If I understand you correctly, it's manifest that the right to a creative work belongs with the consumer, not the producer. Is that true?
As an aside, your arguments are similar to the "manifest destiny" paradigm of the 18th and 19th centuries in the US. It boiled down to "might makes right." "Rights" which are enforcable only through social contract don't matter to much when you encounter a large group of people who have advanced technology and the desire to use that technology against you. Today, an artist and his so-called "right" to how others use his work is irrelevant in the face of ten million teenagers with a P2P application. Likewise, history has shown us that it was futile for American Indians to claim their so-called "rights" to land when faced with a million settlers with rifles.
Naturally, I'm not calling you an "Indian killer," but just pointing out that human nature is constant. If enough people are united in wanting something and they have the technology to overcome social contracts, they'll take it, and rationalize it as they see fit.
""Most" is a very strong word that I think fails to factor in the numerous uses of p2p software that is 1. totally legal or 2. falls within fair use."
This can be answered by the following thought experiment: what if you had a magic wand to wave, or a magic button you could push, that would make all the unauthorized content on, say, Kazaa disappear instantly? By what percentage would the traffic then decrease? Would Sharman Networks continue to be able to stay in business?
Slashdotters may tend to think of P2P traffic being largely Linux distros, but the reality is that the vast majority is music and porn. If that all went away tomorrow, traffic on Kazaa would evaporate, Sharman would no longer be able to generate ad revenue or charge for upgrades, and they'd be out of business.
Interesting, I haven't heard that. Do you have a citation?
"I think it's still legal to take a cassette tape and copy somebody else's CD , tape or record, but I'm not sure if it's legal to make a copy digitally, like make an mp3 of somebody else's CD (or even tape or record) anymore. I suspect it still is, though I'm sure the RIAA wouldn't agree."
Also interesting. Do you have anything to back that up? If you would like to see what US law says about "fair use" (as opposed to the common Slashdot misunderstandings), Here's the link. Ivan Hoffman also has an excellent article about Napster's failed attempt to defend their actions as fair use. pdinfo.com addresses the specific issue of music and fair use here ; they write "We have attempted to do find specific details and examples of Fair Use of music. The rumors that it is OK to use so many notes or so many bars are just not true. There is little doubt that, other than private in-home listening and playing, Fair Use of music is extremely limited."
So, if you've found a law that makes it okay to copy my friend's CDs onto cassette tapes, please post the links. In either case, there's an important difference between "under the radar" copyright violation (making copies of your friends CDs in small quantities) for which nobody will get on your case, vs. activities which are truly "fair use."
"Of course, the RIAA IS getting paid. If you copy a CD onto an Audio CD, the RIAA gets a cut. (It's called the `DAT tax'. Google is your friend if you've never heard of it.) I guess they're just not getting paid enough..."
That's counter to the popular understanding of how it works. It's explained here (Google is indeed great for finding instances of that retarded "the RIAA gets a cut" meme, but for stuff like this, just going to the actual law book will save a lot of wasted time). The vast majority of the money goes to artists, composers and musicians -- who, I should add, generally aren't paid enough. A small percentage goes to record companies. None goes directly to the RIAA.
"But when your friend avoids the need to buy a copy of a book, the bookstore and the publisher do not lose anything they had. A more fitting description would be that the bookstore and publisher get less income than they might have got."
Correct.
"The same consequence can result if your friend decides to play bridge instead of reading a book."
The crucial difference is how one avoids paying for the book: if they get a copy of it without the rightsholder's permission, or by playing bridge. The former is gnerally illegal. The latter is not.
"In a free market system, no business is entitled to cry "foul" just because a potential customer chooses not to deal with them."
Correct, but irrelevant. Piracy is not part of a free market system. From the Wikipedia:
A free market economy is an idealized form of market economy in which buyers and sellers are permitted to carry out transactions based solely on mutual agreement without interventionism in the form of taxes, subsidies, regulation, or government provision of goods or services beyond simply the protection of property rights and enforcement of contracts.
"Apple's iTunes is doing okay. It's not charging money that's the problem - it's enforcing inferior technology in order to protect a revenue stream with overinflated priofit margins that's the problem. These days it's just silly to get your music by buying it on a physical disk, and it's even sillier to be paying 10x markup for it."
That's a common misperception. Margins in the record industry are typically much lower than many other retail industries. Granted, most Slashdotters are engineering types rather than economist or marketing types, but this misunderstanding can be traced to a few reasons:
They're not aware of the inherent inefficiencies of a two tier distribution mechanism (the same mechanism through which many computer parts are sold). A typical new release is sold by the record company to the distributor for about $8 - $10, the distributor takes a cut (I believe less than 10%) and the retailer marks it up by around the neighborhood of 30% (again, by comparison, that same retailer might have a 30% - 50% markup for computer products and accessories). The last money the record company ever sees from the sale is when it goes to the distributor for $8 - $10, and in no point in the chain is there a "10x markup."
They're not aware of the cost of making the CD. Often Slashdotters think of bulk CD-Rs which they can buy for a dime or less each and incorrectly think that the cost of pressing a CD is similar. It's not: it costs more to press a CD, and audio CDs are typically produced in much lower quantities than bulk CD-Rs. And, of course, the cost of the pressing is one of the most insignificant expenses in the process of producing a CD. If a CD has a production run of 10,000 pieces, the check that the record company writes to pay the salaries for the engineer, the producer and other recording personnel (a check that the musician would have to write themselves if they'd opted not to sign a recording contract) is probably much larger than the check they wrote to the CD duplication house.
They don't understand that the delta between gross margin and net margin is all the difference in the world. It's net margin that determines whether you're profitable, whether you get to give your employees raises or perhaps lay them off, and whether you'll be able to grow your business.
Is buying CDs the old fashioned way inefficient? You betchya. Long live iTunes. Does the recording industry make better margins than most of the other stuff you see for sale at Wal-Mart or Best Buy or wherever you buy your CDs? No way in hell.
It's a bit like Apple's taking responsibility of adding DRM to songs they make available via the iTunes Music Store. DRM provides a comfort level that allows record companies to make their catalogs available on iTunes. What people do with the content after they download it isn't Apple's problem, but DRM was necessary for the iTMS to build the extensive library that it has, and that's been critical to its success. I imagine that some moducum of protection, as brain-dead as it is, has made it easier for Google to get permission to offer content through this new service.
"I think that companies who take up the responsibility to protect users against themselves should also be held accountable for any glitch (legal stuff that doesn't work, illegal stuff that does work) in their system."
You won't find much argument here. And in this example, Apple has a customer service team that's been pretty good, in my experience, in dealing with technical issues relating to DRM-encoded content.
