Of course. I would feel more comfortable in leaving it alone if people wouldn't subtly alter my words in order to make them sound more appealing. What do people call that again?
If I'd rather keep my money instead of buying a song file, then that song file isn't worth the price to me.
There's a subtle distinction here. If the music wasn't available for free, would you still rather keep your money and not have any music from your pirated collection? There's value in the economics sense, in that people won't want to pay for it. Then there's value in the sense that I was referring to, which is more intrinsically linked to the product itself, not the external factors surrounding it. There's value in an enjoyable music album, even though it's possible to get it for next to nothing. The fact that the music isn't worth the iTunes price is mostly an indicator of the sick and dying music market than the actual music itself. The actual music is, well, enjoyable, and in terms of enjoyment per dollar, it rates reasonably well against any other ways to spend $15.
If I decide that downloading the song from iTunes isn't worth forgoing a tasty snack, then presto, I've just concluded that the iTunes download is worth less than $1 to me.
It depends. The choice needs to be either downloading the tune and not having the snack, having the snack and not downloading the tune (and not getting it for free back home), or keeping your $1. Personally, I think that spending $1 on an unhealthy, short-lived snack is, far more often than not, worse value than a music track that you'll get to listen to as much as you want, even if it's only 5 or so times over your lifetime.
You never presented any counter-arguments to my statements, but merely dismissed them out of hand, sort of accusing me of being a pirate and just not wanting to pay for what I get.
Look, no question I was a dick, but you actually need to read between bile to find the counter-arguments.
First paragraph: Your conjecture is completely unsupported. If anything, it will be false over time, because the next generations will not be as charitable as we are now.
Second paragraph: People won't learn from a reasonably popular artist dropping off the map. They'll instead accept it, and just download the back-catalogue. This is part of human nature: to not learn from mistakes, and just go with what feels good in the short term (until it's too late).
Third paragraph: Art is subjective. There's no such thing as crap music, only popular and unpopular. Unpopular music isn't sold, or if it is sold, then it usually goes in the bargain bin, or some other out-of-the-way place.
Fourth paragraph: What the free market pays (assuming no regulation) by no means equals a "fair price". If everyone acted by free market principles (without copyright) they would get a product of equal value for less price, so they would download wherever they can. Artists would get nothing. That is, of course, assuming the free market actually worked as advertised.
See? Four counter-arguments. I got the feeling that you just skimmed over the text, not being able to handle so many insults landing so close to home.
I still remain convinced that if somebody really likes a given product, they will reward the artist.
Of course, because if you didn't, you wouldn't be able to justify your actions over the past few years, or however long you've been pirating. It's perfectly natural.
If there are not enough people there that do care, then I see little reason that the artist should be supported through marketing power, inflated prices and the likes.
"Inflated prices", and "marketing power" are not ways to "unnaturally" enhance value, they're tools to realise it. That's the way the free market works: to find an ideal price that isn't too high so that no-one buys it, but that makes the seller as rich as possible. If people really only wanted it for a lower price, then that would drive prices down. There's nothing evil there. Similarly too with marketing. Marketing allows business to offer their product to as many people as they can, who can choose whether or not to buy it. That's achieving potential, rather than "artificially" inflating profits. It's all the things that aren't marketed that are "unnaturally" deflated.
And, more importantly, if people care enough to download, but not to pay, that's a problem with people, not the artist. If people start caring less about all artists, so much so that they stop caring if they pay or not, is it really the artist's fault? Can't it be just a teensy-weensy little bit the fault of those who illegally download, despite the protests of their favourite artists?
About copyright: it was invented because people THINK that it encourages creativity. Nobody has ever proven that idea, AFAIK.
No-one can provide a conclusive proof, but there was undeniably a sharp rise in the richness and availability of culture after the advent of copyright. Plus there is a whole lot of extremely sound economic rational as to why copyright should (and does) work, and how the sharp rise in richness and availability can be explained by copyright. There's also plenty of precedent for the concept of adding profit to something to make it good.
I think these people are sorely mistaken, and the world would be far better off without copyright.
And to think I thought you just made up reasons to justify your greed...
