Downloading a single song is no different than singing "Happy Birthday" at a comapny function (technically a violation of copyright)

Downloading an entire album, IMHO, is stealing.

In the ideal world, you download the song, like it, and buy the album.


Goodbye Callisto & Skaði, Hello Ishara:
2022 Kia Stinger GT2 AWD
The only thing every single person from every single walk of life on earth can truly say
they have in common is that their country is run by a bunch of fargin iceholes.

I'm a pirate, I'll admit it. I'd never pay for half the crap that I have, it just isn't worth the money. I'd rather buy parts for my car or a new computer or something.

I don't know.....

If it's as illegal as everyone says.... how come limewire is still up and running.... you'd think the feds woulda shut them down by now.... they have to know about it and yet they do nothing.

I still buy CD's I'm not one of those people that just downloads everything... Especially if I'm a fan of a particular band.... For example... I'm a big fan of the band Korn... and the only mp3 CD I have with Korn on it was made by copying off of my store bought CD's so I wouldn't have to keep changing CD's in my car.

Although I still download music and other forms of media (mp3, videos, roms, software ect) because I can. Most of which never leave my computer though. Looking back at all the software and other things I've pirated in the past... damn it adds up to a lot.... but I've never made a single cent off of doing it.

Remember the 80s and early 90's when 9 times out of ten when someone was playing an audio tape it was copied? No one ever questioned that on the level they are now... I honestly don't see a difference between a "mix tape" and burnt cd's or downloaded music. This has been going on forever... and now that computers are being used... suddenly it's a problem. And what about hitting record when a song you liked started playing over the radio?

Even with all the downloading going on... bands and other companies (original owners of the media) are still making large amounts of money.

Is it technically stealing.... probably.... but do most of us care.... NO....

Most people aren't thinking about the moral side of it..... they are just making use of the fact that they can just download a song instead of going to the store and buying a whole CD.... as long as we are able to do that..... we will.... regardless of principal.

My friend at work said that he read the disclaimer from limewire and it said that you can download music. But if you download some songs off a cd that is ok. They are just assuming that you like those songs and if you like those songs, you will have full intention of buying the cd. However, if you download the whole cd, then it is stealing. Also, if I'm not mistaken he said something about a 90 day grace period. If you choose to download 6 of the 13 songs, you can't download any more until that 90 day period is up. It sounds fair enough to me. I only download certain songs, I have NEVER download an entire cd. Although, there are times I wish I would have *ahem* MIKE JONES *ahem*.

-dan

This is an extremely muddled subject. On the one hand the record companies are very well known as thieves who have stolen from bands for years. Most bands barely make a dime off their albums and don't make any money at all off their singles. The ones that do, like Metallica and Puff Daddy, are "oddly" enough the ones yelling the loudest about being ripped off. Most other bands don't really have much to say about it because they're not making money either way. Most bands make money off merchandise and touring in case you were wondering.

However, nothing is free. For example, TV is 24/7 commercials with a few shows thrown in to keep you watching. Same with radio. It's a bunch of ads with some songs so you won't change the station. And why do you all think that there's 30 minutes of ads at the beginning of movies now or that there's obvious marketing in films? I mean, it wasn't an accident that they remade "The Dukes of Hazzard" one year before Dodge released the new Charger and it's no accident that the General Lee had a HEMI (tm) in that film. That was just a very sneaky ad for the new car, seriously.

So if you download music you're getting something free that someone paid to make. Trust me, no one is going to enjoy losing money forever and they will find ways to make their money back somehow.

That's actually why Hip-Hop keeps chugging on (like 70's metal does) because you can sneak ads for things in the lyrics. Notice how in the 80's the rapper dudes wouldn't mention products by name. They'd just babble about gold chains, drinking nonspecific champagne or driving an unnamed blingmobile. Now they very very specifically and audibly mention brand names. That is NOT an accident.

^^ another thing to mention about the movie industry. When the use a coke or a pepsi product, you better believe that they are paying for the advertisement, and they have been doing it since the begining. And, I'm willing to guess that the music videos are the same way.

-dan

I think that when I pay 20.00 for some crappy cd that took the artist 2 days to make they are stealing from me.

I always download music from torrent sites.

After listening to it, if I feel it is good enough to buy then I will.

Sommer wrote:I think that when I pay 20.00 for some crappy cd that took the artist 2 days to make they are stealing from me.

I always download music from torrent sites.