"You've completely missed the point of the so-called study. The conclusion goes something like this: "Since people in Asia are installing bootlegged Windows on Linux PCs, the number of people world-wide using Linux is much smaller than the number of PCs sold with Linux, and that trend will remain so in the future." This ignores the people who don't bootleg Windows, those who buy a Windows PC and wipe it, and those who build their own systems. The study is just plain dodgy."
Interesting! Naturally, I haven't spent the 5,000 clams or whatever they're asking for the full study, but from reading third-party accounts of it, all I can see that they're claiming is that 75% of PC's sold preloaded with Linux will end up running Windows. From what I've seen, this tidbit's effect on overall Linux desktop usage (taking into account the other methods of acquisition that you've mentioned) is beyond the scope of the Gartner report. I'd love to find a link that has more details on their conclusion -- perhaps there is a point that I've missed. Can you provide a link?
"First, the study was based on anecdotal evidence from Asia. From that, Gartner is extrapolating a very dubious conclusion. Second, how many people have a "copy" of Windows to lend, since computers don't come with Windows CDs anymore?"
Piracy's huge in Asia, with retailers often loading up customers' PCs with pirated software. Judging from the amount of spam I get offering me "OEM" copies of XP, pirated versions of Windows are readily available. Not sure if your last question was rhetorical, but I know tons of people who've installed XP off of a CD-R using somebody else's serial number. It might very well be that you haven't yet personally run into this or gotten that spam (and lucky you if that's the case), but it happens.
"Gartner doesn't do anything out of the goodness of their hearts. They are paid to do these so-called studies, and they won't remain in business very long if their conclusions aren't similar to their customer's expectations."
Interesting, you're the second person who's stated that this study was commissioned. Do you know who commissioned it, and do you have a citation? I'm aware, of course, that analysts will do both the write-then-sell approach as well as doing specific research projects on behalf of customers, but I wasn't aware that this one was one of the latter.
At any rate, in my line of work, reports, forecasts, analysis and the like from analyst firms are valued because they contain reliable information, and not because they tell me what I want to hear. Are things different in your business?
"They are hardly well-respected by anyone who knows how they work."
That's a very broad statement. The article you linked was interesting, but I think that it's a given that whenever a well-known entity passes judgement about { Microsoft | Linux | Apple | Playstation 2 | XBox } there's bound to be a contingent who'll rebut it. Do you have any other citations?
"This is the result of the "free market" : MS paid them to have an opinion. In other countries we have clearly understand the USA definition of "free market"."
You're correct that it's the result of the free market. It's the free market which has caused the explosion of Linux pre-loads, and lots of people are buying those Wal-Mart PCs because they'd rather save the money and just load Windows themselves using a friends' copy. No big deal; it's economics at work. But if things had gone a little differently and, say, AmigaOS were today a free, open source Windows alternative, then the Gartner Group might have written a report about that. Either way, the Gartner Group analyzes the market.
I lost you on the "MS paid them to have an opinion" part, though. I was not aware that Microsoft commissioned this report. Do you have a citation for that? The Gartner Group are well respected as call-em-as-they-sees-em analysts and have slammed Microsoft on several occasions. And, when Gartner (or another analyst firm) releases a report that can be spun by a third party, they'll spin away.
"OK, colour me not too bright, but I cannot see why pre-installed Linux is being targeted here by Gartner - their claim doesn't seems to be, pre-installing Linux is the same as shipping the machine with no OS whatsoever."
It's very simple: Gartner comments on industry trends. Wal-Mart and other major retailers are selling a relatively huge number of PCs equipped with Linux. That's the trend, and that's what Gartner is commenting on. If Wal-Mart were selling non-bootable PCs with no OS whatsoever, then Gartner might have written a report focusing on that.
I think the Linux community is taking this way too personally. There is a difference between cause and effect and blame. Of course people are buying those Wal-Mart Lindows PCs so they can avoid the Microsoft tax and load up a copy of Windows from a friend -- although it's naturally not stated overtly, that's the whole point. But this is not something that Linus Torvalds or anybody running Linux should take personally. If people choose to see this as an issue of "blame," then blame Wal-Mart and the other retailers who recognize a marketing opportunity when they see it, or blame those who'd use this Gartner report to promote an agenda.
"Oh - and then, shock horror, the opensource community comes back with: "We don't steal from you" (probably true on the whole) "and those who buy Linux desktops don't steal from you either" (probably, at least, significantly false)."
Agreed 100%. The OS community's umgrage is misdirected. And so what if Wal-Mart is selling a buttload of Linux-loaded PCs to customers who are loading Windows? Big deal, no more of a big deal than all those copyrighted MP3 files sitting on Slashdotters' PCs across the land. Not much difference in my book between the Wal-Mart customer who wants to save $50 by using his brothers' copy of XP vs. the Slashdotter who's sourcing music via P2P as a "social protest" to "make a statement about overpriced music."
"Oh - for the purposes of this comment it has been assumed that the independant research company Gartner is independently researching for the independent entity of Microsoft."
Precisely. Analyst firms will occasionally be commissioned by third parties to do reports and studies, but they remain independent.
" OK. lets get this out of the way. It is NOT theft. It is NOT a criminal act [yet]."
Another persistent Slashdot myth. In the US, copyright violation carries both civil and criminal penalties. This has been the case for some years now, and I think this myth survives around here largely because Slashdotters keep telling each other that there's no such thing as "criminal copyright infringement" rather than doing a bit of reading.
"Now. Why is it social protest? Its people realizing that they are being price gouged by large corporations involved in price fixing. Price fixing and unreasonable extension of copyright."
Of all the people I know who get their music via P2P, they do it for simple greed -- they'd really rather get it for free than pay the $0.99, simple as that. But they don't try to snow anybody by claiming that it's "social protest." The Montgomery freedom march was social protest. This is just piracy. Big difference.
"The problem is that the music companies are going to try and conspire to raise these prices I think."
Record companies are subject to the laws of a free market economy just as every other business. This is why record prices have dropped significantly over the past few years, and why record companies must operate on lower net margins than many, many other industries. If they could raise their prices, they could, but if the market doesn't let them, they won't.
"I think that the record companies are in for a shock. They are no longer needed. The internet has replaced them."
The impending death of the record industry at the hands of the Internet has been predicted for years now.
Record companies do a lot of things. They find talented (or at least marketable) artists and front them the money for engineering, producing, marketing, promoting and distributing their works.
The huge success of the iTunes Music Store and other services has shown that it's the traditional retail channel for old-fashioned plastic CDs that may go first (in fact, a recent industry report has given the CD as the primary music medium another six years, tops). The record companies probably don't mind this; iTMS is just another sales channel for them.
Music will still take money to produce. Setting up a recording and mixing rig and finding a skilled engineer and producer, or taking the time to learn how to do this yourself, all take time and money. The Internet doesn't change this.
