We've enjoyed the golden ages for a while now. OiNK is taken down, and now Demonoid is being restricted for the second time in 3 months. ISOHunt is now restricting access to US hostmasks as of earlier this week.

There are fewer and fewer places to hide. Instead of transitioning with their consumers, the recording industries of the world are frighteningly shoving resources into government agencies that are run by people who don't understand the system at all. Worst, there's no way to fight it. Yes, what we do is currently illegal. No, it isn't an enforceable law. Yes, it's based on corrupt and dated copyright laws. Will anyone listen? Nope.

What's sad is that I'm not going to go out and buy games and music all of the sudden. This won't encourage me to pay for products that I don't think are worth their market price to begin with. I'll just find another way to obtain the things that I want for the price that I feel is justified.

Your reasoning is bad. Just because you don't feel a product is worth a certain price, doesn't mean you can choose a new price. I just acknowledge that its wrong, and go from there. >_>

How is that bad reasoning? Consumers don't buy until the price is worth the product. 20 dollars for a CD is too much. 99 Cents a song is too much.

Put it this way, I don't download movies because I only pay 10 bucks a month and I can watch the movies I want, when I want them. If I could pay 10 bucks a month, or even 20 and then download any lossless album from any band, I'd do it.

Like I said in the other thread:

I typically buy from the artist. A few bands I listen to have their own small collective of artists and they help each other out.

For example RX Bandits have this label. They dont really care if their music gets downloaded, but they ask people to buy cds to support their artists.
http://mdbrecords.com/home.php


Am I going to download 30gb of music to "stick it to the man!" No. But seriously most of the time I download something, its so obscure I really doubt anyone would care anyway. I end up buying most of those cds anyway just cause I like album art.

Also I agree $20 for a CD is ridiculous. Buying from the bands label (MDB for example) will run you $10-$12.

Buying at borders though.... $20 or more! Good thing most of the music I buy doesnt get sold there.

But in order to get the non-mainstream bands, you're going to have to spend at least 20 bucks, plus shipping and handling. What's worse is that those bands are the ones that see even less income from those sales.

Im not sure how main stream you mean though. I can go to best buy and comfortably spend $10-$15 on a CD.

http://www.techspot.com/news/27687-the-pirate-bay-develops-p2p-protocol-to-replace-bittorrent.html
It's inevitable.

Still, it's not up to do to decide how much you'll pay for something. If you don't like the price, just go with out. Especially with games. If you pirate games you're just a jerk. Everyone else supports the costs of developments, you can jolly well do it to.

Read free? I'm with Greenboy.You cannot just say "this price sucks, change it." You either find a vendor who is willing to sell the product cheaper or you find the competitor of said product and purchase from them. It may or may not do exactly your needs demand. Such is the way in a capitalist society.

Yes, the RIAA/MPAA have used bully tactics to get their way. They do get away with that because the hair color of Congress is still white or skin colored. Don't expect that to change anytime soon. So, to get at the MPAA/RIAA, you attack the pocket book. Again, no dice there. There isn't enough demand for the competition to thrive and thus monopolies/oligopolies thrive. You get the demand for the competition against RIAA, and RIAA/MPAA companies will have to lower prices in order to compete or they lose money. This is basic capitalist economics.

You can't really ***** and moan about sites dedicated to stealing being taken down. Despite your objections to the recording industry, in all eyes of law and just plain common sense, you are indeed stealing something. You never paid for it. In reality the government is enforcing laws written since the Code of Hammurabi. ****, these closed sites are lucky that it's just lawsuits being filed and not criminal charges.

I'm supposed to be the hippy here. Why are other people going "YOU CAN'T LIKE, OWN MUSIC, MAN"?

Ah if you don't have a good private tracker by now you don't deserve to be pirating anything honestly. Private trackers are for people who aren't stupid, and usually stay up forever and a day, and come back constantly.

Public sites...well it was just a matter of time.

I'm pretty sure I don't have a lot of sympathy for people that are complaining about not being able to break the law anymore....

"This is too expensive! I know! I'll steal it!"

That's a stupid, and unfortunately, morbidly popular outlook on the ordeal. Music sales have risen quite a bit since pirating became big, and it's not just a "Hey I need to pirate this!" deal, it's more like "These guys are cool, I'll get some of their stuff." There's a lot of artists I would've never found/supported if not for pirating, honestly.

The internet is great for hearing new stuff, but there are plenty of ways to hear cool new stuff by free means, not piracy.

I think thats only part of it. The other part is that labels can be *******s to their bands.

Ticketmaster isnt the greatest example, but I guess it works kind of.
If you buy a ticket via ticketmaster you get charged something like a $7 convenience charge, which is just about half the cost of the ticket itself.

Same probably goes for cds. How much of that actually goes to the band? I mean seriously, Borders has OK Computer (radiohead) for something like $20. At Best Buy its a lot less.

