"So it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say, "Let's not be disingenuous here, the primary effect of the ADA will be that a bunch of architects and contractors make some extra money doing ADA compliance work.""
I agree 100%. But, this fact would not bother me in the least if I were handicapped and that ramp came in handy. Likewise, the fact that 90% of the people using the crack will be for piracy would not bother me one bit if I were among that 10% using it for a legitimate purpose.
(But before the howls of protest begin: I did not just say that we should scrap the ADA, or that the rights of the handicapped aren't important. What I did just say is that the rights of legitimate media purchasers are important.)
I understand your need for a preemptive clarification. Most people have gotten my point, but a few folks have similarly misinterpreted my statement, as well.
"That's besides the point. You can use a gun to kill someone in an illegal way, yet guns are legal (or can be, in any case.)"
As I stated, the primary application of the crack will be for piracy. Killing people is not the primary application for most guns sold. The ratio of legal to illegal uses of guns is perhaps 98%; it's also my rough estimate of the ratio of the illegal to legal uses of BitTorrent.
"Or are you one of those guys arguing that bittorrent should be illegal as well?"
Eh? It's a technology. Per your analogy, it's like a gun. One notable difference is, as covered above, that most gun owners use them in a legal fashion, while the majority of BT traffic is likely infringing.
And, please -- I don't want to hear from anybody if you use BT exclusively for torrenting Linux distros, WoW patches, and other content authorized by the rightsholder. While I am sure that there are folks out there -- and God bless you -- you are among the minority among BT users. It's easy enough to understand this point.
"Besides any legal issues, what about the political ones? What about social responsibility? What about freedom? (Remember that old hag? Something to do with some song, land of the brave and the free or some such nonsense. Care to share the mp3 on that one?)"
Reminds me of a quote from Otter in Animal House:
I put it to you, Greg - isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!
I think you got it right in your second paragraph: piracy will be the primary application of the crack (as I pointed out), not the sole application (as you appear to imply in your first paragraph.)
I'm not sure where you're going with banning the use of cracking software. I don't think you're deliberately trying to put words in my mouth, so I think you may have me confused with another poster. While I agree with you that the MPAA, through their various mouthpieces, will come down on application developers who use the crack to write "backup" software, your anger appears to be directed at me for pointing out what we both already know.
"The GP was right: idjit."
Huh? Why the unprovoked personal attack? The GP was addressing somebody else; I think you may be confusing me with the other poster.
"Or use your legally purchased DVD's on your homebrew video server maybe? Or back them up? idjit."
Sure, in the sense that those bongs in the head shops could be used to smoke tobacco. In fact, the employees of said establishments will swear up and down that that's exactly what they're for.
Of all my friends, I know not a single person who's built a "homebrew video server," nor have I ever met anybody who's had a problem with scratching a DVD. On the other hand, I have many friends who enjoy acquiring free movies with BitTorrent.
In short, let's not be disingenuous here: we all know what the primary application will be for the copy protection crack.
"The cost of downloaded music by all logic should be below the half of what the CD of the same stuff costs."
This article is a bit wordy, but it does a pretty good job of explaining why retailers do not set their pricing according to the cost of production. It happens in other markets, too: Kenneth Cole can sell a shirt for $150, while Sears sells one for $15, and they have roughly the same cost of goods. I'm sure you can think of many more examples. It even happens in other forms of media: movie A might be an art house flick that cost $10MM to make, and movie B might have cost $100MM. Yet both will cost about nine bucks to see in the theatre, and both will cost about $20 when they're released on DVD.
Believe me, you're not the first one to be befuddled by this... but it's a widely recognized principal. We can complain, but it won't help. Kenneth Cole will keep selling those $150 shirts as long as people will keep buying them. Logic be damned!
"Now allofmp3.com had reasonable prices."
...and allofmp3.com is there to serve a certain type of customer. The iTunes store serves a different type. There's room for both of us in this world.
As an aside, I think lots of Slashdotters have a flow chart in their head which has a constant terminus labelled "...and thus, I am still morally entitled to pirate music!". The flow chart keeps changing along with the market. Ten years ago, it was price and selection (tracks were $3.00 and selection was pitiful). Once Apple drove the price down and online catalogs exploded, the path was modified to encompass DRM. Now that DRM seems to be going the way of the dodo, it's back to price.
"I've seen no mass outcry among book authors about Project Gutenberg."
FYI, Project Gutenberg works are typically in the public domain. For works that aren't, you can be sure that the Project has secured the proper permissions. If the Project started distributing copyrighted works by living authors without the authors' permission, there would most certainly be an outcry. This does not happen, because the Project respects the rights of authors.
"I haven't seen a painter's association start screaming about their paintings being put online."
When a visual work is digitized and put online, it's done with the artist's permission. A photographer or an artist gets paid each time you download something from Corbis or istockphoto; they respect the artists' rights. Even if a piece of art is shown in a motion picture, permission must be obtained. And, yes, artists have sued.
"I haven't seen software companies (yes, I consider coding an art) start suing bit torrent users for pirating software."
Software companies take legal action all the time; it's under the radar as far as P2P users are concerned because it typically happens at the corporate level -- companies using pirated software, system integrators installing pirated or counterfeit software, and the like. The BSA, like the RIAA, picks their targets carefully. With software, the biggest source of piracy is at the corporate level. With music, it's at the P2P level.
"Photoshop is one of the most pirated pieces of software (this is only a reasonable guess, not based on any hard facts) yet Adobe isn't serving up lawsuits left and right. They simply put better copy prevention in their next version."
Huh? Adobe is one of the biggest contributors to the BSA; they even have a director-level anti-piracy position whose tasks includes working with the BSA and law enforcement. The P2P kiddies aren't their biggest target, for obvious reasons, but don't make the mistake of thinking that they're not rabidly litigious.
"In conclusion, if we had a broader range of artists complaining, some people (myself included) might be inclined to stop or at least curtail our file-sharing. On the other hand, with just the music and movie industries complaining... well, let's just say that it becomes a lot easier to apply the label "whining bastards" to the lot of them."
Two wrongs do not make a right. Pirate as much as you want, if you're comfortable with it, but you are mistaken if you believe that artists in other fields are not concerned about their rights being violated. Using this as a rationale for your actions is misguided, as it's based on faulty data.
"first.. if someone considers creating artistic expression a "labor", then they shouldn't be doing it."
Trust me: you are wrong on this. Creating art can be incredibly hard. Great writers, poets, sculptors, composers, painters et al certainly make it look easy. But those works that we enjoy are quite often built of blood, toil, tears and sweat.
