I've never seen a watertight defense for the whole "I should be able to freely copy content that takes millions of dollars to produce!"-sentiment.
Well, why not? You already can, completely legally, to a certain extent. There’s nothing to stop you recording stuff off the TV and burning it to DVD. There’s nothing to stop you using realtime sound capture software to record everything your computer plays on Spotify or Last.fm. People already freely copy content that takes millions of dollars to produce, and have been doing so for decades; the world hasn’t ended.
Clamping down on people illegally selling content they don’t own is one thing. But people downloading for personal consumption? I can’t fault it—in most cases it’s not as if they would have spent the money had downloading been impossible.
Sure, there are some arguments that make sense ("try before you buy", and then actually doing the buying part, something often forgotten by many of the pro-piracy crowd..), but those arguments are basically advocating a change in the business model of large entertainment companies. Giving consumers alternate (and more modern) ways of purchasing/consuming their digital content.
Uh, not only alternative and more modern, but
cheaper ways of purchasing and consuming digital content.
Why would I pay 79p for an mp3 on iTunes when I can have exactly the same thing for free now, and then if I like it, wait a couple of months and have it for half the price on an actual physical CD? The fact is that the music industry has been ripping off fans for decades, and now it’s having to deal with the fallout: music consumers don’t feel they owe record labels anything, and everyone has seen a breakdown or two of where the money goes anyway. I was looking at an artist’s website the other day, and he had his entire back catalogue available for free download right there on his site. He said that he received about 2p/track out of the 79p you would pay on iTunes; the rest went to distributors, managers, labels, iTunes, and goodness knows who else, so he would prefer you to have the music for free and buy a gig ticket or a t-shirt once in a while.
A model of "the content producer shouldn't earn a single cent for all their hard work" is never going to be a good idea. (not saying you advocate this, but you know..)
I don’t. Content producers will continue to earn money for their hard work.
The fact is that if you look at the figures, the illegal sharing of music and video is not actually a big problem for the music or film industries. The biggest downloading demographic is young people with no money. They download stuff that they would never buy—that they
could never buy. And most of the people I know who download music and films also regularly buy hard copy formats of the stuff they love best. What is happening is that people are hearing more music and seeing more films, but they’re not buying fewer CDs or DVDs as a consequence.
The other thing is that if I didn’t have access to illegally copied mp3s, I probably wouldn’t have bought any music in the last three or four years because I would never have heard it. The summary of
this excellent page about the effects of file sharing on the music industry makes an interesting point: “the 'bottom' 3/4 of artists sell
more as a consequence of file-sharing while the top 1/4 sell
less.” In other words, the obscure bands whose albums I and many others have downloaded are doing
better because of file-sharing. I would never have heard of Clare & The Reasons, DM Stith, My Brightest Diamond, Hanne Hukkelberg, Oh No Ono, Mia Doi Todd, Asaf Avidan & The Mojos, or Absynthe Minded if it hadn’t been for filesharing, and I now own CD albums by all of these artists, have been to see several of them live, and have even donated a considerable sum of money to one of them in order to help fund their next European tour.
The problem comes when Dr. X decides to write an extremely specialised book on the flourescent properties of Carbon Nanotubes, that only 20 people in the world are going to find interesting. At the moment, such specialised books are sold for ridiculous amonts of money (
e.g.) in order to pay for Dr. X's time.
Now, if everyone pirates Dr. X's book, he's not going to earn any money, and the next person with specialised knowledge will think twice before spending a year on sharing his knowledge with the world.
Do you think that the people who pirate Dr X’s book would have paid for it if they hadn’t been able to pirate it?
Also, if I can quote at length the excellent and entirely serious Oxford student newspaper
The Oxymoron,
“UNDERGROUND BOOK RING RAIDED
POLICE have raided and shut down what is believed to be the biggest book-sharing ring in the western world. OLIS was an invitation-only internet service where users could acquire books for free, sometimes even after they were in the shops. A year-long operation spearheaded by the Thames Valley Police culminated in a raid last night which led to the arrest of the head-user who is thought to be masterminding the ring.
Police uncovered an estimated 5 million separate titles hidden in underground chambers beneath the streets of Oxford. Preliminary investigations revealed that although most users only took material for personal use, some went further, with one scanning millions of manuscripts and subsequently releasing them online. A police spokesman confirmed the gravity of the issue, stating: “this was no ordinary book-swapping club, this was a full blown copyright library where users could freely borrow and copy from a large selection of titles.”
A criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site’s users.”
Aren’t library users pirating Dr X’s book?
