Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Leafsnail]

I'm not sure if the wildly inflated claims about piracy is true (for them to be true, everyone who downloads illegally must be downloading £25 worth of illegal content a day, which is quite frankly ridiculous) but I'm also not sure if the underlying argument is true either.

The argument seems to be that if people didn't share music then billions would be added to the British economy.

Possibly true, but could you not say the same thing about public libraries and books?  About recycling?  About friends lending CDs and games to each other?

In fact, come to think of it, isn't the music industry by printing CDs unfairly undermining live musicians?  Aren't the printing presses of that mass produce books unfairly undercutting the  writers who could overwise go on tour reading their book?  Wouldn't it create more value if we had no books or CDs at all?

The problem seems to be the sudden change of setting. The music industry has gone from its best time ever (being able to put music onto very cheap and difficult to copy CDs) to a very bad time when digital music can easily be copied.

[LegoLord]

Now there's not a person I know who could afford books that wouldn't buy a book they like rather than go to a library to get every time they want to read it, so it's a moot point on your part.  As for recycling, that paper has to be refined and processed by recycling centers and paper companies, so in effect the paper is just going straight back to the original creator.  Plastic bottles are different; sometimes they are processed into synthetic clothing, sometimes they are melted down and possibly used for various other recyclable plastic goods.

I don't even know where you're getting this idea that printing CDs and books cheats the authors.  That makes absolutely no sense at all.  The appeal of tour readers and concerts is actually seeing the creator, why else would you put up with all the other people there?  Second, only so many people can go to a given concert at a given time; music tours are less profitable than selling CDs, or at least permitting payed download.  That's PAYED download, mind.  Musicians actually get some royalties from both of those (replace CD with books and you get the same thing with authors), but they get nothing from when a person makes a free download.  A payed download, or buying a CD, gets pretty much the same result as free downloads for the consumer, only at a small cost, whereas a free download's cost is payed only by the creator, not the consumer; a relation which can be significantly harmful.

[Areyar]

I think the point he is making is that the money the publishers claim as lost due to piracy would not have been spent on music to begin with.
Money does not magically appear because of demand, any product needs to compete with all the other things that cost money. And the amount of 'spendable' money is fixed, if not shrinking with the economy/inflation.

The argument about recorded music unfairly competing with live artists is outdated though. 't Was relevant when LPs were new, but live [only] performers no longer exist as such.

[ranting]
Recently there were some similar rumblings from the book writers: cheap paperback novels printed enmasse and sold in supermarkers for peanuts would undermine the sale of less popularized books. We all know this is pure 'old man sign', as cheap books can open a 'casual' readers (to borrow a term from computing) audience to start reading and thus also buying books more regularly.
As our(NL) current system (BUMA) works, all novels have a set price, this is so that less popular books can also be sold for a competitive price*. Supermarkets thought to evade the tax on books that pays for this subsidy and sell paperbacks at discount prices. Hence the ruccus was in the end just about missing out on money from the popularity of other people's work. (BUMA is our local media copyright/subsidy government watchdog)


* I'd certainly have several lengthy research papers on my bookshelf, if not for the excessive price. Non-fiction/study books are not elligable for subsidies here. Also the small audience for studies on the finer points of 'grasspollen polarization during the early stage of anther formation' or whatever make publishing such works expensive.

[/rant]