 you paid for an album in 1990 would be more than $20 in today's dollars -- so, music prices have fallen by about 50%.
The Trent Reznor quote you provided was in response to over-inflated music prices in Australia, where they are considerably more expensive than they are in the US. What did you mean that this is "proof" that the RIAA isn't representing the artists? Are you aware that the RIAA doesn't have anything to do with retail pricing in Australia? And, this is the big one -- what's the point? Everybody knows that the RIAA represents the interests of the labels. But the troubling thing is that tou seem to be using it as justification to pirate music in the USA, as well. Is this correct?
"I'd also be careful of any of the "statistics" the RIAA puts forward, especially when they consider "lost revenue" to mean "the money we could have earned if every tune downloaded was paid for" - this reasoning is as flawed as it is irrealist."
Can you cite an example? I've seen plenty of examples where Slashdotters incorrectly claim that such a study makes such an assumption (ie. Straw Man fallacy), but what I'm looking for is an actual study that was based on this flawed reasoning.
"Actually, this study just confirms common sense. People who are interested in music both DOWNLOAD and BUY CD's. Duh. One would EXPECT a very strong correlation between the two. All this study has down is to show that the positive correlation driven by interest is larger than the negative correlation of p2p (presumably) decreasing CD sales. It has not in any way shown that this correlation does not exist."
Great point. To amplify this, there's the factor which researchers call "social desirability", in which the subjects being interviewed tend, as a group, to give answers which they think are "right" or which they think the researchers want to hear. An oft-referenced example is the asking of men and women how many sexual partners they've had. Heterosexual men report higher numbers than heterosexual women due to the social implications; one does not need a master's in combinatorics to see how this cannot match up with reality.
This is significant to this situation because many people don't really want to acknowledge that piracy has replaced sales for them. And if they do, they come up with stereotypes to anneal any potential guilt: artists aren't paid enough, so it's OK. Artists are paid too much, so it's OK. Record company employees are bad people, so it's okay. The record industry business model is moribund, thus it's OK because it's simply manifest destiny. And so on.
Thus, in short: I think a certain number of respondents in the P2P group are simply lying about the number of CDs they purchase. I have no idea of the magnitude to which this skews the results, but for me, this study is no more reliable than many studies which show that P2P usage does result in fewer CD sales.
"Contrary to common practice, KC owns the copyrights to their work."
It's more common than you might think. Plenty of musicians own the publishing and performance rights to their work. If they don't, the rights are often owned by a management company that's not connected to a label.
The interesting thing is that this difference between distribution rights and publishing rights was a major hitch in online music sales getting off of the ground. Record companies couldn't simply put legacy stuff up for sale without breaking the law (as we apparently see in this EMI case); they had to get permission from the singer and/or songwriter or their agent or heirs. As recently as a couple of years ago it was common to find eight of ten tracks of a CD available for download; the other two were held up because, say, the lyricist for that song wouldn't give permission.
A common reaction among P2P users at the time was "Well, if the [bad word here] record company won't make the music available for legal download, they deserve what they get and I'll exercise my God-given right to have the entire Turtles catalog for free." But ironically enough, it was often the [bad word here] artist who was holding things up.
Nowadays, virtually all new recording contracts include digital distribution clauses. But as EMI has found out the hard way, there are still a few holdouts.
Sorry, the GP is correct.
He was correcting an earlier post claiming that the RIAA named themselves thusly to avoid bad press, presumably from lawsuits. The GP was explaining that for most of the RIAA's existence, it's been responsible for rather mundane things like certifying gold and platinum record sales and publishing the equalization standards. Ever seen one of those gold records framed in a black shadow box? It has a big "RIAA" label on it. Remember the "RIAA equalization curve" term from your analog hi-fi days? The very same RIAA.
You appear to be very concerned with accounting chicanery on behalf of the record companies -- as well you should be, particularly if you are a signed artist. But I am not sure how it is germaine. And your "puhleez" and your hostile tone seem misguided here.
"Hmm... I guess I must not be keeping up with the changing definition of Pirate -- my immediate thought was, "wait a minute, the people mass producing the discs with the old code can still do so; the old code doesn't cease to be valid...." Then I realized you were talking about people ripping a legally purchased video to a DRM-less format, not people mass distributing discs for profit."
It hasn't changed. The definition is pretty broad. e.g. dictionary.com:
to use or reproduce (a book, an invention, etc.) without authorization or legal right: to pirate hit records.
Of course, I know that many people have their own definitions. If I understand you correctly, the definition you favor includes only those who are mass producing (presumably counterfeit) discs. This presumably means that if you're ripping the occasional DVD or downloading the occasional torrent, you're not really a "pirate" according to the definition you choose to accept. Fair enough -- but it's important to understand that the word's actual definition does encompass what you're doing.
For what it's worth, the Wikipedia disambiguation page agrees with the dictionary. Wikipedia being the democratic, egalitarian free-for-all that it is, if you have a spare moments, why not update that page and change "Copyright infringement" to "mass distribution of discs for profit"? It's apparent that your definition is not the widely accepted one, but I could very well be wrong.
