Yes some of the bigger bands may suffer, but they still make millions and if they are good enough people will pay to see them live and buy merchandise

see more on the subject matter that i posted on, specifally focusing on unsigned artists at Unsigned Bands

Framing the debate in that way is like arguing for or against the necessity of producing and maintaining enough bombs to destroy the earth n-times over on the basis of spurious concepts like “the national interest” or “national security”. That is, both sides reproduce the limits of the society that creates the so-called necessity for bombs (or IP) and avoids the real problem.

Most of the arguments above presuppose commodity production and its law/morality (the one where even the bones of the saints could not withstand the alchemy by which everything becomes saleable), and downloading is judged to be right or wrong according to whether or not it costs the owner of the property. I think this misses the point and the actions of downloaders (everyday people) should be interpreted as acts of resistance to capitalist processes of enclosure and a desire for a life beyond capital.

I think it would be more helpful to think of this in terms of benefit, rather than product. If you listen to my album when you get home in the evening to chill out, or if you read my book to entertain you, then I have provided a benefit to you for which you have not paid me. I have enriched your life but you have not enriched mine in return – bad karma for society. You may not have taken anything *physically* from me but we have had a 100% one-way transaction of benefit. If you don’t like my album or my book, then you’ll delete it and not bother with my future work – I haven’t enriched your life so no harm no foul. But if you do like it, will you (a) download my other work for free, or (b) buy my other work? I’d like to think the latter but I’m afraid that there would be quite a lot who would take the former path.

But wait – do I get enriched by knowing that my work is being appreciated? Well, if you actually drop me an email and tell me how much you loved it, then yes I do. But how many people would do that, really? How many say thank you? Paying a small amount for my work is not just a way of keeping a roof over my head, but also a way of saying “thanks, your work is worth something”. Paying nothing for it is, on an emotional level, saying “your work is worth nothing to me – making the sunshine is your hobby, and my hobby is to bask in it”.

Of course, musicians can make money by touring, as music by its nature lends itself to the live experience. How many authors do you think could make a living from live performance? You may say “well, libraries didn’t kill publishing” but every time a book is borrowed from a library, a small payment goes to the author. The current rate in the UK is 5.98p going direct to the writer for each lend, capped at £6,600 per author per year. Not a lot, but it’s a small thank you nonetheless.

And all of this relates to art that can be cheaply and easily created at home. Software and movies are very different issues – the huge sums of money needed to create something of high quality make investment prohibitive if those with the money don’t believe they will ever recoup it. I must admit I get rather annoyed when I hear stories of actors being paid huge sums to appear in a film, and I’m sure they could bring their budgets down if they tried (just as football teams could bring their ticket prices down if they didn’t pay ridiculous wages to the players) but a good film with effects and location shooting is still going to cost millions whatever you do. Now, even if you took away DVD sales, films can still try to make money through (a) cinematic releases – an evening out and an experience you can’t get at home, and (b) TV repeats. What can those who develop software do? Like authors, their work is usually intended to be consumed at home, and with piracy rife there’s no need for anyone to pay a penny to do just that.
So, please, all you who download lots of free music, ebooks, software, movies, whatever – make sure that you balance your karma by doing *something* to give back to those who have made your lives better.

(BTW before anyone accuses me of being a new-age hippy I’m not suggesting that karma, in the Buddhist sense, is a real thing – I’m using it as a way of expressing that as a society we should not be wholly selfish, or society itself is damaged.)

And while music is an “intangible asset that can’t be treated like manufactured products,blah,blah,blah…” is nice to see how the music industry usually make analogies with tangible things (like stealing a car, etc).

Just posting my 2c.

I’ve been very interested by this discussion, as it’s a subject pretty close to my heart.
I think what has surprised me most is the number of intelligent, rational adults who get upset at the idea that piracy is, or might be considered, a crime.

i’d like to give you an example, from real life, if i may :

i’m a software developer. i’ve not been at it long, about 4 to 5 years. I have a very small company, it’s just myself and my business partner. We make sound content for digital musicians – digital instruments.
after a very difficult start, in the last 2 years or so we have started to make a living from the business, which we’re very pleased about. we have been able to give up other contracts to concentrate on it full time.

Now, in our industry, piracy is rife. Many teenagers etc make music with their computers, and cracked software is part of the culture.

