No kidding, voting with only an electronic record is so foolish, what is to be done in the event of a recount?
The voting machine should print a clearly defined receipt for each vote cast. This receipt is tossed in to the box that only election officials have the key to, after the user can preview it through a piece of glass. The receipt can contain a human readable printout of results, as well as a barcode machine-scannable printout of results. Auditing can then be established on a variety of levels, recounts can be done by scanning the barcodes, and failing that, by the human readable printouts.
It looks like with out some sort of actual dead tree paper trail, it'd look very similar to the Simpsons Bart vs Martin for class president election. Let's do a recount. Yep, Martin won.
Actually I read someplace that they only made this claim in press releases, and not in any official capacity. I'm not sure how accurate that is, I try to not get overly involved in the whole thing:-)
Oh, and, distributing it under a different license is basically the equivalent of me taking the latest Metallica album / Harry Potter book, selling / giving away copies of it, and telling the recipients of these copies that they're permitted to use the material in a way not permitted under its original copyright (or that they're not permitted to use the material in a way that *is* permitted under its original copyright).
Well, distributing it with a different license is in violation of the GPL even if they follow all the other points of the GPL. The GPL says that derivative works, if distributed, must also be distributed under the GPL.
I'm not certain that this counts as a license violation, or a copyright violation, making changes to the license of GPL products, or GPL derived products is not their decision unless they are the copyright holder. In the case of the kernel, the copyright belongs to so many many people that it'd be essentially impossible to change the license on the kernel.
I assume you meant to ask if he also keeps a copy on his hard drive? Keeping a local *backup* (which would be a tape backup or other separate-media local duplicate of the working copy on his harddrive) wouldn't gain him a lot of added security over the remote backup.
In order for that off-site ISP being destroyed to be a problem to data integrity, that would have to happen at the same time that (s)he lost local data. The chances of catastrophy occurring on both ends simultaneously are low enough for average data usage, only data that had some very serious value would need to be backed up locally and remotely both, but if your local data store (basement / attic / spare bedroom of computers) burned down, you'd lose your working copy and local backup both, so the local backup isn't gaining you that terribly much anyhow. If you really want to secure your data, do two remote backups to geographically disperse ISP's, and keep your local copy on your hard drive.
I disagree with this. Although I'm less likely to make the initial investment required to play a game which requires a software purchase, plus monthly licensing fees, once I make that crucial purchase, you'd better believe I'm going to be playing it for several months.
I currently refer to this as the Star Wars Galaxies syndrome. Lots of people paid for a game that was ready for beta 3 when it hit the shelves. They played in a world that was incomplete and buggy, and the initial weeks saw crucial nerf after crucial nerf. To date, there is still a question if they've yet programmed the Jedi class since no one has unlocked it yet. So with all of this, you'd think the world would be totally empty. But it's not. Why? Because people paid $50 or $60 or whatever the price was initially, and they are trying to get their money's worth out of it since they have no chance to get a refund on that money.
All of the MMORPG's that I've downloaded have resulted in the same thing for me: I've quit after the free trial ended. I don't go for the monthly installment plan, because it doesn't hold my interest that well. It would if I was already invested, but not if I'm not. This is true of Lineage, Rubies of Eventide, and even with Star Wars Galaxies (I was in beta you see, and I didn't buy the game).
Everquest: I paid for Everquest. And I'm still paying for it. Initially I paid for it to buy the CD in the shiny box. When my free month was up, I hadn't totally made up my mind about the game, but as I was already financially invested, I figured, in for a penny, in for a pound, and let the subscription roll over. By the time I felt I had gotten my initial investment's worth out of it, guess what? I had a level 30-something cleric. No way I'm gonna give THAT up! It's only $10 a month, and still mildly amusing.
Plus I'm psychologically invested between my progress and the friends I'd hate to say goodbye to. Did I make those friends in my initial month, during the free trial? Nope. The friends I made during that time I'd have been easily able to say goodbye too, it wasn't until I'd spent several months with them on an almost daily basis that they began being worth more than the monthly investment.
So I might as well keep playing, I have friends and accomplishments here.
Now it's 3 years later, I have a 61 necromancer with his second level title, a 55 cleric, a 53 druid, a 53 bard, a 36 monk, a 36 ranger, a 36 mage, two accounts, plus my wife's account, plus my brother's account (he pays for it, but lends it to me), plus my brother in law's account (he quit, but I pay for his account since I use it).
