Would somebody please give me a cogent argument for pirating music?

FWIW, I use emusic, a pay service, as it's faster and P2P systems are a mess and a bore.

How in any way is that not "wrong"?

john is a member of the mountain goats.

Also, burning a CD isn't 'pirating' per se, especially if you paid for the stuff.

In my question, I clearly indicated that this is not any way the case.

I really want to understand how people consider this not wrong. Here is what I think: everybody knows it's wrong, all the people ridiculing me. However, they think in black-in-white George-Bush-"With us or against" us dichotomy worldview (evidence, this quote from Momus: ""If I have to choose between being an industry bod and being a pirate,
well, I choose piracy every time") and have come to conclusion that I'm not one of "us" anymore. I'm now one of "them." Therefore, fuck me. Fuck me! Nevermind the fact that they agree with the content of my very serious simple, non-controversial statement: it is not okay to download an album for yourself without paying, and continue to use that album in a way as if it was a product you purchased.

Prove me wrong.

xpost
ratty, that is clearly an exception and not the norm. I am not talking about artists that want you to not pay for their music. Is The Mountain Goats one of them? I don't know.

For electronic and audio-visual media, unauthorized reproduction and distribution is often referred to as piracy or theft (an early reference was made by Alfred Tennyson in the preface to his poem "The Lover's Tale" in 1879 where he mentions that sections of this work "have of late been mercilessly pirated".) The legal basis for this usage dates from the same era, and has been consistently applied until the present time.1 Critics of the use of "software piracy" to describe such practices contend that it unfairly compares a crime that makes no victim - except for those that would have profited from hypothetically lost sales - with the violent actions of organized thieves and murderers; it also confuses mere illegal copying of material with the intentional and malicious penetration of computer systems to which one does not legally have access. As a consequence, "software piracy" is a somewhat loaded term. "Theft" or "stealing" are considered even more inflammatory, as well as legally misleading.

I see 'downloading' as distinct from your legal term 'piracy'. From what I've read, piracy implies distribution. Hence I am curious about your inclusion (as a detail) of someone burning a CD and playing it in a car or something.

Downloading is downloading, and piracy is piracy. It is not yet clear whether P2P is "illegal".

1. logic suggests to most people that he would not be in serious criminal trouble if that were all it was; and
2. what public information has come out about his case also suggests that he was involved in something much more serious.

Therefore they are annoyed by Mickey and give him shit. And no matter how many times he asks his question, they'll feel he's being disingenuous. This isn't answering his specific question, which, as Min points out is pretty clear-cut and not too interesting.

And that fact that all he wants is for other people to come out and say "Yeah, it's wrong and we do it anyway," well, that's also annoying.

Mitya, your point is very well reasoned. To respond to that, people really don't understand how all this works behind the scenes, and I've tried again and again to explain it, only to met with increasingly more scorn. There's a difference between what it takes to be targetted by the powers-that-be and what it takes to be prosecuted.

What it takes to be prosecuted -- very little. I've been honest about my activity the entire time. It's to a degree not significantly different from what is common here. What difference does it make if an individual uploads a Mountain Goats CD to a private FTP server, to a ILM YSI thread, or to a random user on Kazaa? Is that not the same crime, the same degree, executed differently?

What it takes to be targetted -- something unusual. I was a part of a group. Yes. Does being a part of a group necessarily imply something different from what is the norm? No.

Could I have been targetted if I wasn't a part of APC? Who fucking knows. It isn't an exact science who the FBI decides to go after. If the FBI already knew more about APC and who they were busting when they went after me, they probably wouldn't have bothered. They were very disappointed when they started interviewing me and it was blatantly obvious. They thought I was involved in pre-releasing music, I had access to it somehow. They thought I was a group leader. They thought I ran a server. I did none of this.

I'm really ashamed at myself right now for how worked up I've gotten over my critics here. But really, I'm tired of trying to handle this situation with dignity. I'm tired of trying to defend myself. I am probably just going to be a lurker here for a while to learn about music, because I am fucking tired of posting.

Yeah, I myself got the new Neko Case and the new Stereolab off emusic. Hate to sound like a shill, but I found it easier and less time-consuming. But I suppose I could bootleg the things and distribute them if I knew anything about organized crime.

Socialists hold that capitalism is an illegitimate economic system that serves the interests of the wealthy and exploits the majority of the population. As such, they wish to replace it completely or at least make substantial modifications to it, in order to create a more just society that would reward hard work, guarantee a certain basic standard of living, and extend economic and cultural opportunities to all.

Is that not the same crime, the same degree, executed differently?

