Below Average Dave believes that he should not have to pay the songwriter. This is based on his apparent misunderstanding of the laws regarding parodies.
Elizabeth Taylor was paid $1MM to perform in Cleopatra. That's about $7MM in 2009 dollars. Very, very few female celebrities make more than $7MM per picture today.
The film grossed $43MM, which is about $300MM today.
Relative hyper-commercialization and hyper-glamorization is an exercise left to the reader. Sure, celebrities didn't have Twitter accounts in the 1960s and (with a few exceptions) didn't show up in naked photos. Yet the star-making machine was in full force, and young people were just as rabidly crazy about their favorite musicians and flim performers as they are today.
"You're OK that their business model has them scan a customer's hard disk and gets a list of what you already have on your hard drive? And they're funded by an RIAA member? Not as a philosophical point, not as a political point - for you, as a business point."
I think it's highly interesting, that's for sure. My memory is hazy, but my recollection is that when Michael Robertson tried this himself several years ago (streaming your music collection to you on any computer without requiring that you upload), the record labels got their panties tied up in huge knots.
The fact that a record label now supports this is a sign that things are changing. The record labels are beginning to understand that they should be making money in the general realm of music, and not by providing it in any particular form. If consumers are no longer interested in buying music ten tracks at a time on shiny discs, then the record labels must realize this. Kudos to them for investing in companies that are innovating. If we keep the mindset that record labels are CD-selling dinosaurs that are doomed to extinction, then we're liable to be surprised each time they try the tried-and-true approach of providing customer value through innovation.
"What happens to the little guy, customer, holding the bag, with his locker full of music that he's paid for, but can no longer access?"
If you're referring to lala's Rhapsody-esque music rental business, where you build a locker of music you don't already own -- that's just a risk in the business world. I have about fifty albums in my Rhapsody library; some of it is stuff I already own, and others is stuff that I enjoy listening to but don't see the need to buy. I'll enjoy Rhapsody's service for as long as they're around. If they go out of business, I'll miss them, but it won't break my heart. I'll still have the music I already own, and if I want to have permanent copies of the stuff I was renting on Rhapsody, then I'll buy it.
Similarly, there's a Chinese restaurant that I enjoy patronizing. I might go there this month and pay them $20 for a meal; I might do the same thing in subsequent months. If they close up and leave me "holding the bag" I'll be upset, but I won't think that they'll owe me anything.
As for your privacy concerns -- you're right; we should always be concerned about privacy. Apple and Rhapsody know all about my music collection and Netflix knows what movies I like to watch. The risk of my privacy being violated is always there. It's not unique to lala.
They may indeed be hilarious clowns, but LaLa is doing well. They're cheap and they allow flexibility that many services that others don't offer. Consumers appear to like them because they offer a hybrid service that operates as both a web locker (ie. listen to your home music collection at work without having to upload your music to the cloud or tote an iPod) as well as a subscription service for streaming music on demand, a la Rhapsody (but without locking people into Rhapsody-style pricing).
It's all about building better mousetraps. A better mousetrap means more customers and more money. They certainly haven't appeased the "information wants to be free" crowd, but that's apparently not their target market. It's a safe bet that BT tracker sites already own that market.
Lots of folks state that they'll stop pirating when music becomes more affordable. My guess is that many pirates are being disingenuous when they state this, but it looks like lala is trying to capture this market by providing cheap pricing and flexibility. As mentioned above, it appears to be working, and in the business world, that's what counts.
The BitTorrent crowd will continue to call them clowns, but in the meantime, they're enjoying the money.
"Yes they are - but now they can more-or-less show 'good faith' to the judge."
But then:
"But now they can say "ahh, but look.. we installed a filter.. it's not our fault that them sneaky pirates find ways around those filters.. it would be *impossible* for us to manually go over each and every upload!".. then hope to exit the court grinning while their main page continues to display top 10 lists of every popular category with scarce 'legal' torrents."
That's not good faith. More importantly... if you and I know it's not good faith, it's not going to fool the courts.
The legal system is particularly unsympathetic toward bad actors. If Mininova can't control the actions of their users, then the court is liable to simply order them to shut down until they can.