After listening to it, if I feel it is good enough to buy then I will.

Depends on the album. With Hip-hop that wouldn't surprise me if it did take only two days. But there are some albums that take months to make, sometimes years. It's not all recorded in one take you know.

I'm waiting for Urban to post his 2 bits on this.




Transeat In Exemplum: Let this stand as the example.

Bands and other musical artists create music for others to listen. The fact that we have to pay for it is for their own greedy benefit. They should be proud of the fact that people are willing to go the extra mile to obtaining their songs. Just my opinion. I mean, there ARE albums that I will pay for. But normally it's just up to Limewire!


-Markus
2002 Yellow Cavalier LS Sport

eco mark.

what is your occupation? if your a dishwasher, shouldn't you work for free and just be happy that people are nice enough to eat off the plates your washing? if your work at a store as a cashier shouldnt you work for free and just be happy that someone was nice enough to choose your line to checkout in? getting paid for your hardwork is not greed.



sommer. have you ever read a book that you ended up not liking to much. did you demand your money back? have you ever aten a meal that you ended up not liking did you run out without paying? just because someone creates an album doesn't mean you should absolutely love the entire thing or its free?


weebel. diffrence between a cassette and and this is you have a guy taping cassesttes non stop over a weekend and he gets what, maybe a 100 tapes made if he's lucky. you can take 1 single song on the internet and it can be distributed over 100,000 times in a single weekend, and thats just 1 song. imagine how many songs there are out there that have the same amount of downloads.

yes even with the downloads bands are still making large amounts. but does that give you the right to steal from them? if thats true, can i just decide that your making way more money then me that its okay if i just come over and take your tv.



tabs. imagine you wrote a book a book that you felt may be on the best seller list, and you show it to yoru friend and your friend takes it, copies it to the internet and comes back a few days later and goes, hey man i had 100,000 people download your book and they loved it. great are you happy. or do you think, man i just slaved over this thing pouring my heart and soul into it working long hours writing it and i just lost 100,000 sales... id be somewhat pissed.



the owner of wallmart is a billionaire im sure that to me seems pretty rich but most of you wouldnt feel right walking in and stealing something off the shelf. so why should music be any diffrent, its someones hard earned money. and yet allot of you sit here and say, well if all the money went to the musicians then i'd buy the music. but all the money goes to the midle man and not the band. well im guessing everyone that says that isnt' buying any product ont he market because when you buy a burger your paying mcdonalds money, your paying the truckers that shipped the materials, your paying the place that made the materials etc. etc. etc. there are middlemen in every aveunue of life. the music business is no diffrent.




people bash metallica because they stood up for their craft most people don't realise that there are allot of little bands out there that dont want their music stolen but they dont have the millions of dollars it takes to fight that battle. metallica and the other bands that stood up didnt say all music should not be downloaded. allot of them said they just want the oppurtunity to keep their music from being illegally downloaded if they choose to. but they didnt have that option. the bands work hard for the product they put out wether you like 1 song or all 10 songs and they should have the right to say wether or not their music is given out freely or sold.




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i understand what youre saying sndsgood, but there are a few differences in d/l music and the examples you use.

first of all, if i wrote a book and someone took it and distributed, that would be wrong because they didnt give me the chance to make $ off of it. now, once that book has been published by whomever, and THEN its redistributed, people have the choice of purchasing a copy or not. in your example they never had the choice. and also, just because 100k people d/l'd a book i wrote definitely does NOT mean that 100k would BUY the book given a choice. and then youve also got the fact that any library could order a copy of the book and redistribute it freely, or you could borrow the book from a friend who has purchased it, again as other outlets of how you can obtain a copy of the item or enjoy the item w/o having to pay for it. i believe downloads are a new form of this model and that its just taking people awhile to adjust to this new mindset.

using an example of saying someone should wash dishes for free and be happy that people are eating off of them is silly, to say the least. a dishwasher's sole income is based on his washing dishes. musicians make very little on albums and make most from touring and merchandiselast time i checked, washing dishes wasnt an art. and thats not to say that art should always be free, but i do have a notion that if you were truly an artist that you wouldnt care the distribution method of your art. what really matters would be that people were able to see it, hear it, enjoy it..

