Is Pirating Stuff Really Stealing

[kyser_soze]

I think there are substantive differences between copying albums (where a lot of the money from sales goes into a whole supporting cast of non-artists), torrenting a TV show from overseas (which has already been paid for from the advertising sold against it), and copying a film, which while it doesn't jeopadise future film production (Hollywood accouting and studios throwing $200mn at polishing turds does that), the sheer size of actively involved craftspeople in the production of a movie does tend to make me torrent films less and either go to the cinema or buy the DVD/BRD. Plus of course there's the qualitiative difference of watching a film on a huge screen which completley fills your vision, and on a postage stamp (which even a 40" screen is in comparison with a decent cinema screen).

 

[stupid dogbot]

So generally the artists can stop whingeing about all this - they can still play live and make a good living

Just out of interest, how many gigs have you personally been to this year?

 

[matt m]

If that artist sells their album for too high a price then it is natural that it will be copied more - so you could think of it as a mechanism to limit abuse by the seller.

That model doesn't work when the majority of potential buyers know exactly where to get the album for FREE. "Too high a price" is entirely relative and thus becomes meaningless: when you can get something for free, suddenly ANY price is too high a price. Simple economics, innit.

So generally the artists can stop whingeing about all this - they can still play live and make a good living

Woah there! You've clearly never tried to be a professional musician! Four-piece-band on an exceptionally good night=£100. You do the maths.

BTW I heard about a guy who bought a game for the serial number so that he could activate his copy, and then returned it to the shop for a full refund. That's out of order coz the next guy who buys it is not gonna be able to activate it properly etc!!

It's really interesting that you consider that to be beyond the pale. Why? Why is it OK for the producer of a leisure product to lose out, but very definitely NOT okay for the consumers of these leisure products to ever lose out? See that I think is typical of the totally and utterly alienated consumer-led attitude that cannot comprehend of anyone but the consumer being a victim. It's like the couch potato creed: none shalt interfere with relentless one-way consumption.

 

[matt m]

"I think there are substantive differences between copying albums (where a lot of the money from sales goes into a whole supporting cast of non-artists"

well that supporting cast might actually be necessary. There's a lot of bands out there who aren't really interested in booking tours, mastering CDs, press and promotion, or paying for recording studios. The majority of albums cited by people here on the 'Best Albums of the 2000s" thread would not have been made without that supporting cast of non-artists. It's funny how you never hear downloaders making this argument about, say, coffee-growers rights. They don't start nicking from Sainsburys because little of the sale of the fruit they buy there goes to the people who actually grew and picked it.

 

[DotCommunist]

Maybe we could look at it another way.

Some silly sod goes to work all week but, come Friday, the boss decides he will just copy all the stuff from Monday and just pay the poor bastard for one day a week.
Would you enjoy that if it happened to you?

You buy shonky DVD's and so lose the moral highground

 

[spanglechick]

i torrented 'true blood' and then I bought the dvd boxset of season 1 anyway. i will buy the season 2 boxset when it's out. If i could buy the dvd of the things i torrent as soon as i want to see them, then i probably wouldn't torrent anything. I like owning dvds. i don't mind paying for my entertainment, but i'm very bad at waiting.

 

[kyser_soze]

There's a lot of bands out there who aren't really interested in booking tours, mastering CDs, press and promotion, or paying for recording studios.

All these things can be done on a project-by-project basis; the whole management infrastructure of the music industry needs, and will b, radically overhauling. The point is the record companies (those who stand to lose the most from the decline of hard-media sales) and the retailers are the ones who lead to a CD costing £10-15 a pop. Couple that with having to pay shareholders of the major labels as well as the stupidly inflated salaries of the upper manangement.

 

[ATOMIC SUPLEX]

So generally the artists can stop whingeing about all this - they can still play live and make a good living!

Er, no. Not in a million years.

 

[gentlegreen]

yes

next.

 

[DotCommunist]

The irony is that if they hadn't spent so much money and legislation on persecuting crypto-geeks and hacker types they might have actually fostered geeky sorts into making an unbreakable, un-rippable format.

 

[spacemonkey]

The thing is, I can max out my broadband connection with rapidshare and within 15 mins be watching a HD 720p copy of any film/TV show of my choice. The illegal service is just miles ahead of the legal alternative (renting or buying DVDs), and I actually pay for rapidshare!

I pay for spotify now because for me, it was a better service than searching for 'illegal' mp3's, downloading them and saving them to my mp3 player.

Now if the music/film industry had a decent subscription (or micro payment) system where I could download HD films near instantly, I would probably switch.

It's difficult to compete with 'free', but it can be done, and the industry needs to realise they'll never make as much money as the 'good old days', but they don't need to die completely.

 

[ouchmonkey]

Which brings up another point, what's the score with 2nd hand records? is that stealing? If I sell a record am I allowed to record it before I do so? That's tantamount to filesharing no?