I guarantee, if I hadn't made the initial investment, I'd have quit at the end of the first month. Now every 6 months they're releasing an expansion, and I'm running around buying tons of copies of it for all of my accounts, and paying all those monthly fees. It creeps up on you, but you gotta get them hooked, and that takes more than the free trial period. Oh, and I'm hooked.
Yeah, but it's a terrible resource hog. I've yet to see how iTunes compares, but with the music store built in, I had hoped to make iTunes my primary music player. With out ogg, this isn't a reality. Since there have been 3rd party patches released for the Mac version of iTunes, I imagine (and hope soon) there'll be something like this for Windows.
Now for us Winblows users, tell me that there's an update available that lets us play OGG files!! *argh! As long as I've been looking forward to iTunes for Windows, it's a serious letdown that most of my existing music isn't playable. Can you play OGG's on the Mac in iTunes?
So why don't we have precautions against easily available equipment being able to interfere with plane control?
Doesn't this open the potential for terrorists to start shipping packages that have a temperature trigger to cause an electronic device to go haywire once it gets cold enough (signifying high altitude). Or just plain old timers. If it's easy enough to interfere with a plane that standard user products pose a threat, this is easily exploitable if this is one's intention.
All this crap with national security, and giving up constitutional rights in the sake of it, and all of these lost rights don't afford us any additional real security.
What if I'm blind? Is there a screen reader built in to this EULA? Maybe I'm "blindly" pressing keys till I can hit a key combination that I know turns on the Microsoft Narrator.
Further, what if I let my 7 year old son have "the honors" of booting up the computer? Just because he pressed a key when he was told to, doesn't mean that I'm legally obligated by the agreement. I haven't agreed to anything.
Further, what if I set this system up for my elderly grandparents. It doesn't belong to me, how can I be the one who agrees to it? Anyone who wanted to dodge this could *easily* claim that they never saw this screen, but that they had a friend or child set it up for them.
As loudly as they proclaim, "Get your Illegal Warez here, we will protect you, we got nothing but illegal sutff," I don't trust them to not be a trap for users. Think about it, RIAA/MPAA set this up, make it super duper abundantly clear that the only purpose here is to be illegal, they score a two fold victory: first their case is strengthened against P2P in general, and second, they eventually sue said company and in an "out of court agreement" come away with complete logs of who did what on the network. Now they get to really sue those people, and their case is all the stronger, "More people watched Terminator 3 on the net than went to see it in theatres!"
"The Congress shall have power . . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts"
Copyright exists because it is believed by Congress to progress science and useful arts. If it ever becomes impossible for artists to make any money selling music because it's all available for free on the net (bottom of a slippery slope, which is also an extreme that we'll never reach, but it's used as an example), then how does that promote the useful arts?
Further, I was unaware that Congress was composed exclusively of vDave420 and the other people who download tracks that they haven't paid for. When this happens, or when Congress is composed at least half of such people, then you may pass an amendment which permits free unlimited downloading of music on the net.
But the Constitution doesn't say, "individual members of society may choose to promote the progress of science and the useful arts in what ever means they see fit." It explicitly says Congress. And Congress has established copyright law, under which it is still illegal to download and listen to tracks you haven't purchased.
You have a voice in Congress, and so does the RIAA, and so do I. Collectively "we the people" (not "we the vDave420") have decided that copyright laws promote the progress of science and useful arts, and until such time as Congress finds differently, it will remain illegal to download and listen to tracks you haven't purchased.
One amazing thing about the constitution is that it's sincerely not up to individuals to interpret as they see fit, if it was, it'd hold no power, because anything that anyone wanted to do could be permissable under some distortion of the constitution, perhaps online music swapping is the means by which you choose to exercise free speach by communicating to the record company that you only want to download your tracks, and for free. Thus it's a fundamental right in the constitution. Similarly, perhaps carrying an unregistered loaded high powered rifle on the streets and pointing it at police officers is how I choose to exercise my right to bear arms. Guess what, it's not YOUR decision to make to be allowed to do these things any more than it's YOUR decision to be allowed to download unpurchased music. That's why we have Congress, which represents the needs of all individuals, and that's why the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts is explicitly granted to Congress, and not to vDave420.