which brings me to the musicians who DO support downloads. my favorite artist for over a decade has been moby. he agrees with what ive just said about d/l'd and says that he's thrilled anytime someone downloads his music because that means that they like it and WANT it enough to go out and get it. he even has a whole site, mobygratis.com, that is solely for allowing independent film makers to d/l his music and use it in their films for FREE. and hes a multi-platinum, award-winning artist, so he has plenty to "lose" from downloads. and in fact his new album just came out at the beginning of this month. it was leaked early like most albums are now and i d/l'd it immediately. but i also placed an order with amazon JUST so i could support him, which i believe proves that people are willing to support those artists that they like.

and i still say that there is a huge difference between stealing something off the shelf of walmart and downloading music. when you take something from WM, you are physically removing an item that would be available for sale. so someone has produced that item and is out that much money, no matter what, as well as the possible sale and the profit that could be made from the markup on the item. now, when d/l'ing music, there is no removal of a physical item. its just a transfer of 1s and 0s. the printed CDs are still wherever they were before and no one loses money on physical items, much less the markup they could make from the loss of a physical item. because that CD is still there for sale, i say no harm no foul.

Tabs, the only thing that hitches up the thing with Moby is that he (like a lot of other artists, notably the Smashing Pumpkins) is that they put that stuff out with the intention of it being for free, while they only retain the copyright so you or whomever else can't claim ownership.

For the label releases, the Label & Distributor are getting hit for the lost revenue, and so is the artist for that matter.

Again, the media is really irrelevant, the content is what you're buying/pirating irrespective of whether it's a CD/DVD/Book/Download. Stealing is stealing, that's the way the law looks at it and realistically, if you want to split hairs about what constitutes theft and whether it has to be a concrete object, you can steal electrical power, and you can steal identities and they're the same thing under the law. All this aside, I'd honestly like to see more people with Moby's attitude because it would facilitate change instead of hostility and needless litigation.







Edited 1 time(s). Last edited Monday, April 14, 2008 8:59 AM

Transeat In Exemplum: Let this stand as the example.

tabs, you say no harm no foul. the recording artists says foul because they are the one taking the loss, its easy for you to say no harm no foul because you lose nothing, you just gain a free musical cd. that's great that moby likes to give his music out for free. but that doesnt mean that every person does. and every person should have the right to decide wether they give their music out for free or wether they wish to charge. just as you have the ability to choose whos music u wish to buy.



lets go back to my book example. okay lets say you wrote that book and you got it published and its in the first store finally after all your hard work. now imagine if someone took your book, made thousands of copies, and setup a display right by your book and was just giving it out for free. now people walk into the store and they can choose yours or the free copy. sure some will support you and buy your book but i'd bet that the majority of people would take the free copy and walk away, leaving you without any commision on your hard work. your right those 100,000 people all wouldnt have bought the book. but maybe 25,000 would have. thats still lost commision either way.

you going into the library or letting a friend borrow it is two difrent things. in a years time at a library a book may be out maybe 52 times at most if its lucky. a cd on the internet in that amount of time could go out to millions of users. biggggg diffrence there.

and i think gam stated it best. if its just 1's and 0's run out and take someone s.s. # and start using it, its just a series of numbers.

saying that its not a physical item is people just using that as an excuse to get something for free that they would have otherwise had to purchase.










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the reason i dont consider it stealing is that, again, there is no LOSS of an item, physical or not. just because i d/l a cd doesnt mean that i was going to go out and buy the cd. therefore there isnt even a loss of a sale. yes, i get the benefit of occasionally putting a song from that album in my rotating playlist, so i get the benefit from it. but because i was NOT going to purchase it to begin with, the artist and label do not get hurt. see what im saying there? it could almost be argued that it is a form of commensalism....one benefits while the other is neither helped nor harmed.

and again, when looking at the laws that we have, you are allowed to freely distribute X amount of copies of copy written material. sure, leaving a cd in your share file for a month might put you over what would be considered the limit (although there is no actual number) but as long as you arent doing that, who is to say that youve gone over the unspecified limit? you cant count redistribution by the people you distributed it to, like the record companies like to do, because as long as your copy was legal to begin with, then it is legal for others to have and also share copies.

so theoretically one copy of a cd could legally (by our own, current laws) be enough to allow every person on the planet to own a copy. lets say the magic number for legal distribution was 5. one person gave to five. those five each gave to five who each gave to five, et al. each time they redistribute a copy legally, the new owner also has the ability to redistribute legally. while i am sure that was not what lawmakers had in mind when they came up with the law, thats still, from what i understand, how it works.

