Damn those Russian pirates! I would support http://www.allofmp3.com/ if it were Ukranian pirates though. Or Czech pirates.
What about pirates of the Caribbean?
Huh? Capitalism is the economic model in which large amounts of capital are gathered together in order to fund a large scale enterprise, which presumably will then deliver profits to the original providers of capital. Capitalism as a system doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any particular venture, or even about the welfare of entire economic sector.
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Capitalism
an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.
Now, I think the important parts here are “private or corporate ownership of capital goods … and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition ina free market.” I’m assuming that there’s an implied link between owning the goods and distributing them. Thus, since there is no case for allofmp3.com actually owning the .mp3s they distribute, it’s pretty hard to imagine how they’re an example of capitalism in action.
People’s certitude that the market for virtual intellectual property is exactly the same as the market for physical objects amazes me.
As does the argument that just because it’s thought, or sonic energy, or little ones and zeros, that it therefore represents somehow less of an effort.
Regardless, however, are you actually arguing that it should be wholly impossible to own things that aren’t tangible in nature? Seems a rather interesting tract to go down:
Hope you don’t mind, I jimmied open the door on your house, kicked back in your barkalounger, watched your TV for a while, thumbed through your girly magazines, and then rubbed one out real quick in your bathroom. But no worries, I brought my own beer, my own toilet paper, and I don’t think anyone but your youngest daughter caught me rifling through your wife’s lingerie drawer. She’s a sweet one, that thing.
I mean, as long as there’s no actualy physical damage, it’s not a big deal, right?
(Note: That was a hyperbole. Expressly written to try to illustrate the point that lack of physicality is not equivalent to lack of damage. I don’t even know if McCullough is married and has a daughter, nor that his girly magazines would at all be the same girly magazines I would want to read.)
Didn’t say they were totally different, but to hear people in here you’d think they were stealing musician’s cars.
I agree with every last word of Corey’s Doctorow DRM speech:
http://www.dashes.com/anil/stuff/doctorow-drm-ms.html
To understand what DRM does to artists, you need to understand how copyright and technology interact. Copyright is inherently technological, since the things it addresses – copying, transmitting, and so on – are inherently technological.
The piano roll was the first system for cheaply copying music. It was invented at a time when the dominant form of entertainment in America was getting a talented pianist to come into your living room and pound out some tunes while you sang along. The music industry consisted mostly of sheet-music publishers.
The player piano was a digital recording and playback system. Piano-roll companies bought sheet music and ripped the notes printed on it into 0s and 1s on a long roll of computer tape, which they sold by the thousands – the hundreds of thousands – the millions. They did this without a penny’s compensation to the publishers. They were digital music pirates. Arrrr!
Predictably, the composers and music publishers went nutso. Sousa showed up in Congress to say that:
These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy…in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal chord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.
The publishers asked Congress to ban the piano roll and to create a law that said that any new system for reproducing music should be subject to a veto from their industry association. Lucky for us, Congress realized what side of their bread had butter on it and decided not to criminalize the dominant form of entertainment in America.
But there was the problem of paying artists. The Constitution sets out the purpose of American copyright: to promote the useful arts and sciences. The composers had a credible story that they’d do less composing if they weren’t paid for it, so Congress needed a fix. Here’s what they came up with: anyone who paid a music publisher two cents would have the right to make one piano roll of any song that publisher published. The publisher couldn’t say no, and no one had to hire a lawyer at $200 an hour to argue about whether the payment should be two cents or a nickel.
This compulsory license is still in place today: when Joe Cocker sings “With a Little Help from My Friends,” he pays a fixed fee to the Beatles’ publisher and away he goes – even if Ringo hates the idea. If you ever wondered how Sid Vicious talked Anka into letting him get a crack at “My Way,” well, now you know.
That compulsory license created a world where a thousand times more money was made by a thousand times more creators who made a thousand times more music that reached a thousand times more people.