I think that for many P2P fans, the thought process is that since the artist enjoyed creating the work, that should be payment enough -- and if the artist saw it as work and was hoping to be paid, then they're obviously not a real artist. Unfortunately, many artists understand this viewpoint to be self-serving horseshit.
"With copyright infringment, you deprive the other person of nothing. They still have thier copyright. They can still do everything that they could before you infringed."
...except sell it to you. And when your friends, and your friends, and their friends, and so on opt to P2P their work instead of paying for it, they are deprived of a market.
Yes, yes, I know: information wants to be free; copyright owners who charge for their work are greedy, and so on. It's okay to acknowledge that you don't particularly care if the people whose rights you violate will still be able to make a living off their work -- after all, it's their problem, not yours -- but the "they're deprived of nothing" crap is insult to injury.
"One hundredth of 40 million is 400000. Four hundred thousand dollars a year is NOT middle class. I guess you meant to say that you earn forty thousand a year, which is even less than I do in my scientist yob. I pity you."
I pity you for your reading comprehension skills.;-) The other fellow has already pointed out your mistake.
Going off-topic here for a second: I make closer to $400K than $40K. Per my friend zillow.com, my home's value is in the 25th percentile for the county in which I live -- meaning that 3/4 of the rest of the houses are worth more than mine (in English terms: it's a bit of a crap hole). It doesn't even break 50th for my city, or even my ZIP code. Yet it's in the 90th percentile for home values across the USA. And home value ~= mortgage payment.
So, if you pity me, it should be for choosing to live in the fucked up economy that is the Silicon Valley. Perhaps Max Zorin had the right idea.
"91% >> 50% (and 9% to the artist is a "very good deal"!)"
Huh? I was referring to retail margins -- the markup that the retailer charges. The GPP believes that the retailers should be paid less than the artists. All fine and good, but manufacturers -- no matter what business they are in -- don't get to set retail margins.
I sell computer peripherals. Amazon makes about 15 points on my products; Best Buy makes about 50 points. This is out of my control, and has nothing to do with the salary of anybody who touches the products from start to finish -- including mine. Whether I make 0.01% of the retail price, or 1%, or 0% or 100%, Amazon and Best Buy will add whatever markup they please. Amazon and Best Buy will generally make more than the salary of the highest-paid employee who touches the product. This is a sad fact of the retail industry as a whole, but it angers the GPP that the music industry doesn't work differently.
By the way, I should point out another misconception. If, say, in selling computer peripherals my salary averages 9% of the sell-in price, it's not accurate to say that my employer gets to keep the other 91%. The rest goes to all the other innumerable costs of sale... usually, it's ultimately somebody else's salary. Getting back to the record industry... Warner Music managed to keep about 3% of their income last year. The other 97% all went to other people. If their average artist collected even a 4% royalty, they did better than the record company.
""the end-to-end costs of recording, producing, marketing and selling a CD"... are mostly decreasing. Why are the labels not then increasing what they pay to the artists?"
Ugg... I wish that this were true! Hard good supply chain costs have gone up a lot in the past few years, due to rising fuel prices. There are new and exciting ways to market products, such as the Internet, but the salaries you pay to the people who do the marketing sure aren't going down. Believe me, I really, really wish you were right.
Either way, CD prices are in freefall (something like a $5 drop in average retail price over the past few years). As for why record labels aren't paying artists more out of the goodness of their little hearts... they don't have to! They're not looking out for the artists' best interests. There's always more people looking for a recording contract than can get one, so the record companies have little motivation to raise their royalty rates.
If this doesn't make sense to you, imagine yourself in any business where (like the record industry) the production costs are going up, retail prices are being forced down, and there are people waiting in line to come work for you. Paying your employees or contractors more wouldn't be an obvious first priority.
"Um...isn't that what the RIAA is technically supposed to be? Not that it actually represents the artists' interests."
No; not hardly. They represent the recording industry. From their "about" page (emphasis mine):
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is the trade group that represents the U.S. recording industry. Its mission is to foster a business and legal climate that supports and promotes our members' creative and financial vitality. Its members are the record companies that comprise the most vibrant national music industry in the world. RIAA members create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States.
Musicians have their own alliances. Somebody's already pointed out the AFM; There are also the ASCAP and BMI; both are performance rights societies run by and for musicians.
Slashdotters often consider ASCAP and BMI to be just as evil as the RIAA, but I should point out that ASCAP/BMI and the RIAA are often at odds with each other, because they represent groups of people who are on the opposite ends of the business deals.
The situation you describe also applies very well to writing software, building houses, selling ice cream, and innumerable other professions. Try to go it alone, work with a small company, or work with a big company. Each have reasons that make them good, and bad. This is part of doing business in modern society, no matter what your business is. Why would ye olde Invisible Hand make an exception for the music industry?
"I have no expectation of free music, but I DO expect that the price I pay get passed mostly on to the artist with only a small percentage going to the label and distributors (including the retailer). This isn't what happens, and I know why people are pissed."
Why would you expect that? When you put together the end-to-end costs of recording, producing, marketing and selling a CD, the studio time (including the paying of the session musicians) and the royalties (in which the songwriters, composers, and featured performers are paid) are but a small percentage of the cost.
You probably already know that retail margins are anywhere from 10% (Amazon) to 50% and more (Best Buy, etc.) across all categories. Music is no different. If this is truly pissing you off, how do you cope with the anger of paying 10% - 50% markup for everything you buy?
"It's just wrong that corporations should not be able to force artists into contracts which deny them any profits after millions of dollars worth of sales."
It's much worse than you think. I'm at the director level for a company that makes PC peripherals. I'm in charge of $40MM of business a year, yet my employment contract (which I was "forced into" in the same sense that artists are "forced into" recording contracts) includes a salary that isn't one hundredth of that amount. I've probably been responsible for half a billion dollars of sales, yet I'm firmly in the middle class.
I believe that everybody should pirate as much music as their hard drive will hold, if they feel that it's the right thing to do. "I pirate to save money" or "I pirate because I give fuck all about respecting the rights of somebody whom I haven't even met" are good rationalizations for doing so. Inequities in contract negotiations aren't a particularly good rationalization, as that's something that we all have experience with -- on both sides of the desk.
"Those authors have experimented, and are not doing it now, because it doesn't friggin' work. Been tried -- didn't work."