If the piracy community has one weakness, it's putting too much faith in legal loopholes that simply don't exist, and overestimating the naivete of legal professionals. For instance, pirates continue to parrot the "it's just like google" defense, apparently oblivious to the fact that the original Napster, TorrentSpy, Kazaa, Aimster, Grokster, and countless others fruitlessly tried the same defense. Unless pirates get smarter about this, wishful thinking will be their downfall.
"I know there's nothing illegal about a torrent file itself.. splitting hairs over technical details is what they'll be doing in court."
This is actually a perfect example of what I mean. Of course a torrent file itself isn't illegal -- everybody already knows that, including the courts. Yet when you mention the terms "contributory copyright infringement" and "vicarious copyright infringement" to a pirate, it's often like shouting into a well. Yet pirates cling to the hope that this will allow trackers to operate legally. The best it will do is get you off of direct infringement charges, but the penalties for contributory and vicarious infringment can be just as severe.
One of the big strawmen foisted by the pro-piracy community is that Big Media thinks they can stop all piracy. The reality is that Big Media simply wants to keep it from going truly mainstream. By picking the low-hanging fruit, the goal is to scare people away from starting new trackers. If enough people are scared off, then the theory is that there won't be another TorrentSpy or Mininova in the USA -- just a number of smaller sites that stay under the radar.
It's very much like anti-theft measures at retailers and built into cars. The folks who put them in place know darn well that they won't stop everybody, but if they stop the bottom 80%, then it's a worthy investment.
It's revealing that the porn patroller featured in the article -- a fellow whose job is to view photos all day and press "yes" or "no" buttons -- is a Stanford graduate.
This illustrates how many people apply to work at Facebook, and how hard it must be to get a job there. This guy got his degree from Stanford and took a job that could easily be outsourced to Mechanical Turk -- just to work at Facebook.
For what it's worth, the $50K salary quoted might sound like a lot to those of you in the flyover states but it's pretty dismal by Bay Area standards. My first job out of college in the Bay Area, by comparison, paid $30K -- and that was 20 years ago.
"You need to point out what US law they were violating cause everything done by Pirate Bay is being done by Google and any other search engine out there."
Either contributory copyright infringement or vicarious copyright infringement (the approach used to shut down Aimster and TorrentSpy); if I were trying the case I'd also consider using the Betamax decision (the "substantial non-infringing uses" safe harbor), similar to how the Supreme Court nailed Grokster. There's plenty of precident here -- I know that lots of people like the "it's just like Google" defense, but it's not a good one. I grant that you may not understand why, but I'll leave it to somebody else to outline the differences in greater detail.
"Plus in the US they'd have the DMCA safe harbor laws."
There may be some confusion over DMCA Safe Harbor. Compliance requires responding to take-down requests. PirateBay was not doing this -- in fact, they were posing takedown requests and openly mocking them.
"Err okay, how does that work though? How would a century-long copyright violate the constitution?"
NB that I wrote that it violates the spirit but not the letter. The letter specifically is the "for a limited time" clause. The framers deliberately added this because they intended for copyrights to eventually expire. With media companies continually pushing out the term length, it strains the contextual meaning of "limited time."
"if your cost of sale of a product is $40 and you sell it for $100 (ie. $60 in profit), cutting the selling price in half would require a 6X sales volume increase to make the same profit."
"Valve had a 3000% increase in sales of Left 4 Dead by cutting the price in half. Why lower the cost if they are selling? So you can sell even more!"
Each and every product has its own unique pricing curve. That's great for Valve, but you can't responsibly apply any assumptions to any given product.
In general, keep in mind that even unit elasticity (where sales scale 1:1 with price) does not favor hardware products. In very simple terms... if your cost of sale of a product is $40 and you sell it for $100 (ie. $60 in profit), cutting the selling price in half would require a 6X price increase to make the same profit.
I've dealt with Amazon on many occasions. They are often VERY good at what they do. They have a margin model that's unlike most other retailers and it's served them well. Pricing models and elasticity are concepts that they're very familiar with. Practically speaking, the chances are very low that $RANDOM_SLASHDOTTER knows better than them regarding Kindle pricing.
"It's kind of sad to see that despite all the progressive politics that Obama and Biden embody, that they're following Hollywood's line to the letter."