While the Internet provides some absolutely great opportunities for self-promotion, effective promotion still takes skills, time, and money. Ripping your stuff onto MP3 and putting it on your web site or on the P2P networks is a good start, but it won't get your CD to every radio station in the country for airplay. It won't get you a video produced and shown on MTV. It won't get you in the Best Buy circular or on the home page of iTMS or other services. It won't get you booked on a concert tour and it won't get you in front of a stylist and professional photographer for PR materials. It won't accomplish the other squillion things that a record contract will do for you. This is why most musicians still want recording contracts and aren't flocking to Magnatune in droves.
Of course, there are plenty of indie musicians who frankly don't need or want any of that; folks who will be happy to distribute their stuff on a payment-optional basis via P2P and picking up the occasional local gig. The Internet will continue to be a tremendous enabler for these folks. The Internet is a truly wonderful thing, but it isn't the Great Equalizer that many Slashdotters see it as for many industries. In a buyer's market such as the music industry, there's still no substitute for talent and money, and the folks who have talent and money can use the Internet just as easily as anybody else.
If I understand you correctly, you're advocating socializing the entertainment and software industries, two industries which hold lots of IP.
Naturally, many folks would like to see somebody else's career socialized while they continue to pursue filthy lucre on their own. A good test for anybody advocating that somebody else's revenue stream become socialized is to ask oneself if one would be happy if one's own industry went that way. Would you be satisfied with your income being converted to a fixed government wage, determined by law and subject to the whims of the political climate?
For such a change to occur, it's not enough that Slashdotters want musicians to relinquish the right to sell their stuff on their own terms and covert to a socialized, government-run compensation; the musicians will have to want it, as well. There are already clues to how musicians in general feel about this. Generally speaking, musicians still want recording contracts, and they have the same financial aspirations that you and I do. Compare the breadth and quality of material and the overall user experience of, say, the iTunes Music Store vs. Magnatune, an "open source" label.
"I have to be totally honest in asking WTF is going on with all this emphesis on file trading? Seriously, America has the single largest murder numbers in the western world (Larger then Canada's and Europes combined - excluding ww2) I think that there are far bigger issues that the US could do with addressing then kids getting some singles on the cheep (free)."
The US is also the world's largest producer of intellectual property. Like it or not, we owe a great deal of our relative wealth and way of life to the taxes collected on profits earned on the IP owned by US citizens and US-based companies.
The taxes collected on those earnings can then be addressed to addressing violent crime and the squillion other things that a government requires money to do.
"if the record companies would trust people to do the right thing and stop calling us all thieves they could make a LOT more money. If I can buy a used CD for five bucks, rip it and get the quality I want, why the fuck would I pay twice that for the download? Magnatune gets it... the others don't."
The empirical evidence runs counter to your opinion. The iTunes Music Store does absolutely gangbuster business, and they have very little trouble signing up artists, compared to Magnatune. They charge a buck a song, and they don't use the "payment optional" system that Magnatune does because they don't need to.
In this context "getting it" means being successful, and it looks like Apple gets it just fine. While Magnatune is a terrific proof of concept and I wish them a long life, their relative unpopularity serves as an interesting counterpoint to the chorus of Slashdotters who point out that the traditional retail music business model is broken.
The web site implementation and staffing issues are problems with their business model in the sense that implementing those would take money, and Magnatune's "payment optional" system and their inability to fund the production of music (meaning that they can only distribute music from artists who have the means and talent to record and engineer their own stuff) limits their talent pool. By comparison, the iTunes Music Store is far more feature-rich and has better selection because they've gone the more traditional "payment required" route. Score one for Apple's accountants and analysts; perhaps they know how to run a business after all!
I think Magnatune is absolutely great and I wish them the best of luck. If the "music should be free, artists who expect payment aren't really artists" contingent of the Slashdot crowd wants to encourage this sort of model, then perhaps some of them can volunteer their time to develop and install the playlist / search features you described, or (better yet) volunteer their time as unpaid e-mail customer service staffers for Magnatune. If musicians are expected to use their time and talent free of charge for the greater good, then Slashdotters with this expectation can make the same commitment. Here's Magnatune's contact page to help everybody get started.
In summary, I agree with you. Slashdotters commonly chant about how the big record labels are pursuing a broken business model. Well, Magnatune's issues are evidence that the business model that many Slashdotters would like to see ain't that hot, either.
"Come on, guys, get with the times. Cisco never was deprived of it's code, so it cannot be theft. It was copyright infingement, all right, but certainly not code theft."
I'm replying to this simply because the original is currently at -1, Troll, and thus will go unread by most.
The irony here, naturally, is that when somebody dares to use the word "theft" for other unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material -- namely films and music, of course -- Slashdotters will jump all over them like they're the last chopper out of Saigon.
This poor guy has made the mistake of applying the same reasoning to a type of intellectual property from which many Slashdotters derive their income. This is, of course, because many Slashdotters are typically producers of code, and consumers of music and films.
I think the next exercise will be to discuss why coders intrinsically deserve more respect than do producers of other forms of intellectual property -- financial self-interest aside. Is it because it's harder to write code than it is to produce a film or write a song? Are coders just better people?
"Apparently you stand on the side of the corporations on all these issues... and likewise consider it moral to deprive someone of something which is freer than air and that costs us, as a society, nothing. I don't."
I think you've illustrated an important crux of the argument: when a Slashdotter hears phrases like "copyright holder" or "holder of intellectual property" or similar phrases, they think "corporation." Copyright laws and trademark law, like so many other laws, apply to us all. Any one of this reading this can copyright or trademark something.
Shows like "MTV Cribs" and the hip hop/rap lifestyle only help perpetuate this myth that the typical person who makes their living in the music industry has more money than God. The reality is that (as with most industries) the vast majority of people who work in the music industry and who benefit, directly or indirectly, by the sale of music, are normal folks. And on the songwriting / composing / performing end, the curve's even more out of balance.
If I buy a track on iTunes rather than finding it on P2P, sure, some of the money goes to Apple, which is a big corporation, and some goes to a record company (which may be a huge conglomerate, but more likely than not is what most of us would consider a "small business"). But without that record company taking the risk putting up their own money to record, engineer and produce the work, I'd have not been able to download it. And, importantly, some goes to the performer, the composer, and the songwriter. I have the wisdom to understand that they -- just like you, me, and most everybody reading this -- need an income to survive. If they can do this by providing something that's worth the price paid, I'll pay it, even though I could have easily sourced it on P2P and kept the money for myself.
"If financial straits are that dire, maybe they should consider, I dunno, getting a REAL job instead of trying to be paid infinitely for one bit of work? Normal people work 8 hours and get paid for 8 hours, they don't get paid for the same 8 hours for the rest of their lives + 95 years (or whatever it is now)."
