This will sound as elitist as hell, but you may be on to something. The mouth-breathers will install Kazaa and happily pirate away with no sense of guilt or understanding of the economic harm they're causing by downloading without paying. Meanwhile, smarter folks, who might be more inclined to listen to indie music because it's better, might also be more liable to use file sharing as a 'try before you buy' mechanism and otherwise have a stronger sense of a moral obligation to support their favorite struggling indie artist or label because they like their work.
You're correct; they're just guesses. I don't think either of us have the proper background to write out accurate equations.
I think we can agree that the indie labels are less failure resistant. CD sales are down 31%. That may be skewed by the type and popularity of music (another area where neither of us have the data), but if you're an indie label, even a drop in sales in the high single digits may mean that hard-working people lose jobs.
That's beyond my ability to guess. He was asking for examples of folks who'd lost their jobs as a result of declining CD sales. For all I know, his sales went down because he signed a bunch of artists that nobody wanted to listen to, or he didn't spend enough money on promotion, and so on.
However, you bring up a good point. Assuming that indie music is "shared" at the same ratio to sales as mainstream music (e.g. no matter how big the act or the label is, they lose C percent of sales to piracy where C is a constant), piracy can hurt the indie labels harder. If you're a conglomorate like Time Warner and your Warner Music subsidiary posts a 20% loss, you can just shuffle some things around and the corporation will survive. The indie labels with a handful of employees are much less failure resistant.
Crew guys like the guy in the PSA work for unions and are hired on a per-job basis. It's not a 40-hour-a-week, 52-week-a-year job in the sense that you're probably used to.
If you're a union electrician and you're hired to work on a film which bombs, you still get paid for that job, so you're correct on that front. I believe the point of the PSAs is that if the film industry suffers due to piracy, fewer films will be made, or smaller budgets will be allocated per film. This will mean fewer jobs to go around in Hollywood.
I know a person who runs an indie music label. Six employees. Used to be ten, but when sales dropped, he had to lay four of them off. These four people were all hard-working people. They were not coke addicts, nor did they fit any of the other stereotypes that some people like to perpetuate to make music piracy go down smooth and easy. They were young people being paid an hourly wage and struggling to get by in, as you put it, their chosen profession. They chose this profession because of their love of music.
A lot of people are over-interpreting this law. It simply states -- rightfully so -- that you can't be prosecuted for using one of these digital audio recording devices (DARDs) for its intended purpose: recording digital audio for non-commercial use. Some folks have taken this to mean that downloading songs off a P2P service is legal as long as they then burn them to a music CD using on digital audio recording device. This is absolutely not true. Simply using a DARD at one step along the way is not a "Get out of Jail Free" card.
The exact definition of "non-commercial" can be contextual, and these sorts of ambiguities are why we have a court system, to examine them on a case-by-case basis. Making a backup of music you bought? No problem. Make five copies and give them to five of your friends with no expectation of anything in return? Practically speaking, no problem; nobody would care anyway. These are all in the realm of the theoretical because traditionally, the limits imposed on making perfect digital copies made it impractical to distribute copyrighted material widely for non-commercial purposes.
By the way, newbies might wonder why running a warez FTP site or putting a lot of material up for grabs on a P2P system doesn't qualify as "non-commercial" if you're not asking for money. The NET act closed this loophole; at the risk of over-simplifying, if you're expecting anything of value in return -- and this includes other warez or other MP3 files -- it's no longer in the realm of non-commerical. The NET Act was passed about a decade ago, before MP3s were a big thing; I believe its impetus and target was the warez traders.
It is vitally important to understand that the majority of the tariff on blank music CDs goes primarily to musicians, composers and other artists, not record companies. None of it goes to the RIAA. This is important to understand if you kneel at the shrine of "RIAA bad, musicians good."
Music blanks are not exactly the same as data blanks. There is a slight difference in the manufacturing process to allow set-top audio CD burners to recognize them. This is covered by the AHRA; burners designed and sold primarily for recording music (and here I'm talking about the set-top burners again, not CD-RWs for PCs) must check for this flag.