Interesting choice of words. The administration isn't looking at the short term here -- they see the writing on the wall and want to cement the USA's position as an economic superpower as the manufacturing leaves us behind. The USA is the biggest exporter of IP on the planet, and the administration likely sees this as our economy's golden ticket as India and China usurp what have been traditionally some of our big money-makers.
The current administration probably looks at it a bit like global warming -- doing something about it should not be put off. They want to make progress here; hence the term "progressive." To do nothing would not be progressive.
Agreed with you, however, that the ever-extending copyright lengths violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the constitution. Very well put. The big media companies would, of course, like to make copyright perpetual, but that would be unconstitutional. So instead they're doing the next best thing, and getting it pushed out each time Mickey Mouse is in danger of entering ye olde publick domain.
"And if prices are stupid, like a soundtrack going for 17.99 vs the movie itself going for 15.99, guess what? Piratebay here we come."
You're not the first one to be boggled by this. It gets worse: the videogame based on the movie might cost $50. A CD with image editing software might have a retail price of $400, or a CD with a Linux distro might be free!
There's certainly some desire for digital media to be sold by the ounce, rather than according to development costs or market value (as other goods, like clothing and cars, are sold). But it won't happen soon.
You sound very steadfast in your belief that this entitles you to pirate your stuff. I don't think this will change, so good luck and Godspeed.
I'll add, however, that if you find a soundtrack CD for $18, the store that's selling it is taking a huge markup. Most new CDs are $10 to $14 nowadays. More often than not, soundtrack CDs have only a few good tracks, so I can get by with buying just the tracks I want. That costs me about $2.50 on Amazon.
"might as well say p2p is fair use, the riaa/miaa think that someone bringing over a dvd/cd to watch with you is stealing...right?"
No. You might be confused by the "unauthorized public performance" text in the FBI warning. It doesn't refer to watching a film with a buddy; not even the music or film industries believe this to be the case. Per US copyright law, a public performance is:
to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered
"Open to the public" and "substantial number of persons outside of...family and friends" are the key things to understand here.
Here's the funny thing: for music, public performance rights are licensed through ASCAP and BMI, which are run by and for musicians. Record companies (ie. the RIAA) only see part of this money if they happen to own a publishing company. So, you'd think that file-sharing enthusiasts would be OK with a system in which the artists are paid directly and the RIAA is bypassed, right? Whenever the subject comes up, the sympathy tends to lie with the business owner who isn't paying the performance rights society, and thus causing the artists to get less money.
Thanks for pointing this out. Lots of file sharing enthusiasts hope to find loopholes -- you can avoid trouble if you keep an unencryped wireless network, you can avoid trouble if the activity could be blamed on your kids, etc. The reality is that the courts generally don't like loopholes, as they don't want their time to be wasted. It's like tax loopholes: if you can think of one, somebody probably already thought of it years ago, and it's been closed.
"Repeat until it sinks in: copyright infringement is not a criminal matter."
What do you mean by this? Copyright violation is one of many things that has both civil and criminal penalties, depending on how much you do of it. And for copyright infringement, the bar's set pretty low: share just $1,000 worth of software or music with your friends, and you're liable to face criminal charges. You could hit this threshold just by distributing a few copies of Adobe software, or just one copy of a high-end vertical market application, like specialized CAD/CAM software.
Criminal charges are typically reserved for the really big whales, and not your garden-variety file-sharing enthusiast who barely crosses the line, but it's dangerous to give the impression that copyright violation doesn't have criminal penalties. It's important for piracy enthusiasts to understand this -- if, at the very least, so they can go into law and try to get the law changed.
"Because - at least in most of the jurisdictions derived from English law - it's usually not a crime, but a civil offence?"
It's all too easy to cross that line. In the USA, the threshold is $1,000 of value in 180 days. Distribute just a few copies of PhotoShop or a similar app and you're in criminal territory. If, like many Slashdotters, you have a substantial music collection in your share directory and you run BitTorrent overnight, that $1,000 point can race up really fast.