Thanks for illustrating another rationalization for piracy: "artists know what they're getting into. It's a high risk profession and I'm not going to support their bad choice." It's funny... I was considering being snide and ending my original post with "for more examples of rationalization for piracy, see the replies to my post." Even without that, the Slashdot community (at least represented by you) did not disapoint.
I've said before that one can judge a society by how it treats its artists. A great deal of us here on Slashdot truly see them as second-class citizens whose rights we're comfortable violating; hence your "real job" comment. How terribly sad that we compartmentalize and discriminate against others due to their choice of work.
This sort of circular thinking is human nature. It is, of course, a badly drawn analogy, but I'm sure that guys who hold up liquor stores also rationalize their actions with "that's what the liquor store owner gest for opening a liquor store. Don't they know that they'll just get robbed sooner or later?"
By the way, the vast majority of songwriters and composers don't get "paid indefinitely for one bit of work." How many songs that were popular in the 1940's are still commonly heard today? With the sheer volume of music that's out there, for a songwriter or composer to write something that's still generating significant money even five or ten years from now is a fantastic amount of luck. Many get one shot if they're lucky; one or two songs and that's it.
Lastly, some unsolicited advice: if you think that to be "normal" you have to work for eight hours a day, I urge you to challenge yourself and look beyond your current goals and aspirations. Through hard work and application of the programming skills I've learned in school and beyond, I've managed to create a thriving business that allows me to spend only a couple of hours a day coding -- and I make my money without selling software or exploiting other people. As an aside, I've proud of what I've done, and if any teenager were to try to take away my income through some misguided rationalization that I'm not "normal," as you've put it, I'd kick their ass right proper.
"If it means "this is ok but I wouldn't buy it" then so what? At least the listener is going to be that much more likely to "preview" the next release."
Maybe I've misunderstood your point, but the point I was making is that it becomes shorthand for "This is okay but I wouldn't buy it because I can get it for free."
"Perhaps a small sampling, but I doubt anyone reading this can point to a single person they know who never buys but downloads large amounts of media."
This isn't the politically correct thing to say, but I personally know at least a few people who've gone years without buying music or software, opting instead to help themselves to it via IRC, P2P and the like. Both make plenty of money, so it's not a situation similar to, say, Les Miserables where the dude steals the candlesticks.
To their credit, at least my friends have the balls to acknowledge that they do this simply because they'd rather keep the money for themselves than give it to somebody else; in short, they do it because they can. They don't try for a moment to fool themselves or others into thinking that it's some sort of social protest.
"it all comes down to the free market. Either you believe in it, or you don't. Apparently many of you believe in freedom just so long as it doesn't mean you have to practice it."
Again, I may have misunderstood you -- are you saying that piracy (let's say that in this case, driven by the inability or lack of desire to pay for some media) is part of a free market economy? If that's the case, perhaps there are different definitions. The Wikipedia
definition matches my understanding:
"A free market economy is an idealized form of market economy in which buyers and sellers are permitted to carry out transactions based solely on mutual agreement without interventionism in the form of taxes, subsidies, regulation, or government provision of goods or services beyond simply the protection of property rights and enforcement of contracts."
Piracy is violating somebody else's property rights. There are plenty of ways of rationalizing piracy here on Slashdot, and "it's just the free market economy in action" is a perfect example of this sort of rationalization.
"And then there's the greed of the people that don't want to pay for someone else's hard work too, and consider that work "public domain"."
You have nailed it. Many people pirate for the simple reason that they'd rather not pay for something. Naturally, nobody wants to think of themselves as greedy, so it's often cloaked in a veil of social protest -- they are fighting for consumer rights, or fighting an evil organization, and so on. It's perfectly natural to want something for nothing... but this is petty copyright violation, not the Montgomery freedom march.
Unfortunately, that struggling songwriter who relies on royalties to pay the rent cares not one whit that a million teenagers are thinking of clever ways to absolve themselves of guilt. "I did it because I really like your shit" or "I'm fighting back against the record company that collects royalties on your behalf" or "my parents are dorks and don't give me an allowance" or "I'm giving you free advertising" are meaningless when the rent is due or the children are hungry.
"I don't think this means that they are lying when they say they wouldn't have bought it."
The thing is, this becomes a tautology. When paying for something becomes optional, it becomes easier and easier to opt not to pay for it. The more comfortable one gets with "previewing" music via P2P in lieu of buying it, "I wouldn't have bought it anyway" becomes easier to say. It becomes shorthand for "I wouldn't have bought it because I can get it for free."
"You forget that few copyrights are held by the person who has created the work."
In the case of music, the people who write the words and music typically own the rights to the music. Often (in the case of the "singer songwriter") this is also the performer.
When a record company pays for the recording, engineering, producing, distributing and marketing of a song, the record company often gets (or shares) copyright of that particular recording of the song. This is so the record company can try to recoup the expenses of making the recording a reality.
There are some record companies (Magnatunes comes to mind) which will license the rights to distribute your recording, but the catch is that you have to come up with the money for recording, engineering and producing your music.
It goes without saying that it would be great for artists and Slashdotters alike if there were record companies that would provide all of these services for free and ask for nothing in return. Likewise, I have a business idea for which I'll need $100K to really do right, and I'd love to find somebody to just give me that money without asking for an equity stake or some other way of recouping their investment. But, record companies, like you and me, have the need to make money. One person's greed is another person's need to put food on the table.
"Dig a bit deeper: Until about two years ago when I was still there, computer science students at Cambridge would get the full Visual Studio suite for free as a bonus from M$, probably other goodies too. What technologies would they then be more likely to be familiar with when they graduated???"
From your reaction, I can only guess that this is a rarity in the UK. In the US, companies have understood for years that getting products into the hands of students can be a good investment. Apple has been providing educational discounts since before many Slashdotters were born, and tons of software companies either provide free or low-cost copies to schools, or offer an educational discount on single purchases -- that is, take some sort of step to show that you're a student or an academic, and get a cheap price.
As with Microsoft's adoption of this very common practice, these actions are typically not driven by philanthropy, but with the goal of making money somewhere down the road. Steve Jobs, Bill Joy, and their counterparts at Adobe, AutoDesk, and countless other companies like their money as much as Bill Gates does.
If, this Visual Studio giveaway aside, Cambridge pays full retail for their computer hardware, software, and other resources, that's certainly a credit to Cambridge's budgeting (I suppose being around for a millennium helps). In the US, many universities are constantly struggling with budgets, and free or reduced-cost hardware and software from manufacturers can really make the difference.
Agreed. You've made some very good points. As you say, ultimately it's not what the proper or right thing to do that matters, it's what actually happens that counts. And, whether you're a musician or a coder, if there's a bunch of people out there who have technology at their disposal to take advantage of you, they will. This is why there aren't nearly as many American Indians around nowadays as there were a couple of hundred years ago -- just as it's hard to argue with a million teenagers with a P2P app or a crack who want a free copy of your software or your music, it's hard to argue with a million settlers with guns who want your land.