At any rate, I think you're saying that because of the tariff, it is legal to copy music without the copyright holder's permission as long as a music CD is used. This is not the case. Buying a music CD does not give one license to ignore copyright law.
A DMCA-style infringement claim requires signed statements, valid phone numbers and e-mail addresses, and other items to prevent bogus and other "nuicance" claims. Filing a bogus claim will get you in hot water, both with the ISP and the user whom you've falsely targeted. Rather than halt the ISP's ablity to respond to your fake request, they'd likely respond in a way which would not turn out well for you at all.
As we saw with the RIAA "usher" incident, even making a genuine mistake can cause a lot of grief.
Would not make a difference. She was nailed because she was distributing copyrighted material, not because she downloaded it. If you're distributing copyrighted stuff without the owner's permission, whether you bought it or downloaded it doesn't have much effect.
The tariff on blank audio CD-Rs goes largely to musicians and composers, not record companies or the RIAA. It's divvied up to various unions like the American Federation of Musicians, AFTRA, and the like. They, in turn, distribute it to artists. You will have probably heard of about 1% of these people, because they are famous. The rest are session musicians, composers, background vocalists, and the other working stiffs of the industry. A very small portion of the tariff goes to record companies. This is a very important distinction to understand if you kneel at the shrine of "record companies bad, musicians good."
So, you probably wouldn't see a lawyer picking up the case, since the lawyer would crack the lawbook. Anybody else who wants to learn more about the tariff on blank media is welcome to, as well. It's section 1006 of chapter 10 of title 17 of US copyright law.
At any rate, the tariff can be thought of "insurance," or a partial restitution to those whose works are presumably being copied illegally onto blank music CD-Rs. But, paying the tariff doesn't automatically give anybody a license to pirate music. This notion wouldn't pass what lawyers call the "laugh test," so this is another reason why the hypothetical lawsuit you describe would probably never come to light.
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This will sound as elitist as hell, but you may be on to something. The mouth-breathers will install Kazaa and happily pirate away with no sense of guilt or understanding of the economic harm they're causing by downloading without paying. Meanwhile, smarter folks, who might be more inclined to listen to indie music because it's better, might also be more liable to use file sharing as a 'try before you buy' mechanism and otherwise have a stronger sense of a moral obligation to support their favorite struggling indie artist or label because they like their work.
You're correct; they're just guesses. I don't think either of us have the proper background to write out accurate equations. I think we can agree that the indie labels are less failure resistant. CD sales are down 31%. That may be skewed by the type and popularity of music (another area where neither of us have the data), but if you're an indie label, even a drop in sales in the high single digits may mean that hard-working people lose jobs.
That's beyond my ability to guess. He was asking for examples of folks who'd lost their jobs as a result of declining CD sales. For all I know, his sales went down because he signed a bunch of artists that nobody wanted to listen to, or he didn't spend enough money on promotion, and so on.
However, you bring up a good point. Assuming that indie music is "shared" at the same ratio to sales as mainstream music (e.g. no matter how big the act or the label is, they lose C percent of sales to piracy where C is a constant), piracy can hurt the indie labels harder. If you're a conglomorate like Time Warner and your Warner Music subsidiary posts a 20% loss, you can just shuffle some things around and the corporation will survive. The indie labels with a handful of employees are much less failure resistant.
Crew guys like the guy in the PSA work for unions and are hired on a per-job basis. It's not a 40-hour-a-week, 52-week-a-year job in the sense that you're probably used to.
If you're a union electrician and you're hired to work on a film which bombs, you still get paid for that job, so you're correct on that front. I believe the point of the PSAs is that if the film industry suffers due to piracy, fewer films will be made, or smaller budgets will be allocated per film. This will mean fewer jobs to go around in Hollywood.