In practical reality, the US government tends to reserve criminal charges for folks who run the counterfeit CD/DVD operations or who leak a pre-release movie (506(a)(1)(C)), or who otherwise engage in blatant, highly visible piracy. So, most Slashdotters who commit piracy solely via BitTorrent, even if they share a lot of stuff, should reasonably expect only civil penalties. But it's important to understand that the low monetary threshold combined with fast transfer speeds makes lots of us criminals.
The article in question is about downloading movies. You're referring to the Canadian levy on blank CDs, which goes to Canadian recording artists and Canadian record labels. If you've bought a blank CD in Canada, odds are that none of it went to the people who worked on The Dark Knight or Watchmen -- both products of the USA.
Your purchase of blank media might give you a sense of moral justice in pirating, say, Celine Dion or Bryan Adams tracks... if this is ample justification for you, then go about your merry pirating ways and God bless you. But it would be a stretch to apply this moral justice to downloading Watchmen.
"I had an economist friend years ago who calculated what songs would cost on the radio per airing, and it came out to $.05USD. At that price, I would buy large quantities of music. As it is now, CDs are too expensive and so are mp3s on iTunes."
You're correct that performance royalties are less than $0.05 per track, but you can't confuse these with royalties paid per sale. By law, mechanical royalties are at least $0.08, and beyond that, there are royalties negotiated with the performer. Even if you assume that everybody involved with producing the music worked for free, you're looking at a cost of sale of perhaps $0.15 alone.
If your price to start paying for music is $0.05, God bless you and happy pirating. But it's important to understand that until the laws are changed to abolish mechanical royalties, there's a floor you won't get below.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, many new CDs are $10 - $12 and a lot of albums can be downloaded for $6 or less if you catch them on sale at Amazon. This often puts the price per track at less than $0.50. I'll take it at face value that you consider this to be "too expensive," but the math doesn't work. Even if you're toiling at a minimum wage job, working just one more hour a week would likely allow you to buy all the music you want.
Many engineers don't realize that convenience plays a HUGE part in purchase decisions. While I've no doubt that you have no problem driving to the store or waiting a few days for the mail each time you want to buy a CD, it's essential to understand that the instant gratification of clicking a link and having something immediately is a big motivator for lots of people.
It's somewhat pointless to argue whether $0.99 is the right price for a track -- Apple has sold four billion tracks at that price. Last year they surpassed Wal-Mart and became the top music retailer in the US. Your rhetorical question of "why do they think people would be willing to pay..." has an answer: because people are indeed willing to pay $0.99 a track. This goes beyond theory. Apple has figured it out.
At any rate, prices are actually lower than you indicate. Most new releases are $10 to $13 on Amazon, and while there's no questioning Apple's success at $0.99 a track, there are better deals to be had. I bought The Bird And The Bee's latest album for $4.00. This worked out to about $0.30 per track.
Yes, yes, I know -- you probably got it for free. I doff my hat to your financial saviness, but I happen to be in a financial position where spending four clams for a DRM-free album isn't a hardship.
You're correct -- they're assuming that the owner of the IP address will take some personal responsibility for how it's used. If said owner doesn't want to catch heat, they'll give everybody in the household a "don't do anything illegal, mmmkay?" speech, if said household members really need to have this explained to them.
As for somebody using your wireless connection without your authorization and potentially doing illegal things with it... again, this is a good opportunity for personal responsibility to make an appearance. Securing your wireless connection from abuse by your neighbors is just common sense.
Regardless of your feelings on piracy, both of these tactics are hugely in your self interest.
"Okay, I gotta ask - exactly why do artists think they're owed a living?"
Classic Slashdot strawman.
In all my days, I've not met one artist (in any medium) who thought they were owed a living.
However, it is the common claim among pirates that artists believe that they are owed a living.
But, the statements "artists believe they are owed a living" and "pirates like to claim that artists believe they are owed a living" are not equivalent.
"If I want to be a musician, why would I deserve a public subsidy? (that's basically what Copyright has turned into.)"
Slashdot Mirror
Correct -- but the songwriter is still paid.
Below Average Dave believes that he should not have to pay the songwriter. This is based on his apparent misunderstanding of the laws regarding parodies.
With regard to salaries, then vs. now:
Elizabeth Taylor was paid $1MM to perform in Cleopatra. That's about $7MM in 2009 dollars. Very, very few female celebrities make more than $7MM per picture today.
