adelaideperson wrote:just a few thoughts on this..
people spend years honing their skills to produce music, yet some of you say they shouldn't receive their fair due for their labour. following this train of thought you could say that no-one should get anything for their profession ie doctors who spend years & substantial amounts of money training? you yourself? do you go to work just for the fun of it? or perhaps you still live with your parents so it doesn't really matter?
perhaps you say that the pleasure of producing music is reward enough? have you considered (taking that to it's logical conclusion) that in that case that most music would be amateur, where would the incentive be for someone to spend the time to produce truly exceptional music? should someone who does so be denied the ability to put food on the table for themselves & loved ones? are we to be condemned to even more substandard music because of this attitude?
some of you seem to think that because the technology exists, it's alright to steal. technology has also produced other means of theft, this doesn't make it right, and the law reflects this.
please give credit where credit is due, & honour the intellectual property of people who create.
You should probably do a little research and learn what intellectual property is and how it works before talking about it. And while you're at it, do some research to and learn about how fucked up, corrupt and in-need-of-reform IP law is. (even so, the current law is misunderstood by most... it isn't as black and white as people claim)
Secondly, you're giving way too much scope to the issue. You might as well be giving a speech about the so-called 'butterfly effect'.
If individual downloads and filesharing can somehow actually hurt an artist, then there is a serious problem in the business model of the label you're part of. Sure, it effects everyone in part... but it shouldn't hurt anyone very much. Especially because it isn't new. (look at camcorders, vcrs, cassette decks, movies and music in the 70s and 80s and 90s).
The only grey area to me is the slowly expanding focus on digital distribution. Digital sales could potentially be dwarfed due to digital piracy. Buuut...
Bottom line though - nobody can come up with evidence to demonstrate the effect digital piracy has on music/record sales or if there is even a connection at all. The few attempts that have been made to generate statistics were all based on an assumption that each stolen good would have been purchased by the theif who grabbed it had they not been able to steal it. This is bullshit. All those reports you see from organizations that say stuff like "Lost revenue due to piracy in 200X" then show a spreadsheet.... worst kind of see-through propaganda.