Want to use your voice in Congress to say that the free download of all music on the net promotes the progress of the useful arts? Then write your congresspersons. Then later vote for those with similar views to yours. This is how your voice is known in society, and this is how you affect change; not by deciding that you disagree with the law and acting accordingly.
None of that changes the fact that in our society, as it stands now, downloading tracks from the net with out permission, and with out owning the original album, is copyright infringement, and thus illegal. Further, providing the tracks for free on p2p networks is willful ignorance of the fact that people *will* use this sevice to engage in this illegal activity (most likely more often than not).
The law is pretty clear that willful ignorance is just as criminal as full knowledge. Bank owners go to jail if their bank is used to launder money, and it's proven that they chose to be "unaware" of the illegal activities going through their bank.
Your post is full of "RIAA propaganda" accusations, but I have no more interest in listening to the RIAA than I do to listening to the d3wds who want to illegally download all their songs for free. It's still not our right to decide that we know better than the record labels what they should do with their own copyrights.
If they can't continue to compete in this age of easy distribution of music, then they are forced to either adapt or die, but it's not our place to adapt them for themselves.
I'm not proposing that copyright restrictions should be any stricter than they already are, in fact, in a lot of ways they're a little too strict already. I'm just trying to make sure that people are cognizant of the fact that downloading music that you don't own is neither legal nor moral, no matter how much fun it is, and no matter how "good" it is for the recording companies. Just because I agree with the "pirating music is illegal" aspect of what the RIAA says doesn't mean I also agree with other things they say, nor did I profess to. However, it IS their right to enforce their copyright to the full extent OF THE LAW, as it exists at the time. Further, it's also their right to try to get the law changed to their favor (this is what's great about America, because it's also our right to do the same for our own favor, maybe a law should be in place that requires recording companies to provide online repositories where we can download backup copies of music we've purchased).
This remains their right so long as the law continues to provide it as a right to them. It's not a fundamental human right, but it is a right within the law.
You definately have a very well formed opinion on the matter, you've explored your own motives and desires, and you don't delude yourself in to thinking that you are ethical when you do things that aren't, but you've weighed the alternatives, and have chosen to go for a path which you believe to be for the greater good.
I respect that a lot, and I hope you get modded up for it. I'm kinda an argumentative guy, and it bugs me when people try to delude themselves in to thinking that it's ok for them to download music illegally because music sharing helps the industry overall, and thus it's not illegal, because it's for the labels' best interests even if they don't know it.
I strongly agree with your entire post. Every MP3 I own is either something for which I own the album, or something for which I would NOT buy the album. I'm eagerly awaiting a service where I can buy single songs, and at which time I'll gladly pay for the dozen or so songs I have which aren't worth $20 for the entire album, but which are worth $1. I recognize that those which I have not yet paid for are in essence stealing, but I'd more gladly delete them than pay for them.
If you bought the CD, then there's nothing wrong with downloading MP3's of it. The disucssion at hand here is regarding those who do NOT buy the CD's, particularly those who WOULD HAVE had they not had easy access to MP3's. These people are engaging in a form of theft. Thus it is theft. The phrase "form of theft" is designed to help some people make the connection that just because you are not walking out of a store with a physical good in your pockets that you did not purchase, that it can still be theft. Robbing a bank of $100,000 is a form of theft. Stealing a candy bar from the super market is a form of theft. Downloading MP3's to which you do not have rights is a form of theft. They are all forms of theft, they are all theft. Some people just have a hard time conceptualizing that theft doesn't necessarily require a physical item.
As far as downloading the MP3's before the CD arrives (from having bought the CD), I'm definately not versed enough in copyright law to know whether or not this could be considered copyright infringement, but my guess is that it is not. You paid for it already, the truck just hasn't arrived yet, but the main principle is that you have already placed the sale, certainly if you didn't uphold the *letter* of the law, you met the spirit of the law, in that you rewarded people for the intellectual property that they developed in the ways that they requested, and they in turn granted you the right to listen to the music.
Ok, I'll agree that the net job market sees no impact, but what this does do is divert money away from those who have worked for it, precluding the need for the consumer to balance value between a couple of burgers at McDonald's and a new CD, and thus artificially devaluing one industry, and artificially valuing another.
in this case, the song is a "work" and use of the work is denied unless you have the copyright holder's permission.
