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Penn’s smart. He’s got smart friends. What does he think of P2P file-sharing?
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21 comments
Being an independent and somewhat libertarianish guy makes this a tough one for me to rationalize. I'm not unwilling to download things for free and I think music and films are art forms and art is kinda priceless and should be 'free' in at least some regards (that's my 'liberal' side talking). But it is the artist's intellectual property and property is also a big deal to me on the libertarian side of things. Despite my 'free' (how free are they really if you pay for internet and sites have ads? and yada yada) download tendencies I still try to support artists if I enjoy their content enough. Maybe the whole system is screwed and artist's should be more willing to let some things out for free? I don't really know either. It's a wierd place philosophically. Factor in record labels which people have certain feelings about and you've got a real mess of a philosophical conundrum.
"cause I had to be sleeping and jacking off" Penn man, fucking Penn x,D
I have a friend who is a muscian, and he doesnтАЩt mind that his stuff is torrented, because it spreads his music and makes it more likely for people to come see his shows. Now with that being said, he has a venue by which he can still make money. Now an actor is often paid before a role is complete by the film industry, so the only people who probably actually care about are the companies who produce whatever it is you are downloading. Typically the rule I follow is, that if I torrent anything and I like it enough I will buy it when It becomes available to me.
i seriously still pirate most of my music
Go camera 1. Go camera 2. Go 1. Go 2. Go 1. Go 2. Go 1. Go 2. Go 1. Go 2. Go 1. Go 2.
I think the good or bad affect is up to us not the artist or company. The artist aren't forced at gun point to sign anything and major "Big Music" dont care about music. That's thier fight. Plenty of good has come from that fight. Tech n9ne is a great example, like him or not. From the way I understand it slipknot sets the terms with roadrunner. I could be wrong about that but its definitely the way that specific relationship has been presented in interviews. All that being said the piracy affect falls on the rest of us. I'll buy the music I love. Anything else well….
i wonder what he thinks of the Pandora free radio app which streams free music
I know how hard it is to put a movie together and that's why I pay for things.
Gee. Never expected that answer from a Libertarian.┬а
The statement, "You should not┬аtake a specified course of action," is an incomplete thought, unless it is accompanied by the corollary statement, "That course of action will necessarily have consequences which you┬аdo not want for yourself." The idea of an obligation, detached from the consequences of it and from the values of the obliged, is a judgement detached from reality.
It's immoral to expect a man to work for nothing: because a rational man will not.┬аIt's immoral┬аfor your offer not to be in┬аmoney if that is all that you can offer him. It is wrong to take his work for less than he asks, since┬аhis own chosen price┬аexpresses exactly what he will work for. It's also immoral to expect┬аthat man, whose work you've taken without his voluntary consent, to leave you in peace, since peace is not what you offer him, by violating his property. It's immoral to intercede between what a man's mind has produced, and what he produced it for. If you do that, you cut off his means of productive, creative interaction with physical reality for his own benefit, which is the essence of life itself, and the reason why a rational man lives. Such rational men do not tolerate such intervention.
There are a number of factors which can obscure the consequences of property violation: if it is legal; if it is social custom; if you are but one of your victim's thousands of customers, most of whom do pay what he asks; if your victim is irrational, and doesn't know his own interests. The consequences, though, being inherent to human nature, can only be obscured. If you choose not to see them, they will┬аruin your life, and the lives of your fellow man, nonetheless.
Many musicians are wonderful, charitable people, I dig that. But I just cant stand how so many musicians who illegally use drugs and illicit substances, abuse their families, buy sex from hookers, and engage in countless other morally questionable activities, mostly funded by the sale of their art, get behind the microphone and judge us for downloading their music. ┬а
intellectual property is bullshit. It is just there so that rich companies with good lawyers can extort artists, claim ownership of their music and just sit back and cash all the money that other people worked for. Like I can spend a year perfecting a song. Spend thousands of dollars on studio time. Spend months going around playing gigs. Spend all the time and energy to get my song published and played on the radio. I could do all that and some rich fat cat can just hire a badass lawyer and sue me for copyright infringement because they have some patented recording in their gigantic database that shares somewhat the same melody as my song and they can claim ALL the money I made from working my ass of for years JUST because somebody came up with a similar idea at some point.┬а
People have no rights to something not offered for free by the people whom own the copyrights. Using P2P channels to get something you have not brought or have no rights to is illegal. You don't NEED a song, or a piece of software, if you don't like the DRM then boycott the product and don't get it. DRM free pirated versions have their own risks anyway and should be avoided like the plague, these are a favored method of spreading malware and recruiting computers into illegal botnets.
On the flip side, I feel that when these companies catch somebody the punishments are often vastly out of sync with the crimes. Heck children getting sued over downloading nursery rhymes for thousands of dollars is just extreme.
Also the big companies were running a racket before off of physical media, making insanely disproportional amounts of money to the cost of producing the songs. The shame is that smaller companies have suffered because of this. It's ashame the action forced has such a negative impact on smaller labels but something needed to be done to address some major BS on basically price fixing that had been tolerated for too long.
There are other reasons that people pirate items. Story time, there was a TV movie that I wanted to see because it had an actor in it that I liked (For mockery purposes, it was a Lifetime movie called My Neighbors Secret and had Nicholas Brendon, who I enjoy) and being an australian, I had no way of seeing it because it was only airing in the US, and the only Itunes that carried it was American (I know this because I could see it, it was like waving candy in front of a baby). So naturally I did the smart thing and emailed Lifetime and sent them an email that basically consisted of "Shut up and take my money" only in nicer terms. I Explained where I was from but that I really wanted to see this movie and was a DVD planned or any way I could legally purchase it from them, even willing to pay inflated prices to see it… I was told that not only would they not find a way to help me, someone who would've probably handed them 50 bucks for a download (I was an idiot, but also knew I had no power there) but that they had no intentions of releasing a DVD in my area. Naturally, I went online and in a week I had a pirated DVD of the movie… and 3 weeks after that going shopping, there was an Australian DVD release (Which I bought instantly).
