The business model is broken. And, yes, the record companies are partially to blame. But the bottom line is before the Interwebs, no one believed they were entitled to a new release instantly and for free. If you wanted a new album for free, you had to go into the record store and steal it. How is this any different?

I’ve engaged in a lot of mental masturbation over the subject. The game goes something like this: I’m the Prez. of Captiol Records in 1996 and the Ghost of Record Industry Future pays me a visit and lays out excatly what has transpired in the past 15 years with the advent of the Internet, CD burners, Napster, p2p and bit torrents etc. What do I do to make sure the business doesn’t go belly up? I’ve thought about it for ages and there’s not a way where all parites– the label, the consumer, the artist, the distributor, the retailer– come out happy.

We’re still finding the balance an it will take years. But honestly, you can defend it by saying people might hear it at parties or buy a t-shirt and isn’t that cool? But it doesn’t change the FACT that if you download an album without paying for it, you are stealing.

I wonder if you are asking with a straight face too..

Yes, it is technically about copying, but really the issue is whether you enjoy a product of someone else’s time without paying for the priviledge.

I didn’t answer your questions outright because I thought you were intelligent enough to parse the equivalency of my counter questions, and see that the net result is the same.

Beyond the physical bits, how is buying a CD second-hand (that could just as easily have remained in the owner’s collection, unlistened, encouraging me to buy a new copy) and paying an unrelated third party for it, any different to copying (or downloading) it and still not paying the artist?

In both scenarios, I’m enjoying the music and the artist isn’t getting paid. In the downloading/copying scenario however, I’m at least encouraged to go on to buy my own copy because the allure of having the real version, with graphics and booklets is there. Also with copying/downloading, no one else is making money off the transaction. Not so with the second hand market.

Similarly, beyond the physical bits, how is downloading/listening/rejecting any different than borrowing/listening/rejecting?

I hear it either way, reject it either way, no one gets paid because I don’t want it.

You seem to assume that as soon as one person buys something and digitizes it, no more copies get sold to people with internet access. Or at least that digital copies are equivalent to packaged physical ones. The evidence just doesn’t bear these ideas out. Studies have show that people who download a lot of content also buy the most content.

To answer to your specific questions, yes, of course there have been things that I’ve downloaded and not gone on to purchase, whether I liked them or not. In exactly the same way as you almost certainly have taped an album from a friend, or taped a show off the tv, or watched a clip on YouTube and not gone on to purchase them.

There is almost no possible scenario, likely to have occurred, in which you have not casually infringed copyright multiple times, unless you have been living in a significantly different environment than the one I presume you now inhabit.

Agreed. However, calling it *stealing* is misleading. If you were a carpenter, and I did something that prevented you from making $750 from fixing a kitchen counter for somebody, would you call that stealing? No. You’d call it “restraint of trade” or something like that.

“They’re totally misrepresenting the issue.”

So is calling it “stealing”.

1) If you were not selling but giving away the CDs, would you feel the same way?

2) As a musician, do you want more fans or don’t you?

3) If CDs were not there, how would you increase your fan base?

I’m not saying any artist has a right to make a living by only releasing music, but he/she should get compensated by everyone that enjoys the fruit of his/her efforts.

I like the free exchange of ideas as much as anyone including not only words but plans for DIY, code and other such. Ideas are often voluntarily “donated” and hopefully, as with open source, if you take you’ll give something back if you take.

If, however, someone (or group of someones) spent a good deal of time and money developing skills and inventing and manufacturing, say, a car (which might also put a good number of people to work) and people could put the car in a replicator and make new cars for free, why would anyone want to go into the car biz?

It seems unfair to the musician or writer that, just because it is easy to copy their work, they lose their income while the car (or bicycle) people don’t.

It seems to me the creator should have the choice to give their work away or not and I thought that’s what Copyright protection was for. In fact Creative Commons opens up the idea that you can fine tune what you will give away and to whom.

I’m not sure I completely buy what amounts to the “free advertising” argument; that you can live off the T shirts and coffee mugs. Sounds like a bit of rationalizing to me. On the other hand, I know that if I can tell first if I like someone’s music I’m more likely to pay to download a whole album. Again, it seems it ought to be the creator’s decision to give something away, not the person who want’s it for free (no matter what the creator says).

Just because my physical property is gone doesn’t take away from the fact that I paid the artists, paid for the manufacturing, paid for the licensing and distribution and now you have and are enjoying a “copy” that you didn’t pay for. If you want to argue that bits are not property because it’s digital and I can’t see it, then I’m afraid you’re being kind of thick about it.

How can we regulate this sort of thing with laws when we haven’t even found a way to discuss it?

Now I’m sure that the physical medium cost the studio some money to produce but I’m willing to bet that the majority of my hard earned cash went toward the intellectual property right to own those songs. So, why is it okay for music companies to not provide me a method whereby I may gain access to the intellectual property that I paid for and it’s wrong that I “illegally” downloaded some FLAC files of an album that I’ve paid for over four times.

Artists need to take the reins. Provide ME with a method to pay YOU regardless of where I download your music from. I *will* pay you. From there feel free to distribute portions of those monies to whomever you choose.

With digital technology the record companies had the opportunity to set the paradigm for a cheap, convenient, fair, profitable market place. They chose to shit the bed.

I said “a form of theft” because it certainly is not the classical kind of theft, but it also denies compensation to people improving my life in some way. If I were wealthier, I’d pay more often, for this reason (and downloading has its own drawbacks, but that’s a different story).