Now, I can go onto various well known torrent sites, and easily find quite a few torrents of our products. On these sites people post comments – often, under a torrent for one of our products, they’ll say how much they like our work, and how pleased they are to get hold of it. How grateful they are to the person who posted it.

It may not surprise you to learn that this is extremely difficult for me to read. i find it very upsetting, and it makes me quite angry to have this first hand experience.
to those of you who haven’t had it, i’ll try to describe it. it feels a bit like overhearing a burglar saying how much he likes watching your TV which he has recently stolen, or how nicely your car handles.
I understand that at this point many of the posters above will jump in with ‘ ah, but he [i]hasn’t[/i] deprived you of anything, nothing is physically missing’.
But I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t feel much like that. As i say, i’m making a living now, but it’s not the kind of living that allows me to buy a house in the UK for my family. Yet many thousands of people have taken our products for free, and enjoy using them, perhaps even use them in commercial work, and earn money themselves.
i’m not naive, i understand very well that a large percentage of these people would never have paid for it, but in my opinion there IS a percentage who would have done so if it hadn’t have been so readily available on torrent sites. I would guess that if they had purchased it, i might well have been able to buy a house by now. you may say otherwise.

Some of the posters above seem to object very strongly to the term ‘thief’. fair enough, maybe its not exactly the same ( although it does feel like it to the victim).
Perhaps it’s fairer to say that ‘people who download illegally are criminals’? since software piracy is a crime, then surely ‘criminal’ is not too strong a term?

anyway, i don’t want to get to emotive over this. What I am genuinely interested in is what the people who defend piracy would say to me? Hopefully it won’t be the usual ” ah, well, you’re a small company, you’re different, people should buy your stuff”. they don’t. it isnt different to them.

I don’t believe that game, CD, etc. sales are significantly hurt by copying as I have yet to see any evidence that those copying would have bought otherwise. What is never taken into account is that freely available material encourages hording. Back in the early 90s, long before widespread downloading I met people with vast collections of copied games, more than they could ever even play. It was primarily hording behaviour. Another factor of course is that people have limited funds and therefore any money switched to say buying CDs has to be diverted from something else, so any claims of losses to the economy as a whole are quite likely rubbish.

Ultimately our current copyright periods are nothing, but welfare for lazy people. There is no valid reason for copyright to be more than a few years, and I don’t see the biggest whiners in the various mediums demanding it be reduced. As creative endeavours earned more and more money copyright should have become shorter, while instead it is regularly extended. Why aren’t these complaining fatcats not out protesting to stop this? It’s because they’re not interested in encouraging creative endeavour, but rather wealth transfer. In fact for society as a whole it would be a great advantage if the major movie studios and music labels were put out of business.

I definitely don’t agree that music stations would just play old material if copyright were shortened. If copyright ever comes to an end maybe we can test this hypothesis. Besides if you know anything about the way royalties get distributed you’ll know that in many cases the money never makes it back to the writers anyway.

I can see how it can be argued that no-one has a right to play a game or see a particular movie or listen to any specific album, but because doing so without paying does not cause any direct harm to the creator of the material, in total contrast to for example stealing a Ferrari, it is not really possible to argue that it is wrong. I’d definitely prefer people to pay for what I produce, but as long as they’re not selling my work without giving me my share or actually breaking in and stealing my originals the worst they’re doing is denying me a potential sale and I have no reason to think they would have paid. Not to mention that even a paying customer selling the material once they’re done with it or lending it to their friends also denies me potential income, and yet we don’t call these people thieves; well in reality many of the lazy fatcats who support infinite copyright periods do think doing these things is theft. I borrow a lot of books from friends and the library, so call me a thief too. I’ve even borrowed games from friends. Theft, I know.

As an example of punishing your paying customers, I own Acrobat 7, but when I had to work on a Vista machine the activation gave problems. Adobe’s response was that although Acrobat 7 itself works perfectly on Vista the activation module does not and their solution was for me to pay them for Acrobat 8. Anyone who copied their software would just move to the next version for free, although like me they’d find that it does not work as well as the previous version. The previous version worked perfectly, but the “upgraded” version does not. Activation module works though. A friend who does 3D graphics was punished with weeks of downtime, twice, by failed dongles. Never happens to those who didn’t pay for the software.