There's still the disparity of Slashdot reactions to people who fight for their legal rights, rather than simply lying back and taking it if those rights aren't respected. The countermeasures by software developers discussed in this thread haven't met with too much hostility, but compare this to the reaction by many Slashdotters to DRM or legal action against music pirates. "It's better to die on your feet than live on your knees" might be a rallying cry that garners agreement from Slashdotters if your intellectual property happens to be a web site or a piece of code, but God help you if you've chosen one of the lesser professions.
Slashdot Mirror
"Even if one were to admit that a primary reason for p2p networks is for trading copyrighted material. That does not make it the network's fault."
Of course not; a network is simply a collection of computers that talk to each other, and the infrastrtucture to do so.
"It is an abuse."
Not true in the least. the eDonkey and Kazaa networks are being used in exactly the way their creators intended.
If I understand you correctly, it's manifest that the right to a creative work belongs with the consumer, not the producer. Is that true?
As an aside, your arguments are similar to the "manifest destiny" paradigm of the 18th and 19th centuries in the US. It boiled down to "might makes right." "Rights" which are enforcable only through social contract don't matter to much when you encounter a large group of people who have advanced technology and the desire to use that technology against you. Today, an artist and his so-called "right" to how others use his work is irrelevant in the face of ten million teenagers with a P2P application. Likewise, history has shown us that it was futile for American Indians to claim their so-called "rights" to land when faced with a million settlers with rifles.
Naturally, I'm not calling you an "Indian killer," but just pointing out that human nature is constant. If enough people are united in wanting something and they have the technology to overcome social contracts, they'll take it, and rationalize it as they see fit.
""Most" is a very strong word that I think fails to factor in the numerous uses of p2p software that is 1. totally legal or 2. falls within fair use."
This can be answered by the following thought experiment: what if you had a magic wand to wave, or a magic button you could push, that would make all the unauthorized content on, say, Kazaa disappear instantly? By what percentage would the traffic then decrease? Would Sharman Networks continue to be able to stay in business?
Slashdotters may tend to think of P2P traffic being largely Linux distros, but the reality is that the vast majority is music and porn. If that all went away tomorrow, traffic on Kazaa would evaporate, Sharman would no longer be able to generate ad revenue or charge for upgrades, and they'd be out of business.
"It was. It was called fair use."
Interesting, I haven't heard that. Do you have a citation?
"I think it's still legal to take a cassette tape and copy somebody else's CD , tape or record, but I'm not sure if it's legal to make a copy digitally, like make an mp3 of somebody else's CD (or even tape or record) anymore. I suspect it still is, though I'm sure the RIAA wouldn't agree."
Also interesting. Do you have anything to back that up? If you would like to see what US law says about "fair use" (as opposed to the common Slashdot misunderstandings), Here's the link. Ivan Hoffman also has an excellent article about Napster's failed attempt to defend their actions as fair use. pdinfo.com addresses the specific issue of music and fair use here ; they write "We have attempted to do find specific details and examples of Fair Use of music. The rumors that it is OK to use so many notes or so many bars are just not true. There is little doubt that, other than private in-home listening and playing, Fair Use of music is extremely limited."
So, if you've found a law that makes it okay to copy my friend's CDs onto cassette tapes, please post the links. In either case, there's an important difference between "under the radar" copyright violation (making copies of your friends CDs in small quantities) for which nobody will get on your case, vs. activities which are truly "fair use."
"Of course, the RIAA IS getting paid. If you copy a CD onto an Audio CD, the RIAA gets a cut. (It's called the `DAT tax'. Google is your friend if you've never heard of it.) I guess they're just not getting paid enough ..."
That's counter to the popular understanding of how it works. It's explained here (Google is indeed great for finding instances of that retarded "the RIAA gets a cut" meme, but for stuff like this, just going to the actual law book will save a lot of wasted time). The vast majority of the money goes to artists, composers and musicians -- who, I should add, generally aren't paid enough. A small percentage goes to record companies. None goes directly to the RIAA.
"But when your friend avoids the need to buy a copy of a book, the bookstore and the publisher do not lose anything they had. A more fitting description would be that the bookstore and publisher get less income than they might have got."
Correct.
"The same consequence can result if your friend decides to play bridge instead of reading a book."
The crucial difference is how one avoids paying for the book: if they get a copy of it without the rightsholder's permission, or by playing bridge. The former is gnerally illegal. The latter is not.
"In a free market system, no business is entitled to cry "foul" just because a potential customer chooses not to deal with them."
Correct, but irrelevant. Piracy is not part of a free market system. From the Wikipedia:
Copyright is a property right.
"Apple's iTunes is doing okay. It's not charging money that's the problem - it's enforcing inferior technology in order to protect a revenue stream with overinflated priofit margins that's the problem. These days it's just silly to get your music by buying it on a physical disk, and it's even sillier to be paying 10x markup for it."
That's a common misperception. Margins in the record industry are typically much lower than many other retail industries. Granted, most Slashdotters are engineering types rather than economist or marketing types, but this misunderstanding can be traced to a few reasons:
Is buying CDs the old fashioned way inefficient? You betchya. Long live iTunes. Does the recording industry make better margins than most of the other stuff you see for sale at Wal-Mart or Best Buy or wherever you buy your CDs? No way in hell.
It's a bit like Apple's taking responsibility of adding DRM to songs they make available via the iTunes Music Store. DRM provides a comfort level that allows record companies to make their catalogs available on iTunes. What people do with the content after they download it isn't Apple's problem, but DRM was necessary for the iTMS to build the extensive library that it has, and that's been critical to its success. I imagine that some moducum of protection, as brain-dead as it is, has made it easier for Google to get permission to offer content through this new service.
"I think that companies who take up the responsibility to protect users against themselves should also be held accountable for any glitch (legal stuff that doesn't work, illegal stuff that does work) in their system."
You won't find much argument here. And in this example, Apple has a customer service team that's been pretty good, in my experience, in dealing with technical issues relating to DRM-encoded content.
"You've completely missed the point of the so-called study. The conclusion goes something like this: "Since people in Asia are installing bootlegged Windows on Linux PCs, the number of people world-wide using Linux is much smaller than the number of PCs sold with Linux, and that trend will remain so in the future." This ignores the people who don't bootleg Windows, those who buy a Windows PC and wipe it, and those who build their own systems. The study is just plain dodgy."
Interesting! Naturally, I haven't spent the 5,000 clams or whatever they're asking for the full study, but from reading third-party accounts of it, all I can see that they're claiming is that 75% of PC's sold preloaded with Linux will end up running Windows. From what I've seen, this tidbit's effect on overall Linux desktop usage (taking into account the other methods of acquisition that you've mentioned) is beyond the scope of the Gartner report. I'd love to find a link that has more details on their conclusion -- perhaps there is a point that I've missed. Can you provide a link?