"That sounds like a lot of work. I think I'll just use another ISP. :P"
I believe that is what Comcast wants. With fewer folks like you on their network, their average bandwidth consumption per customer goes down, and they have to process fewer DMCA letters.
I know, I know -- we all only use it for Linux distros -- but you see my point.
"a rat is a rat anywhere in the world... and we all know what happens to rats. america promotes the culture of 'telling on someone', ratting on your friends to save ur ass, or make money. please dont admire a rat."
Meanwhile TorrentSpy is right up there with Mother Theresa, eh?
This is all wrapped up neatly with a nice pretty bow as long as you don't consider for a second that TorrentSpy is in the very profitable business of helping people get stuff without permission. If you try to explain that TorrentSpy's charter was to provide better access to Linux distros or other material that doesn't infringe on others' rights, then you are lying. They're in the business of piracy, and business is good.
"Trying to sow FUD about file sharing through this etymological fallacy only proves the *AA's level of desperation, and your defense of their crimes against language only proves you're a tool. "piracy" applied to file sharing is the same as a godwin: it's making a mountain out of a molehill."
I was a software pirate (cracking as well as collecting) in the 1980s; I wore the badge proudly. As do the millions of fans of The Pirate Bay. The homonym (or, if you prefer, homophone) has existed for several centuries now; much longer than you, I or the RIAA have been around.
I think it's you who are splitting hairs. Software/movie/music piracy is piracy; acquiring your warez via "file sharing" vs. the old-school methods doesn't make it anything else. It's still got the look, demeanor and distinctive quack. File sharing is simply the latest technological tool that allows you to trade warez. The net result is the same.
"I'm sorry, but, if it's FREE, then it's not really PIRACY."
Popular understanding of the term "copyright" is that it refers to one's exclusive "right" to how something is "copied" (hence "copyright"). Does your understanding differ?
Putting on my Nostradamus hat for a second (although I will not write this as a quatrain), my guess is that we'll see your argument a lot more in the future. Many pirates claim that they have a moral allowance to pirate music because it's outrageously priced at a buck a track, and claim (disingenuously, of course) that they'll start buying when the price hits ($_CURRENTPRICE - $_ARBITRARYVALUE). When that day comes, I suppose the argument will be "Well, now it's practically free, so if I just help myself to the torrent, it's not really piracy now, is it?"
Good explanation of the AHRA, but the original poster is Canadian.
"Basically, his point was this - if he's paying royalties on every player, recorder, and blank music cd he buys to compensate for the piracy he is assumed to commit, then shouldn't he have the right to commit said piracy? In other words, if you are going to be punished for a crime whether you commit it or not, then why should you be punished again when you actually do?"
That's stretching it way too far. Here in the US we pay taxes and levies on countless items. Our firefighters and policemen are paid courtesy of the taxes we pay; our roads are maintained courtesy of taxes we pay at the pump. But smart people know that this doesn't give us the legal or moral right to commit arson or to go at the road with a pick axe, no matter how we try to spin these taxes and levies as "punishment" for these crimes.
I think the Canadian levy is completely lame. Music is cheap enough; they don't need a socialized music system. And, it's unfair, as the money goes to Canadian artists while Canadian music is likely a fraction of the music pirated by Canadians. But the original poster is a self-serving whiner who is apparently uncomfortable with acknowledging that he pirates to save money.
"Canadians pay a levy on blank media to the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association), in exchange, music downloads seem to be legal."
It goes to the CPCC, which in turn gives most of it to the artists through SOCAN. The CRIA gets a minority of the levy.
This is vital to understand if you subscribe to the "artists good, record labels bad" philosophy.
"I pay a tax every time I buy a blank CD. If that doesn't that give me the right to "pirate" my MP3's then what is it for?"
You know as well as I do that only Canadian artists get the money. Radiohead is not a Canadian band.
Pirate all your music if it feels like the right thing to do -- but don't think that the levy gives you any sort of moral justification to do so, and don't believe for a second that the levy goes the bulk of the musicians whose work you pirate.
"It seems only that the RIAA has sued 'usenet.com'. Apparently the RIAA thinks this is the end of the matter, and usenet.com, being a private entity, will settle everything, for everyone?"
I'm not even sure where you got that idea. They're going for the precedent. Once they got a ruling that one of the P2P services was illegal, they were able to shut down several more. They're looking for that first domino amongst the Usenet feed providers.
"The truth is that the RIAA truly believes that they are more important than absolutely everybody else in the world!"
When it comes to protecting the rights of their members, yeah. The AMA is more important than everybody else in the world regarding the interests of the doctors who are its members; the Ferret Protection Society is more important than anybody else in the world when it comes to ferret rights, and so on.
Pick a cause, and you'll find somebody who's defending it. Even causes we don't like.
"We have already seen that most of those that pirate music still purchase CD's - in fact we consistently see that those that pirate music are the *highest* purchasers of music."