Well, that's the whole point behind the movement to weaken copyright law. There's Creative Commons, GNU, and good old-fashioned releasing stuff for free or even releasing it into the public domain in the hopes of priming a secondary revenue stream. Some people choose these methods; most do not. And that's the problem. Not enough producers are releasing their stuff for free, so we want the laws changed to effectively force them to. Market economics aren't enough of an incentive for producers to distribute their works freely, so I think the rationale here is that the works of the producers are far too important for the producers to dictate how they're sold and distributed. The desires of the consumers should outweigh those of the producers, and we'll change the laws if we have to. Anybody who's read Atlas Shrugged is familiar with this line of reasoning.
It's a bit rough to admit that you're part of a majority that wants to take away the rights of a few, so a common tactic is to come up with reasons why the producers don't deserve those rights. This is why, when discussing P2P, piracy, and the like, we often talk about the greed of musicians and record companies, their stupidity (ie. their inability to grasp the superiority of the "give it away for free" model -- thus creating a nice tautology), and their lack of talent. They have enough money; they don't deserve any more, and they lack the brainpower to embrace the P2P model. Thus, P2P users are actually the heroes here: we're righting some economic wrongs, and we're using our advanced intellect for the cause of good.
Students of American history will also recognize these tactics. The majority (the European settlers) wanted to take the land away from the few (the American Indians), so we created notions like "manifest destiny" and painted the original residents as being drunken savages. The rest was fairly easy.
"You'd think the self-professed "smart people"* who vote for "smart candidates"** would realize this. But they don't, because they're nothing more than sheep being led to slaughter."
The problem is that people in the entertainment industry -- whom strong copyright laws protect -- tend to vote for and support Democratic candidates.
"After you download a song, everyone involved still has everything they did before you downloaded it."
You're correct to a point. If the copyright holder wasn't attempting to sell the product to you or anybody else who downloaded it, then they're not hurt at all. For example, if it was some free software, or maybe a song which the copyright holder had purposely released for free. In those cases, they haven't lost the right to control how the work is copied, because the rightsholder has allowed free and unmetered copying.
Note that I haven't touched the "infringement vs. theft" issue. It is pointless, because when you lose money because more and more people are helping themselves to your stuff for free rather than paying you for it, it doesn't matter whether you (or the infringers) call it theft, infringement, piracy, or even some word in that African language with the clicking sound.
"Not really, they'll just have to change their business model from manufacturing to providing a service - just like musicians are going to have to do."
I was with you on the "when we download music, the musician isn't deprived of anything" point, but you appear to be acknowledging that musicians will have to find a new way to make money because of our actions.
"On the other hand, if he could "steal" a copy of my car, leaving the original untouched in my driveway, then why should I care? I have a car, he has a car too; we both win."
When people make the "copyright enforcement is theft" argument they are not stating that it is theft from the torrent seeder, but the holder of the copyright. Of course you don't care if your neighbor copies your car, or your collection of music, or what have you. You're not analogous to the copyright holder; the car manufacturer is. When the day comes that people can BT each other's cars, the auto industry will be right properly fucked.
"BMI et al. is behind the first case. These cases wont go away until we start identifying them with the parent company, and not the RIAA."
BMI is a performance rights society. Like ASCAP, they are run by and for songwriters, composers, and publishers. They are not a record company, and were not "behind" the RIAA suit by any stretch. Thus, the GP's joke about BMI going after her for singing "Ding, Dong...": if you want to perform a songwriter's work, you pay the songwriter by licensing it through BMI/ASCAP; you don't pay the record company.
BMI/ASCAP and the RIAA look after different people. BMI/ASCAP represent the artists; the RIAA represents the record companies.
Nota bene that BMI/ASCAP are normally the "good guys" while the record labels are the "bad guys." But, this changes whenever people get wind of BMI/ASCAP shaking down a bar or restaurant owner who neglects to buy a performance license. It seems that we're okay with artists having rights; we just don't want artists to exercise those rights.
"I wasn't intending the cost thing to be the main point, I was just trying to use it as an example of the apparent value that DVDs and CDs can have. It's clearly not a good indication of the worth of particular CDs and DVDs to individual consumers. The point is simply that a lot of people would rather spend their money on DVDs rather than CDs because they value the DVDs more."
sure, if they're a real movie buff and not particularly into music. I know of people who'll watch LOTR two dozen times; I'm not one of them. I think this just speaks to the fact that different folks like different types of entertainment... there are also lots of people who'd rather spend that money toward a video game, or a trip to the movie theatre, or to the opera, or to a rave, or to a live play, or to a concert, or any of innumerable choices for spending their descretionary cash on entertainment. I don't think it's a music vs. DVD thing per se.
"What I was really meaning here is that the RIAA is ignoring the impact of DVDs in their media material. I'm sure they know that DVDs etc are eating into their sales but I don't see them acknowledging that fact or doing much to counteract it. Instead they are spending a lot of effort blaming piracy and trying to counteract it."
Again, this is more of a "music vs. all other forms of entertainment" but we can use the ten years or so as an example, as that's roughly the period that DVD sales began to explode. In the past ten years, here's what record companies have done to try to make their product more attractive, off the top of my head:
Dropped the ASP from about $18 to about $13 -- a 30% decrease; it's actually a 50% decrease in constant dollars.
Dropped the ASP of online tracks from about $3.00 (yes, they really were $3 five years ago) to $0.99 or less (a 71% decrease in constant dollars), offered subscription models, and increased the availability of tracks online by a huge, huge order of magnatude (the amount of tracks legally available online five years ago was really awful, and even when iTunes launched, selection was nowhere near where it is now)
Put their toes in the water WRT DRM-free music (first emusic, then selected tracks on Yahoo!, and now EMI's entire catalog -- they're in ankle-deep. If their speed shocks and horrifies you, remember how long it took from the advent of the CD player to the time that all new music releases came out on CD at the same time as the LP.)
DVD Audio and the DuoDisc
bundling CDs with DVDs (videos or concert footage, or what have you)
Invested a lot more in online content (ten years ago, TMBG.com was the absolute state of the art in artist sites, and TMBG had to do it themselves).
I think that when many people write "the record industry isn't adapting" what they really mean is "the record industry isn't adapting in the exact way I want it to; ie. selling DRM-free tracks for $0.25 each and not going after copyright infringers." Thus, it makes it easier to ignore the fact that the iTunes store simply didn't exist ten years ago, or the fact that downloads now make up 30% of some major labels' sales. This gives lots of folks the moral justification to keep on pirating; and the joke here is that if the record labels did start selling tracks for $0.25, the collective Slashdot zeitgeist would be that this means that the artists are also getting a lot less -- thus, the record companies are more evil than ever, and I have more justification than ever to get my music via P2P, thankyouverymuch.