Thanks in advance.
"First, the study was based on anecdotal evidence from Asia. From that, Gartner is extrapolating a very dubious conclusion. Second, how many people have a "copy" of Windows to lend, since computers don't come with Windows CDs anymore?"
Piracy's huge in Asia, with retailers often loading up customers' PCs with pirated software. Judging from the amount of spam I get offering me "OEM" copies of XP, pirated versions of Windows are readily available. Not sure if your last question was rhetorical, but I know tons of people who've installed XP off of a CD-R using somebody else's serial number. It might very well be that you haven't yet personally run into this or gotten that spam (and lucky you if that's the case), but it happens.
"Gartner doesn't do anything out of the goodness of their hearts. They are paid to do these so-called studies, and they won't remain in business very long if their conclusions aren't similar to their customer's expectations."
Interesting, you're the second person who's stated that this study was commissioned. Do you know who commissioned it, and do you have a citation? I'm aware, of course, that analysts will do both the write-then-sell approach as well as doing specific research projects on behalf of customers, but I wasn't aware that this one was one of the latter.
At any rate, in my line of work, reports, forecasts, analysis and the like from analyst firms are valued because they contain reliable information, and not because they tell me what I want to hear. Are things different in your business?
"They are hardly well-respected by anyone who knows how they work."
That's a very broad statement. The article you linked was interesting, but I think that it's a given that whenever a well-known entity passes judgement about { Microsoft | Linux | Apple | Playstation 2 | XBox } there's bound to be a contingent who'll rebut it. Do you have any other citations?
"This is the result of the "free market" : MS paid them to have an opinion. In other countries we have clearly understand the USA definition of "free market"."
You're correct that it's the result of the free market. It's the free market which has caused the explosion of Linux pre-loads, and lots of people are buying those Wal-Mart PCs because they'd rather save the money and just load Windows themselves using a friends' copy. No big deal; it's economics at work. But if things had gone a little differently and, say, AmigaOS were today a free, open source Windows alternative, then the Gartner Group might have written a report about that. Either way, the Gartner Group analyzes the market.
I lost you on the "MS paid them to have an opinion" part, though. I was not aware that Microsoft commissioned this report. Do you have a citation for that? The Gartner Group are well respected as call-em-as-they-sees-em analysts and have slammed Microsoft on several occasions. And, when Gartner (or another analyst firm) releases a report that can be spun by a third party, they'll spin away.
"OK, colour me not too bright, but I cannot see why pre-installed Linux is being targeted here by Gartner - their claim doesn't seems to be, pre-installing Linux is the same as shipping the machine with no OS whatsoever."
It's very simple: Gartner comments on industry trends. Wal-Mart and other major retailers are selling a relatively huge number of PCs equipped with Linux. That's the trend, and that's what Gartner is commenting on. If Wal-Mart were selling non-bootable PCs with no OS whatsoever, then Gartner might have written a report focusing on that.
I think the Linux community is taking this way too personally. There is a difference between cause and effect and blame. Of course people are buying those Wal-Mart Lindows PCs so they can avoid the Microsoft tax and load up a copy of Windows from a friend -- although it's naturally not stated overtly, that's the whole point. But this is not something that Linus Torvalds or anybody running Linux should take personally. If people choose to see this as an issue of "blame," then blame Wal-Mart and the other retailers who recognize a marketing opportunity when they see it, or blame those who'd use this Gartner report to promote an agenda.
"Oh - and then, shock horror, the opensource community comes back with: "We don't steal from you" (probably true on the whole) "and those who buy Linux desktops don't steal from you either" (probably, at least, significantly false)."
Agreed 100%. The OS community's umgrage is misdirected. And so what if Wal-Mart is selling a buttload of Linux-loaded PCs to customers who are loading Windows? Big deal, no more of a big deal than all those copyrighted MP3 files sitting on Slashdotters' PCs across the land. Not much difference in my book between the Wal-Mart customer who wants to save $50 by using his brothers' copy of XP vs. the Slashdotter who's sourcing music via P2P as a "social protest" to "make a statement about overpriced music."
"Oh - for the purposes of this comment it has been assumed that the independant research company Gartner is independently researching for the independent entity of Microsoft."
Precisely. Analyst firms will occasionally be commissioned by third parties to do reports and studies, but they remain independent.
" OK. lets get this out of the way. It is NOT theft. It is NOT a criminal act [yet]."
Another persistent Slashdot myth. In the US, copyright violation carries both civil and criminal penalties. This has been the case for some years now, and I think this myth survives around here largely because Slashdotters keep telling each other that there's no such thing as "criminal copyright infringement" rather than doing a bit of reading.
"Now. Why is it social protest? Its people realizing that they are being price gouged by large corporations involved in price fixing. Price fixing and unreasonable extension of copyright."
Of all the people I know who get their music via P2P, they do it for simple greed -- they'd really rather get it for free than pay the $0.99, simple as that. But they don't try to snow anybody by claiming that it's "social protest." The Montgomery freedom march was social protest. This is just piracy. Big difference.
"The problem is that the music companies are going to try and conspire to raise these prices I think."
Record companies are subject to the laws of a free market economy just as every other business. This is why record prices have dropped significantly over the past few years, and why record companies must operate on lower net margins than many, many other industries. If they could raise their prices, they could, but if the market doesn't let them, they won't.
"I think that the record companies are in for a shock. They are no longer needed. The internet has replaced them."
The impending death of the record industry at the hands of the Internet has been predicted for years now.
Record companies do a lot of things. They find talented (or at least marketable) artists and front them the money for engineering, producing, marketing, promoting and distributing their works.
The huge success of the iTunes Music Store and other services has shown that it's the traditional retail channel for old-fashioned plastic CDs that may go first (in fact, a recent industry report has given the CD as the primary music medium another six years, tops). The record companies probably don't mind this; iTMS is just another sales channel for them.
Music will still take money to produce. Setting up a recording and mixing rig and finding a skilled engineer and producer, or taking the time to learn how to do this yourself, all take time and money. The Internet doesn't change this.
While the Internet provides some absolutely great opportunities for self-promotion, effective promotion still takes skills, time, and money. Ripping your stuff onto MP3 and putting it on your web site or on the P2P networks is a good start, but it won't get your CD to every radio station in the country for airplay. It won't get you a video produced and shown on MTV. It won't get you in the Best Buy circular or on the home page of iTMS or other services. It won't get you booked on a concert tour and it won't get you in front of a stylist and professional photographer for PR materials. It won't accomplish the other squillion things that a record contract will do for you. This is why most musicians still want recording contracts and aren't flocking to Magnatune in droves.