This story repeats itself throughout the technological century, every ten or fifteen years. Radio was enabled by a voluntary blanket license – the music companies got together and asked for an antitrust exemption so that they could offer all their music for a flat fee. Cable TV took a compulsory: the only way cable operators could get their hands on broadcasts was to pirate them and shove them down the wire, and Congress saw fit to legalize this practice rather than screw around with their constituents’ TVs.
…
Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we’ve changed copyright. Copyright isn’t an ethical proposition, it’s a utlititarian one. There’s nothing moral about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there’s nothing immoral about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They’re just the best way of balancing out so that people’s physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings.
But Jason, in this case, nothing has changed except how easy it is to steal the work.
And yet, how often do you go to the movies and see someone playing the piano in the lobby these days? How different would it be if the shoe had come down on the other foot, d’you think? After all, tapes, CDs, and the like would have evolved far differently. On the other hand, I probably wouldn’t have to pay $75 to see a frickin’ live concert because it takes so much time/effort/money to find anyone who can stick through things long enough to become a musician. Always consequences…
Sorry, I just don’t see the expediency of the consuming mob as a compelling reason to undermine the fundamental principles of business which have gotten us here so far. Maybe it’s because I can pretty clearly anticipate a day in the future when the ability to make digital copies of things won’t be limited to something as innocuous as media.
There are already plenty of machines out there that make drugs, or engines, or cars, or anything else. They take nothing but information and raw materials, and spit out products. If it’s not the information required to take separate parts and assemble them into a whole that has the value, then what is it? The raw materials? If that were the case, then it would be no more or less worthwhile to buy 3 CD’s of Bach, Beethoven, or the Beatles than it would be Tiffany, Gerardo, or N’Sync. There is inherent value in the information itself, because of the quality of that information. No matter how easy it is to convert that information into the finished product.
I’m sorry, Best Buy doesn’t purchase the CDs they sell beforehand? Well, that I didn’t know, JonR. Or had you completely forgotten that, in a rush as you were to smack me down?
I’ll even add at this point, because you’re ugly and your mother dresses you funny, that a significant portion of the music I download happens to be music that I already purchased in cassette form years ago. I already paid for the music. I’ve converted any CD I enjoy in part or full by buying its CD, but those one-hit wonders I download. Doesn’t seem unfair to me; I shitcanned all those cassette tapes, so there’s no duplicate ownership of media there. Is there a statute of limitations on legally-purchased music? If we used only CDs for the next 50 years, aren’t I still allowed to listen to CDs I bought decades ago?
Furthermore, where’s your counterargument for the fact that my personal musical acquiring habits fail to serve as a harbinger of the death knell for the music industry, and are in all rational trains of thought unlikely to? Just as the fact that I pay for a far greater percentage of my drinks than I get free from a secondary supplier (a bar), so do I with music from its secondary supplier (Best Buy). We all failed to bankrupt the film industry (and theaters) with our VCRs and cable and the like, it seems. I’m sorry you can’t see the connection, Jon, but really you aren’t trying to. You just want to be a dick again. Here’s the caps part: TRY FUCKING HARDER, SON.
Let’s say I purchase the new CD by the Flaming Bazookas. I then rip it to MP3 and resell the CD on Ebay. Can I keep the MP3’s since the record company/artist got the money for the Cd I bought originally?
Best Buy now offers direct downloads of songs, for free, that will self-destruct after one use depending on whether or not you’re buds with whoever’s running the server at the given moment? Had no idea, Bill Dungsroman. Or had you completely forgotten about that in the rush to carry on with your usual witless schtick?
If we used only CDs for the next 50 years, aren’t I still allowed to listen to CDs I bought decades ago?
Since free drinks and movie tickets are so similar to music, shouldn’t you also be allowed to drink for free for the next 50 years? Are you making sense yet?
Furthermore, where’s your counterargument for the fact that my personal musical acquiring habits fail to serve as a harbinger of the death knell for the music industry, and are in all rational trains of thought unlikely to? Just as the fact that I pay for a far greater percentage of my drinks than I get free from a secondary supplier (a bar), so do I with music from its secondary supplier (Best Buy). We all failed to bankrupt the film industry (and theaters) with our VCRs and cable and the like, it seems. I’m sorry you can’t see the connection, Jon, but really you aren’t trying to. You just want to be a dick again. Here’s the caps part: TRY FUCKING HARDER, SON.
