Pirating, us and the future.

Fact of the times: it is impossible to control the mobility of digital information on a large enough scale to put any sort of dent in this problem. Any attempt at digital rights control will fail due to the prevailing attitudes of both hacker culture and consumer culture. Going forward, the way I see it (barring the collapse of the internet) making your living selling digital goods is a fool's game that most everyone involved will lose. There is no solution and we must now adapt to the new paradigm.
 
Since the day of reel to reel tape decks people have been recording and sharing with friends songs of all kinds. Since the VCR people have been taping TV shows and movies for friends, family etc. Although it seems OK since its "just my family" it is still stealing and I just don't see it stopping. Maybe we need to go back to 8 track players.
 
GRUNTERSDAD said:
Since the day of reel to reel tape decks people have been recording and sharing with friends songs of all kinds. Since the VCR people have been taping TV shows and movies for friends, family etc. Although it seems OK since its "just my family" it is still stealing and I just don't see it stopping. Maybe we need to go back to 8 track players.
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LOL! That is so true. I remember Sinbad the comedian saying that when he was a kid all he had was an 8 track player and thats when all the songs had to be good because there wasn't a rewind button!


Another question: Once you buy a CD, do you own the rights forever? How many of us have scratched or lost a CD we have purchased and instead of buying another one, just go download it. What about a CD you have owned in the past that may be out of print and can't be found except on the sharing sites?
 
Ah pirating and copyrights, the intense debate we have been having for couple of years now here in northern scandinavia, mostly because of Pirate Bay case and the political movements that it has breeded.

This is a tough debate for sure. Some thoughts I have had over the years:

1) Audio & images are too easy to copy. If you can experience them you can record them and making that impossible would be insane, you'd have to make using microphones and cameras illegal. And if we could copy milk or meat without losing the original piece we would most certanly do it.

2) Distributing copies is too easy. And I like the idea of free internet. Censorship & control breeds the enviroment for serious political abuse in not-so-far future when things get tough. How happy are the people in China for their not-so-free internet?

3) Most of the analogies in these discussions are made between the material rights and immaterial rights and it just doesn't work that way. If I steal a car from a shop the shop doesn't have the car anymore but I can copy a recording and nothing is lost.

4) Now, I also understand that professional musicians have to get paid for them to get money to supports their living. But I'm not sure this current system is all that good. The best analogy I have is that of a researcher in an university. He/she get's paid for his work not by the royalties for viewing his papers in whatever context. If we assume musicians should be paid with mostly royalties, why not researchers also? But that would be insane since that would make science community more money based and I personally don't think that should be the case. Why should musicians be able to just sit home and do nothing and money just flows onto their accounts?

5) The worst thing is that the system is not fair at all. The artist whose album is sold more gets more money. Ok it's fine you say, after all people like his work more. But then again, why people know him better? Yes, marketting. I'm not entirely conviced that we should make the profitability the only priority in art in general.

6) What's wrong with getting 90% of your money from gigs? Afterall there you are working. What about some teaching? If not interested in these things why not work in some other field? Most musicians have to do something completely different for their daily job.

7) Maybe the music industry as we have known it for less that 100 years is just becomeing to an end. We used to have those guys who stored ice for the summer and sold it for huge profits on the summer. Then came the refridgerators. Should they have tried to stop the development? No, they couldn't have. I think we are on the same boat here with music industry, unless we are willing to try out totalitarism.

8) As with science, I think freedom of information really boosts our development as artists. So it's not all bad. And in a sense, music and art is always copying, the more creative you seem to be, the better you are actually in hiding your sources. Culture doesn't breed from a void.

I'm not trying to justify piratism at all. It's just a little more problematic than just saying "piratism = stealing and that's it". And the over the top fines you can get for pirating just a few songs makes me sick. You can get youself in to a more big of a trouble by committing copyright crimes than molesting a child (at least here in finland). Why on earth is that the case? Have we lost our priorities? If it's the amount of punishment that gets people to not commit copyright crimes why is piracy still increasing? Should we try out a death sentence?