I agree with you, of course, that the record industry probably hasn't changed in the exact way that you want. This is likely because their ultimate goal is to make money, and not to convert Slashdot users to customers -- that's a bit of a Sisyphian task, if you ask me!
"What IS sad to me is that musicians think that they're entitled to anything. I buy my music, but I don't owe any musician a damn thing if they're not selling what I want to buy."
Can you give an example of a musician who believes that you owe them money even if you don't buy their music?
So many people on Slashdot straw-man "don't pirate my music" into "you owe me a living" that I'm curious to hear from musicians who really have stated that they're entitled to get money from people who don't buy their music.
"There's also no law that says a CD which cost about $0.50 to stamp out has to sell for $15. Cut the prices back to $5 or $8 per disk and you'll see sales go up. Record albums used to sell for $4 or $5 back in the day, then tapes came along and bumped the price up to about $10 or $12, and then CDs went through the roof. OK already, a CD *player* costs $20 so why are disks still so expensive?"
You're 100% correct -- before prerecorded cassettes were widely available in the 70's, LPs cost about $5. That $5 LP you bought in 1970 was about $26 in today's money. The average retail price of a new CD release is around $13, so the price has dropped by 50%.
I was paying around $8 for LPs -- $16 in today's money -- in the early 80's, so if prerecorded cassettes hit $12.00, an educated guess is that this would have been in 1986 or so, where that $12 cassette would be $22 in today's money.
I started buying CDs in 1985. They cost me around $17 each, or $31 in today's money. As mentioned, they're $13 today; that's a 60% reduction in cost.
If you're genuinely wondering why CDs are $13 today when LPs sold for only $5 "back in the day," I'm not sure I can do the best job of explaining it, but a good way to start is to think about all the people who touch the CD from start to finish -- including the guy at the pressing plant and the guy in the store who sells it -- and think about how much they were paid by the hour in 1970, vs. how much they make now.
Music isn't alone in reflecting the effect of inflation. My mother bought a new 1965 Beetle for $2,000 back in the day. Inflation's a real devil bitch.
If you're wondering why the price of new CDs has settled at $13 vs. $8 or $10 or $16 or $21, it's that other devil bitch, supply and demand. They're $13 because that's the optimal point on the curve (five years ago, CDs were $18, but the P2P explosion and the growth of other competition for your entertainment dollar put a stop to that). The supply and demand god is the same one who dictates that Sears is lucky to sell a shirt for $20, while Kenneth Cole has no problem selling shirts for $120. He can smile on you -- if you're Kenneth Cole -- or he can be one mean SOB -- if you're trying to sell CDs.
"Do you honestly believe that out of that $15 (or $12 or $18) the musician is receiving more than $0.25 or $0.50? Typically not."
I think that's a pretty well established fact. Similarly, I'm at the director level for a maker of PC peripherals; I'm responsible for some $40MM of business per year. Yet I don't even see 1% of that. The retail industry is pretty inefficient. You're right -- digital delivery, direct from the producer to the customer, is often the best way to go. I hope your model of releasing your songs for free and making your money on live performances is working for you; best of luck to you on your career.
"For one thing, the RIAA jacked up the cost of CDs to mom and pop shops like his, mean while letting Walmart sell the same CDs at cost or a loss. That's just evil."
When Wal-Mart and Best Buy started selling CDs as loss-leaders and the smaller music-only chains (like Tower Records) started to feel the heat, record companies (namely, Universal) tried to do something about it -- they set up MAP programs at Tower and some other chains. Wal-Mart and Best Buy got wind of this, joined forces with the government to bitch slap Universal, and Slashdotters cheered.
At the time, setting up the MAP programs with the smaller retailers was labelled as "evil," and Wal-Mart was seen as the good guys for blowing the whistle. Record labels were prevented from running MAPs with the smaller stores, and Tower Record went gently into that good night.
Interesting to see that it's come full circle, and the modern perception is that Wal-Mart is now the evil one, and that the record companies were evil for losing the fight.
"I think a big part of the reason for this is that it doesn't compare well to DVDs. Should I consider $15 dollars a good deal for an hour of music that cost $1M to produce when I can spend $20 for 2 hours of movie that cost $200M to produce? (Not that cost is any indication of quality.)"
You've answered your own question. You can drill down even more by pointing out that production cost is not necessarily a reflection of value to the buyer.
I do not buy DVDs, for the simple reason that they're not worth the money to me. I rarely watch a film more than once. So, Netflix serves my needs.
But I'll listen to a good CD dozens, or hundreds of times.
In either case, I don't care of the film cost $1MM, $10MM, or $100MM to make. Nor do I care if the CD cost $100, $1K, $10K or $100K or $1MM to produce. It's my enjoyment of the product that determines whether it's of value to me.
Have you noticed that the "they're both pieces of plastic; so why do they have similar costs if the production costs are widely disparate?" argument is typically used for CDs vs. DVDs, and not, say, to question why a film with production costs of $1MM and a film with production costs of $100MM both cost the same on DVD? In other words, if that crowd is so tragically unclued into the concept of supply and demand that they really, genuinely don't understand why CDs and DVDs are priced the way they are, then they'd be making one hell of a holy stink over the fact that, say, a copy of Clerks costs $3 more on Amazon than does a copy of Titanic, when the production cost ratio on the two was somewhere on the order of 100X.
The answer, I think, is that many people understand this just fine (it's readily apparent to anybody who's ever visited a shopping mall and compared prices of clothes from hot designer brands vs. those from Sears), but they make this comparison primarily as a way to help justify music piracy. Odds are that they go through the rest of the life like most people do -- if they want something and they think it's a good value, they'll buy it, without making some sort of moral judgement of the ratio of the cost of production to the retail price.
"The RIAA has conviently ignored the impact of DVDs."
Not sure that I follow. The music industry is fighting for its very life against the impact of other sources of entertainment. It's patently obvious to you and I that we have a lot more choices for spending our entertainment dollars than we did 10 or 20 years ago; you can assume that the folks in the music industry, do, too. It's fun to say "ha ha, they sure are dumb, they haven't done any market research to see how their target market is spending their money!", but really.
"I think what we'd like to see is the record companies stop demanding more and more money for the creative work of the artists *after* they're recouped their investment."
Interesting idea! If I understand you correctly, it would be a record company that would aim for zero profitability. The mission statement would be to fund the production of music and earn back the costs, but not to make a profit going forward. This would be a very bold step indeed, as even Magnatune and CDBaby aim for a profit, rather than simply covering costs.