I'm not so familiar with copyright law that I can cite it, nor do I have the ambition to research individual clauses for this purpose, but I think pretty much anyone would agree that this is infringement on a copyright if you haven't purchased fair use rights. The "work" and the medium have nothing to do with each other aside from the mechanical process by which the work is delievered. It's analogous to saying that it's ok to back your own car up to a furniture store to load up furniture for which you have not paid, because in this case, the furniture isn't being delivered by the store's truck.
The copyright doesn't protect the CD's, but rather the music which is contained on them.
Despite all of this, copyright law is not vague when it comes to the use of a music file for which you have not bought rights, had rights transferred to you, or borrowed rights from someone else (during which time they ive up their own rights to it) being simply illegal.
If you download a song from a p2p network, and listen to it with out having gotten the copyright holder's permission (this permission is traditionally represented in the form of purchased CD's, though many indie bands give it for free), then you are engaging in an illegal activity. Period. You deserve any fines that come along as a result. If you want to communicate your desire for inexpensive downloadable music from the record company, CEASE listening to their music AT ALL, neither pay for it nor listen to it. Write your local radio stations and tell them, "Each time you play songs by the following artists, I will change the station to which I am listening," and the message will eventually come through to the recording company. Mean while, you'll be listening to non-label bands who provide their music for download on the net, and you'll be giving them a chance to succeed.
Right, and when you download a song for which you have already paid, you are not doing anything illegal, nor would anyone justifiably claim that you were.
This is one of the reasons that p2p isn't inherrently wrong, what you've described is a fair use.
Sadly, any lost revenue from p2p is going to come from the grunts and artists first, and from the execs last. Those antiestablishmentalists who want to beat "the man" by getting p2p music are woefully mistaken in thinking that they will do so. They'll hurt all the non-mans out there long before they hurt the man.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding, voting with only an electronic record is so foolish, what is to be done in the event of a recount?
The voting machine should print a clearly defined receipt for each vote cast. This receipt is tossed in to the box that only election officials have the key to, after the user can preview it through a piece of glass. The receipt can contain a human readable printout of results, as well as a barcode machine-scannable printout of results. Auditing can then be established on a variety of levels, recounts can be done by scanning the barcodes, and failing that, by the human readable printouts.
It looks like with out some sort of actual dead tree paper trail, it'd look very similar to the Simpsons Bart vs Martin for class president election. Let's do a recount. Yep, Martin won.
Actually I read someplace that they only made this claim in press releases, and not in any official capacity. I'm not sure how accurate that is, I try to not get overly involved in the whole thing :-)
Oh, and, distributing it under a different license is basically the equivalent of me taking the latest Metallica album / Harry Potter book, selling / giving away copies of it, and telling the recipients of these copies that they're permitted to use the material in a way not permitted under its original copyright (or that they're not permitted to use the material in a way that *is* permitted under its original copyright).
Well, distributing it with a different license is in violation of the GPL even if they follow all the other points of the GPL. The GPL says that derivative works, if distributed, must also be distributed under the GPL.
I'm not certain that this counts as a license violation, or a copyright violation, making changes to the license of GPL products, or GPL derived products is not their decision unless they are the copyright holder. In the case of the kernel, the copyright belongs to so many many people that it'd be essentially impossible to change the license on the kernel.
I assume you meant to ask if he also keeps a copy on his hard drive? Keeping a local *backup* (which would be a tape backup or other separate-media local duplicate of the working copy on his harddrive) wouldn't gain him a lot of added security over the remote backup.
In order for that off-site ISP being destroyed to be a problem to data integrity, that would have to happen at the same time that (s)he lost local data. The chances of catastrophy occurring on both ends simultaneously are low enough for average data usage, only data that had some very serious value would need to be backed up locally and remotely both, but if your local data store (basement / attic / spare bedroom of computers) burned down, you'd lose your working copy and local backup both, so the local backup isn't gaining you that terribly much anyhow. If you really want to secure your data, do two remote backups to geographically disperse ISP's, and keep your local copy on your hard drive.
I disagree with this. Although I'm less likely to make the initial investment required to play a game which requires a software purchase, plus monthly licensing fees, once I make that crucial purchase, you'd better believe I'm going to be playing it for several months.