Of course, there are plenty of indie musicians who frankly don't need or want any of that; folks who will be happy to distribute their stuff on a payment-optional basis via P2P and picking up the occasional local gig. The Internet will continue to be a tremendous enabler for these folks. The Internet is a truly wonderful thing, but it isn't the Great Equalizer that many Slashdotters see it as for many industries. In a buyer's market such as the music industry, there's still no substitute for talent and money, and the folks who have talent and money can use the Internet just as easily as anybody else.
"Adapt o
If I understand you correctly, you're advocating socializing the entertainment and software industries, two industries which hold lots of IP.
Naturally, many folks would like to see somebody else's career socialized while they continue to pursue filthy lucre on their own. A good test for anybody advocating that somebody else's revenue stream become socialized is to ask oneself if one would be happy if one's own industry went that way. Would you be satisfied with your income being converted to a fixed government wage, determined by law and subject to the whims of the political climate?
For such a change to occur, it's not enough that Slashdotters want musicians to relinquish the right to sell their stuff on their own terms and covert to a socialized, government-run compensation; the musicians will have to want it, as well. There are already clues to how musicians in general feel about this. Generally speaking, musicians still want recording contracts, and they have the same financial aspirations that you and I do. Compare the breadth and quality of material and the overall user experience of, say, the iTunes Music Store vs. Magnatune, an "open source" label.
"I have to be totally honest in asking WTF is going on with all this emphesis on file trading? Seriously, America has the single largest murder numbers in the western world (Larger then Canada's and Europes combined - excluding ww2) I think that there are far bigger issues that the US could do with addressing then kids getting some singles on the cheep (free)."
The US is also the world's largest producer of intellectual property. Like it or not, we owe a great deal of our relative wealth and way of life to the taxes collected on profits earned on the IP owned by US citizens and US-based companies.
The taxes collected on those earnings can then be addressed to addressing violent crime and the squillion other things that a government requires money to do.
Money, as they say, makes the world go 'round.
"if the record companies would trust people to do the right thing and stop calling us all thieves they could make a LOT more money. If I can buy a used CD for five bucks, rip it and get the quality I want, why the fuck would I pay twice that for the download? Magnatune gets it... the others don't."
The empirical evidence runs counter to your opinion. The iTunes Music Store does absolutely gangbuster business, and they have very little trouble signing up artists, compared to Magnatune. They charge a buck a song, and they don't use the "payment optional" system that Magnatune does because they don't need to.
In this context "getting it" means being successful, and it looks like Apple gets it just fine. While Magnatune is a terrific proof of concept and I wish them a long life, their relative unpopularity serves as an interesting counterpoint to the chorus of Slashdotters who point out that the traditional retail music business model is broken.
The web site implementation and staffing issues are problems with their business model in the sense that implementing those would take money, and Magnatune's "payment optional" system and their inability to fund the production of music (meaning that they can only distribute music from artists who have the means and talent to record and engineer their own stuff) limits their talent pool. By comparison, the iTunes Music Store is far more feature-rich and has better selection because they've gone the more traditional "payment required" route. Score one for Apple's accountants and analysts; perhaps they know how to run a business after all!
I think Magnatune is absolutely great and I wish them the best of luck. If the "music should be free, artists who expect payment aren't really artists" contingent of the Slashdot crowd wants to encourage this sort of model, then perhaps some of them can volunteer their time to develop and install the playlist / search features you described, or (better yet) volunteer their time as unpaid e-mail customer service staffers for Magnatune. If musicians are expected to use their time and talent free of charge for the greater good, then Slashdotters with this expectation can make the same commitment. Here's Magnatune's contact page to help everybody get started.
In summary, I agree with you. Slashdotters commonly chant about how the big record labels are pursuing a broken business model. Well, Magnatune's issues are evidence that the business model that many Slashdotters would like to see ain't that hot, either.
"Come on, guys, get with the times. Cisco never was deprived of it's code, so it cannot be theft. It was copyright infingement, all right, but certainly not code theft."
I'm replying to this simply because the original is currently at -1, Troll, and thus will go unread by most.
The irony here, naturally, is that when somebody dares to use the word "theft" for other unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material -- namely films and music, of course -- Slashdotters will jump all over them like they're the last chopper out of Saigon.
This poor guy has made the mistake of applying the same reasoning to a type of intellectual property from which many Slashdotters derive their income. This is, of course, because many Slashdotters are typically producers of code, and consumers of music and films.
I think the next exercise will be to discuss why coders intrinsically deserve more respect than do producers of other forms of intellectual property -- financial self-interest aside. Is it because it's harder to write code than it is to produce a film or write a song? Are coders just better people?
"Apparently you stand on the side of the corporations on all these issues... and likewise consider it moral to deprive someone of something which is freer than air and that costs us, as a society, nothing. I don't."
I think you've illustrated an important crux of the argument: when a Slashdotter hears phrases like "copyright holder" or "holder of intellectual property" or similar phrases, they think "corporation." Copyright laws and trademark law, like so many other laws, apply to us all. Any one of this reading this can copyright or trademark something.
Shows like "MTV Cribs" and the hip hop/rap lifestyle only help perpetuate this myth that the typical person who makes their living in the music industry has more money than God. The reality is that (as with most industries) the vast majority of people who work in the music industry and who benefit, directly or indirectly, by the sale of music, are normal folks. And on the songwriting / composing / performing end, the curve's even more out of balance.
If I buy a track on iTunes rather than finding it on P2P, sure, some of the money goes to Apple, which is a big corporation, and some goes to a record company (which may be a huge conglomerate, but more likely than not is what most of us would consider a "small business"). But without that record company taking the risk putting up their own money to record, engineer and produce the work, I'd have not been able to download it. And, importantly, some goes to the performer, the composer, and the songwriter. I have the wisdom to understand that they -- just like you, me, and most everybody reading this -- need an income to survive. If they can do this by providing something that's worth the price paid, I'll pay it, even though I could have easily sourced it on P2P and kept the money for myself.
"If financial straits are that dire, maybe they should consider, I dunno, getting a REAL job instead of trying to be paid infinitely for one bit of work? Normal people work 8 hours and get paid for 8 hours, they don't get paid for the same 8 hours for the rest of their lives + 95 years (or whatever it is now)."
Thanks for illustrating another rationalization for piracy: "artists know what they're getting into. It's a high risk profession and I'm not going to support their bad choice." It's funny... I was considering being snide and ending my original post with "for more examples of rationalization for piracy, see the replies to my post." Even without that, the Slashdot community (at least represented by you) did not disapoint.
I've said before that one can judge a society by how it treats its artists. A great deal of us here on Slashdot truly see them as second-class citizens whose rights we're comfortable violating; hence your "real job" comment. How terribly sad that we compartmentalize and discriminate against others due to their choice of work.