Perhaps some enterprising Slashdotter can set up a non-profit organization to do just that. It could be a foundation, or even an artist-run collective, that would have as its mission statement to give away the music for free, or give the rights to the artists, after the costs had been recovered. However, given the state of the record industry (Warner managed to clear something like three points of net profit last year, and lots of smaller labels are bleeding money) going for zero profit would be a goal, not a step backward for many of them!
Slashdot Mirror
"So it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say, "Let's not be disingenuous here, the primary effect of the ADA will be that a bunch of architects and contractors make some extra money doing ADA compliance work.""
I agree 100%. But, this fact would not bother me in the least if I were handicapped and that ramp came in handy. Likewise, the fact that 90% of the people using the crack will be for piracy would not bother me one bit if I were among that 10% using it for a legitimate purpose.
(But before the howls of protest begin: I did not just say that we should scrap the ADA, or that the rights of the handicapped aren't important. What I did just say is that the rights of legitimate media purchasers are important.)
I understand your need for a preemptive clarification. Most people have gotten my point, but a few folks have similarly misinterpreted my statement, as well.
"That's besides the point. You can use a gun to kill someone in an illegal way, yet guns are legal (or can be, in any case.)"
As I stated, the primary application of the crack will be for piracy. Killing people is not the primary application for most guns sold. The ratio of legal to illegal uses of guns is perhaps 98%; it's also my rough estimate of the ratio of the illegal to legal uses of BitTorrent.
"Or are you one of those guys arguing that bittorrent should be illegal as well?"
Eh? It's a technology. Per your analogy, it's like a gun. One notable difference is, as covered above, that most gun owners use them in a legal fashion, while the majority of BT traffic is likely infringing.
And, please -- I don't want to hear from anybody if you use BT exclusively for torrenting Linux distros, WoW patches, and other content authorized by the rightsholder. While I am sure that there are folks out there -- and God bless you -- you are among the minority among BT users. It's easy enough to understand this point.
"Besides any legal issues, what about the political ones? What about social responsibility? What about freedom? (Remember that old hag? Something to do with some song, land of the brave and the free or some such nonsense. Care to share the mp3 on that one?)"
Reminds me of a quote from Otter in Animal House:
I think you got it right in your second paragraph: piracy will be the primary application of the crack (as I pointed out), not the sole application (as you appear to imply in your first paragraph.)
I'm not sure where you're going with banning the use of cracking software. I don't think you're deliberately trying to put words in my mouth, so I think you may have me confused with another poster. While I agree with you that the MPAA, through their various mouthpieces, will come down on application developers who use the crack to write "backup" software, your anger appears to be directed at me for pointing out what we both already know.
"The GP was right: idjit."
Huh? Why the unprovoked personal attack? The GP was addressing somebody else; I think you may be confusing me with the other poster.
"Or use your legally purchased DVD's on your homebrew video server maybe? Or back them up? idjit."
Sure, in the sense that those bongs in the head shops could be used to smoke tobacco. In fact, the employees of said establishments will swear up and down that that's exactly what they're for.
Of all my friends, I know not a single person who's built a "homebrew video server," nor have I ever met anybody who's had a problem with scratching a DVD. On the other hand, I have many friends who enjoy acquiring free movies with BitTorrent.
In short, let's not be disingenuous here: we all know what the primary application will be for the copy protection crack.
"The cost of downloaded music by all logic should be below the half of what the CD of the same stuff costs."
This article is a bit wordy, but it does a pretty good job of explaining why retailers do not set their pricing according to the cost of production. It happens in other markets, too: Kenneth Cole can sell a shirt for $150, while Sears sells one for $15, and they have roughly the same cost of goods. I'm sure you can think of many more examples. It even happens in other forms of media: movie A might be an art house flick that cost $10MM to make, and movie B might have cost $100MM. Yet both will cost about nine bucks to see in the theatre, and both will cost about $20 when they're released on DVD.
Believe me, you're not the first one to be befuddled by this... but it's a widely recognized principal. We can complain, but it won't help. Kenneth Cole will keep selling those $150 shirts as long as people will keep buying them. Logic be damned!
"Now allofmp3.com had reasonable prices."
...and allofmp3.com is there to serve a certain type of customer. The iTunes store serves a different type. There's room for both of us in this world.
As an aside, I think lots of Slashdotters have a flow chart in their head which has a constant terminus labelled "...and thus, I am still morally entitled to pirate music!". The flow chart keeps changing along with the market. Ten years ago, it was price and selection (tracks were $3.00 and selection was pitiful). Once Apple drove the price down and online catalogs exploded, the path was modified to encompass DRM. Now that DRM seems to be going the way of the dodo, it's back to price.
"I've seen no mass outcry among book authors about Project Gutenberg."
FYI, Project Gutenberg works are typically in the public domain. For works that aren't, you can be sure that the Project has secured the proper permissions. If the Project started distributing copyrighted works by living authors without the authors' permission, there would most certainly be an outcry. This does not happen, because the Project respects the rights of authors.
"I haven't seen a painter's association start screaming about their paintings being put online."
When a visual work is digitized and put online, it's done with the artist's permission. A photographer or an artist gets paid each time you download something from Corbis or istockphoto; they respect the artists' rights. Even if a piece of art is shown in a motion picture, permission must be obtained. And, yes, artists have sued.
"I haven't seen software companies (yes, I consider coding an art) start suing bit torrent users for pirating software."
Software companies take legal action all the time; it's under the radar as far as P2P users are concerned because it typically happens at the corporate level -- companies using pirated software, system integrators installing pirated or counterfeit software, and the like. The BSA, like the RIAA, picks their targets carefully. With software, the biggest source of piracy is at the corporate level. With music, it's at the P2P level.
"Photoshop is one of the most pirated pieces of software (this is only a reasonable guess, not based on any hard facts) yet Adobe isn't serving up lawsuits left and right. They simply put better copy prevention in their next version."
Huh? Adobe is one of the biggest contributors to the BSA; they even have a director-level anti-piracy position whose tasks includes working with the BSA and law enforcement. The P2P kiddies aren't their biggest target, for obvious reasons, but don't make the mistake of thinking that they're not rabidly litigious.
"In conclusion, if we had a broader range of artists complaining, some people (myself included) might be inclined to stop or at least curtail our file-sharing. On the other hand, with just the music and movie industries complaining... well, let's just say that it becomes a lot easier to apply the label "whining bastards" to the lot of them."