The film grossed $43MM, which is about $300MM today.
Relative hyper-commercialization and hyper-glamorization is an exercise left to the reader. Sure, celebrities didn't have Twitter accounts in the 1960s and (with a few exceptions) didn't show up in naked photos. Yet the star-making machine was in full force, and young people were just as rabidly crazy about their favorite musicians and flim performers as they are today.
"You're OK that their business model has them scan a customer's hard disk and gets a list of what you already have on your hard drive? And they're funded by an RIAA member? Not as a philosophical point, not as a political point - for you, as a business point."
I think it's highly interesting, that's for sure. My memory is hazy, but my recollection is that when Michael Robertson tried this himself several years ago (streaming your music collection to you on any computer without requiring that you upload), the record labels got their panties tied up in huge knots.
The fact that a record label now supports this is a sign that things are changing. The record labels are beginning to understand that they should be making money in the general realm of music, and not by providing it in any particular form. If consumers are no longer interested in buying music ten tracks at a time on shiny discs, then the record labels must realize this. Kudos to them for investing in companies that are innovating. If we keep the mindset that record labels are CD-selling dinosaurs that are doomed to extinction, then we're liable to be surprised each time they try the tried-and-true approach of providing customer value through innovation.
"What happens to the little guy, customer, holding the bag, with his locker full of music that he's paid for, but can no longer access?"
If you're referring to lala's Rhapsody-esque music rental business, where you build a locker of music you don't already own -- that's just a risk in the business world. I have about fifty albums in my Rhapsody library; some of it is stuff I already own, and others is stuff that I enjoy listening to but don't see the need to buy. I'll enjoy Rhapsody's service for as long as they're around. If they go out of business, I'll miss them, but it won't break my heart. I'll still have the music I already own, and if I want to have permanent copies of the stuff I was renting on Rhapsody, then I'll buy it.
Similarly, there's a Chinese restaurant that I enjoy patronizing. I might go there this month and pay them $20 for a meal; I might do the same thing in subsequent months. If they close up and leave me "holding the bag" I'll be upset, but I won't think that they'll owe me anything.
As for your privacy concerns -- you're right; we should always be concerned about privacy. Apple and Rhapsody know all about my music collection and Netflix knows what movies I like to watch. The risk of my privacy being violated is always there. It's not unique to lala.
They may indeed be hilarious clowns, but LaLa is doing well. They're cheap and they allow flexibility that many services that others don't offer. Consumers appear to like them because they offer a hybrid service that operates as both a web locker (ie. listen to your home music collection at work without having to upload your music to the cloud or tote an iPod) as well as a subscription service for streaming music on demand, a la Rhapsody (but without locking people into Rhapsody-style pricing).
It's all about building better mousetraps. A better mousetrap means more customers and more money. They certainly haven't appeased the "information wants to be free" crowd, but that's apparently not their target market. It's a safe bet that BT tracker sites already own that market.
Lots of folks state that they'll stop pirating when music becomes more affordable. My guess is that many pirates are being disingenuous when they state this, but it looks like lala is trying to capture this market by providing cheap pricing and flexibility. As mentioned above, it appears to be working, and in the business world, that's what counts.
The BitTorrent crowd will continue to call them clowns, but in the meantime, they're enjoying the money.
You write:
"Yes they are - but now they can more-or-less show 'good faith' to the judge."
But then:
"But now they can say "ahh, but look.. we installed a filter.. it's not our fault that them sneaky pirates find ways around those filters.. it would be *impossible* for us to manually go over each and every upload!".. then hope to exit the court grinning while their main page continues to display top 10 lists of every popular category with scarce 'legal' torrents."
That's not good faith. More importantly... if you and I know it's not good faith, it's not going to fool the courts.
The legal system is particularly unsympathetic toward bad actors. If Mininova can't control the actions of their users, then the court is liable to simply order them to shut down until they can.
If the piracy community has one weakness, it's putting too much faith in legal loopholes that simply don't exist, and overestimating the naivete of legal professionals. For instance, pirates continue to parrot the "it's just like google" defense, apparently oblivious to the fact that the original Napster, TorrentSpy, Kazaa, Aimster, Grokster, and countless others fruitlessly tried the same defense. Unless pirates get smarter about this, wishful thinking will be their downfall.