Artists make nothing from second hand product sales do they? They only make about 5p out of every CD sold too a lot of the sale price in-store goes to pay for the manufacture and distribution of product, shit it even has to pay the guy at the till and the overheads at the store - Mp3, not so much.

file sharing is kinda like taping (generally a poorer quality copy with no artwork etc.) but it's so much morre convenient it's on an insane scale.

personally, I still buy music too. maybe a little less than I would. but not much less and I have a very low income

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

Woah there! You've clearly never tried to be a professional musician! Four-piece-band on an exceptionally good night=£100. You do the maths.

A band who are only getting a hundred quid between them for a gig wouldn't be making any money off CD sales would they, regardless of downloads? A band with any sort of profile will make more than that.

 

[trevhagl]

Maybe we could look at it another way.

Some silly sod goes to work all week but, come Friday, the boss decides he will just copy all the stuff from Monday and just pay the poor bastard for one day a week.
Would you enjoy that if it happened to you?

well put. A lot of people on here are (like i say in another thread) just crusties without the dreadlocks. They will simply not pay for ANYTHINg and will be the first to complain when their fave band splits up.

 

[rutabowa]

A band who are only getting a hundred quid between them for a gig wouldn't be making any money off CD sales would they, regardless of downloads? A band with any sort of profile will make more than that.

you would be surprised!!

 

[matt m]

A band who are only getting a hundred quid between them for a gig wouldn't be making any money off CD sales would they, regardless of downloads? A band with any sort of profile will make more than that.

er, no.

My one experience of touring was with a band that did actually have a bit of a profile.

The venue/promoter takes a cut. Manager takes a cut. If you're on tour, driver has to be paid, van hire and petrol paid for, hostels/hotels and food paid for. (Tour manager and sound engineer need paying too, if you have them.) Until you really are at the point where you don't just have "any kind of profile", but have a pretty fucking BIG profile, gigging's going to be basically a necessary expense.

But more than that, there's actually no reason why "A band who are only getting a hundred quid between them for a gig wouldn't be making any money off CD sales would they, regardless of downloads". I mean, I have unquestionably seen CD sales at small gigs drop. It used to be the case that when a really really good band finished playing a really really good gig, people would flock to them afterwards trying to buy an album. There'd be a palpable sense of a worry that they might run out.

I don't see that anymore. That revenue might not have put a touring band in the black, but it would at least pay for a ginsters pie or two.

 

[soulfulofsoul]

So yes there are greedy dinosaurs running large record companies who really don't understand the 21st century, and their are record companies that rip off artists. However the situation is very much not one of courageous file sharers striking a blow against outrageously greedy capitalists. At both ends of the scale musicians are getting ripped off because the music industry is only interested in getting as much money out of them as possible, and most consumers are only interested in getting as much music for free as they can regardless of the consequences.

Some musicians are able to cope well in the current environment, some aren't. The simple fact is that pretty much nobody gives a toss at either end of the scale, it's just that everyone from record company executives to file-share junkies knows that the only way they can justify their greed is by claiming it's actually in the interests of the artists. Actually it pretty much always isn't.

What I'd like to see is more honesty on either side of the argument.

Good post.

Music might be art and not just any old product, but the traditional record industry is/was extremely inefficient (with lots of people sharing the pie and the artists getting a tinmy slice)- something like this was inevitable.

I believe that in the long term this digital revolution thing will benfit muso's. I used to think that this newer, better, fairer system might emerge in something 5-10 years, but it's been ages and I don't see anything changing soon.

It's surprising how clueless we all are about what might happen next, what shape it all might take. I have'nt read/ heard any brilliant theories but most people (like me) kinda assume that this is a transition stage.

 

[Nanker Phelge]

Musicians need to stop seeing recorded music as the main revenue stream because, like it or not, those days are behind them and the rock 'n' roll dream of big house, swimming pool, sports car has been replaced with something more modest.

Recorded music has become a band's window, a calling card to invite those that are interested into their world, and those that like what they hear can then be drawn to events where that music is presented in interesting and exciting ways that are beyond a straight forward gig.

There will be a market for the music in a recorded form, and it will come in different formats, box sets, etc....it just won't shift the units it once did.

The Madness album was first released as an advance sale item, 6 months ahead of the physical release, which allowed an immediate download of 11 of the 15 tracks. Then it was released as a 4 disc Vinyl set, and various other formats, and now it's coming out with a live DVD...which is the version I was waiting for.

So the musicians need to adapt and think differently and see their intellectual property in a new way while also celebrating that the record companies don't hold all the aces anymore.

So there's + and - to the whole thing, but people have always found ways to access free music....in my day we had things called tapes, like a hard drive, only smaller.

 

[Dr. Furface]

Studies show that those who do the most downloading also happen to spend more on music than other peoples. So fuck it.

