4 ms·
I like to pirate music as much as the next guy, but I can't get behind arguments that go like "The music industry isn't giving us fair alternative to outright s
by aston 19y ago
I like to pirate music as much as the next guy, but I can't get behind arguments that go like "The music industry isn't giving us fair alternative to outright stealing music."
Music is probably the cheapest it's ever been right now. Nobody buys $5 'singles' CDs because they can get the MP3 of it legally for 99c. Gone are the days where you need to pay $20 for a CD from a music store, since you can get all of the tracks for half that, assuming you're cool not getting the physical media (like cover art).
Ultimately, music piracy happens not because the RIAA is mean or information wants to be free or any other positive sounding reason. We pirate music because we can and we won't get caught and we now have a bunch of moral arguments in our back pocket we can use whenever we want to feel like we're actually not doing anything wrong.
- brl 19y agoYou're not doing anything wrong when you share music. Intuitively everybody knows this already which is why everybody does it without thinking twice. File sharing is just not a moral issue and never has been.
- aston 19y agoYou're fooling yourself, man. Maybe it's because you're only considering music. Think about all of the software firms that make money only when people buy copies of their product. Is there nothing wrong with handing out copies of OSX or Photoshop just because it's easy? Both industries are trying to fight the same battle, that their product is now easier replicated than purchased legitimately.
- brl 19y agoIn any other industry if you can't make money because nobody wants to pay for your product (no matter what the reason is) it's because your business model sucks, not because you're a 'victim'.
- aston 19y agoPiracy is stealing, whether the music industry sucks at business or not.
- brl 19y agoThe music industry sucks at business, whether piracy is stealing or not. The moral debate isn't even very relevant here because regardless of whether downloading mp3s is stealing or impolite or a sin or whatever, in 25 years nobody will even remember that record companies ever existed.
- ced 19y agoPeople pay because they have to (excluding tipping), not because they want.
- mironathetin 19y agoI don't think that nobody wants to pay for their product. If I could get a CD for 3 or 4$ I would happily buy it, let it be only because of the nice cover photo or to have something in my hand that I have given money for. Let alone the uncompressed quality of the music. But: It does cost me 12-18$. And I know that the record label gets most of it, not the artist. Thus I pay most of my money to the stupid lawyers, who use other peoples instruments to record, carry the music to the shops, spend my money to sue people who don't pay and do all these dumb things that need neither talent nor intelligence. Instead they use also my money to give shit contracts to the ones who produce all this: the artist, who creates in the real value. The author of this article is completely right: In our ecomomy the ones who produce value are the ones who take all the risk and get the least profit for it. The distributors get it all and they make the rules. This is definitely wrong!
- Tichy 19y agoDRM-free? And I mean not only without copy protection, but also without a watermark identifying me as the original buyer. iTunes does the latter with it's supposedly DRM-free tunes. It's just that if I can't sell the MP3, it's price should be compared to the price of a CD minus the resale value of the CD (up to 50%, I guess).