"I know there's nothing illegal about a torrent file itself.. splitting hairs over technical details is what they'll be doing in court."
This is actually a perfect example of what I mean. Of course a torrent file itself isn't illegal -- everybody already knows that, including the courts. Yet when you mention the terms "contributory copyright infringement" and "vicarious copyright infringement" to a pirate, it's often like shouting into a well. Yet pirates cling to the hope that this will allow trackers to operate legally. The best it will do is get you off of direct infringement charges, but the penalties for contributory and vicarious infringment can be just as severe.
You win the prize for today.
One of the big strawmen foisted by the pro-piracy community is that Big Media thinks they can stop all piracy. The reality is that Big Media simply wants to keep it from going truly mainstream. By picking the low-hanging fruit, the goal is to scare people away from starting new trackers. If enough people are scared off, then the theory is that there won't be another TorrentSpy or Mininova in the USA -- just a number of smaller sites that stay under the radar.
It's very much like anti-theft measures at retailers and built into cars. The folks who put them in place know darn well that they won't stop everybody, but if they stop the bottom 80%, then it's a worthy investment.
It's revealing that the porn patroller featured in the article -- a fellow whose job is to view photos all day and press "yes" or "no" buttons -- is a Stanford graduate.
This illustrates how many people apply to work at Facebook, and how hard it must be to get a job there. This guy got his degree from Stanford and took a job that could easily be outsourced to Mechanical Turk -- just to work at Facebook.
For what it's worth, the $50K salary quoted might sound like a lot to those of you in the flyover states but it's pretty dismal by Bay Area standards. My first job out of college in the Bay Area, by comparison, paid $30K -- and that was 20 years ago.
I hope the guy is buried in options.
"You need to point out what US law they were violating cause everything done by Pirate Bay is being done by Google and any other search engine out there."
Either contributory copyright infringement or vicarious copyright infringement (the approach used to shut down Aimster and TorrentSpy); if I were trying the case I'd also consider using the Betamax decision (the "substantial non-infringing uses" safe harbor), similar to how the Supreme Court nailed Grokster. There's plenty of precident here -- I know that lots of people like the "it's just like Google" defense, but it's not a good one. I grant that you may not understand why, but I'll leave it to somebody else to outline the differences in greater detail.
"Plus in the US they'd have the DMCA safe harbor laws."
There may be some confusion over DMCA Safe Harbor. Compliance requires responding to take-down requests. PirateBay was not doing this -- in fact, they were posing takedown requests and openly mocking them.
"Err okay, how does that work though? How would a century-long copyright violate the constitution?"
NB that I wrote that it violates the spirit but not the letter. The letter specifically is the "for a limited time" clause. The framers deliberately added this because they intended for copyrights to eventually expire. With media companies continually pushing out the term length, it strains the contextual meaning of "limited time."
"if your cost of sale of a product is $40 and you sell it for $100 (ie. $60 in profit), cutting the selling price in half would require a 6X sales volume increase to make the same profit."
Fixed that for myself.
"Valve had a 3000% increase in sales of Left 4 Dead by cutting the price in half. Why lower the cost if they are selling? So you can sell even more!"
Each and every product has its own unique pricing curve. That's great for Valve, but you can't responsibly apply any assumptions to any given product.
In general, keep in mind that even unit elasticity (where sales scale 1:1 with price) does not favor hardware products. In very simple terms... if your cost of sale of a product is $40 and you sell it for $100 (ie. $60 in profit), cutting the selling price in half would require a 6X price increase to make the same profit.
I've dealt with Amazon on many occasions. They are often VERY good at what they do. They have a margin model that's unlike most other retailers and it's served them well. Pricing models and elasticity are concepts that they're very familiar with. Practically speaking, the chances are very low that $RANDOM_SLASHDOTTER knows better than them regarding Kindle pricing.
"It's kind of sad to see that despite all the progressive politics that Obama and Biden embody, that they're following Hollywood's line to the letter."
Interesting choice of words. The administration isn't looking at the short term here -- they see the writing on the wall and want to cement the USA's position as an economic superpower as the manufacturing leaves us behind. The USA is the biggest exporter of IP on the planet, and the administration likely sees this as our economy's golden ticket as India and China usurp what have been traditionally some of our big money-makers.