Two wrongs do not make a right. Pirate as much as you want, if you're comfortable with it, but you are mistaken if you believe that artists in other fields are not concerned about their rights being violated. Using this as a rationale for your actions is misguided, as it's based on faulty data.
"first.. if someone considers creating artistic expression a "labor", then they shouldn't be doing it."
Trust me: you are wrong on this. Creating art can be incredibly hard. Great writers, poets, sculptors, composers, painters et al certainly make it look easy. But those works that we enjoy are quite often built of blood, toil, tears and sweat.
I think that for many P2P fans, the thought process is that since the artist enjoyed creating the work, that should be payment enough -- and if the artist saw it as work and was hoping to be paid, then they're obviously not a real artist. Unfortunately, many artists understand this viewpoint to be self-serving horseshit.
"With copyright infringment, you deprive the other person of nothing. They still have thier copyright. They can still do everything that they could before you infringed."
...except sell it to you. And when your friends, and your friends, and their friends, and so on opt to P2P their work instead of paying for it, they are deprived of a market.
Yes, yes, I know: information wants to be free; copyright owners who charge for their work are greedy, and so on. It's okay to acknowledge that you don't particularly care if the people whose rights you violate will still be able to make a living off their work -- after all, it's their problem, not yours -- but the "they're deprived of nothing" crap is insult to injury.
"One hundredth of 40 million is 400000. Four hundred thousand dollars a year is NOT middle class. I guess you meant to say that you earn forty thousand a year, which is even less than I do in my scientist yob. I pity you."
I pity you for your reading comprehension skills. ;-) The other fellow has already pointed out your mistake.
Going off-topic here for a second: I make closer to $400K than $40K. Per my friend zillow.com, my home's value is in the 25th percentile for the county in which I live -- meaning that 3/4 of the rest of the houses are worth more than mine (in English terms: it's a bit of a crap hole). It doesn't even break 50th for my city, or even my ZIP code. Yet it's in the 90th percentile for home values across the USA. And home value ~= mortgage payment.
So, if you pity me, it should be for choosing to live in the fucked up economy that is the Silicon Valley. Perhaps Max Zorin had the right idea.
"91% >> 50% (and 9% to the artist is a "very good deal"!)"
Huh? I was referring to retail margins -- the markup that the retailer charges. The GPP believes that the retailers should be paid less than the artists. All fine and good, but manufacturers -- no matter what business they are in -- don't get to set retail margins.
I sell computer peripherals. Amazon makes about 15 points on my products; Best Buy makes about 50 points. This is out of my control, and has nothing to do with the salary of anybody who touches the products from start to finish -- including mine. Whether I make 0.01% of the retail price, or 1%, or 0% or 100%, Amazon and Best Buy will add whatever markup they please. Amazon and Best Buy will generally make more than the salary of the highest-paid employee who touches the product. This is a sad fact of the retail industry as a whole, but it angers the GPP that the music industry doesn't work differently.
By the way, I should point out another misconception. If, say, in selling computer peripherals my salary averages 9% of the sell-in price, it's not accurate to say that my employer gets to keep the other 91%. The rest goes to all the other innumerable costs of sale... usually, it's ultimately somebody else's salary. Getting back to the record industry... Warner Music managed to keep about 3% of their income last year. The other 97% all went to other people. If their average artist collected even a 4% royalty, they did better than the record company.
""the end-to-end costs of recording, producing, marketing and selling a CD" ... are mostly decreasing. Why are the labels not then increasing what they pay to the artists?"
Ugg... I wish that this were true! Hard good supply chain costs have gone up a lot in the past few years, due to rising fuel prices. There are new and exciting ways to market products, such as the Internet, but the salaries you pay to the people who do the marketing sure aren't going down. Believe me, I really, really wish you were right.
Either way, CD prices are in freefall (something like a $5 drop in average retail price over the past few years). As for why record labels aren't paying artists more out of the goodness of their little hearts... they don't have to! They're not looking out for the artists' best interests. There's always more people looking for a recording contract than can get one, so the record companies have little motivation to raise their royalty rates.
If this doesn't make sense to you, imagine yourself in any business where (like the record industry) the production costs are going up, retail prices are being forced down, and there are people waiting in line to come work for you. Paying your employees or contractors more wouldn't be an obvious first priority.
"Um...isn't that what the RIAA is technically supposed to be? Not that it actually represents the artists' interests."
No; not hardly. They represent the recording industry. From their "about" page (emphasis mine):
Musicians have their own alliances. Somebody's already pointed out the AFM; There are also the ASCAP and BMI; both are performance rights societies run by and for musicians.
Slashdotters often consider ASCAP and BMI to be just as evil as the RIAA, but I should point out that ASCAP/BMI and the RIAA are often at odds with each other, because they represent groups of people who are on the opposite ends of the business deals.
The situation you describe also applies very well to writing software, building houses, selling ice cream, and innumerable other professions. Try to go it alone, work with a small company, or work with a big company. Each have reasons that make them good, and bad. This is part of doing business in modern society, no matter what your business is. Why would ye olde Invisible Hand make an exception for the music industry?
"I have no expectation of free music, but I DO expect that the price I pay get passed mostly on to the artist with only a small percentage going to the label and distributors (including the retailer). This isn't what happens, and I know why people are pissed."
Why would you expect that? When you put together the end-to-end costs of recording, producing, marketing and selling a CD, the studio time (including the paying of the session musicians) and the royalties (in which the songwriters, composers, and featured performers are paid) are but a small percentage of the cost.
You probably already know that retail margins are anywhere from 10% (Amazon) to 50% and more (Best Buy, etc.) across all categories. Music is no different. If this is truly pissing you off, how do you cope with the anger of paying 10% - 50% markup for everything you buy?
"It's just wrong that corporations should not be able to force artists into contracts which deny them any profits after millions of dollars worth of sales."
It's much worse than you think. I'm at the director level for a company that makes PC peripherals. I'm in charge of $40MM of business a year, yet my employment contract (which I was "forced into" in the same sense that artists are "forced into" recording contracts) includes a salary that isn't one hundredth of that amount. I've probably been responsible for half a billion dollars of sales, yet I'm firmly in the middle class.
I believe that everybody should pirate as much music as their hard drive will hold, if they feel that it's the right thing to do. "I pirate to save money" or "I pirate because I give fuck all about respecting the rights of somebody whom I haven't even met" are good rationalizations for doing so. Inequities in contract negotiations aren't a particularly good rationalization, as that's something that we all have experience with -- on both sides of the desk.
