Let’s start off with terminology..
The terms PIRACY, STEALING, THEFT, ROBBERY or even BURGLARY simply do not mean what the RIAA, SPA and others portray them as meaning. Downloading copyrighted material is not an act of murder or robbery on the high seas, it is not taking money or property from a person by threat or force, nothing physical is being removed and no one is being deprived of the original material. They mis-use those words constantly and it pisses me off. The ONLY thing you can call the acts they’re deeming as illegal, is Copyright Violation.
Next, let’s outline the market..
In 2002, the RIAA complained of around a 4% drop in sales. They blamed this drop on activity of file-swappers. Two problems with this. First, I doubt anyone with a few brain cells wouldn’t agree that the recent economy is doing very badly. Second, the recording industry did some pretty wacky shit by themselves.. They decided to do several things at once:
-Disregard the tanked economy
-Raise the price of CDs from expensive to ludicrous
-Encode copy protection in any CDs they could
-Cut their number of yearly releases by about 12,000 albums
-Not report on or release most singles for sale
-Viciously attacked internet-only radio stations
Now unless you’re totally stupid, you can probably see how these points above are what hurt their sales the most. Because if you have no money, the prices have raised, you can’t make tapes or mp3s of what you bought, you can’t find the artist/album you want and you can’t even buy a CD single..obviously you’re going to be more reluctant to buy new CDs.
Another couple of interesting facts.. The decline in sales didn’t happen until well after they had Napster shut down. Also their price raising tactics got them in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission, who ordered them to discontinue the cooperative Minimum Advertised Price program which may have cost consumers $480 million in illegal charges.
Next item? Evil Intent…
So with the companies under the RIAA doing all of these bizarre and nasty things, you might pose the question…”Why?”
The answer is simple. Greed through control. What they’re doing is actively narrowing the variety of music available for broadcasting and sales. This maximizes their profits: Less operating costs from fewer artists to sign, manage, record and promote. More profit per sale through pricing monopoly. No competition in sales, because the radio and television don’t broadcast anyone else but the select handful of most profitable pop stars. They control the market with an iron grip and take as much money as they can squeeze out. No choice for us translates into higher profits for them.
They’re committing artistic censorship in the name of a greasy dollar. It’s anti-freedom, anti-choice, anti-capitalist, anti-competitive and basically anti-consumer. They’re making an evil musical dictatorship, built to force-feed the american public with 100% soulless top 40 crap. The only reason they’re getting away with it is because they expensively lobby to the government and lawmakers – all with the money they’re making off of YOU the consumer.
Are you disgusted yet?
Copyright Violations…
Now that I’ve outlined the lies and selfishness of who is causing the biggest stink about lost profits and violations of copyrights, I can talk about what I think of amateur (P2P jockeys) and professional (so called “pirates”) copiers of copyrighted material.
First, the professionals. People who copy material of a certain value and sell those copies solely for their own profit are in my view, the only real criminals outside of the recording industry. Particularly if they do so without any form of credit available of the artist who created it. It’s very clear that this is not okay legally, financially, or karmically. They are willfully undermining the creativity and/or monetary livelihood of the artist who made the material.
Second, the amateurs. My opinion about people who acquire and share copies of music (or software, etc.), is that it’s more an issue of etiquette and degree. A good analogy is email. Like file swapping, people use it every day to send eachother things and frequently you can encounter cases of bad etiquette. When you use email, it’s bad form to spam people with loads and loads of old jokes, chain letters, huge letters with way too much information. It’s also bad to send what other people wrote without giving credit. It’s unrespective and needlessly excessive. Those things are annoying, they’re not done out of necessity, they’re impersonal, wasteful and don’t inspire the cherishing of individual items.
Going back to file-swapping, if you’re copying massive amounts of songs just for the sake of copying massive amounts, if you are acquiring songs for free that you could just as easily buy, if you are distributing digital copies of songs without including the artist info; you’re abusing your freedoms in a manner disrespectful to the artists. I consider that stupid and mis-guided, but I wouldn’t consider it wholly illegal.
Now moderate amateur use of music or file swapping I feel to be the equivalent to sharing physical things and analog information. You buy some music, you sample some music, you share some music with friends, you find some music that you can’t buy because it’s out of print. Copy just enough music to listen to it where you want, hear music you wouldn’t otherwise hear and allow your acquaintances to do the same.
Sure, there are lost sales but the same thing happens with dubbed tapes and borrowed or swapped gadgets. Lost sales happen every day with used products. Whenever you buy a used CD, software title, chair, anything really, not one cent goes to the original artist, manufacturer or publisher. Same as file swapping! The only two differences are, file swapping can happen between more people that don’t know eachother and file swapping is cheap to track. It would cost the RIAA billions and billions of dollars to pay people to try and track physical and analog used products, which is why they don’t do it. Internet-based used copies of products though they can easily track down with a meager budget and a few lawyers. Massive profits and tyrannical control through fear.
For this reason of already accepted leniency through practicality, I don’t feel moderate swapping should be considered illegal or immoral. It’s just the way it is in the analog world.. It makes people happy and is culturally beneficial. It stimulates active diversity and spurs commerce of the arts. Most if any lost profits through swapping, wouldn’t have been attained anyway.
Another thing moderate sharing does that they don’t like to admit (which also is a major benefit of Independent Internet Radio, IIR), is it acts as free advertising for the artist and anyone who wants to be associated as a licensed seller of their work. For instance, when I started hearing new music through file swapping services and especially IIR, my musical horizons widened tenfold. I found I could Get Info while songs played and jot down the names of the artists, songs and sometimes albums I listened to; then go out and buy them. My CD collection grew by leaps and bounds, and I was VERY happy with most all of my purchases. And if I hadn’t heard them through these means, I wouldn’t have known to look for these albums. I would otherwise still be stuck in Top 40 Hell, disenchanted by the lack of any new and good music…life, dry and pointless. Hence, P2P and IIR are good for both consumers and artists because they allow low quality versions of songs with info of origin to spread through the world and form an emotional and commercial link between the creator and the audience. Once that link is made, culture grows and people are happy to pay money for more of the music they like at a higher quality, and/or hearing the artists live. Artists that otherwise, would never be heard by so many people.