I can see the basic connection between VCRs and MP3s. Cable TV also is kind of like your half-baked analogy, which i’m sure is a complete and total accident on your part. I just can’t see your moronic connection between a freebie bourbon, a connected perk resulting in a free viewing of Gigli, and downloading music.
I don’t understand what you’re talking about at all. “The expediency of the consuming mob?” Machines that make things are covered by patents, not copyrights. And I don’t recall saying information is worthless…
Are you asking me for permission? NO! I would consider that illegal, same as renting games and movies from Blockbuster and burning copies of them before returning them. Or burning copies of films and games you bought at Best Buy and reselling them.
You’re the one shaking the witless schtick at me, pal. Analogies need not be identical to be true and furthermore, you as usual are utterly failing to address the salient points of my post, the ones specifically regarding usage, ownership, and fair consumption. You’re so desperate for me to disappear down an argumentative rabbit hole of your own devising, shored up with your bland, ill-aimed sarcasm. Fine, I will!
But purchased music is consumable, Jon! In theory, and in practice to a certain extent, it isn’t. But! And I’m speaking just in terms of myself - I have CDs and casette tapes I haven’t listened to more than few times, and never will. Tracy Chapman? WTF was I thinking? I’ve gone on to buy new music, and then bought new music to supplant the former, and on and on. Sounds like consumption to me, I’m sorry if your pea brain can’t wrap itself around the concept that a non-consumable item is potentially consumable by virtue of the consumable-prone society we live in. I’m still buying those CDs Jon, and every CD I buy means less airplay for the ones I own. And worse yet, my average time to listen to a CD on a daily basis (in my car on the way home from work and the occasional errand, not even an hour’s worth a day, no music at work that I can appreciably listen to) has decreased over the years. You could sneak into my house and replace my copy of Richard Marx’ Greatest Hits and replace it with your personal selection of armpit farts, and I’d never know the diff, because that bastard has languished on my shelf for years know and will forever, unless I snag a part-time gig as a wedding DJ. Puchased, used a discrete number of times, never used again. Are you telling me that’s not good enough to qualify as consumable?
That’s because your tinfoil hat has slid down over your proto-Neanderthalic brow and obscured your vision. Someone, somewhere, in at least two points of pre-service, paid for the commodity I horked for free. But it was an occasional, infrequent perk weighed against all the other times I paid my way fair and square. The ability to get fee drinks, used sparingly, doesn’t endanger the liquor industry or its intermediaries, and I harbor no guilt over it; neither in the case of the occasional song I download. But WHATEVER, arguing with you is the most boring pointless activity ever, and this is all just a gay grudge you’re carrying out, a fatwa from a fathead, Shiite from a shit-for-brains, Jihad by a Jabroni. Carry on, since you will and always do.
Jon vs. Bill, round… umm… what round are they on?
Are you asking me for permission? NO! I would consider that illegal, same as renting games and movies from Blockbuster and burning copies of them before returning them. Or burning copies of films and games you bought at Best Buy and reselling them.[/quote]
Ah, but they got their money for the one copy I bought. And I’d only resell what I bought once, not hundreds of copies in Thailand or something. And I never make copies of DVDs. So, that change your mind any? Anybody else got an opinion?
Legally you are not allowed to do this. When extrapolated to its logical conclusion, keeping in mind the absurdly low cost of entry for wide distribution over the internet, it would have profound repurcussions if it were legal. Basically, copyright would be destroyed and artists would not be paid for their work at all.
Now, let’s go back to the good old days of taping songs off the radio for personal use… If I listen to an internet radio station and record the songs… am I evil too?
Right. And those automatic piano players…
Here’s that same assumption that keeps coming up. The idea that lack of copyright protections immediately impoverishes all artists and stops all artistic production. I’m having a hard time swallowing that, because somehow music has been around for 1000’s of years longer than copyright laws. Sure Britney Spears and various boy bands might have to get real jobs, but somehow I’m not seeing American civilization really suffering any serious loss.