Again, I think a lot of people have the sense that you are only concerned with this question at this completely reductionist level. That is, if my only choice is "Downloading, right or wrong?" then I refuse to answer. Because that question obscures a huge range of variables that determine whether this is a white lie to your parents about where you were after school and testimony under oath in a capital murder case.

Ultimately, though, I think you're right. Lurk for a while, read one of the fifteen Roxy Music/Bryan Ferry threads going now and argue about prog Roxy vs. new romantic Roxy. Much less stressful.

Well this is an interesting question. How many of us are there? are we exceptional?

I want my music downloaded for free wherever possible because it leads to gigs, licensing opportunities etc, and brings in money by various indirect routes.

Now I have a question. What is the record industry going to do to preserve my right to have my music available for free download without the legal interference and harassment of my potential customers?

What you did was set up a straw man, Mickey. That's a bullshit rhetorical device. Similar to your emotional appeals and syllogisms.

Why I download music: There are two big, and distinct, reasons. The first is to try out music that I haven't heard before and am curious about. I don't have infinite space on my hard drive, so a lot of what I download gets deleted pretty quickly. And the stuff that I like, I buy (though I tend to buy used albums, which don't benefit the artist. But that's only a distinction if you're making legal claims based on the morality of compensating the artist). Since there's no sense of physical product for digital copies, there's no resale market, so things that I might pay, say, a nickel for are either free or a buck (or from a .ru).
The second reason why I download music— It's out of print and never coming back. I suppose the argument can be made that I should respect the artist's decision, and that by downloading it I make it less likely to be reissued. But frankly, that Wildman Fischer album is never going to come out again in my lifetime, and I don't respect the rights holders enough to particularly care why they're holding it back.

So, Mickey, what you might try to draw out of this is that yes, in YOUR situation YOUR copyright infringement was WRONG AND ILLEGAL. In other people's positions? Not so much. For example, in countries such as Sweden and Canada, the legal position on downloading is different and (at least in Canada) administered through compulsory license fees paid by certain electronics manufacturers.

For a man facing a pretty stiff legal penalty, you sure don't seem to know shit about the law. See: Criminal versus civil tort.

I don't consider that action, in any way, unethical or immoral. The record company tried to milk the public out of more money with shady business practices, and I ain't buying.

So you say, repetitively. You're so-o-o-o tired yet you keep coming back to see what others say of you. You're not only convicted but you're vain, too. You're just in no position to be a pedantic scold or a purveyor of lessons in life and piracy in a place where others can talk back to you. You need to get to a classroom where you can give a boring sermon while the teacher stands ready to give someone a bad grade for being rude and truculent.

You also quacked on being passionate about music in the newspaper. I'm not seeing it here or in any other thread. But I'm seeing lots of you being passionate about what people think of you.

I was going to ass semi-seriously that one side of that argument is rape and the other mass murder, but that's a little dark. Thepoint is, within that example is a gradation of offences.

js pretty much OTM on many fronts, esp. wrt hard to find/obscure/held for ransom stuff.

I would toss in that not all material is fit for consumtion. to pay $15.00 for a CD with 2 good tracks is a waste; then paying for those two tracks becomes a waste of time (to log on to itun3s, register, whatever) and risk (credit thieving, etc) relative to the value and lowering the worth of the track to essentially 0.

Paying for music is like the penny -- as soon as people leave it behind at the register it loses its use in society.

Nevermind the fact that U2 makes a shitload of money playing to 50,o00 fans at $60.00 a head.

http://www.popmatters.com/music/columns/campbell/060407.shtml

And as far as stealing it, what am I stealing? A transient, ephemeral piece of data, without the art, without the quality of the copy (CD-Rs always skip in my car, for example). The sound quality still sounds worse to me even at the highest encoding rate. Meanwhile, I have thousands of records and hundreds of CDs that I paid cold hard cash for, and I have hundreds of ticket stubs for shows I would never have known about without the educative possibilities of peer-to-peer filesharing.

this isn't necc. all true, but large bits of it are compelling.

also, sueing yr. customers = bad marketing

(which also = why they need duly chastened pr flacks to push the message)

the related argument is that the only "natural" component of the major labels' monopoly derives from the ever-presentness of their major artists (bought often with payola anyway -- so not like they're all decent legal sorts to begin with [and if it isn't bought with illegal paolya, it's bought with the legal sort via promotional mechanisms]) which is what lands them in a pretty impossible contradiction anyway -- they're trying to straddle making an artist *everywhere* AND making themselves the sole channel to access that art. the cudgel of big legal action is the only thing they have to try and keep that massive contradiction suspended.

other related issue -- the problem freelancers have where the only promos that are easy to get seem to be the ones you're not that interested in.

the major labels are trying to sell sand to the beach. it makes no sense, but they still wonder why no one's buying... music is so beyond oversaturated ...the age of highly priced music is clearly long gone, whether morality likes it or not. it's economics

what the RIAA calls piracy and what i call plagarism are, thankfully, two different things

And as far as stealing it, what am I stealing? A transient, ephemeral piece of data, without the art, without the quality of the copy (CD-Rs always skip in my car, for example). The sound quality still sounds worse to me even at the highest encoding rate. Meanwhile, I have thousands of records and hundreds of CDs that I paid cold hard cash for, and I have hundreds of ticket stubs for shows I would never have known about without the educative possibilities of peer-to-peer filesharing.