A lot is made of the fact that a copy of an mp3 is identical to the original mp3, but it’s a red herring. Back in the days of tape people really didn’t care about the quality reduction. I knew many people who had copies on tape that were several generations away from the source vinyl, and it didn’t bother them. Others would even make further copies from their nth generation copies. Ultimately a single piece of vinyl could result in many thousands of copies on tape; 7 generations in can easily make 10 million tapes.

- The internet threatens the big record companies by democratising music. They want to control through radio, tv, and whatever other means they have, who likes what. File sharing and things like LastFM makes it possible for people to discover new bands. ie. the threat is that there will be more fish with smaller pieces of the pie – bad news for record companies.

- Finally, there are some CDs that I only bought because i had heard pirated versions of them before. I’m sure many other people have experienced this. Any honest assessment of the impact of piracy on sales would have to take this effect into account.

So someone illegally downloads Adobe Photoshop. This person uses it at home, occasionally, to fix red-eye and other flaws in his personal photos.

If the software were not available for free, this person simply would not use it. Whether he uses the software or not, he will not pay a dime to Adobe.

Did Adobe actually lose any money by having this person “steal” the software? Are there actually any fewer dollars in Adobe’s corporate checking account because of this user?

Or did Adobe just expand their userbase, with one more person likely to recommend their products at work, at no actual cost to the company? Are they actually hurt by these users?

(For the record, I have paid Abode good money, regularly and repeatedly for fifteen years, to have this software legally licensed on three computers at home, and I consider it worth the market price. But Adobe InDesign, not Photoshop, is really the one I can’t live without.)

The manufacturers of these high-end applications continue to make their money from the people this stuff is ultimately made for: businesses that *must* acquire their software legally, lest they get shopped one day and are paid a nasty visit from FAST or the cops.

Although I doubt piracy has greatly affected the sales of this expensive software, the same cannot be said of the games industry. While we can agree that few would be willing to shell out a grand on AutoCAD if it were not available to download illegally, the same argument, perhaps, does not apply to a £30 computer game. If, somehow, Sims 3 disappeared from all torrent sites tomorrow (and somehow stayed disappeared), it’s seems obvious to me that sales would rocket.

Again, this is an extreme example and maybe a less popular, less famous game is unharmed by piracy–may, in fact, be aided by it. The same is true of music: while sales of the latest U2 album are almost certainly harmed by illegal downloads, the smaller or more obscure artists are probably unaffected or even affected *positively* by it.

“The talk about proprietary versus open-source was relevant to the claim that it was okay to bankrupt the proprietary software industry (through piracy) because open-source would fill the gap.”

Who said that? The idea that piracy will drive the proprietary software business out of existence entirely is exactly the kind of venal scaremongering the article dissects.

“So, no every act of piracy is not an assertion that it’s not worth the price being charged for it.”

Neither is every act of piracy an admission that the proprietary version is better.

The over-arching point is that the IP-lobby wants to paint the situation in unrealistic black and white terms. They began by asserting that piracy was causing huge harm to their industry, and now have moved on to assuming that fact while making a push for government and ISPs to demonise piracy. As a wise man once said, ‘I’ll think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that’. What’s particularly telling is that the only study I’m aware of that wasn’t paid for by the lobby (the guardian link in the article) flatly contradicted their line.

In short, they simply don’t care about the evidence.

There’s a place for both, but thinking that OSS is some sort of ghetto adjunct to proprietary software is crushingly naive.
Yes, that’s what I meant when I said: “Yes, there are some very good open-source products”.

Plus, every time software is pirated it’s an assertion that it’s not worth the price being charged for it.
Except that people often pirate material because they want it as cheaply as possible (and piracy = free). I’ve also heard pirates admit that they’ve pirated stuff they would’ve paid for. So, no every act of piracy is not an assertion that it’s not worth the price being charged for it.

We’re getting a little off-topic. Sometimes proprietary software goes in first, sometimes open source goes in first (at least since the concept gained traction). Why is that so hard to accept?

Besides, my point is that the assertion that propriety software moves faster than open source is demonstrably false- you only have to look at the speed with which patches for vulnerabilities are deployed between the two alternatives to witness the gulf. There’s a place for both, but thinking that OSS is some sort of ghetto adjunct to proprietary software is crushingly naive.