The current administration probably looks at it a bit like global warming -- doing something about it should not be put off. They want to make progress here; hence the term "progressive." To do nothing would not be progressive.
Agreed with you, however, that the ever-extending copyright lengths violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the constitution. Very well put. The big media companies would, of course, like to make copyright perpetual, but that would be unconstitutional. So instead they're doing the next best thing, and getting it pushed out each time Mickey Mouse is in danger of entering ye olde publick domain.
"And if prices are stupid, like a soundtrack going for 17.99 vs the movie itself going for 15.99, guess what? Piratebay here we come."
You're not the first one to be boggled by this. It gets worse: the videogame based on the movie might cost $50. A CD with image editing software might have a retail price of $400, or a CD with a Linux distro might be free!
There's certainly some desire for digital media to be sold by the ounce, rather than according to development costs or market value (as other goods, like clothing and cars, are sold). But it won't happen soon.
You sound very steadfast in your belief that this entitles you to pirate your stuff. I don't think this will change, so good luck and Godspeed.
I'll add, however, that if you find a soundtrack CD for $18, the store that's selling it is taking a huge markup. Most new CDs are $10 to $14 nowadays. More often than not, soundtrack CDs have only a few good tracks, so I can get by with buying just the tracks I want. That costs me about $2.50 on Amazon.
"might as well say p2p is fair use, the riaa/miaa think that someone bringing over a dvd/cd to watch with you is stealing...right?"
No. You might be confused by the "unauthorized public performance" text in the FBI warning. It doesn't refer to watching a film with a buddy; not even the music or film industries believe this to be the case. Per US copyright law, a public performance is:
"Open to the public" and "substantial number of persons outside of...family and friends" are the key things to understand here.
Here's the funny thing: for music, public performance rights are licensed through ASCAP and BMI, which are run by and for musicians. Record companies (ie. the RIAA) only see part of this money if they happen to own a publishing company. So, you'd think that file-sharing enthusiasts would be OK with a system in which the artists are paid directly and the RIAA is bypassed, right? Whenever the subject comes up, the sympathy tends to lie with the business owner who isn't paying the performance rights society, and thus causing the artists to get less money.
Thanks for pointing this out. Lots of file sharing enthusiasts hope to find loopholes -- you can avoid trouble if you keep an unencryped wireless network, you can avoid trouble if the activity could be blamed on your kids, etc. The reality is that the courts generally don't like loopholes, as they don't want their time to be wasted. It's like tax loopholes: if you can think of one, somebody probably already thought of it years ago, and it's been closed.
"Repeat until it sinks in: copyright infringement is not a criminal matter."
What do you mean by this? Copyright violation is one of many things that has both civil and criminal penalties, depending on how much you do of it. And for copyright infringement, the bar's set pretty low: share just $1,000 worth of software or music with your friends, and you're liable to face criminal charges. You could hit this threshold just by distributing a few copies of Adobe software, or just one copy of a high-end vertical market application, like specialized CAD/CAM software.
Criminal charges are typically reserved for the really big whales, and not your garden-variety file-sharing enthusiast who barely crosses the line, but it's dangerous to give the impression that copyright violation doesn't have criminal penalties. It's important for piracy enthusiasts to understand this -- if, at the very least, so they can go into law and try to get the law changed.
"If that were so, the media industries would call the police and report it, not sue for damages."
Oh, they do. Microsoft works with law enforcement quite a bit. The music industry calls the cops from time to time as well:
http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/05/guilty-verdict.html
It's a safe bet that most busts for criminal copyright infringement are the result of a tip-off from a copyright holder.
"Because - at least in most of the jurisdictions derived from English law - it's usually not a crime, but a civil offence?"
It's all too easy to cross that line. In the USA, the threshold is $1,000 of value in 180 days. Distribute just a few copies of PhotoShop or a similar app and you're in criminal territory. If, like many Slashdotters, you have a substantial music collection in your share directory and you run BitTorrent overnight, that $1,000 point can race up really fast.