I currently refer to this as the Star Wars Galaxies syndrome. Lots of people paid for a game that was ready for beta 3 when it hit the shelves. They played in a world that was incomplete and buggy, and the initial weeks saw crucial nerf after crucial nerf. To date, there is still a question if they've yet programmed the Jedi class since no one has unlocked it yet. So with all of this, you'd think the world would be totally empty. But it's not. Why? Because people paid $50 or $60 or whatever the price was initially, and they are trying to get their money's worth out of it since they have no chance to get a refund on that money.
All of the MMORPG's that I've downloaded have resulted in the same thing for me: I've quit after the free trial ended. I don't go for the monthly installment plan, because it doesn't hold my interest that well. It would if I was already invested, but not if I'm not. This is true of Lineage, Rubies of Eventide, and even with Star Wars Galaxies (I was in beta you see, and I didn't buy the game).
Everquest: I paid for Everquest. And I'm still paying for it. Initially I paid for it to buy the CD in the shiny box. When my free month was up, I hadn't totally made up my mind about the game, but as I was already financially invested, I figured, in for a penny, in for a pound, and let the subscription roll over. By the time I felt I had gotten my initial investment's worth out of it, guess what? I had a level 30-something cleric. No way I'm gonna give THAT up! It's only $10 a month, and still mildly amusing.
Plus I'm psychologically invested between my progress and the friends I'd hate to say goodbye to. Did I make those friends in my initial month, during the free trial? Nope. The friends I made during that time I'd have been easily able to say goodbye too, it wasn't until I'd spent several months with them on an almost daily basis that they began being worth more than the monthly investment.
So I might as well keep playing, I have friends and accomplishments here.
Now it's 3 years later, I have a 61 necromancer with his second level title, a 55 cleric, a 53 druid, a 53 bard, a 36 monk, a 36 ranger, a 36 mage, two accounts, plus my wife's account, plus my brother's account (he pays for it, but lends it to me), plus my brother in law's account (he quit, but I pay for his account since I use it).
I guarantee, if I hadn't made the initial investment, I'd have quit at the end of the first month. Now every 6 months they're releasing an expansion, and I'm running around buying tons of copies of it for all of my accounts, and paying all those monthly fees. It creeps up on you, but you gotta get them hooked, and that takes more than the free trial period. Oh, and I'm hooked.
Non-US spammers buying the list for a big pile of confirmed email addresses. Of people who get lower than average spam perhaps (for a little bit?).
http://www.vorbis.com/
was that sarcasm?
Yeah, but it's a terrible resource hog. I've yet to see how iTunes compares, but with the music store built in, I had hoped to make iTunes my primary music player. With out ogg, this isn't a reality. Since there have been 3rd party patches released for the Mac version of iTunes, I imagine (and hope soon) there'll be something like this for Windows.
I saw that page, but I believe the only thing there are Mac binaries.
Now for us Winblows users, tell me that there's an update available that lets us play OGG files!! *argh! As long as I've been looking forward to iTunes for Windows, it's a serious letdown that most of my existing music isn't playable. Can you play OGG's on the Mac in iTunes?
Getting sued by the FCC or whoever's running the list now.
Do they want to finance my open source project too? :-D
Legend of the Green Dragon
So why don't we have precautions against easily available equipment being able to interfere with plane control?
Doesn't this open the potential for terrorists to start shipping packages that have a temperature trigger to cause an electronic device to go haywire once it gets cold enough (signifying high altitude). Or just plain old timers. If it's easy enough to interfere with a plane that standard user products pose a threat, this is easily exploitable if this is one's intention.
All this crap with national security, and giving up constitutional rights in the sake of it, and all of these lost rights don't afford us any additional real security.
What if I'm blind? Is there a screen reader built in to this EULA? Maybe I'm "blindly" pressing keys till I can hit a key combination that I know turns on the Microsoft Narrator.
Further, what if I let my 7 year old son have "the honors" of booting up the computer? Just because he pressed a key when he was told to, doesn't mean that I'm legally obligated by the agreement. I haven't agreed to anything.
Further, what if I set this system up for my elderly grandparents. It doesn't belong to me, how can I be the one who agrees to it? Anyone who wanted to dodge this could *easily* claim that they never saw this screen, but that they had a friend or child set it up for them.