Yet piracy is exploding, while CD sales are dropping.
I think there's a bit of confirmation bias going on here -- we want to feel good about piracy, so we keep repeating stuff like the above. When somebody tells us that their piracy has led them to purchase more music, we remember it. When we meet somebody who (like many of my friends) acknowledges that they stopped buying music once they discovered that they can simply get it for free, we tend to forget this fact quickly, as it is not congruent to the "pirates purchase more music" meme.
My grandmother does not pirate music. She does not buy music, either. My brother now pirates 100% of his music, but might have bought a CD once or twice in his life. There you have it -- non-pirates buy zero music, and pirates buy some music. We can use this as evidence that pirates purchase more music, but it's intellectually dishonest.
"Do you really think Amazon is making $4 on an $8 digital download sale? I don't think so..."
Nope; as I covered in my first sentence, they make 15 points on the sale. I'm highly confident that my estimate is accurate to within a few points. This in itself rules out going too crazy with the pricing; I used the $4 / $8 to make the math simple for my little rant on net margins and elasticity. So to address your last point, I don't think Amazon will be having steep price breaks on sales.
Agreed that there are likely others like you for which the point that they leave P2P behind is perhaps $4.00 or so for an album. But the record industry doesn't have to go that low. Let's say for sake of simplicity that the record company's total amortized expenses per album are just $1.00 beyond the royalties (obviously not a real-world situation; a lot of work goes into producing and marketing an album). But anyway, mechanical royalties are mandated by law to be $0.08 each for the composer and lyricist; more if there are performers who aren't either. If you assume that the total royalties paid out are $1.50 per album plus that buck for expenses, then the record company nets $1.00 if they sell that album to Amazon for $3.50, or $4.50 per sale if they sell the set of MP3s to Amazon for $7.00 (which Amazon would in turn sell for $4 or $8, if you follow).
This means that the record company would have to sell 4.5X as many copies at a $4 Amazon price as they would at an $8 Amazon price. In other words, the curve would have to show much, much better than unit elasticity, and I don't think that the music market even approaches unit elasticity, particularly now that the cost of an album download isn't much more than an hour of minimum wage pay.
So -- is music overpriced? You, a focus group of one, think so; that's perfectly valid. And there are probably many more people like you. But are there really 4.5X more people out there who'd buy at $4 than who would currently buy at $8? Highly unlikely, and the reason why an album's worth of CDs presently costs $8.00, and not $4.00, is likely due to the fact that research has confirmed this to be the case. And the game here isn't getting the most customers; it's getting the most money.
"Why can't they charge much less and make up the profits on volume?"
Well, first -- if by "they" you mean Amazon, my highly educated guess is that Amazon is making 15 points on the sale. They don't have much room to move.
Many people tend to put too much faith in unit elasticity: if you cut the price of oranges in half, you'll sell twice as many; double the price and you'll sell half as many. The real world seldom works that way, so lots of research is done on pricing theory. My industry (computer peripherals) does it, countless others do it, and it's a safe assumption that record labels and Amazon do it, too -- despite the fact that every Slashdotter just knows that music is overpriced and sold at obscene profits.
Putting costs of production aside (assuming that they have the ability to sell at any price and make a profit), it might simply be that they do not believe that they will double their sales if they sell albums at $4 rather than $8. I know it certainly wouldn't be the case in my situation; I would not spend appreciably more on music if prices were lowered. I buy all the music I could possibly want on iTunes (and I'll soon be trying Amazon). My interest runs out before my budget does. And, as nonsensical as this might seem, there are millions of other consumers just like me.
When you step closer to the real world and take into account the costs of sale, elasticity becomes even more of an issue. If (say) that album has a cost of sale of $3.90, then they'll make a dime per sale at $4, or $4.10 per sale at $8. So even if they double their sales by cutting the price in half, their net revenue would still drop by 95%. In this scenario, sales would need to increase by about 20X to make the same amount of money, and that's very unlikely to happen.
"That's neither here nor there as its legal to download and upload music thanks to the CD tax."
Misinformation like this is contributing to the problem.
As you've demonstrated, this doesn't prevent folks from trying to claim that uploading is legal. The most common argument is that since the default operation of P2P software is to automatically redistribute what's downloaded, then if downloading is a legal act, then anything that happens (including the redistribution) as a result of the downloading must, in turn, be legal. However, this would not even pass the laugh test in court.
"Like I said, I'd be willing to pay up to $0.10 each. I think, given the kind of distribution they can achieve with such low prices and the internet, they would do just fine."
Are you sure about that? Legally mandated royalties in the USA are $0.08 each to the composer and lyricist; that doesn't even include the royalties to the performer if they didn't happen to write the song.
There are two pieces of popular wisdom around here that may cause some problems with your plan:
If you still believe that it's possibly to legally sell tracks in the US for $0.10, make money, and be fair to the artists, perhaps you're right, and there is big money to be had. Why not try it yourself? You could totally undercut the rest of the market.
Either way, it sounds like you'll be sticking with allofmp3 for the duration.