with that being the case, how can a commensalistic relationship that by our own laws is considered legal (in small redistribution batches) be considered stealing?

and you seriously cant compare something like this to taking someone's SS# and using it. id like to think that the differences between personal information and a product made for mass marketing would be glaringly obvious. and the difference between your example, sndsgood, of a person making physical copies and setting up directly in front of a book store and giving them away should also be obvious. as i explained, the law allows you to make and redistribute copies of certain copy written materials legally. if someone did so in a small enough batch, then it would not only be legal, but most definitely NOT stealing.

we are on the precipice of a new way of thinking about these sort of things. as much as you may not like it, a revolution is happening and your thinking is becoming outdated and obsolete. in another 20-30 years people will find it odd that anyone ever thought any other way about redistribution of media. take that as you will, but i am glad to help lead the way into a much needed change.

the only real revolution is that people are thinking its okay to steal.



there is no LOSS of an item but there is loss of revenue.



sorry but you may feel that EVERY single person who downloads music wasnt intending to buy it anyway, but i'd bet there are easily millions of transfers by people who are just getting it for free so they dont have to pay. by your reasoning because i didnt INTEND to buy something, then its okay if i take it for free since i had no intentions of buying it legally.


and just saying well i can legally trade it to 5 people and then those 5 people is bogus as well because when i used to go onto napster (yes i used to do it to) i have seen instances where ive had the same thing in que or being downloaded a dozen times. so you hit that magic 5 number or whatever u want to make it no time flat. i got a call from universal studios about the original spiderman movie that a coworker had illegally downloaded. and came to find out he system was always on day and night and he had a list a good two pages long of stuff he was downloaded. ive seen people entire music collections collected by stealing music. hey i dont intend to buy a yacht but if i can steal it for free it should be free (yeah i know im back to your whole imaginary object versus real object u can touch) but the bottom line is your just taking money out of musicians hands and your trying to find a guilt free way of doing it. the diffrence betwen now and then is back then everyone new if you bought a cd or tape or whatever that it may get copied a few times and that would be it. now when you buy a cd and load it up it can be basically copied hundreds of thousands of times if you leave your system running like some people do. even if only 10% of the people who steal originally planned on buying a cd that is still stealing in my eye.





you seem to put it all into your perspective that because u didnt plan on buying the cd anyway then its ok. but that is just a small percentage of the big picture.


you talk about a revolution. people claimed its their way of saying cd costs are to high blah blah blah. heres an idea. instead of just stealing music, why not just stop buying music in general. if everyone did that the music company would open their eyes, instead everyone just steals and says its a new revolution. wouldnt surprise me if at this point companies are just keeping cd costs high to negate lost sales.
i mean if you didnt intend on buying it, why do you have it?


http://www.flickr.com/photos/sndsgood/ https://www.facebook.com/#!/Square1Photography

i dont think stealing is ok. but i still dont think downloading is stealing.

i can only be responsible for my own actions, not that of others. as such, i cant speak for what other people do or dont do regarding why they download music. i support my favorite artist moby by buying his latest CD even though i didnt like it much at all and had already downloaded it.

Quote:

by your reasoning because i didnt INTEND to buy something, then its okay if i take it for free since i had no intentions of buying it legally.

again, there is a big difference between physical goods and something digital.

you say you want a yacht? well imagine if you could figure out a way to replicate it and digitize it so that there is no loss or damage to the original yacht. all you would be doing is copying it, creating something out of thin air, so to speak.

if you could do something like that, would that be stealing? no! it might be considered copyright infringement because you copied a patented design.....but by doing so you did not harm the originator of the design, did you? nope. same thing for the music.

edit: and this isnt just some far fetched scheme to assuage my guilt for "stealing". as i said, i wouldnt take a physical item from a store, but i seriously dont think this is even equatable to that. i do believe this is the beginning of a shift in how people view media distribution and what encompasses it. and i am glad to help bring about that change, as i feel it is past due.





Edited 1 time(s). Last edited Monday, April 14, 2008 2:54 PM

(tabs) wrote:the reason i dont consider it stealing is that, again, there is no LOSS of an item, physical or not. just because i d/l a cd doesnt mean that i was going to go out and buy the cd. therefore there isnt even a loss of a sale.

So we should just excuse Cleptomaniacs from their thefts? There is a loss on the item, because you have not purchased the rights to use that piece of music for any purpose. It's part of the reason that you have separate releases for broadcast and for personal use.