Propably the wisest decicions for antipiratism are somesort of library-type servises like Spotify (but look who got the stocks and at what price... I'm not downloading spotify either). That way at least most of the listening can be somewhat controlled and predicted. And look at book writers, people still write books and we can get them free from the library.

I will play. Even if no one is paying me. But then again I also have the education to do something else if my music doesn't pay the bills. To me art is at it's best communication and sharing. This all debate is slapping those ideals on the face. Are we so jealous of Britney Spears? Or... did even she earn it?
 
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I'm just throwing this out there: anyone who can't see how stealing and piracy are two different things should probably duck out of this conversation.

Car analogy: unless you somehow duplicate the car, IT DOESN'T WORK AS AN ANALOGY.
 
MisterMixelpix said:
I'm just throwing this out there: anyone who can't see how stealing and piracy are two different things should probably duck out of this conversation.

Car analogy: unless you somehow duplicate the car, IT DOESN'T WORK AS AN ANALOGY.
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I disagree, because it comes down to ownership choice. If a band like Radiohead wants to give their album out for free, that is their choice. No one should tell anyone what they should do with their property.
 
dale w miller said:
I disagree, because it comes down to ownership choice. If a band like Radiohead wants to give their album out for free, that is their choice. No one should tell anyone what they should do with their property.
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Something called producers and managers? Only out to get money and so on? Contracts?
 
dale w miller said:
I disagree, because it comes down to ownership choice. If a band like Radiohead wants to give their album out for free, that is their choice. No one should tell anyone what they should do with their property.
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You're still not getting it.

If you steal an album out of a store, you rob the people there of potentially two sales: yours and the person who would have bought the item you took. Supply diminishes. I could, in theory, steal every copy of a given album out of a record store and they wouldn't sell ANY. Piracy involves copying, there is no loss of supply and anyone who wants to buy one is still entirely able to.

The reason it's a grey area is because if person A has absolutely no intention of purchasing a movie/album and gets a copy of it, the record label sees no effect of this. Person A wasn't going to buy one anyway and their total stock stays the same. When a person who isn't going to buy something gets a copy of it for free, from the supplier's standpoint nothing changes.

Where things get hazy is that, again theoretically, there are people who WOULD have bought something but choose not to because it can be attained freely (but this is very, very difficult to quantify). However, that's again somewhat counterbalanced by the question of how much someone would be buying.

Consider the average iPod. The big ones hold 10,000 songs or so. That's $10,000 worth of iTunes tracks. Does Apple seriously believe anyone is going to be buying TEN GRAND worth of music from their store? Helllllll no. However, it HAS been shown that those who "pirate" music tend to buy more overall because they sample so much that they decide to buy from musicians that they like. I can totally tell you that I've spent a lot more on music and merch thanks to the way the internet has opened things up.

Again, it's a very, very murky topic, but when people get polemic and say "IT'S LIKE STEALING CARS" you come across as painfully ignorant.
 
The way that I see it, the basic situation is quite simple. First and foremost, pirating will not go away. That's an undeniable fact.
With that realisation in mind, there are only three options I find:
  1. You cry about it and keep going about things the same way as you did before, until you go bankrupt.
  2. You accept the reality and develop a new business model in respect to the changes in the environment.
  3. You find another job.

A friend of mine has released an album with his band a couple of days ago (shameless plug: you can listen to it and/or buy the songs here). He decided not to print any CD's. Why? His response (as an artist, but a music fan too, with a big personal CD collection):
"No one buys CD's any more. What would you do with them? You'd just rip the songs to your hard disk where the rest of your music collection already is and forget about the disc; I know I do that every time."
Instead, they released the album for purchase online, and will focus on selling T-shirts and other merch.
"I know people will share it for free. If someone likes the band and wants to support us, they can buy the electronic version, or they can buy a T-shirt, and they will get a free download too. T-shirts are as popular as ever, and it costs us much less to produce a shirt than a CD."
If the sales go well, they might also release a vinyl version for the die-hard fans and audiophiles.

There are already a few bands taking this approach, and I believe we will see many more doing the same thing in the future.
 