Well, you could consider what I just said. Look at all this talk about ISP-level filtering. This is the kind of thing that piracy is responsible for. It hurts the RIAA to be sure, but it doesn't look like it will kill them. What I said is perfectly plausible, and follows current trends. And these aren't unforeseen consequences, these have been foreseen, and how could you not foresee them and also read RIAA-related slashdot posts?
In fact, I find your attitude deeply frightening. Your reluctance to help stage a boycott seems to be just a lazy unwillingness to actually help. When I try and point out some of the damage you are doing, your response is "I don't care what you think" (or something along those lines), and "I don't know what's going to happen, so I'll just do it anyway". Something about the combination of laziness, apathy, and wilful ignorance just terrifies me on some fundamental level.
i trust people here. the people who regular this site are not your average joe and jill. they have better perception and cognitive judgment abilities.
Look, I'll grant that they're smarter than your average internet-dwelling creature (I'm not sure about the world-dwelling creature, though), but they're far from infallible. They're human beings, and their intelligence does not make them immune to certain phenomena. For example, it's been widely established that groupthink exists in the slashdot community. It occurs because certain opinions are modded up more than others, and are hence viewed more than others. People then read the same opinion over and over again, until they forget (by a matter of degrees) why they didn't believe that all along. The groupthink, ironically enough, is often geared towards people thinking for themselves, but they don't really practice what they preach. I'm not saying that makes them stupid, I'm saying that makes them human. The difference between me and them is that I automatically distrust opinions on Slashdot (but I still enjoy coming here;) ). I do that because I learned the hard way that the Slashdot groupthink is far from fallible, and is riddled with artefacts from cognitive dissonance and self-justifying bullshit.
I meant that I don't care if I am perceived to be a problem.
When I told you that I perceived you as part of the problem, I actually meant, a part of the problem, not just some external fuss that doesn't affect you. It's a problem for you too, and a problem for people you know. In your efforts to hurt the RIAA, you may be only hurting them temporarily, and helping them gain a stronger stranglehold on policing your communications, and invading your privacy. Your actions may leave them as an unprofitable business with significant, almost universal demand, which makes them a prime candidate for government subsidies. Your actions allow (and encourage) others to be part of the same problem, fuelling and exacerbating it.
If you were to boycott them entirely, and spread the message as far as you can, you might actually make a dent in downloads and sales. Then again, maybe people actually do want the RIAA's music, and there's not much you can do about it. Whatever it is, what you are doing isn't helping anyone.
If there really is demand for the music, the artists will get their fair share of money for it.
You want to back that up? Seriously, apart from the bullshit self-justification from fellow file-sharers that their greedy little entertainment grab is good and healthy, what makes you think that artists will get their fair share of money? If file-sharing became truly mainstream, and we taught our kids that file-sharing is wrong, do you really think we'd be paying for music in 10 years? Or 5 years, for that matter? Right now, it's the last remnants of moral conscience compelling you to fork out some money for the entertainment you pilfered, but as generations march on, without putting morality into solid practice, it ends up fading away. I can just see kids saying "You got to choose how much you paid, and so can we! We choose to pay nothing!" But, of course, since values on copyright infringement are so flexible these days, I guess "nothing" (or next to nothing) would constitute the "fair share" that the artist deserves then.
If the artist would not get any money, he would stop making music and people would complain. Eventually they will figure out that there is no such thing as a free lunch and the artist should get some money, and everyone can be happy again.
Or, when it starts happening left right and centre, people start to think of it as a fact of life, and continue to rip off what they can, lamenting that they'll only be able to enjoy the back catalogue of that artist (until they get bored with it). It makes me think of a spoiled rich kid who has is nanny fired over some trivial matter, and then cries that he can't play with her any more. Actually, thinking about it, what would happen in that situation? The rich parents would ask the nanny back, of course, but would the nanny gladly return, and would the rich kid learn his lesson about toying with people? Or would the rich kid just not learn the consequences of his actions, and fire the nanny again? Or would the nanny know this, and say "Screw you, I'm out of here. The pay was barely tolerable as it was."?