*Simples!*

 

[trevhagl]

Studies show that those who do the most downloading also happen to spend more on music than other peoples. So fuck it.

*Simples!*

i was wrong about people on here downloading stuff then . By that logic then only Chico and Josef download stuff , they being the only ones to cross my palm with silver, out of all the ones who teased me that they might

 

[matt m]

Well, everyone always talks about it as a fait accompli, but I don't see why it has to be. Why can't rapidshare, soulseek et al just be taxed to high heaven by their countries they're hosted in? They already charge for premium services or seek donations (as the music blogs do). If they were punitively taxed, then they'd either have to fold, or start charging users (more). Then suddenly paid-for music would be more competitive.

 

[matt m]

Studies show that those who do the most downloading also happen to spend more on music than other peoples. So fuck it.

*Simples!*

all that means though, is that people are buying less and less music in proportion

The people that always bought daft amounts of music are still buying more of it than anyone else, but they are buying a lot less of it, like everyone else.

 

[stupid dogbot]

i was wrong about people on here downloading stuff then . By that logic then only Chico and Josef download stuff , they being the only ones to cross my palm with silver, out of all the ones who teased me that they might

So unless we buy music off you, we're ruining the industry...

How much of your beer money are you kicking back to the individual artists, trev?

I'm guessing the figure hovers somewhere around £0.

 

[newme]

I basically download all my media, cant even remember the last time I bought a DVD, CD or otherwise unless it was to burn things onto. But then at the moment if I didnt have the option of getting it free, then I simply wouldnt have it, as the amount of expendable income I have isnt that high. So theyve lost exactly no sales and frankly its so much more convenient to just download what you want when you want. Admittedly the legal side is catching up a bit with paid for downloads but Id still question Id be able to even find half the stuff Ive downloaded and listened to, let alone afford to buy it that much.

Also I was shite at keeping CD's and have had to download stuff I previously bought as the sodding CD was broke, scratched or the case damaged in some way.

 

[trevhagl]

So unless we buy music off you, we're ruining the industry...

How much of your beer money are you kicking back to the individual artists, trev?

I'm guessing the figure hovers somewhere around £0.

I put a fortune into printing a small free fanzine, does that count? And unlike most on here i go to see small bands every week.

 

[trevhagl]

So unless we buy music off you, we're ruining the industry...

How much of your beer money are you kicking back to the individual artists, trev?

I'm guessing the figure hovers somewhere around £0.

Not just me either, hardly anyone seems to go into shops lately

 

[soulman]

I love the sound of live music, I love meeting a new installation. Something that challenges me, something that causes a reaction within me. The sharks who've been creaming off their percentage can fuck off.

 

[Sunray]

File sharing is the basis of the internet. If you include web servers into the mix then the percentage of illegal content to legal content is tiny. For the ignorant, web servers deliver files to web browsers. So if I set up a system that lets me share files it should be taxed, so your advocating taxing the internet.

The horse has long gone had children and died, the gates slowly rotted and is only hanging on by one hinge. The problem with music being free now lays entirely at the door of the music industry. 10 years ago they were told repeatedly this was going to happen. What they did was to imply that everyone with an internet connection was leeching their warez and went on a crusade against the very people who were saying that they should do something about it.

So those very people got the hump and went and invented bittorrent to prove their point and now look were we are.

Any argument about the rights and wrongs of this have become irrelevant. It cannot be stopped, don't even bother trying. Any attempt is just King Canute telling the sea to go out.

Streaming services are the way forward IMO, make one that has all the music ever created on it and charge flat rate access for them. Have common protocols. Have it multi tier so each distributor allows access to streaming companies and they can negotiate the price come up with better software etc etc.

As far as I can see this is the industries great last chance saloon.

 

[Beanburger]

I don't understand why it's impossible to hold a moral objection to filesharing/copying etc etc without suffering under the misapprehension that it's "stealing". I also don't understand why their seems to be this immediate assumption that if anyone points out that it isn't stealing, they're somehow complicit in the moral defence of filesharing.

But mostly, this:

It doesn't matter if it's stealing or not anymore. Filesharing is here and it's not going to go away. No one is going to accept paying £15 for a cd anymore, give it another generation and everyone will expect to get music for free or next to nothing.

It's not the first industry to be knackered by new technology and it won't be the last....

That's the bottom line. We can debate the rights and wrongs of it indefinitely, but it won't change anything. People can get stuff for free, so they will. The industry needs to stop trying to fight reality and adapt.

 

[mr_eko]

It's an electronic copy, and even a FLAC or a very high bitrate mp3 isn't quite the same as CD in terms of audio quality.

FLAC uses lossless audio data compression so it doesn't lose any quality from the audio stream. You can recover an exact duplicate of the original data.

If the consequences of pirating were higher and it wasn't so easy to do then I'm certain that you'd find that less people would be doing it. And the more people do something the more it becomes acceptable behaviour.