"Those authors have experimented, and are not doing it now, because it doesn't friggin' work. Been tried -- didn't work."
Well, that's the whole point behind the movement to weaken copyright law. There's Creative Commons, GNU, and good old-fashioned releasing stuff for free or even releasing it into the public domain in the hopes of priming a secondary revenue stream. Some people choose these methods; most do not. And that's the problem. Not enough producers are releasing their stuff for free, so we want the laws changed to effectively force them to. Market economics aren't enough of an incentive for producers to distribute their works freely, so I think the rationale here is that the works of the producers are far too important for the producers to dictate how they're sold and distributed. The desires of the consumers should outweigh those of the producers, and we'll change the laws if we have to. Anybody who's read Atlas Shrugged is familiar with this line of reasoning.
It's a bit rough to admit that you're part of a majority that wants to take away the rights of a few, so a common tactic is to come up with reasons why the producers don't deserve those rights. This is why, when discussing P2P, piracy, and the like, we often talk about the greed of musicians and record companies, their stupidity (ie. their inability to grasp the superiority of the "give it away for free" model -- thus creating a nice tautology), and their lack of talent. They have enough money; they don't deserve any more, and they lack the brainpower to embrace the P2P model. Thus, P2P users are actually the heroes here: we're righting some economic wrongs, and we're using our advanced intellect for the cause of good.
Students of American history will also recognize these tactics. The majority (the European settlers) wanted to take the land away from the few (the American Indians), so we created notions like "manifest destiny" and painted the original residents as being drunken savages. The rest was fairly easy.
"You'd think the self-professed "smart people"* who vote for "smart candidates"** would realize this. But they don't, because they're nothing more than sheep being led to slaughter."
The problem is that people in the entertainment industry -- whom strong copyright laws protect -- tend to vote for and support Democratic candidates.
"After you download a song, everyone involved still has everything they did before you downloaded it."
You're correct to a point. If the copyright holder wasn't attempting to sell the product to you or anybody else who downloaded it, then they're not hurt at all. For example, if it was some free software, or maybe a song which the copyright holder had purposely released for free. In those cases, they haven't lost the right to control how the work is copied, because the rightsholder has allowed free and unmetered copying.
Note that I haven't touched the "infringement vs. theft" issue. It is pointless, because when you lose money because more and more people are helping themselves to your stuff for free rather than paying you for it, it doesn't matter whether you (or the infringers) call it theft, infringement, piracy, or even some word in that African language with the clicking sound.
"Not really, they'll just have to change their business model from manufacturing to providing a service - just like musicians are going to have to do."
I was with you on the "when we download music, the musician isn't deprived of anything" point, but you appear to be acknowledging that musicians will have to find a new way to make money because of our actions.
"Can she sue for slander? If so, can she win?"
You could've saved yourself the trouble by typing "dict pirate" or "dict piracy" into your Firefox toolbar.
Odds are that your great, great, great grandparents were familiar with the multiple definitions of this homonym.
"On the other hand, if he could "steal" a copy of my car, leaving the original untouched in my driveway, then why should I care? I have a car, he has a car too; we both win."
When people make the "copyright enforcement is theft" argument they are not stating that it is theft from the torrent seeder, but the holder of the copyright. Of course you don't care if your neighbor copies your car, or your collection of music, or what have you. You're not analogous to the copyright holder; the car manufacturer is. When the day comes that people can BT each other's cars, the auto industry will be right properly fucked.
"BMI et al. is behind the first case. These cases wont go away until we start identifying them with the parent company, and not the RIAA."
BMI is a performance rights society. Like ASCAP, they are run by and for songwriters, composers, and publishers. They are not a record company, and were not "behind" the RIAA suit by any stretch. Thus, the GP's joke about BMI going after her for singing "Ding, Dong...": if you want to perform a songwriter's work, you pay the songwriter by licensing it through BMI/ASCAP; you don't pay the record company.
BMI/ASCAP and the RIAA look after different people. BMI/ASCAP represent the artists; the RIAA represents the record companies.
Nota bene that BMI/ASCAP are normally the "good guys" while the record labels are the "bad guys." But, this changes whenever people get wind of BMI/ASCAP shaking down a bar or restaurant owner who neglects to buy a performance license. It seems that we're okay with artists having rights; we just don't want artists to exercise those rights.
"I wasn't intending the cost thing to be the main point, I was just trying to use it as an example of the apparent value that DVDs and CDs can have. It's clearly not a good indication of the worth of particular CDs and DVDs to individual consumers. The point is simply that a lot of people would rather spend their money on DVDs rather than CDs because they value the DVDs more."
sure, if they're a real movie buff and not particularly into music. I know of people who'll watch LOTR two dozen times; I'm not one of them. I think this just speaks to the fact that different folks like different types of entertainment... there are also lots of people who'd rather spend that money toward a video game, or a trip to the movie theatre, or to the opera, or to a rave, or to a live play, or to a concert, or any of innumerable choices for spending their descretionary cash on entertainment. I don't think it's a music vs. DVD thing per se.
"What I was really meaning here is that the RIAA is ignoring the impact of DVDs in their media material. I'm sure they know that DVDs etc are eating into their sales but I don't see them acknowledging that fact or doing much to counteract it. Instead they are spending a lot of effort blaming piracy and trying to counteract it."
Again, this is more of a "music vs. all other forms of entertainment" but we can use the ten years or so as an example, as that's roughly the period that DVD sales began to explode. In the past ten years, here's what record companies have done to try to make their product more attractive, off the top of my head:
I think that when many people write "the record industry isn't adapting" what they really mean is "the record industry isn't adapting in the exact way I want it to; ie. selling DRM-free tracks for $0.25 each and not going after copyright infringers." Thus, it makes it easier to ignore the fact that the iTunes store simply didn't exist ten years ago, or the fact that downloads now make up 30% of some major labels' sales. This gives lots of folks the moral justification to keep on pirating; and the joke here is that if the record labels did start selling tracks for $0.25, the collective Slashdot zeitgeist would be that this means that the artists are also getting a lot less -- thus, the record companies are more evil than ever, and I have more justification than ever to get my music via P2P, thankyouverymuch.
I agree with you, of course, that the record industry probably hasn't changed in the exact way that you want. This is likely because their ultimate goal is to make money, and not to convert Slashdot users to customers -- that's a bit of a Sisyphian task, if you ask me!
"What IS sad to me is that musicians think that they're entitled to anything. I buy my music, but I don't owe any musician a damn thing if they're not selling what I want to buy."