If the artist produces only crap, he won't get any money, and thankfully he will stop making any more.
It's not that simple. Art is subjective, and what some people call crap, other people actually enjoy. Pirates tend to dance around this little fact, pretending their judgement is the be all and end all of taste (it makes it easier to rip-off the "crap" ones). The more selective their tastes, the better! Selective tastes serve the dual purpose of making them feel that their tastes are superior (which is an absolute must for spouting self-justifying crap), and also severely limiting who they feel they should pay money to.
In reality, most art sold today have genuine fans, who would normally pay for their art. Some of the less mainstream artists would drop off the radar if people started to take the free option rather than manning up and just paying for their music.
Now, will the (good) artist get as much money as he does nowadays? Most probably not. But he would get the exact market value of his music - and not be overpaid. This system would be far more fair to everyone.
That's a load of shit. We have copyright because the market price for digital art severely misrepresents its demand. As copies become more abundant, the market value approaches 0 (elementary economics there). The only reason that artists get any money from the pirate community is because they feel, at a fundamental level, guilty for ripping them off. Paying true market price (that is, market price conveniently ignoring copyright, which is part of the market now), and not relying on temporary phenomena like this guilt-alleviating charity spend, people wouldn't pay anything, because they can. If they were intelligent consumers, like the free market assumes people are in order to work, they wouldn't pay anything. Sometimes, the free market just doesn't work. We've learned that the hard way in the past. Nowadays, saying that pure free marketeering would produce a different result is no longer, by any means, proof that we are doing the wrong thing.
See, I think you are part of the problem in this. On one hand, you say the RIAA doesn't deserve money from you. On the other, you illegally download their creations, sending a clear message that you have some demand for what they offer. If you want the RIAA to go away, just ignore them, and everything they create. While people download their stuff, they can justifiably whine about people ripping them off (because even though 17,000 downloads != 17,000 lost sales, it's also true that 17,000 downloads != 0 lost sales).
I got the distinct impression from that passage that the same thing would happen
And what would you have thought if the same thing was phrased a little less deceptively? Probably the same thing again. Let me try again:
What if it phrased a little less deceptively, and you made your entire slim living from creating and selling copyrighted materials? What if we reversed your bias? Would you really, truly believe that nothing that was pirated would ever be bought had it not been available for free? Would you really believe that no-one would actually download something they'd be prepared to pay for normally for free for next to no personal risk? It seems absurd to me.
And you don't think that the people who sees these examples daily won't be just a tad biased towards believing whatever keeps their stream of ill-gotten entertainment going strong? They might start reading into the correlation as causation because that's what they want to think. It's much more comforting to think that free stuff doesn't hurt the people who provide it for you. It's much more pleasant to be secure in the belief that if everything costed money, you would just suffer without it, and thus there's no harm, no foul. The reality is much more logical: the people who pirate the most are the people who enjoy entertainment the most, who need it the most, and who are most likely to get however way they can, even if it means actually paying for it. This is pretty basic stuff.
Even if you disagree with me, you surely can't deny that we should be questioning our biases when formulating rational ethical arguments. I just don't see it happening on anti-copyright discussions, yet on a story about the RIAA, or something copyright neutral (or, god forbid, pro copyright), people can't criticise certain rhetoric fast enough.
Not to sell him out, but to admit, privately or non-committally, that you're pretty convinced this guy is guilty, or if not that, then many of your clients are most likely guilty.
Don't forget that the RIAA aren't the only aggressors in this ongoing feud. There are still people out there unlawfully using what they risked their precious capital to pay for.
