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quinaraI find this kind of disgusting.
He clearly wasn't running a file sharing website - why has only he been brought to trial? Reading another article on it to day it seems there is a base fine for distributing copyrighted music (it was in the jury's hands to see how much higher than that he would have to pay) - why is it so disproportionate to the revenue that this man would have cost them? Say an mp3 download is 80p, then that means nearly 17,000 people would have had to download each of his thirty songs for that amount of revenue to be lost (oh, the name and the value, I suppose, which is such a joke). Maybe that many people did download them, I don't know, but frankly, at the very least, this guy is being made the scapegoat for a collective activity between tens, hundreds, possibly thousands of people.
Copyright theft = bad, wrong, nasty. But I've argued before and I will continue to argue that if the music industry intends digs its heels in and pretends internet culture doesn't exist things are only going to get worse. Somehow they've got to innovate around the fact that music no longer exists in objects, but in data. People have always let friends listen to records/tapes/cds; trying to stop all forms of sharing music over the internet and make people only listen to the music that they themselves have personally bought (or has been conveyed to them through specific, sanctioned channels) is madness. That would kill music far faster than BitTorrent is doing.
I don't use file-sharing networks, but I've got quite a few tracks that people have sent me over the internet. You know what else I've got? Albums I never would have bought if it hadn't been for being sent those tracks and getting into them. They're probably the majority of the library on my laptop (which is about two years old), considering all the other albums I've bought after getting into the other albums which I bought because of those tracks I didn't pay for. Maybe I'm not the norm, but I don't see why I shouldn't be.
In less ranty news(!), I'm going on holiday tomorrow afternoon/evening for a week. I'm not entirely sure what LJ access will be like, so I'll see you when I see you! Will definitely respond to comments as and when I can.
ETA: One more rant before I go, considering I really shouldn't make another post about it - YOU CUT AHRC FUNDING BACK TO PITTANCE AND THEN YOU BRING IN *THIS* USELESS-BUT-SPINNABLE SCHEME?? WHAT THE HELL, GOVERNMENT??
He clearly wasn't running a file sharing website - why has only he been brought to trial? Reading another article on it to day it seems there is a base fine for distributing copyrighted music (it was in the jury's hands to see how much higher than that he would have to pay) - why is it so disproportionate to the revenue that this man would have cost them? Say an mp3 download is 80p, then that means nearly 17,000 people would have had to download each of his thirty songs for that amount of revenue to be lost (oh, the name and the value, I suppose, which is such a joke). Maybe that many people did download them, I don't know, but frankly, at the very least, this guy is being made the scapegoat for a collective activity between tens, hundreds, possibly thousands of people.
Copyright theft = bad, wrong, nasty. But I've argued before and I will continue to argue that if the music industry intends digs its heels in and pretends internet culture doesn't exist things are only going to get worse. Somehow they've got to innovate around the fact that music no longer exists in objects, but in data. People have always let friends listen to records/tapes/cds; trying to stop all forms of sharing music over the internet and make people only listen to the music that they themselves have personally bought (or has been conveyed to them through specific, sanctioned channels) is madness. That would kill music far faster than BitTorrent is doing.
I don't use file-sharing networks, but I've got quite a few tracks that people have sent me over the internet. You know what else I've got? Albums I never would have bought if it hadn't been for being sent those tracks and getting into them. They're probably the majority of the library on my laptop (which is about two years old), considering all the other albums I've bought after getting into the other albums which I bought because of those tracks I didn't pay for. Maybe I'm not the norm, but I don't see why I shouldn't be.
In less ranty news(!), I'm going on holiday tomorrow afternoon/evening for a week. I'm not entirely sure what LJ access will be like, so I'll see you when I see you! Will definitely respond to comments as and when I can.
ETA: One more rant before I go, considering I really shouldn't make another post about it - YOU CUT AHRC FUNDING BACK TO PITTANCE AND THEN YOU BRING IN *THIS* USELESS-BUT-SPINNABLE SCHEME?? WHAT THE HELL, GOVERNMENT??
(no subject)
Date: 01/08/2009 07:26 (UTC)Here is France, they're trying to get a law that would cut off the Internet access of offenders. However, the first version of the law was found partly unconstitutional, and the patch they wrote up looks like it's heading that way too.
I agree with you that the music industry needs to take the plunge into the 21th century. I'll agree with their argument that the Internet made music sharing a whole lot bigger that it was back in the days of taping the radio (and songs on the radio are cut off at the end precisely for that, at least in France) but the Internet is there. If they were to set up Internet shops that were easy to find, didn't use DRMs, and didn't give the customers the impression they were ripped of. (Alternatively, they could start by justifying the price of CDs, with hard numbers.)
(no subject)
Date: 01/08/2009 08:43 (UTC)Yes, exactly. I refuse to buy music from iTunes because of how disproportionate the UK prices are to the EU and US ones - and the fact that you can only buy things that have been 'released' to UK and not from the site of any other country. (At least, I think that's still true - I think the European Commission made a case against it for being anti-competition a while ago.)
And, like you say, it's really hard to work out where most of the money goes from CD sales, since it doesn't particularly appear to go straight to the artists. I completely understand that there are going to be marketing costs, but I don't see why they have to be so phenomenally huge as they must be now.
As far as cutting off internet access goes, I'd be hesitant to say that the internet is a right rather than a privilege, but I don't recall any instances where people committing fraud through the post have been banned from sending letters...