Quote:

yes, i get the benefit of occasionally putting a song from that album in my rotating playlist, so i get the benefit from it. but because i was NOT going to purchase it to begin with, the artist and label do not get hurt. see what im saying there? it could almost be argued that it is a form of commensalism....one benefits while the other is neither helped nor harmed.

I point back at the cleptomaniacs... Or even better, your neighbour borrows the car you're selling.. you never gave your consent he just up and borrowed it.

I reiterate that you're missing the point that while you may never have intended to purchase the item, it was originally proffered with the intent of selling it. Now, if you were to say, listen to it with the intent of auditioning it, you're not stealing it and if you don't like it, there's no harm or foul because you're not leaving the store with it.

Quote:

and again, when looking at the laws that we have, you are allowed to freely distribute X amount of copies of copy written material.

Of your own material? Certainly. Of someone else's stuff? Hardly.

Quote:

sure, leaving a cd in your share file for a month might put you over what would be considered the limit (although there is no actual number) but as long as you arent doing that, who is to say that youve gone over the unspecified limit? you cant count redistribution by the people you distributed it to, like the record companies like to do, because as long as your copy was legal to begin with, then it is legal for others to have and also share copies.

I'd like to know where you're getting this information, because it's patently wrong.

You have no right to distribute any copyrighted material without the copyright owner's expressed permission.

I suspect you may be thinking of fair use laws, and those still don't allow the distribution of copyrighted materials. You CAN make a copy of a CD into MP3/AAC/Whatever and put it on your computer/mp3player/Car stereo/home stereo and play it for your own personal enjoyment, and the enjoyment of your friends.. there's no where in the fair use laws that allows you to distribute someone else's materials to many other individuals. You're allowed to keep up to 3 copies for back up, if you no longer own the original material (for reasons other than it was destroyed), you can't keep them.

Quote:

so theoretically one copy of a cd could legally (by our own, current laws) be enough to allow every person on the planet to own a copy. lets say the magic number for legal distribution was 5. one person gave to five. those five each gave to five who each gave to five, et al. each time they redistribute a copy legally, the new owner also has the ability to redistribute legally. while i am sure that was not what lawmakers had in mind when they came up with the law, thats still, from what i understand, how it works.

No... yet again, this isn't about the medium, it's about the content. I want to know where you're getting this information: it's not covered under fair use.

Quote:

with that being the case, how can a commensalistic relationship that by our own laws is considered legal (in small redistribution batches) be considered stealing?

Again, the idea is that you're injuring the party that is offering the artwork for sale. You're not in a commensalist relationship because the distributor (if not the artist as well) expects payment in exchange for your use of the art.

Quote:

and you seriously cant compare something like this to taking someone's SS# and using it. id like to think that the differences between personal information and a product made for mass marketing would be glaringly obvious. and the difference between your example, sndsgood, of a person making physical copies and setting up directly in front of a book store and giving them away should also be obvious. as i explained, the law allows you to make and redistribute copies of certain copy written materials legally. if someone did so in a small enough batch, then it would not only be legal, but most definitely NOT stealing.

You most certainly CAN make the parallel. It doesn't matter the medium: you're taking something that has value, art/numbers/programs... it's all relative: you are taking something that you have no right to.

And no law allows you to distribute something you don't own... that would be like your neighbour loaning your car to someone else after they took it without your consent.

Quote:

we are on the precipice of a new way of thinking about these sort of things. as much as you may not like it, a revolution is happening and your thinking is becoming outdated and obsolete. in another 20-30 years people will find it odd that anyone ever thought any other way about redistribution of media. take that as you will, but i am glad to help lead the way into a much needed change.

I seriously doubt that. The "What's mine is MINE" mentality has been endemic in human conciousness for 60,000 years before today. No one is going to put effort into something on a regular basis when they are going to receive no remuneration.




Transeat In Exemplum: Let this stand as the example.

(tabs) wrote:
...Downloads are non-material ... and they're just series of 1s and 0s....
so what do you people think?

I run an indie record label, and comments like that make my blood boil.

- The hundreds of thousands of dollars my company spent last year to promote our artists was material enough.
- The long hours we spent working these projects was material as well.
- The hearts and souls our artists poured into their music is certainly more than just a series of 1s and 0s....

I don't have a problem with people that download music occasionally, but kids these days think they're entitled to free music 99.9% of the time. Most artists are bleeding to death, and I lost count the number of times one of artists told me how some kid asked to get a burned copy signed.