In practical reality, the US government tends to reserve criminal charges for folks who run the counterfeit CD/DVD operations or who leak a pre-release movie (506(a)(1)(C)), or who otherwise engage in blatant, highly visible piracy. So, most Slashdotters who commit piracy solely via BitTorrent, even if they share a lot of stuff, should reasonably expect only civil penalties. But it's important to understand that the low monetary threshold combined with fast transfer speeds makes lots of us criminals.
The article in question is about downloading movies. You're referring to the Canadian levy on blank CDs, which goes to Canadian recording artists and Canadian record labels. If you've bought a blank CD in Canada, odds are that none of it went to the people who worked on The Dark Knight or Watchmen -- both products of the USA.
Your purchase of blank media might give you a sense of moral justice in pirating, say, Celine Dion or Bryan Adams tracks... if this is ample justification for you, then go about your merry pirating ways and God bless you. But it would be a stretch to apply this moral justice to downloading Watchmen.
The writer thinks that it means something which it does not:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dicker
The dictionary does, however, define "dick around" as "to spend time idly; fool around."
"I had an economist friend years ago who calculated what songs would cost on the radio per airing, and it came out to $.05USD. At that price, I would buy large quantities of music. As it is now, CDs are too expensive and so are mp3s on iTunes."
You're correct that performance royalties are less than $0.05 per track, but you can't confuse these with royalties paid per sale. By law, mechanical royalties are at least $0.08, and beyond that, there are royalties negotiated with the performer. Even if you assume that everybody involved with producing the music worked for free, you're looking at a cost of sale of perhaps $0.15 alone.
If your price to start paying for music is $0.05, God bless you and happy pirating. But it's important to understand that until the laws are changed to abolish mechanical royalties, there's a floor you won't get below.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, many new CDs are $10 - $12 and a lot of albums can be downloaded for $6 or less if you catch them on sale at Amazon. This often puts the price per track at less than $0.50. I'll take it at face value that you consider this to be "too expensive," but the math doesn't work. Even if you're toiling at a minimum wage job, working just one more hour a week would likely allow you to buy all the music you want.
Many engineers don't realize that convenience plays a HUGE part in purchase decisions. While I've no doubt that you have no problem driving to the store or waiting a few days for the mail each time you want to buy a CD, it's essential to understand that the instant gratification of clicking a link and having something immediately is a big motivator for lots of people.
It's somewhat pointless to argue whether $0.99 is the right price for a track -- Apple has sold four billion tracks at that price. Last year they surpassed Wal-Mart and became the top music retailer in the US. Your rhetorical question of "why do they think people would be willing to pay..." has an answer: because people are indeed willing to pay $0.99 a track. This goes beyond theory. Apple has figured it out.
At any rate, prices are actually lower than you indicate. Most new releases are $10 to $13 on Amazon, and while there's no questioning Apple's success at $0.99 a track, there are better deals to be had. I bought The Bird And The Bee's latest album for $4.00. This worked out to about $0.30 per track.
Yes, yes, I know -- you probably got it for free. I doff my hat to your financial saviness, but I happen to be in a financial position where spending four clams for a DRM-free album isn't a hardship.
You're correct -- they're assuming that the owner of the IP address will take some personal responsibility for how it's used. If said owner doesn't want to catch heat, they'll give everybody in the household a "don't do anything illegal, mmmkay?" speech, if said household members really need to have this explained to them.
As for somebody using your wireless connection without your authorization and potentially doing illegal things with it... again, this is a good opportunity for personal responsibility to make an appearance. Securing your wireless connection from abuse by your neighbors is just common sense.
Regardless of your feelings on piracy, both of these tactics are hugely in your self interest.
To the poster's credit, I don't think he's referring to the USA, but for those who are interested in criminal copyright infringement in the US:
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#506
"Okay, I gotta ask - exactly why do artists think they're owed a living?"
Classic Slashdot strawman.
In all my days, I've not met one artist (in any medium) who thought they were owed a living.
However, it is the common claim among pirates that artists believe that they are owed a living.
But, the statements "artists believe they are owed a living" and "pirates like to claim that artists believe they are owed a living" are not equivalent.
"If I want to be a musician, why would I deserve a public subsidy? (that's basically what Copyright has turned into.)"
Oh, please.