Seriously Slashdot. Is your collective brain just switched off? Why bother doing any analytical thinking when we have something pro-piracy? If the story was "Study Says Filesharing Has Negative Economic Effects", and the study simply associated file sharing with low purchasing rates, the thread would be bursting with people flexing their sceptic muscles, repeating "correlation is not causation", and quite rightly too. Now we have a study associating piracy with high purchase rates. Come on: a five-year-old could work this one out. I'll give you a hint: people who get entertainment illegally, and people who get it legally, get it for the same reason.
downloaders on average buy just as much music as non-downloaders
Interesting, but that doesn't prove the activity is harmless or positive. This just shows that people who pirate music, like music (go figure). What would happen if they didn't unlawfully gain copies? Then they might actually pay the artist fairly for what they use, rather than what they feel like, when they feel like it. People are understandably ignorant about the affairs of specific musicians, about their financial needs, and about the musicians motives, but nothing flaunts and accentuates that ignorance like deciding unilaterally what a musician "deserves" based on public appearances.
but they buy more DVD's and games then people who don't download
Well, DVD and game piracy just isn't as mainstream music piracy. It's understandable that music lovers could be entertainment lovers, and that media that is pirated less often could be bought more frequently by these people.
They also tend to visit more concerts and buy more merchandise.
That's great. So all a musician has to do to regain the right to set his own prices is to stop recording altogether, and just do live gigs, perhaps with some slapdash, garage band, unpolished free recordings as advertising. Brilliant, if you happen to only like live gigs, and music that can be performed live, and you have mainstream tastes.
Re:Apple Computer, the Homosexual's Favorite
on
Gaming Netflix Ratings?
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Best. Troll. Evar.
I have to agree. Not too obvious to be lame, not too crass to be disgusting, not too subtle to stop it being hilariously funny. Mod GP funny!
along with the reasons so many gamers turn to piracy to play their games -- including the slew of inferior games, availability of flash carts and industry greed.
Not to mention consumer greed. It's all the industry's fault, or at least those damn flash cart manufacturers. They provide a product like that, how could we possibly have the free will to say no?
Ha! What you just said, in fact, is a generalisation itself! It also sucks, because obviously, that statement itself is the exception, because it's true, and...
The fact that it was defeated doesn't imply that the original action was without merit. I, for one, was of the opinion that holding liable people who make copyrighted materials available is sensible. In many circumstances, they are, after all, just as party to causing damages to the copyright holder as the person/people who take advantage of the availability. Since copyright infringement is so notoriously difficult to pinpoint, it seems sensible to attack it from both ends.
Of course because non-citizens can't vote, it's next to impossible to get this reported in media in the US, and policy will not loosen anytime soon. Of course, policymakers don't realize how much this hurts trade relations, tourism, etc.
Well, just because they can't vote for their rights in the country they're visiting doesn't mean they can't get any rights, or any influence. The idea is that citizens will look at them as human beings, and stand up for their basic rights (even if the right to vote isn't among them). Plus I believe most democracies have signed the odd human rights treaty or two.
The problem is that most people are scared of other people. Screw trade relations, tourism, etc. What's the point in maintaining them when we can't feel safe in our own country?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course. I would feel more comfortable in leaving it alone if people wouldn't subtly alter my words in order to make them sound more appealing. What do people call that again?
There's a subtle distinction here. If the music wasn't available for free, would you still rather keep your money and not have any music from your pirated collection? There's value in the economics sense, in that people won't want to pay for it. Then there's value in the sense that I was referring to, which is more intrinsically linked to the product itself, not the external factors surrounding it. There's value in an enjoyable music album, even though it's possible to get it for next to nothing. The fact that the music isn't worth the iTunes price is mostly an indicator of the sick and dying music market than the actual music itself. The actual music is, well, enjoyable, and in terms of enjoyment per dollar, it rates reasonably well against any other ways to spend $15.
It depends. The choice needs to be either downloading the tune and not having the snack, having the snack and not downloading the tune (and not getting it for free back home), or keeping your $1. Personally, I think that spending $1 on an unhealthy, short-lived snack is, far more often than not, worse value than a music track that you'll get to listen to as much as you want, even if it's only 5 or so times over your lifetime.
Look, no question I was a dick, but you actually need to read between bile to find the counter-arguments.
First paragraph: Your conjecture is completely unsupported. If anything, it will be false over time, because the next generations will not be as charitable as we are now.
Second paragraph: People won't learn from a reasonably popular artist dropping off the map. They'll instead accept it, and just download the back-catalogue. This is part of human nature: to not learn from mistakes, and just go with what feels good in the short term (until it's too late).