That was what I figured I'd hear.




Transeat In Exemplum: Let this stand as the example.

I believe I've said this before...

Right now there are no players, commercially or otherwise, that can play a mp3-encoded 5.1 DVD-audio file. basically, a file from a DVD-audio 5.1 file, that is compressed with the mp3 algorhythm.

Further, if we infer a 44.1khz, stereo (2.0) 16 bit average CD track encoded to an mp3, we're looking at, say, a 3 meg file. for argument's sake, let's say this file is a 4 minute song. the same file, in DVD audio, assuming a 96khz 24-bit 5.1 audio track would be approximately 30 megs in size.

Open reel and casette tapes could recored albums way back when, but usually they had to be broken up by side, and the process was tedious. CD initially were tedious to copy, but it wasn't the MP3 format the blew everything wide open, it was the proliferation of the broadband format.

The industry didn't back the DVD audio format, which right now is very small because of compatibility issues, but believe me, the sound quality is lightyears beyond CD.

Nowadays downloading something 30 megs in size is a matter of minutes, rather than seconds like a 3 meg file. if the average album has 12 songs, you can download an album in about 6 minutes, assuming 30 seconds for a 3 meg download. a 30 meg file would take approximately 5 minutes, meaning that an album would be an hour download.

That in and of itself would have severely curttailed the MP3 trade, after all, you couldn't just listen to it "now." and even though MP3 is a lossy encryption, have you every tried to zip a mp3? it doesn't compress.

IMHO, all this is damage control now. The recording industry SERIOUSLY dropped the ball on this one. They could have moved to DVD audio and would not be having the problems they would at this point. Further, all digital media would be "inferior" quality, being a 192kbps-ish stereo to be used in portable media players (there are no headphone out there that can do 5.1 without a usb interface and realtek '97 audio drivers, which would bring the costs of portable media players, as well as the bulk of the headphones and the players up).

After all, people are easily duped by marketing and advertising into what's "cool" and what's not, and if the RIAA and everyone else came on board, they could have easily flaunted DVD audio as superior and worth it compared to MP3's for the home and car.

As for it being stealing--downloading a whole album, yes. Downloading 1 or two songs that are in public domain, no. Besdies, those MOST hurt by the filesharing are the pop artists on big lables that charge 20 bucks per CD. Most of the smaller artists, well, their fans tend to buy the albums just to support them nowadays.


Goodbye Callisto & Skaði, Hello Ishara:
2022 Kia Stinger GT2 AWD
The only thing every single person from every single walk of life on earth can truly say
they have in common is that their country is run by a bunch of fargin iceholes.

"As for it being stealing--downloading a whole album, yes. Downloading 1 or two songs that are in public domain, no. Besdies, those MOST hurt by the filesharing are the pop artists on big lables that charge 20 bucks per CD. Most of the smaller artists, well, their fans tend to buy the albums just to support them nowadays."


what's your basis on that keeper? im sure allot of smaller artists have lost sales too. just on a smaller scale.





going to a 5.1 setup isnt something nessicarily good if your goal is to give an image of a live playback or somewhat accurate playback, not to mention yourgoing to require everyone to change over to a 5.1 setup to listen to them they way they are recorded not to mention the costs to switch the recording to 5.1 versus stereo, i just dont think the backing is there, they have 5.1 now and its still not selling like hotcakes. no sence in going that route to save downloads if people aren't buying the media in that form to begin with.

besides. people nowadays dont care about the quality of the music anyway. they are compressing sound down as small as they can and destroying the sound just to get as many songs as they can on their i-pods. this is the main reason i havnt switched to an i-pod form. im hoping they can rathcet the quality up a notch so i can use non-compressed songs on it.


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Smaller artists tend to not have the overhead of having to pay back buttloads of money on advertising. Most smaller artists, like the larger artists, make their money from shows. The difference is that it's the record companies that have a vested intrest in album sales. A lot of the smaller artists i've seen are selling their CD's at shows, or hell, giving them away at shows, and use the filesharing networks to propogate their sound to reach a larger fanbase.

Meanwhile, the larger artists that have recording, advertising, and distribution contracts with the large conglomerates to advertise, and distribute their music. the conglomerate frunts the cash outlay for recording, mastering, pressing, and of course the advertising and possible video creation. A lot of those contracts are loaded based upon sales of albums. Hence, the filesharing networks take money out of the pockets of the financiers, and by proxy, the artists.