MisterMixelpix said:
Case in point: it's been shown in multiple studies that pirates tend to buy MORE music because their piracy has expanded their horizons. I can give tons of personal anecdotes on this one (such as my copies of Pig Destroyer albums or Sleep's mighty "Dopesmoker"), each of which I would have never owned if it weren't for "stealing" it first. Same goes for show tix or shirts/hoodies/hats I own for bands I'd have never heard of if I hadn't done some torrenting.
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Illegal downloaders spend more on music






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Fiery said:
You accept the reality and develop a new business model in respect to the changes in the environment.
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Things are slowly changing but the industry is still playing catchup.

Part of the problem is that now a generation of kids have developed a new modus operandi of downloading P2P. It became the most easy and convenient option and the kids did what kids tend to do - they took the line of least resistance, getting their music at home from the PC.

Meanwhile the online music shops that slowly trickled into the scene seemed intent on scaring people away - tortuous and often malfunctioning registering procedures, very limited catalogues, clunky shopping carts. Even Amazon, one of the smoothest of e-commerce sites doesn't allow Australians to buy MP3s. You click and they say sorry, no can do. I get that in European sites too. Don't they want my money??

Compare the experience with downloading software, typing in the song title and voila! Even before Napster got big, the music industry should have seen this coming and competed. But they weren't used to competition outside of their own sphere and were - let's face it - kinda fat, lazy, greedy and complacent. RnD? What's that? Man, you meant RnB, didn't ya?

They missed the boat, gambling on the legal option (no doubt on advice from the lawyers) and they lost, taking their musicians down with them. Meanwhile the lawyers made a fortune conducting these counter-productive witch hunts. They are the biggest winners from this whole mess - surprise surprise

Steve Jobs was first to get the right idea with iTunes. Download the program, register, preview, and buy songs at good prices. Great model, simple as pie, but late ... the kids had already developed their systems for downloading and they figured "Why pay for it (it would need to be Mum or Dad's credit card) when you can just grab it?"

Thing is, their parents were never going to buy as much music as the last generation anyway because they were paying plenty for other entertainment technology - PCs and laptops, wide screen digital plasma TVs and Playstations, not to mention all the software.

At the same time as Napster and their successors hit the scene the entertainment $$ available to music recordings were dwindling due to competition from gaming and movies. Cinema has the same problem. Gaming technology, both in the home and bars and clubs, is crippling the arts. The people have gone away and smart artists like Radiohead are trying to work out ways of luring people back to music.

What the band did was based the same principle as a shopkeeper stocking loss leader products. They deal with a theoretical loss (in giveaways or bargains) so as to gain other sales. It's also a goodwill gesture that that associates good vibes with their "brand".

Then there's the rampant pirating going on in China ... probably a lost cause, given that they are now the most powerful nation on earth. So the challenge is mostly about the west and Japan ... how to entice people to get back into music - and to make the purchasing experience painless.
 
Hi guys! I am very happy for all your contributions here. I will replay more later today!

PM
 
MisterMixelpix said:
You're still not getting it.

If you steal an album out of a store, you rob the people there of potentially two sales: yours and the person who would have bought the item you took. Supply diminishes. I could, in theory, steal every copy of a given album out of a record store and they wouldn't sell ANY. Piracy involves copying, there is no loss of supply and anyone who wants to buy one is still entirely able to.

The reason it's a grey area is because if person A has absolutely no intention of purchasing a movie/album and gets a copy of it, the record label sees no effect of this. Person A wasn't going to buy one anyway and their total stock stays the same. When a person who isn't going to buy something gets a copy of it for free, from the supplier's standpoint nothing changes.

Where things get hazy is that, again theoretically, there are people who WOULD have bought something but choose not to because it can be attained freely (but this is very, very difficult to quantify). However, that's again somewhat counterbalanced by the question of how much someone would be buying.

Consider the average iPod. The big ones hold 10,000 songs or so. That's $10,000 worth of iTunes tracks. Does Apple seriously believe anyone is going to be buying TEN GRAND worth of music from their store? Helllllll no. However, it HAS been shown that those who "pirate" music tend to buy more overall because they sample so much that they decide to buy from musicians that they like. I can totally tell you that I've spent a lot more on music and merch thanks to the way the internet has opened things up.