Third paragraph: Art is subjective. There's no such thing as crap music, only popular and unpopular. Unpopular music isn't sold, or if it is sold, then it usually goes in the bargain bin, or some other out-of-the-way place.
Fourth paragraph: What the free market pays (assuming no regulation) by no means equals a "fair price". If everyone acted by free market principles (without copyright) they would get a product of equal value for less price, so they would download wherever they can. Artists would get nothing. That is, of course, assuming the free market actually worked as advertised.
See? Four counter-arguments. I got the feeling that you just skimmed over the text, not being able to handle so many insults landing so close to home.
Of course, because if you didn't, you wouldn't be able to justify your actions over the past few years, or however long you've been pirating. It's perfectly natural.
"Inflated prices", and "marketing power" are not ways to "unnaturally" enhance value, they're tools to realise it. That's the way the free market works: to find an ideal price that isn't too high so that no-one buys it, but that makes the seller as rich as possible. If people really only wanted it for a lower price, then that would drive prices down. There's nothing evil there. Similarly too with marketing. Marketing allows business to offer their product to as many people as they can, who can choose whether or not to buy it. That's achieving potential, rather than "artificially" inflating profits. It's all the things that aren't marketed that are "unnaturally" deflated.
And, more importantly, if people care enough to download, but not to pay, that's a problem with people, not the artist. If people start caring less about all artists, so much so that they stop caring if they pay or not, is it really the artist's fault? Can't it be just a teensy-weensy little bit the fault of those who illegally download, despite the protests of their favourite artists?
No-one can provide a conclusive proof, but there was undeniably a sharp rise in the richness and availability of culture after the advent of copyright. Plus there is a whole lot of extremely sound economic rational as to why copyright should (and does) work, and how the sharp rise in richness and availability can be explained by copyright. There's also plenty of precedent for the concept of adding profit to something to make it good.
And to think I thought you just made up reasons to justify your greed...
Well, you could consider what I just said. Look at all this talk about ISP-level filtering. This is the kind of thing that piracy is responsible for. It hurts the RIAA to be sure, but it doesn't look like it will kill them. What I said is perfectly plausible, and follows current trends. And these aren't unforeseen consequences, these have been foreseen, and how could you not foresee them and also read RIAA-related slashdot posts?
In fact, I find your attitude deeply frightening. Your reluctance to help stage a boycott seems to be just a lazy unwillingness to actually help. When I try and point out some of the damage you are doing, your response is "I don't care what you think" (or something along those lines), and "I don't know what's going to happen, so I'll just do it anyway". Something about the combination of laziness, apathy, and wilful ignorance just terrifies me on some fundamental level.
Not necessarily. It could be that you'd rather keep the money and buy something that isn't free.
And the people who pirate their stuff. Don't forget them. Without their actions, this mess could be resolved.
Look, I'll grant that they're smarter than your average internet-dwelling creature (I'm not sure about the world-dwelling creature, though), but they're far from infallible. They're human beings, and their intelligence does not make them immune to certain phenomena. For example, it's been widely established that groupthink exists in the slashdot community. It occurs because certain opinions are modded up more than others, and are hence viewed more than others. People then read the same opinion over and over again, until they forget (by a matter of degrees) why they didn't believe that all along. The groupthink, ironically enough, is often geared towards people thinking for themselves, but they don't really practice what they preach. I'm not saying that makes them stupid, I'm saying that makes them human. The difference between me and them is that I automatically distrust opinions on Slashdot (but I still enjoy coming here ;) ). I do that because I learned the hard way that the Slashdot groupthink is far from fallible, and is riddled with artefacts from cognitive dissonance and self-justifying bullshit.
When I told you that I perceived you as part of the problem, I actually meant, a part of the problem, not just some external fuss that doesn't affect you. It's a problem for you too, and a problem for people you know. In your efforts to hurt the RIAA, you may be only hurting them temporarily, and helping them gain a stronger stranglehold on policing your communications, and invading your privacy. Your actions may leave them as an unprofitable business with significant, almost universal demand, which makes them a prime candidate for government subsidies. Your actions allow (and encourage) others to be part of the same problem, fuelling and exacerbating it.