Yes I'll complain if a CDs too expensive, but im not going to complain about a $10 cd. And again, if I buy from the smaller artist owned label that money supports the band directly.

So yea maybe its a "**** the man!" type attitude, but I'd rather my money go towards supporting legitimately talented acts rather than SOME of it going to them and the rest going who knows where.

Depends. When it comes to underground (real underground, not **** like Atmosphere and Sage, more like them when they were earlier on) rap then no. Ska not really. There's a lot of **** out there you can't hear "for free", and if your friend already has the song/CD then it's usually easier for them to send than find a free song for you to listen to online. Not every band has myspace.

I wonder if you could get sued if you pirated music, but donated the money you would have spent to the artist. I imagine it would be difficult to be convicted.

just like the new streetlight album, sure i thiefed it before the release date, but im still going to buy it.

They can shut down sites all they want.

They can't stop the signal.

/me sends landfish's IP to the FBI.

guy killed me with a sword

;___;

Isn't that weird?

Eh.

It's only a matter of time until the RIAA and MPAA die. They are illegal cartels supporting a completely unprofitable business model; they'll get hammered on one of these fronts eventually.

In the meantime just do what I'm doing: don't buy any music or movies. At all. Don't pay to rent. Don't buy songs on iTunes. Turn down the radio every time a commercial comes on.

I'm with dalf.

But I mean come on, there were places to hear new music before the annoying ******* of the internet turned up yknow?

It isn't stealing, though. If Kirby was stealing a CD, the store would have one less physical CD to sell. If he downloads it, no one has actually lost anything, they have only not gained. It's an important difference, regardless of where you stand.

1) If you can't find places to get non-mainstream CD's for less than $20 a pop, you're just uneducated. I'm very big in non-mainstream music and RARELY see an import over $20 unless it's some digipack collectors edition. Unless you import from Japan, but I doubt you do. There's many websites (besides your typical distributors) where you have access to your genre

2) Why do people feel $10+ for a CD is soooo expensive? From a musician's point of view, it costs a significant amount of money for recording in a studio, mixing, mastering, packaging, promotion, and all of the other costs. Plus the fact of the personal time commitment it takes to get it recorded. You get something I spend over a year of my life working on and putting paycheck after paycheck too, and you feel 0.99 cents a song is too expensive?

I really hope you get employed somewhere and get paid only if you're felt as being 'worth it'. Yes the label business is broken. But this mentality that you'll only pay for music at the price you want is retarded. Let me spend $5 a drink when I go out to a restuarant, but I can't spend $.99 for a song I can enjoy over and over.

[Quote=From Wiki]In the criminal law, theft (also known as stealing) is the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's freely-given consent.[/quote]

The music etc is technically the property of the record companies, musicians etc, and when you buy a cd you pay for said property/consent through a 3rd part. Taking it without paying for said consent is stealing unless the artists/companies actually go ahead and tell everyone just to download their products.

So if I 'obtain' someone's information and identity from online, I have not stolen it. They have not actually lost anything. They still have their identity, yes?

Wow, nice analogy, considering identify "theft" is a misnomer. It's not referring to the stealing of goods, but the masquerading as another individual for purposes of fraud. :downs:

So if I steal data.

It isn't really stealing.

Because that data still exists.

All I did was make a copy.




SF_Gold will be excited to hear this news.

I'm not saying it's right, Rob, I'm saying that copyright infringement is not the same as theft.

You can't take something that isn't physical. You benefit from it with out proper consent.



Identity theft is invasion of privacy, fraud, and a bunch of other really bad things. It is usually used for the purposes of stealing, though.

One could look at piracy as capitalism in effect... Most downloaders will admit that they would rather buy it than illegally download it, but the deal ($0, Whatever You Want, Anyway You Want It) is just so much better than competition's that the catch (It being illegal, or depending on the person it being illegal only in the unlikely situation that you are caught) just isn't enough to deter people.

Look at Spiralfrog. It's free, legal, and has a decent catalog. The catch though is that their all in WMA, at what I perceive to be less than the "standard" minimum 192kbs, covered in DRM (Though easily removed), and their download system is quite buggy. While bearable for me, I'm betting most of you probably wouldn't even consider it either because you're an audiophile whose ears bleed at anything below 256kbs VBR, because you have something that prevents you from fully using WMA files, because they don't have anything up for the artist you're looking for, or because the DRM conflicts with what you want to use it for and you don't want to bother going through the process of removing it.

Considering their both free, which is the better deal?

I know that I would rather download something illegally, for free, than buy it.

[edit] But I don't, because... well... it's illegal.

The physical part is just a medium, the actual content is still the same. It's like cutting open a bag of oranges and just taking the fruit. Leaving the bag behind doesn't make it ok.

That's a horrible analogy. We're not saying it's less illegal, we're saying it's different than theft.

The way I see it it's still theft.

[And yes, I do steal music, I'm a thief.]

It's you know.

Still just as bad.

Rob knows where it's at.