Again, it's a very, very murky topic, but when people get polemic and say "IT'S LIKE STEALING CARS" you come across as painfully ignorant.
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I get it just fine. You are just trying to justify what you want/do by calling it a gray area. Even if it is to the artist a benefit to allow people to download, it still should be THEIR CHOICE if they want to offer it for free or not. That is my problem with this whole illegal downloading situation. You have no right to tell them that their hard work should be free and if it isn't you are going to take it anyway. That is simply stealing.
 
as a music fan, not using the ability to get any album you want at any given time doesnt make sense
sorry
if i really like an artist i will obviously buy something, and attend shows if i have the chance, but come on
before you flame think logically
and its not the same as raping a woman damn it
 
Moldy said:
Crazy thought: Until now, radio stations did NOT have to pay to play songs on the air. Let me repeat: Radio stations did not have to pay ANYONE for playing a RECORD LABEL's song on it's frequency. There was an implicit deal: Radio station plays song and gets audience so it's ad revenue goes up, band gets exposure and community. And radio stations are profiting from this arrangement, whereas the consumer is not.
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This is 100% not true.

Radio have always paid for the rights to play songs. They don't pay the record companies, they pay ASCAP and BMI for the publishing rights to broadcast the song. It's mere pennies a play, but it ads up over time if a band is on a lot of stations.

And this is where many artists are losing out.

Yes, when the album is not purchased, the band is out of 10-30% of the cost, while the label is out 60-90% of the money. Which is how many people justify piracy, because they seem mega-corp losing money, not the band.

But when an album is not purchased, the artist doesn't just lose their cut of the sale, they lose their publishing royalties, which is always been where the bulk of the money made comes from.
 
DrumEatDrum said:
VHS found a way to insert a code so that copywrited tapes couldn't be copied, but then VHS was replaced by DVD.
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It's actually "copyrighted" - not trying to be grammar police, it's just the word contains the concept "right to control copy"..."copy-right"

What those types of systems typically did was play "analog slop" - like put a ghost synch pulse (that was slightlyly lower in amplitude) behind the genuine sych pulse. Now on a first gen or really good mastering deck the ghost synch pulse would be copied with precision and wouldn't trigger the synch. On a home deck, there was enough analog slop that the ghost pulse would sometime get recorded high enough to trigger.

but there were filters made to take that ghost pulse out

The beauty of youtube when it started is the audio and video are only streamed, so an artist could put up whatever music they wanted without fear of it being downloaded. But now there are 101 programs that will recorded the stream as if it were downloaded.
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to be honest, stream ripping appeared way way before youtube. Total Recorder's first ver was '98!!!
 
Phil Maturano said:
Do you know about and use torrents?
...
Does any one know of technology that prevents torrent sharing?
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One clarification I'd like to forward

"torrenting" is a distribution technology it is NOT synonymous with nor is it's only use piracy.
For example the open source community uses torrenting as do some music operations like Jamendo, MiniNova recently went legit and operations like legaltorrents.com are around.

I believe it to be conterproductive to link certain technologies as "piracy tech" in the 90s I remember "mp3" meant 'pirated' to many, even 'download' has had that connotation which is just a basic network communications concept (when you browse drummerworld forums you download data).
 
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The issue as really been a catch-22, which has morphed into a self fulling prophecy of sorts.

Because downloads took away so many physical CD sales, most CD stores have gone under.

Even living in Los Angeles, one of the music capitols of the world, CD stores are few and far between. There is only one good size store that has a really good selection anymore, and if you don't live near it, well, too bad.

So, if you want to buy something, you're pretty much forced to go online and order it now.
(thus the catch-22, taking away even more sales from the few CD stores left).

And now, any time you enter a band album name into google, the option to search for a torrent comes up. Right there, taunting you to click on it.

Sure, I can resist the temptations, and stick to my values to only buy legally, but when the option for a torrent is staring you in the face, it's just too easy for the average person to give in and click on the option.

Which is why it's a losing battle to try to fight it. As LarryAce said, It's just another "business" that has fallen victim to the digital age.
 
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