So what's my point? My point is that the networks, studios and labels don't want to help people out. They don't want the customers to be the ones in control, all they want is to dictate who can buy what. If I wave a 50 dollar bill in front of a network for a 25 dollar product and they say no, that network can't justify getting upset if I then go to a torrent. Oh and most networks/studios/labels forget that torrents are basically advertising, and that most people doing it buy the product anyway, and that it isn't hurting their bottom line because sales in all areas have only gone upwards (Avatar is the highest earning and most pirated movie of all time, I rest my case)
Any question that starts "is it ethical" is a bullshit question by definition.
Irrelevant besides.
I don't have any rules regarding whether I'll buy or torrent something. I just do whichever I feel like doing at any given time.
I like buying CDs at record stores. I love having a material incarnation of the music I can keep and show off. But I also like to pay less than it costs on iTune and other legal internet download(since I buy used CDs). I don't pirate music or movies. I believe that paying for art is a sign of respect for the artist, while not paying when they expect to be paid is a sign of disrespect. But the music industry needs to evolve. They need to understand that it isn't in their advantage to fight piracy the way they do, with draconian laws that are punishing people unevenly and often disproportionately. The way to fight piracy is by making it irrelevant, unattractive. By making sure consumer want to pay for the music, by making sure they can. One way to do this is to let the consumer experience the music before buying it ,as many artists are doing. Then, put a fair price on it. Or even better, let the people decide the price. On a large scale, overly generous people might offset the greedy ones, and most people will be between the two. Or at least we can hope. By building a good relationship with the audience, you make sure they'll be loyal and will pay what they can to make sure you can give them what they want.
The idea that piracy hurts music and it's necessary to support the artists are not the same conversation. ┬аA lot of industry spokesmen equate them because it's in their best interests to. ┬аThe whole question of "in a world of piracy, how do we pay artists" presumes that we're paying artists by retail sales. ┬аThe record industry crafted a business model based on paying artists very little, controlling the outlets, and generally leave all but the most successful artists scrounging around on 1-2% of retail sales.
None of this is to say that everyone in the music industry should be working for for free, and it's certainly not just the artists – it is unreasonable to expect, say, the guy operating a forklift in a Sony warehouse to work for free for the "love of the music", or the guys operating a retail music store. ┬аBut, the record labels have crafted a situation wherein they are not giving the customers nor the artists a fair deal. ┬аYes, the CEO of a major record label deserves to make a living, but when a business model is based on that CEO getting 30% of the profit, is that reasonable? ┬аIs the CEO literally 20 times more responsible for why you loved your favourite albums than the artists which made them? ┬аDecades of bad record deals have made it so that retail sales are irrelevant to most artists, who are forced to make almost all of their money based on live performance. ┬аIf this isn't fair, it's exactly the system the record labels put into place. ┬аWhy is it that when the record label system was working well, the record labels get to reap huge profits, but when their unwillingness to engage their actual customers starts failing, they have to seek Congressional protection of a failing business model?
Furthermore, forever-minus-a-day copyright extension is unconstitutional, in that it strictly goes against the actual intent of the original copyright law.
It seeks to reduce all participation in culture to that of the level of mere consumer rather than participant, because for all the attention that p2p file sharing gets, we ignore the fact that cinema tried to sue television out of existence, radio tried to sue television out of existence, the sheet music industry was at war with the early recorded music industry, and that the modern record label cartels were at war with the internet and their own audience until they realized it was making them look bad. ┬аThey went to war with non-profit internet streaming at the same time they were paying to be put in heavy rotation on the radio. ┬аIn what world does that even make sense? ┬аAnd don't kid yourself that Spotify is the answer – this is the same old tired plan of "give the artist 1-2% of the profits" except worse – they make even less there.
If you want to support artists, go see them live. ┬аBuy their merch. ┬аBuy their CDs at their shows (almost all artists have different, much more favourable terms with regards to music sold at shows than they do in retail). ┬аDon't fall for the fallacious arguments of the old guard of a dying business model who were never their allies to begin with.
The participation in culture is important; we shouldn't be shutting down free speech because someone else isn't profiting. ┬аWe shouldn't be shutting down fair use because someone is disturbed by critical review. ┬аWe shouldn't be shutting down sampling culture (which has created richly creative content), remix culture, and we shouldn't be sending DCMA takedowns of some 15 year old girl singing a song (badly) on a shitty mic on a youtube video, nor when someone does something creative that in no way harms the artists.
To put it another way, everything is a remix. ┬аhttp://everythingisaremix.info/
As a libertarian, I am a firm believer in copyright law, unlike some. I believe people own their own ideas. On the other hand, some facets of patent protection make no sense, and I get in arguments all the time with a patent attorney friend of mine about it.
Imagine what would all the great composert like Bach, Mozart, Beethowen would say.┬а They would say, we wrote music for everybody to listen, you can listen our music anytime you want.
Often, but obviously not always pirated material would not have ever been purchased material. Yes people pirate things that others buy. That's not my point. My point is that for some, purchasing a Linkin Park CD or download isn't going to happen. But if they can get their hands on it for free, they might just give it a listen. And some, would even go back later and make the purchase if they liked it.
I buy everything also, but I don't blame people. I consider it to normally be less about greed, but more about protest to the shitty companies peddling it and anti-consumer practices like DRM.
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