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Penn’s smart. He’s got smart friends. What does he think of P2P file-sharing?
source
Looking for more tricks to show off? Check out Scam School with Brian Brushwood: http://vid.io/xoE
Penn’s smart. He’s got smart friends. What does he think of P2P file-sharing?
source
21 comments
It's immoral to expect a man to work for nothing: because a rational man will not. It's immoral for your offer not to be in money if that is all that you can offer him. It is wrong to take his work for less than he asks, since his own chosen price expresses exactly what he will work for. It's also immoral to expect that 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 ruin your life, and the lives of your fellow man, nonetheless.
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.
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)
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.
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. But, the record labels have crafted a situation wherein they are not giving the customers nor the artists a fair deal. Yes, 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? Is the CEO literally 20 times more responsible for why you loved your favourite albums than the artists which made them? Decades 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. If this isn't fair, it's exactly the system the record labels put into place. Why 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. They went to war with non-profit internet streaming at the same time they were paying to be put in heavy rotation on the radio. In what world does that even make sense? And 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. Buy their merch. Buy 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). Don'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. We shouldn't be shutting down fair use because someone is disturbed by critical review. We 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. http://everythingisaremix.info/
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