Can you give an example of a musician who believes that you owe them money even if you don't buy their music?
So many people on Slashdot straw-man "don't pirate my music" into "you owe me a living" that I'm curious to hear from musicians who really have stated that they're entitled to get money from people who don't buy their music.
"There's also no law that says a CD which cost about $0.50 to stamp out has to sell for $15. Cut the prices back to $5 or $8 per disk and you'll see sales go up. Record albums used to sell for $4 or $5 back in the day, then tapes came along and bumped the price up to about $10 or $12, and then CDs went through the roof. OK already, a CD *player* costs $20 so why are disks still so expensive?"
You're 100% correct -- before prerecorded cassettes were widely available in the 70's, LPs cost about $5. That $5 LP you bought in 1970 was about $26 in today's money. The average retail price of a new CD release is around $13, so the price has dropped by 50%.
I was paying around $8 for LPs -- $16 in today's money -- in the early 80's, so if prerecorded cassettes hit $12.00, an educated guess is that this would have been in 1986 or so, where that $12 cassette would be $22 in today's money.
I started buying CDs in 1985. They cost me around $17 each, or $31 in today's money. As mentioned, they're $13 today; that's a 60% reduction in cost.
If you're genuinely wondering why CDs are $13 today when LPs sold for only $5 "back in the day," I'm not sure I can do the best job of explaining it, but a good way to start is to think about all the people who touch the CD from start to finish -- including the guy at the pressing plant and the guy in the store who sells it -- and think about how much they were paid by the hour in 1970, vs. how much they make now.
Music isn't alone in reflecting the effect of inflation. My mother bought a new 1965 Beetle for $2,000 back in the day. Inflation's a real devil bitch.
If you're wondering why the price of new CDs has settled at $13 vs. $8 or $10 or $16 or $21, it's that other devil bitch, supply and demand. They're $13 because that's the optimal point on the curve (five years ago, CDs were $18, but the P2P explosion and the growth of other competition for your entertainment dollar put a stop to that). The supply and demand god is the same one who dictates that Sears is lucky to sell a shirt for $20, while Kenneth Cole has no problem selling shirts for $120. He can smile on you -- if you're Kenneth Cole -- or he can be one mean SOB -- if you're trying to sell CDs.
"Do you honestly believe that out of that $15 (or $12 or $18) the musician is receiving more than $0.25 or $0.50? Typically not."
I think that's a pretty well established fact. Similarly, I'm at the director level for a maker of PC peripherals; I'm responsible for some $40MM of business per year. Yet I don't even see 1% of that. The retail industry is pretty inefficient. You're right -- digital delivery, direct from the producer to the customer, is often the best way to go. I hope your model of releasing your songs for free and making your money on live performances is working for you; best of luck to you on your career.
"For one thing, the RIAA jacked up the cost of CDs to mom and pop shops like his, mean while letting Walmart sell the same CDs at cost or a loss. That's just evil."
When Wal-Mart and Best Buy started selling CDs as loss-leaders and the smaller music-only chains (like Tower Records) started to feel the heat, record companies (namely, Universal) tried to do something about it -- they set up MAP programs at Tower and some other chains. Wal-Mart and Best Buy got wind of this, joined forces with the government to bitch slap Universal, and Slashdotters cheered.
At the time, setting up the MAP programs with the smaller retailers was labelled as "evil," and Wal-Mart was seen as the good guys for blowing the whistle. Record labels were prevented from running MAPs with the smaller stores, and Tower Record went gently into that good night.
Interesting to see that it's come full circle, and the modern perception is that Wal-Mart is now the evil one, and that the record companies were evil for losing the fight.
"I think a big part of the reason for this is that it doesn't compare well to DVDs. Should I consider $15 dollars a good deal for an hour of music that cost $1M to produce when I can spend $20 for 2 hours of movie that cost $200M to produce? (Not that cost is any indication of quality.)"
You've answered your own question. You can drill down even more by pointing out that production cost is not necessarily a reflection of value to the buyer.
I do not buy DVDs, for the simple reason that they're not worth the money to me. I rarely watch a film more than once. So, Netflix serves my needs.
But I'll listen to a good CD dozens, or hundreds of times.
In either case, I don't care of the film cost $1MM, $10MM, or $100MM to make. Nor do I care if the CD cost $100, $1K, $10K or $100K or $1MM to produce. It's my enjoyment of the product that determines whether it's of value to me.
Have you noticed that the "they're both pieces of plastic; so why do they have similar costs if the production costs are widely disparate?" argument is typically used for CDs vs. DVDs, and not, say, to question why a film with production costs of $1MM and a film with production costs of $100MM both cost the same on DVD? In other words, if that crowd is so tragically unclued into the concept of supply and demand that they really, genuinely don't understand why CDs and DVDs are priced the way they are, then they'd be making one hell of a holy stink over the fact that, say, a copy of Clerks costs $3 more on Amazon than does a copy of Titanic, when the production cost ratio on the two was somewhere on the order of 100X.
The answer, I think, is that many people understand this just fine (it's readily apparent to anybody who's ever visited a shopping mall and compared prices of clothes from hot designer brands vs. those from Sears), but they make this comparison primarily as a way to help justify music piracy. Odds are that they go through the rest of the life like most people do -- if they want something and they think it's a good value, they'll buy it, without making some sort of moral judgement of the ratio of the cost of production to the retail price.
"The RIAA has conviently ignored the impact of DVDs."
Not sure that I follow. The music industry is fighting for its very life against the impact of other sources of entertainment. It's patently obvious to you and I that we have a lot more choices for spending our entertainment dollars than we did 10 or 20 years ago; you can assume that the folks in the music industry, do, too. It's fun to say "ha ha, they sure are dumb, they haven't done any market research to see how their target market is spending their money!", but really.
"I think what we'd like to see is the record companies stop demanding more and more money for the creative work of the artists *after* they're recouped their investment."
Interesting idea! If I understand you correctly, it would be a record company that would aim for zero profitability. The mission statement would be to fund the production of music and earn back the costs, but not to make a profit going forward. This would be a very bold step indeed, as even Magnatune and CDBaby aim for a profit, rather than simply covering costs.
Perhaps some enterprising Slashdotter can set up a non-profit organization to do just that. It could be a foundation, or even an artist-run collective, that would have as its mission statement to give away the music for free, or give the rights to the artists, after the costs had been recovered. However, given the state of the record industry (Warner managed to clear something like three points of net profit last year, and lots of smaller labels are bleeding money) going for zero profit would be a goal, not a step backward for many of them!