If you were to boycott them entirely, and spread the message as far as you can, you might actually make a dent in downloads and sales. Then again, maybe people actually do want the RIAA's music, and there's not much you can do about it. Whatever it is, what you are doing isn't helping anyone.
You want to back that up? Seriously, apart from the bullshit self-justification from fellow file-sharers that their greedy little entertainment grab is good and healthy, what makes you think that artists will get their fair share of money? If file-sharing became truly mainstream, and we taught our kids that file-sharing is wrong, do you really think we'd be paying for music in 10 years? Or 5 years, for that matter? Right now, it's the last remnants of moral conscience compelling you to fork out some money for the entertainment you pilfered, but as generations march on, without putting morality into solid practice, it ends up fading away. I can just see kids saying "You got to choose how much you paid, and so can we! We choose to pay nothing!" But, of course, since values on copyright infringement are so flexible these days, I guess "nothing" (or next to nothing) would constitute the "fair share" that the artist deserves then.
Or, when it starts happening left right and centre, people start to think of it as a fact of life, and continue to rip off what they can, lamenting that they'll only be able to enjoy the back catalogue of that artist (until they get bored with it). It makes me think of a spoiled rich kid who has is nanny fired over some trivial matter, and then cries that he can't play with her any more. Actually, thinking about it, what would happen in that situation? The rich parents would ask the nanny back, of course, but would the nanny gladly return, and would the rich kid learn his lesson about toying with people? Or would the rich kid just not learn the consequences of his actions, and fire the nanny again? Or would the nanny know this, and say "Screw you, I'm out of here. The pay was barely tolerable as it was."?
It's not that simple. Art is subjective, and what some people call crap, other people actually enjoy. Pirates tend to dance around this little fact, pretending their judgement is the be all and end all of taste (it makes it easier to rip-off the "crap" ones). The more selective their tastes, the better! Selective tastes serve the dual purpose of making them feel that their tastes are superior (which is an absolute must for spouting self-justifying crap), and also severely limiting who they feel they should pay money to.
In reality, most art sold today have genuine fans, who would normally pay for their art. Some of the less mainstream artists would drop off the radar if people started to take the free option rather than manning up and just paying for their music.
That's a load of shit. We have copyright because the market price for digital art severely misrepresents its demand. As copies become more abundant, the market value approaches 0 (elementary economics there). The only reason that artists get any money from the pirate community is because they feel, at a fundamental level, guilty for ripping them off. Paying true market price (that is, market price conveniently ignoring copyright, which is part of the market now), and not relying on temporary phenomena like this guilt-alleviating charity spend, people wouldn't pay anything, because they can. If they were intelligent consumers, like the free market assumes people are in order to work, they wouldn't pay anything. Sometimes, the free market just doesn't work. We've learned that the hard way in the past. Nowadays, saying that pure free marketeering would produce a different result is no longer, by any means, proof that we are doing the wrong thing.
As many times as it takes before you learn to take care of your music. ;)
Try this one instead:
"I don't want to pay the iTunes price"
These are the ones that make up most of the lost sales.
See, I think you are part of the problem in this. On one hand, you say the RIAA doesn't deserve money from you. On the other, you illegally download their creations, sending a clear message that you have some demand for what they offer. If you want the RIAA to go away, just ignore them, and everything they create. While people download their stuff, they can justifiably whine about people ripping them off (because even though 17,000 downloads != 17,000 lost sales, it's also true that 17,000 downloads != 0 lost sales).
And what would you have thought if the same thing was phrased a little less deceptively? Probably the same thing again. Let me try again:
What if it phrased a little less deceptively, and you made your entire slim living from creating and selling copyrighted materials? What if we reversed your bias? Would you really, truly believe that nothing that was pirated would ever be bought had it not been available for free? Would you really believe that no-one would actually download something they'd be prepared to pay for normally for free for next to no personal risk? It seems absurd to me.