I know a person who runs an indie music label. Six employees. Used to be ten, but when sales dropped, he had to lay four of them off. These four people were all hard-working people. They were not coke addicts, nor did they fit any of the other stereotypes that some people like to perpetuate to make music piracy go down smooth and easy. They were young people being paid an hourly wage and struggling to get by in, as you put it, their chosen profession. They chose this profession because of their love of music.
A lot of people are over-interpreting this law. It simply states -- rightfully so -- that you can't be prosecuted for using one of these digital audio recording devices (DARDs) for its intended purpose: recording digital audio for non-commercial use. Some folks have taken this to mean that downloading songs off a P2P service is legal as long as they then burn them to a music CD using on digital audio recording device. This is absolutely not true. Simply using a DARD at one step along the way is not a "Get out of Jail Free" card.
The exact definition of "non-commercial" can be contextual, and these sorts of ambiguities are why we have a court system, to examine them on a case-by-case basis. Making a backup of music you bought? No problem. Make five copies and give them to five of your friends with no expectation of anything in return? Practically speaking, no problem; nobody would care anyway. These are all in the realm of the theoretical because traditionally, the limits imposed on making perfect digital copies made it impractical to distribute copyrighted material widely for non-commercial purposes.
By the way, newbies might wonder why running a warez FTP site or putting a lot of material up for grabs on a P2P system doesn't qualify as "non-commercial" if you're not asking for money. The NET act closed this loophole; at the risk of over-simplifying, if you're expecting anything of value in return -- and this includes other warez or other MP3 files -- it's no longer in the realm of non-commerical. The NET Act was passed about a decade ago, before MP3s were a big thing; I believe its impetus and target was the warez traders.
It is vitally important to understand that the majority of the tariff on blank music CDs goes primarily to musicians, composers and other artists, not record companies. None of it goes to the RIAA. This is important to understand if you kneel at the shrine of "RIAA bad, musicians good."
Music blanks are not exactly the same as data blanks. There is a slight difference in the manufacturing process to allow set-top audio CD burners to recognize them. This is covered by the AHRA; burners designed and sold primarily for recording music (and here I'm talking about the set-top burners again, not CD-RWs for PCs) must check for this flag.
At any rate, I think you're saying that because of the tariff, it is legal to copy music without the copyright holder's permission as long as a music CD is used. This is not the case. Buying a music CD does not give one license to ignore copyright law.
A DMCA-style infringement claim requires signed statements, valid phone numbers and e-mail addresses, and other items to prevent bogus and other "nuicance" claims. Filing a bogus claim will get you in hot water, both with the ISP and the user whom you've falsely targeted. Rather than halt the ISP's ablity to respond to your fake request, they'd likely respond in a way which would not turn out well for you at all. As we saw with the RIAA "usher" incident, even making a genuine mistake can cause a lot of grief.
Would not make a difference. She was nailed because she was distributing copyrighted material, not because she downloaded it. If you're distributing copyrighted stuff without the owner's permission, whether you bought it or downloaded it doesn't have much effect.
The tariff on blank audio CD-Rs goes largely to musicians and composers, not record companies or the RIAA. It's divvied up to various unions like the American Federation of Musicians, AFTRA, and the like. They, in turn, distribute it to artists. You will have probably heard of about 1% of these people, because they are famous. The rest are session musicians, composers, background vocalists, and the other working stiffs of the industry. A very small portion of the tariff goes to record companies. This is a very important distinction to understand if you kneel at the shrine of "record companies bad, musicians good."
So, you probably wouldn't see a lawyer picking up the case, since the lawyer would crack the lawbook. Anybody else who wants to learn more about the tariff on blank media is welcome to, as well. It's section 1006 of chapter 10 of title 17 of US copyright law.
At any rate, the tariff can be thought of "insurance," or a partial restitution to those whose works are presumably being copied illegally onto blank music CD-Rs. But, paying the tariff doesn't automatically give anybody a license to pirate music. This notion wouldn't pass what lawyers call the "laugh test," so this is another reason why the hypothetical lawsuit you describe would probably never come to light.