As loudly as they proclaim, "Get your Illegal Warez here, we will protect you, we got nothing but illegal sutff," I don't trust them to not be a trap for users. Think about it, RIAA/MPAA set this up, make it super duper abundantly clear that the only purpose here is to be illegal, they score a two fold victory: first their case is strengthened against P2P in general, and second, they eventually sue said company and in an "out of court agreement" come away with complete logs of who did what on the network. Now they get to really sue those people, and their case is all the stronger, "More people watched Terminator 3 on the net than went to see it in theatres!"
"The Congress shall have power . . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts"
Copyright exists because it is believed by Congress to progress science and useful arts. If it ever becomes impossible for artists to make any money selling music because it's all available for free on the net (bottom of a slippery slope, which is also an extreme that we'll never reach, but it's used as an example), then how does that promote the useful arts?
Further, I was unaware that Congress was composed exclusively of vDave420 and the other people who download tracks that they haven't paid for. When this happens, or when Congress is composed at least half of such people, then you may pass an amendment which permits free unlimited downloading of music on the net.
But the Constitution doesn't say, "individual members of society may choose to promote the progress of science and the useful arts in what ever means they see fit." It explicitly says Congress. And Congress has established copyright law, under which it is still illegal to download and listen to tracks you haven't purchased.
You have a voice in Congress, and so does the RIAA, and so do I. Collectively "we the people" (not "we the vDave420") have decided that copyright laws promote the progress of science and useful arts, and until such time as Congress finds differently, it will remain illegal to download and listen to tracks you haven't purchased.
One amazing thing about the constitution is that it's sincerely not up to individuals to interpret as they see fit, if it was, it'd hold no power, because anything that anyone wanted to do could be permissable under some distortion of the constitution, perhaps online music swapping is the means by which you choose to exercise free speach by communicating to the record company that you only want to download your tracks, and for free. Thus it's a fundamental right in the constitution. Similarly, perhaps carrying an unregistered loaded high powered rifle on the streets and pointing it at police officers is how I choose to exercise my right to bear arms. Guess what, it's not YOUR decision to make to be allowed to do these things any more than it's YOUR decision to be allowed to download unpurchased music. That's why we have Congress, which represents the needs of all individuals, and that's why the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts is explicitly granted to Congress, and not to vDave420.
Want to use your voice in Congress to say that the free download of all music on the net promotes the progress of the useful arts? Then write your congresspersons. Then later vote for those with similar views to yours. This is how your voice is known in society, and this is how you affect change; not by deciding that you disagree with the law and acting accordingly.
None of that changes the fact that in our society, as it stands now, downloading tracks from the net with out permission, and with out owning the original album, is copyright infringement, and thus illegal. Further, providing the tracks for free on p2p networks is willful ignorance of the fact that people *will* use this sevice to engage in this illegal activity (most likely more often than not).
The law is pretty clear that willful ignorance is just as criminal as full knowledge. Bank owners go to jail if their bank is used to launder money, and it's proven that they chose to be "unaware" of the illegal activities going through their bank.
Your post is full of "RIAA propaganda" accusations, but I have no more interest in listening to the RIAA than I do to listening to the d3wds who want to illegally download all their songs for free. It's still not our right to decide that we know better than the record labels what they should do with their own copyrights.
If they can't continue to compete in this age of easy distribution of music, then they are forced to either adapt or die, but it's not our place to adapt them for themselves.
I'm not proposing that copyright restrictions should be any stricter than they already are, in fact, in a lot of ways they're a little too strict already. I'm just trying to make sure that people are cognizant of the fact that downloading music that you don't own is neither legal nor moral, no matter how much fun it is, and no matter how "good" it is for the recording companies. Just because I agree with the "pirating music is illegal" aspect of what the RIAA says doesn't mean I also agree with other things they say, nor did I profess to. However, it IS their right to enforce their copyright to the full extent OF THE LAW, as it exists at the time. Further, it's also their right to try to get the law changed to their favor (this is what's great about America, because it's also our right to do the same for our own favor, maybe a law should be in place that requires recording companies to provide online repositories where we can download backup copies of music we've purchased).
This remains their right so long as the law continues to provide it as a right to them. It's not a fundamental human right, but it is a right within the law.