-- polyphonic (polyphoni...), April 11th, 2006.

otm

this isn't necc. all true, but large bits of it are compelling.

also, sueing yr. customers = bad marketing

(which also = why they need duly chastened pr flacks to push the message)

the related argument is that the only "natural" component of the major labels' monopoly derives from the ever-presentness of their major artists (bought often with payola anyway -- so not like they're all decent legal sorts to begin with [and if it isn't bought with illegal paolya, it's bought with the legal sort via promotional mechanisms]) which is what lands them in a pretty impossible contradiction anyway -- they're trying to straddle making an artist *everywhere* AND making themselves the sole channel to access that art. the cudgel of big legal action is the only thing they have to try and keep that massive contradiction suspended.

other related issue -- the problem freelancers have where the only promos that are easy to get seem to be the ones you're not that interested in.

-- Sterling Clover (s.clove...), April 11th, 2006.

also otm

http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~banks/images/logos/jolly-roger.gif

http://disney.go.com/disneyvideos/liveaction/pirates/downloads/desktops/POC_desktop2_small.jpg

That having been said, I pay for my music like chump.

http://us.movies1.yimg.com/movies.yahoo.com/images/hv/photo/movie_pix/walt_disney/pirates_of_the_caribbean__the_curse_of_the_black_pearl/keira_knightley/piratespre2.jpg

http://www.theseventhgame.com/playerimages/sanguillen_manny.jpg

The rest is related but not why I thought Zappa's words applied to this particular thread.

- Don't bother with the "okay, so I didn't buy the CD, but then I did go to their show and buy a t-shirt and totally give Darn31lle a blowjob." Maybe you did -- but face it, most of don't. I mostly didn't.

problem solved!

On the other hand, it should be noted that music companies have been ripping off artists for years, blocking access to "the system" by new and innovative artists for years, serving up pablum and rehashed formulaic junk that passes for music for years, using payola scams to promote their lame so-called music, and preventing listeners from hearing or getting access to all sorts of exciting and diverse music, by restricting us to tightly-controlled music outlets on commercial radio and in corporate record stores. The biggest crime is that the US music industry has destroyed the musical landscape in this country so completely, that many readers of this blog probably don't even realize how bereft our musical taste has become in this country, due to it's corporatization.

In a sense, P2P is an act of listener-survival, or civil disobedience, necessitated by the cultural starvation we've endured for decades under the total domination of the RIAA-affiliated music companies.

More on media domination:
www.inyourear.org

-johny radio

You may want to take a look around "this blog" before making statements like that!

In a sense, P2P is an act of listener-survival, or civil disobedience, necessitated by the cultural starvation we've endured for decades under the total domination of the RIAA-affiliated music companies

Which explains why soulseek and blogs are filled with material from small independent labels how? Also, isn't most P2P just people downloading exactly the kind of major label "lame so-called music" that you resent so much anyway?

re indie music, we at our indie internet radio station, killradio.org, use soulseek to get lot's of indie music, so yes it's there.

you may be correct, that most people are downloading major-label music, but that may be because that's the music that gets the most publicity-- it's all most people are aware of. but p2p has still made non-major label music available.

Pop music, like corporate news, has "dumbed down" our culture, so that listeners want and expect to most awful, prepackaged, simple-minded plastic mass-produced pop songs. The industry ripped off the styles and ideas of neglected artists. For decades, most Americans have been cut off from a universe of ethic music, art music, world music, punk (during its heyday), real jazz (not Kenny G), socially-conscious hip-hop (before IT'S corporatization) and so much more.

It remains difficult to impossible to find any music on FM radio which deviates from the corporate diet.

check out portable internet radios, which let you listen to internet radio without a computer:
www.inyourear.org

In fact in a world with low transactions costs, the 'winners' could completely compensate the 'losers' and still have excess benefit themselves - pareto improvement!

Say you value a CD at $10, it's selling at $11. a) No piracy, you don't get the CD - you are $10 poorer, the company is neutral. a) Now say you can pirate it for $0. You are $10 richer, the company is the same. How is situation b not better than situation a, yo? And yes, some people that pirated would have bought the CD. So, there's some redistribution. Yawn.