The number of proprietary software ‘success stories’ doesn’t even meet 86,000- many of those will be of poor quality, selling like baked turds, and only in existence because of the eternal optimism of venture capital.

“Further, every time someone pirates software, it’s a quiet admission that the proprietary version is superior to the open-source version.”

Except, of course, when it is pirated for comparison shopping or because of compatibility woes as a result of companies attempting to shore up their market share with lock-in. Plus, every time software is pirated it’s an assertion that it’s not worth the price being charged for it.

It’s also depressing how few people seem aware of open source alternatives when they are an appropriate replacement.

@87: “Why should the consumer’s library be limited by the artificial notion of cost-per-album?”

Because that is how the copyright holder has chosen to make the album/film/software available. If you do not like the terms and conditions, if you do not like the price, you have the right to walk away! There is no entitlement, no human right, to own the latest U2 album.

That is the fundamental point many people appear to be missing.

I think it’s wonderful how many people are willing tom freely give their time or the product of their labour. However, I’m not so selfless and expect to be paid.

The way the music industry works is outdated and it will not change without pressure. Artists should be able to make a living from their work when there are people willing to pay for it but the current model for the industry is based on the principle of “owning a copy” of an album. This no longer makes sense. Distributing music costs virtually nothing so why should the size of the consumer’s library be limited by the artificial notion of cost-per-album?

Finding new economic models for the industry isn’t easy but it is necessary. The potential benefits are a more equitable system, richer musical culture and interaction, and better opportunities for artists to find listeners and vise versa.

When services are delivered that provide music in a way that is relevant to the technology and beneficial to the consumer, the consumer will be wiling to pay.

A great deal of fuss is being made about Spotify but I think that last.fm is a much more telling of the pressure on the industry. *resisting raving about last.fm*. It provides streaming music at close to the cost of distribution. It also makes money from linking to download-sales. It provides a valuable service for discovering music and music-centred social interaction.

Games and films are *possibly* a different matter. These are more likely to be a zero-sum-game but I don’t know. Films are typically watched once, games usually have a fixed lifetime and both are associated with a large cost of production which is not out of line with their current retail price (both games and films sometimes make a loss).

I’ve heard the name GnuCash over the past week. I don’t know what it’s like.

But that number of software products on Amazon includes many that do exactly the same thing, or do it more or less well for a greater or lesser price. For instance I think there are at least seven distinct editions of Microsoft Windows Vista. With freeware you get one file or disc or USB stick with all the features included, you don’t have to buy them separately. You don’t have to pay twice for Christmas Card Creator and Birthday Card Creator.

But you also don’t get television adverts for the product. “I’m a Windows PC, really I’m an eight year old child, do you want to spend every day of your life trying to reason with an eight year old child, I know a recipe for breakfast cereal and chocolate.”

Because adverts don’t go quite like that, people still buy commercial products.

I don’t know if there’s GPL (free) personal accounts and tax software. I’m thinking quite possibly not.

LOL reality check fail.

Okay, then explain why proprietary products appear years before their open-source counterparts. Unix/Linux? Photoshop/Gimp? Netscape+IE/Firefox? 3D Studio/Blender? There’s an obvious pattern here: open-source arrives late.

Further, every time someone pirates software, it’s a quiet admission that the proprietary version is superior to the open-source version. Every time you walk into a store and see hundreds of copies of software on the shelves, it’s an admission that open-source (despite being free) hasn’t beaten proprietary software. Afterall, if open-source was always better, the off-the-shelf software industry would already be bankrupt. There’s a variety of reasons open-source hasn’t bankrupted the proprietary software industry. One of them is the fact that open-source has trouble paying software developers, which means they have fewer people to do the work. If you go out to Amazon.com, you’ll find 96,806 software products for sale. Do you think the open-source community can possibly take on the task of handling the development for 96,806 products simultaneously? Yes, there are some very good open-source products, but the number of open-source success stories does not approach 96,806.

Beware of malware in your DVDs if you’re watching on your PC!

Some DVDs at least in the U.S., seem to contain rootkits.

See also this Amazon review.

We have seen other lesser malware installed automatically by DVDs (ALWAYS disable “Autoplay” in Windows!) before like the Interactual crap “player”, and it’s very well known this about CDs too.

The Sony BMG debacle didn’t teach these bastards a lesson.