The only thing is--much like the nazis, as has been said, the RIAA doesn't differentiate between legit Mp3's and pirated ones (the parallel being that the Nazis didn't differentiate between practicing jews and ones that just happened to be born to jewish parents). To me, the burden of proof is on them to prove that the files are illegal. Their extreme bullying, however, is nothing more than a corporate-sponsored racketeering scheme IMHO.

The thing you're missing about the 5.1 setups, snds, is now much of the infrastructure to implement it, we already have in our daily lives. When DVD-audio first came out, Home theaters already started to make their appearance, many of them 5.1 or better. Right there, you have the prime market for 5.1 DVD-audio (who doesn't have a 5.1 setup somewhere in their home nowadays--or better?). Cars, amazingly enough, can be easily take advantage of that based on the existing speaker systems. After all, even the most basic of cars have a 4.0 setup--phantom a center speaker (most home theaters can do this--it would be easy to whack the programming into a car headunit), and sample the bass over all of the speakers, or at least the larger ones. It would not be hard to do at all. And that's just OEM...

The only issue, would be the digital portable media. Music theives would have to downsample the 24 bit, 96khz 5.1 stream into a 2.0 stream, that would fit the smallest requirements. However, at that point, the copy would be considered "inferior quality"--much like the bootleg tape trade in the 80's. Since portable media can only upsample at best, and would be a low quality 2.0 stream, what you'd be getting would be the equivalent of watching an old betamax casette of "Ernest Goes to Camp" on a high-end 1080p 60" widescreen 5.1 home theater.

Believe me. Whith how marketing can sell bull@!#$ nowadays, it would not have been ard, ti implement DVD-audio as the new standard, and even with the MP3 Trade, convince them that it was clearly an inferior product only suitable for personal portable media, but at home, or on the road, only DVD-audio would suffice.


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Personally, I do think that it is stealing. A lot of the artists and bands I listen to are not the huge bands all over radio, and do not have the major labels standing behind them. Granted, I do download songs from time to time to hear a new cd before it comes out, but there is still a VERY strong chance I am buying the cd from the store. Also, as for the argument that you are stealing something intangable, I think Urban said it best. You might not be lifting something out of a store, but you are taking full advantage of not only the bands hard work in creating the music, but the people behind the scenes as well (producers, sound engineers, graphics, media, PR, agents, and so on).

Now, stating this, I also don't tend to purchase too many cds anymore from a store. A lot I purchase digitally from iTunes, or also, if I see a band I like in concert, I will buy the cd there, and for a couple of reasons:

a. The band was impressive on stage, and you got to hear the PURE form of music getting played
b. it is a lot more personal to walk to a member of a band, hand him $10, and say "hey, awesome show"
c. It is a band that has proven themselves to the fans that they do care about the people who make them "rich"

Now, saying this, I also can't stand the RIAA and most major labels, due to the fact that most of them are damned theives. TVT for instance, made several threats to Sevendust, and even tried to go as far and state that they would not release a new record. Thousands of dollars of that bands money was taken, and it did not matter to the band. They got off the label, started their own, got a decent distribution contract, and boom, they are back to making records, and touring.


And speaking of touring, this is where bands make most of their money. Buy purchasing a ticket to a show, you have already given more money to the band then buying 1 cd from them. Also what helps generate revenue from these bands is merchendise, outside of album sales.


With the comments of "its just 1s and 0s", how about if we start taking hard work from your computer, and start producing them on our own, and give you say, $.01 per item we have taken. Or even, give you nothing. I bet you would be pretty pissed.

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As far as it being legally considered theft..... I honestly don't know how it could be since no physical object was actually stolen (although stealing money electronically is still considered theft... but the actual money has to be what is transferred)

You would think that from a legal stand point..... it would be considered using and or distributing media without the proper licence or permission of the proprietor.... or something along those lines.

Is it stealing in the broad sense.... YES.......

What I think most the confusion stems from is that if it's stealing.... why is it so damn easy do freely download the content and share it without prosecution? If it's illegal..... why are programs like limewire still up and running?

I think people need to really look at the big picture.....

Stop blaming the people downloading the music, and start blaming the people that are allowing it to happen..... just make it illegal for programs like limewire to exist and be used and enforce it.... problem fixed (or at least made much better)

Although I would miss all my free Internet porn though LOL.