However, if it has to be a choice between not paying and not hearing, and not paying and still getting to hear, how can anyone tell me the latter choice is unethical?

Agreed. However, calling it *stealing* is misleading.

So, you’re saying it’s an issue of semantics? Come on.

Because in that case the album–the physical object–was gone. Even though the store had bought it from the label for resale purposes, it was no longer available for sale. Maybe that’s the difference. Both cases–copying and shoplifting–are, in essence, stealing. But shoplifting is stealing from the store. Copying is stealing from the record label.

I hear you babe. (tbh, I loved that album too).

Very many websites republish BB material, in some cases our whole feed. We’re not that fussed about it.

What country do you live in? Here in the United States, our entire legal system revolves around protecting profit.

1. Musicians will produce music whether or not they are paid for every copy of it. Just try and stop them from making music!

2. Depriving someone of income opportunity is not stealing. If it were, then everyone who didn’t become filthy rich would have basis for suing everyone in the world who didn’t buy their stupid product or idea.

3. I wish that it were possible to get rich being a very good musician; unfortunately, the high-paying jobs are in the mercenary business (TV jingles, etc.) not in the self-expression business.

4. We can all hate on the record companies with impunity because they are (a) middlemen, (b) obsolete, (c) greedy bastards. They are not the musicians’ friend, they are the musicians’ leech.

The rest is semantics.

Adding the commercial element changes the argument completely.

Here let me correct that for you

“It possibly deprives Harlan of the opportunity to sell me a copy of it. It also exposes me to Harlan’s work, potentially turning me into a lifelong fan of Harlan, willing to spend money on Harlan’s product for many many years”

Metallica’s Lars Ulrich once said in an interview that Metallica would have never made it as a band if it wasn’t for fans making bootleg copies of their music and using that to expose their music to new people who would not have heard it otherwise.

I am not saying copying is inherently good, but neither is it inherently wrong. Bottom line : Technology has changed the world. It is time for certain industries to evolve their business models appropriately or die.

What if Comcast decided to republish all of BoingBoing on a site that they deliver el-pronto-mucho and collect ad revenue from while they simultaneously slow the real BoingBoing down to a mere crawl (or block it entirely) because they’re Comcast and they can do whatever they want now that the ideologues on the US Circuit Court said they could.

You coo wi dat?

Back in the 18th Century the Queen would give copy rights to chartered companies with a duration of 99 years. That was considered excessive at the time by many, just as it is considered excessive today.

Really, does everyone have to squeeze the last penny out of every damn thing?

I’m a writer and I give away my books online, for free, because I like it when people read them (pigeonweather, wordpress) and when people want a copy in paperback, they can buy one from lulu, print on demand.

As for making money, that’s why I have a job.

“Oh, but that’s different!” you might say. “That’s identity theft! Nobody’s hurt if someone copies a novel, a song or a movie. Nothing is taken away from the maker of the original.”

Really?

It wouldn’t be identity theft when I spend five years writing a novel and when I try to pay my health insurance for my Type-II diabetes I find that there’s no money in my checking account because someone pirated my book for free download as a torrent and why pay for something you can get for free?

It wouldn’t be identity theft when the movie I spent half a million bucks of my family’s money making — which cost me my house in California when it didn’t sell to a distributor — also ends up as a free torrent download — and I can’t make another movie because I didn’t make back the money from the first one?

Is that not depriving me of anything by copying for free what I spent my blood, sweat, toil, and tears making is about?

J. Neil Schulman

that’s an interesting question. of course, there’s no ‘have to’ about it, but assuming it involves no extra effort, and the pennies just kept on adding up at a reasonable rate, a few hundred dollars a day for example, then why not?

In the real world, you’d have one of them (Adam) working to make duplicatable stuff (music, movies, software, etc), and the second one (Bob) would be making non-duplicatable stuff (food, bikes, housing, etc). They’d start out singing about how great sharing is. Then, Bob would start copying the work created by the Adam. Adam would then want to take some of the food or bikes or housing from the Bob, but that’s not allowed – that’s stealing. Then, Bob would again copy the work of the Adam, who’s getting more and more depressed and frantic. See, Bob is allowed to copy all the work of the Adam, but Adam can’t benefit by doing the same thing because the Bob doesn’t make duplicatable stuff. Adam wants to eat, and doesn’t understand why Bob gets all the benefits and none of the costs. Adam starts to get angry, but Bob doesn’t care. Bob tells him that “sharing is good”! Adam says that Bob can copy his stuff, but only if he gives him some food and maybe a bike, so that they can both benefit from their own work. Bob shakes his head. “Stupid, Adam, copying is good! Don’t try to introduce artificial scarcity to infinite goods!” At this point, punches Bob for being stupid and selfish even though he talks about “sharing” all the time, then Adam quits making copyable stuff and starts farming.

Yes, there might be alternate ways for creators to earn money, but let’s address the actual argument in the video – which is: irregardless of alternate methods of income, copying stuff (and not having to pay anybody) is good.

Haha, another one?

Copyright was created to “to promote the progress of science and useful arts.” Instead it is stifling it. We have the potential for so many breakthroughs, and because x company holds a patent on this vague concept, others can’t touch it to further THEIR research. Because y company holds a patent on the OMGYOUAREGOINGTODIE gene, only they can decide where you can be tested for it.