This sort of circular thinking is human nature. It is, of course, a badly drawn analogy, but I'm sure that guys who hold up liquor stores also rationalize their actions with "that's what the liquor store owner gest for opening a liquor store. Don't they know that they'll just get robbed sooner or later?"
By the way, the vast majority of songwriters and composers don't get "paid indefinitely for one bit of work." How many songs that were popular in the 1940's are still commonly heard today? With the sheer volume of music that's out there, for a songwriter or composer to write something that's still generating significant money even five or ten years from now is a fantastic amount of luck. Many get one shot if they're lucky; one or two songs and that's it.
Lastly, some unsolicited advice: if you think that to be "normal" you have to work for eight hours a day, I urge you to challenge yourself and look beyond your current goals and aspirations. Through hard work and application of the programming skills I've learned in school and beyond, I've managed to create a thriving business that allows me to spend only a couple of hours a day coding -- and I make my money without selling software or exploiting other people. As an aside, I've proud of what I've done, and if any teenager were to try to take away my income through some misguided rationalization that I'm not "normal," as you've put it, I'd kick their ass right proper.
"If it means "this is ok but I wouldn't buy it" then so what? At least the listener is going to be that much more likely to "preview" the next release."
Maybe I've misunderstood your point, but the point I was making is that it becomes shorthand for "This is okay but I wouldn't buy it because I can get it for free."
"Perhaps a small sampling, but I doubt anyone reading this can point to a single person they know who never buys but downloads large amounts of media."
This isn't the politically correct thing to say, but I personally know at least a few people who've gone years without buying music or software, opting instead to help themselves to it via IRC, P2P and the like. Both make plenty of money, so it's not a situation similar to, say, Les Miserables where the dude steals the candlesticks.
To their credit, at least my friends have the balls to acknowledge that they do this simply because they'd rather keep the money for themselves than give it to somebody else; in short, they do it because they can. They don't try for a moment to fool themselves or others into thinking that it's some sort of social protest.
"it all comes down to the free market. Either you believe in it, or you don't. Apparently many of you believe in freedom just so long as it doesn't mean you have to practice it."
Again, I may have misunderstood you -- are you saying that piracy (let's say that in this case, driven by the inability or lack of desire to pay for some media) is part of a free market economy? If that's the case, perhaps there are different definitions. The Wikipedia definition matches my understanding:
"A free market economy is an idealized form of market economy in which buyers and sellers are permitted to carry out transactions based solely on mutual agreement without interventionism in the form of taxes, subsidies, regulation, or government provision of goods or services beyond simply the protection of property rights and enforcement of contracts."
Piracy is violating somebody else's property rights. There are plenty of ways of rationalizing piracy here on Slashdot, and "it's just the free market economy in action" is a perfect example of this sort of rationalization.
"And then there's the greed of the people that don't want to pay for someone else's hard work too, and consider that work "public domain"."
You have nailed it. Many people pirate for the simple reason that they'd rather not pay for something. Naturally, nobody wants to think of themselves as greedy, so it's often cloaked in a veil of social protest -- they are fighting for consumer rights, or fighting an evil organization, and so on. It's perfectly natural to want something for nothing... but this is petty copyright violation, not the Montgomery freedom march.
Unfortunately, that struggling songwriter who relies on royalties to pay the rent cares not one whit that a million teenagers are thinking of clever ways to absolve themselves of guilt. "I did it because I really like your shit" or "I'm fighting back against the record company that collects royalties on your behalf" or "my parents are dorks and don't give me an allowance" or "I'm giving you free advertising" are meaningless when the rent is due or the children are hungry.
"I don't think this means that they are lying when they say they wouldn't have bought it."
The thing is, this becomes a tautology. When paying for something becomes optional, it becomes easier and easier to opt not to pay for it. The more comfortable one gets with "previewing" music via P2P in lieu of buying it, "I wouldn't have bought it anyway" becomes easier to say. It becomes shorthand for "I wouldn't have bought it because I can get it for free."
"You forget that few copyrights are held by the person who has created the work."
In the case of music, the people who write the words and music typically own the rights to the music. Often (in the case of the "singer songwriter") this is also the performer.
When a record company pays for the recording, engineering, producing, distributing and marketing of a song, the record company often gets (or shares) copyright of that particular recording of the song. This is so the record company can try to recoup the expenses of making the recording a reality.
There are some record companies (Magnatunes comes to mind) which will license the rights to distribute your recording, but the catch is that you have to come up with the money for recording, engineering and producing your music.
It goes without saying that it would be great for artists and Slashdotters alike if there were record companies that would provide all of these services for free and ask for nothing in return. Likewise, I have a business idea for which I'll need $100K to really do right, and I'd love to find somebody to just give me that money without asking for an equity stake or some other way of recouping their investment. But, record companies, like you and me, have the need to make money. One person's greed is another person's need to put food on the table.
"Dig a bit deeper: Until about two years ago when I was still there, computer science students at Cambridge would get the full Visual Studio suite for free as a bonus from M$, probably other goodies too. What technologies would they then be more likely to be familiar with when they graduated???"
From your reaction, I can only guess that this is a rarity in the UK. In the US, companies have understood for years that getting products into the hands of students can be a good investment. Apple has been providing educational discounts since before many Slashdotters were born, and tons of software companies either provide free or low-cost copies to schools, or offer an educational discount on single purchases -- that is, take some sort of step to show that you're a student or an academic, and get a cheap price.
As with Microsoft's adoption of this very common practice, these actions are typically not driven by philanthropy, but with the goal of making money somewhere down the road. Steve Jobs, Bill Joy, and their counterparts at Adobe, AutoDesk, and countless other companies like their money as much as Bill Gates does.
If, this Visual Studio giveaway aside, Cambridge pays full retail for their computer hardware, software, and other resources, that's certainly a credit to Cambridge's budgeting (I suppose being around for a millennium helps). In the US, many universities are constantly struggling with budgets, and free or reduced-cost hardware and software from manufacturers can really make the difference.
Agreed. You've made some very good points. As you say, ultimately it's not what the proper or right thing to do that matters, it's what actually happens that counts. And, whether you're a musician or a coder, if there's a bunch of people out there who have technology at their disposal to take advantage of you, they will. This is why there aren't nearly as many American Indians around nowadays as there were a couple of hundred years ago -- just as it's hard to argue with a million teenagers with a P2P app or a crack who want a free copy of your software or your music, it's hard to argue with a million settlers with guns who want your land.
There's still the disparity of Slashdot reactions to people who fight for their legal rights, rather than simply lying back and taking it if those rights aren't respected. The countermeasures by software developers discussed in this thread haven't met with too much hostility, but compare this to the reaction by many Slashdotters to DRM or legal action against music pirates. "It's better to die on your feet than live on your knees" might be a rallying cry that garners agreement from Slashdotters if your intellectual property happens to be a web site or a piece of code, but God help you if you've chosen one of the lesser professions.