And you don't think that the people who sees these examples daily won't be just a tad biased towards believing whatever keeps their stream of ill-gotten entertainment going strong? They might start reading into the correlation as causation because that's what they want to think. It's much more comforting to think that free stuff doesn't hurt the people who provide it for you. It's much more pleasant to be secure in the belief that if everything costed money, you would just suffer without it, and thus there's no harm, no foul. The reality is much more logical: the people who pirate the most are the people who enjoy entertainment the most, who need it the most, and who are most likely to get however way they can, even if it means actually paying for it. This is pretty basic stuff.
Even if you disagree with me, you surely can't deny that we should be questioning our biases when formulating rational ethical arguments. I just don't see it happening on anti-copyright discussions, yet on a story about the RIAA, or something copyright neutral (or, god forbid, pro copyright), people can't criticise certain rhetoric fast enough.
Not to sell him out, but to admit, privately or non-committally, that you're pretty convinced this guy is guilty, or if not that, then many of your clients are most likely guilty.
Don't forget that the RIAA aren't the only aggressors in this ongoing feud. There are still people out there unlawfully using what they risked their precious capital to pay for.
Seriously Slashdot. Is your collective brain just switched off? Why bother doing any analytical thinking when we have something pro-piracy? If the story was "Study Says Filesharing Has Negative Economic Effects", and the study simply associated file sharing with low purchasing rates, the thread would be bursting with people flexing their sceptic muscles, repeating "correlation is not causation", and quite rightly too. Now we have a study associating piracy with high purchase rates. Come on: a five-year-old could work this one out. I'll give you a hint: people who get entertainment illegally, and people who get it legally, get it for the same reason.
Interesting, but that doesn't prove the activity is harmless or positive. This just shows that people who pirate music, like music (go figure). What would happen if they didn't unlawfully gain copies? Then they might actually pay the artist fairly for what they use, rather than what they feel like, when they feel like it. People are understandably ignorant about the affairs of specific musicians, about their financial needs, and about the musicians motives, but nothing flaunts and accentuates that ignorance like deciding unilaterally what a musician "deserves" based on public appearances.
Well, DVD and game piracy just isn't as mainstream music piracy. It's understandable that music lovers could be entertainment lovers, and that media that is pirated less often could be bought more frequently by these people.
That's great. So all a musician has to do to regain the right to set his own prices is to stop recording altogether, and just do live gigs, perhaps with some slapdash, garage band, unpolished free recordings as advertising. Brilliant, if you happen to only like live gigs, and music that can be performed live, and you have mainstream tastes.
I have to agree. Not too obvious to be lame, not too crass to be disgusting, not too subtle to stop it being hilariously funny. Mod GP funny!
An honest one? Seriously, it's a popular crime. Sooner or later he's going to get one that is guilty (at least, in the informal sense).
Frist Psot + -1 Redundant = Head asplode
Seriously guys. If you want to silence his opinion, do it the discrete, zero accountability way: with a -1 overrated.
Not to mention consumer greed. It's all the industry's fault, or at least those damn flash cart manufacturers. They provide a product like that, how could we possibly have the free will to say no?
Ha! What you just said, in fact, is a generalisation itself! It also sucks, because obviously, that statement itself is the exception, because it's true, and...
Oh wait.
Joke goes horribly wrong: opportunity to use stale meme missed
News at 11
The fact that it was defeated doesn't imply that the original action was without merit. I, for one, was of the opinion that holding liable people who make copyrighted materials available is sensible. In many circumstances, they are, after all, just as party to causing damages to the copyright holder as the person/people who take advantage of the availability. Since copyright infringement is so notoriously difficult to pinpoint, it seems sensible to attack it from both ends.
That's probably because the "DRM on the Linux" isn't relevant to this discussion.
Well, just because they can't vote for their rights in the country they're visiting doesn't mean they can't get any rights, or any influence. The idea is that citizens will look at them as human beings, and stand up for their basic rights (even if the right to vote isn't among them). Plus I believe most democracies have signed the odd human rights treaty or two.
The problem is that most people are scared of other people. Screw trade relations, tourism, etc. What's the point in maintaining them when we can't feel safe in our own country?