You definately have a very well formed opinion on the matter, you've explored your own motives and desires, and you don't delude yourself in to thinking that you are ethical when you do things that aren't, but you've weighed the alternatives, and have chosen to go for a path which you believe to be for the greater good.
I respect that a lot, and I hope you get modded up for it. I'm kinda an argumentative guy, and it bugs me when people try to delude themselves in to thinking that it's ok for them to download music illegally because music sharing helps the industry overall, and thus it's not illegal, because it's for the labels' best interests even if they don't know it.
I strongly agree with your entire post. Every MP3 I own is either something for which I own the album, or something for which I would NOT buy the album. I'm eagerly awaiting a service where I can buy single songs, and at which time I'll gladly pay for the dozen or so songs I have which aren't worth $20 for the entire album, but which are worth $1. I recognize that those which I have not yet paid for are in essence stealing, but I'd more gladly delete them than pay for them.
If you bought the CD, then there's nothing wrong with downloading MP3's of it. The disucssion at hand here is regarding those who do NOT buy the CD's, particularly those who WOULD HAVE had they not had easy access to MP3's. These people are engaging in a form of theft. Thus it is theft. The phrase "form of theft" is designed to help some people make the connection that just because you are not walking out of a store with a physical good in your pockets that you did not purchase, that it can still be theft. Robbing a bank of $100,000 is a form of theft. Stealing a candy bar from the super market is a form of theft. Downloading MP3's to which you do not have rights is a form of theft. They are all forms of theft, they are all theft. Some people just have a hard time conceptualizing that theft doesn't necessarily require a physical item.
As far as downloading the MP3's before the CD arrives (from having bought the CD), I'm definately not versed enough in copyright law to know whether or not this could be considered copyright infringement, but my guess is that it is not. You paid for it already, the truck just hasn't arrived yet, but the main principle is that you have already placed the sale, certainly if you didn't uphold the *letter* of the law, you met the spirit of the law, in that you rewarded people for the intellectual property that they developed in the ways that they requested, and they in turn granted you the right to listen to the music.
Ok, I'll agree that the net job market sees no impact, but what this does do is divert money away from those who have worked for it, precluding the need for the consumer to balance value between a couple of burgers at McDonald's and a new CD, and thus artificially devaluing one industry, and artificially valuing another.
in this case, the song is a "work" and use of the work is denied unless you have the copyright holder's permission.
I'm not so familiar with copyright law that I can cite it, nor do I have the ambition to research individual clauses for this purpose, but I think pretty much anyone would agree that this is infringement on a copyright if you haven't purchased fair use rights. The "work" and the medium have nothing to do with each other aside from the mechanical process by which the work is delievered. It's analogous to saying that it's ok to back your own car up to a furniture store to load up furniture for which you have not paid, because in this case, the furniture isn't being delivered by the store's truck.
The copyright doesn't protect the CD's, but rather the music which is contained on them.
I agree. There are many songs that I might listen to, but for which I would NEVER pay the price of a CD. (I'll have to check out that Zep CD btw)
Nonetheless if you listen to the music, and you haven't bought it, it's illegal. The law is not unclear on this matter.
Despite all of this, copyright law is not vague when it comes to the use of a music file for which you have not bought rights, had rights transferred to you, or borrowed rights from someone else (during which time they ive up their own rights to it) being simply illegal.
If you download a song from a p2p network, and listen to it with out having gotten the copyright holder's permission (this permission is traditionally represented in the form of purchased CD's, though many indie bands give it for free), then you are engaging in an illegal activity. Period. You deserve any fines that come along as a result. If you want to communicate your desire for inexpensive downloadable music from the record company, CEASE listening to their music AT ALL, neither pay for it nor listen to it. Write your local radio stations and tell them, "Each time you play songs by the following artists, I will change the station to which I am listening," and the message will eventually come through to the recording company. Mean while, you'll be listening to non-label bands who provide their music for download on the net, and you'll be giving them a chance to succeed.
Right, and when you download a song for which you have already paid, you are not doing anything illegal, nor would anyone justifiably claim that you were.
This is one of the reasons that p2p isn't inherrently wrong, what you've described is a fair use.
Sadly, any lost revenue from p2p is going to come from the grunts and artists first, and from the execs last. Those antiestablishmentalists who want to beat "the man" by getting p2p music are woefully mistaken in thinking that they will do so. They'll hurt all the non-mans out there long before they hurt the man.