I say not only is downloading music illegally OK, but if you don't do it you are making the world worse off. Seriously, how do you people sleep at night?

Told you.

Johny, the only thing that's dumbed down anything is idiots who can't be bothered to read the boards they post to.

sorry, I'm at a desk job this week!

Johny, I'd love to think if the major labels and tv stations and radio stations started promoting really good shit then america would get educated and all of a sudden the music I'd like would show up on Total Request Live but it ain't gonna happen. The best thing to do is to try to support the artists you like and share it with others, and you know what, you can do that without ripping them off.

Nothing but GG Allin on the radio then?

dan, i'm not saying p2p is a solution to the problem, simply that there's a problem. i imagine p2p hurts indie artists the least-- according to articles i've read (this deserves documentation), some indie artists use p2p as a form of promotions.

"if the major labels and tv stations and radio stations started promoting really good shit then america would get educated... but it ain't gonna happen"

i agree with you that major labels and tv (& radio) stations are not about to start promoting quality material.

but i strongly feel that if they did, then yes, americans would become more sophisticated listeners.

Anyway, first of all, many people would disagree with you that major labels always equals crap. Why, that's why we have Sasha Frere Jones explaining Cristina and Justin to readers of the New Yorker. Anyway, a large portion of the population will always want watered down crap, and alwasy have. You want to give them access to this other stuff but in the end they'll make their own choice, and you probably won't be happy with it.

Love,
The Grammar Police

P.S. The Ethics Committee would like to point out johny radio's use of a false provocation argument, e.g. my local supermarket will not stock organic foods, therefore I am justified in stealing food.

P.P.S. ILM is not a blog.

i support the rule of law-- to a point. some laws are very wrong, and breaking them may be an effective PART of changing the system-- along with working within the system for change.

not sure i'm defending p2p-- just saying it's a symptom of a problem.

johny fever, i dig your sn.

Mickey, thanks for starting the thread. personally, i don't think it's a simple question with simple answers. downloading a song without paying is illegal (i think)-- but again, "illegal" does not necessarily equal "wrong".

i wish rosa parks was still alive to see how brave you are.

"don't worry about it grandma, you can play all the harlem hamlets you want because of this"

"you so sweet"

(can't help it, sorry)

And maybe there's no peace in this world, for us or for anyone else, I don't know. But I do know that I can YSI you the new Clipse record!!!

And I'm not anti-p2p, per se. I just can't stand it when people post logical fallacies on my blog.

might be of interest:
"the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) ...had become a dominant force in the music business through its licensing agreements regarding the sales of sheet music, piano rolls, and the recordings of Tin Pan Alley songs. A battle between ASCAP and the radio stations--whose programming had become increasingly committed to airing recorded music during the latter 1930s and early 1940s--spurred the latter to boycott ASCAP material and establish their own publishing firm, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI). ASCAP's history of ignoring black and country music compositions, combined with the tendency of many radio stations to target regional tastes overlooked by the major networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS) enabled BMI to secure a near monopoly on the material in these categories. The advent of rock 'n' roll, itself largely a product of the marriage of rhythm and blues and country, assured the continued dominance of BMI within the youth music market."
http://tinyurl.com/oj5p6

other authors have observed that rock and roll was created because the indie radio stations broke away from the big establishment firms.

dan, there's an example of music (black and country), previously suppressed (or imitated) by the dominant music provider (ascap), becoming hugely popular with americans once they got access to it.

today, local radio stations are being threatened with being swallowed up by Clear Channel and other national megoliths. if you live in LA read about it here:
www.inyourear.org

http://www.viva-radio.com

Then that artist will get paid. Maybe not a lot but it can add up. But ASCAP isn't controlling what gets played, nor really promoting it. It's up to the DJs, the publishers etc.

http://www.free-culture.cc/

If you talk to indie record labels that have been around pre- and post-p2p, the sales post-p2p are on average significantly less. People are at a bit of a loss on how to make money from p2p.

i dont agree that a viable alternative has to create a U2 success to prove itself. niche marketing is the real power of the web-- marketing to special tastes instead of the lowest common denominator.

direct link on the FCC hearings:
http://tinyurl.com/mvddx

pardon if i've repeated what others have said. i really want to read all 63 pages, but i'm running off to the Podcast & Portable Media Expo.
http://www.portablemediaexpo.com/

http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ahrpa/opa/kids/images/yousaypirate2.jpg

LOL

http://i177.photobucket.com/albums/w228/Tatseart/pirategp.jpg

Please take a toke off the bong for me.

it's a joint, but you're welcome.

trae in the house

this thread was a joke, right?