Stealing is Despicable

govnment Cheese!!!funding

I used to do it a couple years ago. My music was stuck in the stone age for the longest time because I was more of a public radio/talk radio junkie and I hated what was popular at the time. When music started sounding good again, I would download stuff every night and give it a listen to see if I liked it. For a short while I also did peer-to-peer sharing and that was probably the first thing I stopped doing cold turkey in all of this. I'll never go back to doing that again, its just plain wrong and I feel a bit creeped out that I even did it at all. My rational at the time was to search for favorite artists and then find similar music I hadn't heard of before. I have to admit, I did stumble across some good music that way, but it was still wrong.

If I found something good and I liked more stuff by the same artist I'd buy the CD - at one point I was getting 2 or 3 CD's a week which I would then rip for my MP3 player and work computer. The latter only had songs I'd ripped from the CD's. I think I have close to 80 CD's floating around from that period, which probably isn't all that much.

It turns out I like weird stuff - German pop, Scottish "We're not twee, really!" twee, Argentine folk, Japanese techno - not all that easy to find locally. Thank goodness for Amazon.

I'm not doing it anymore, and I think I've deleted almost everything I ever downloaded except for a few I keep intending to buy the CD's for (I haven't, so I don't even listen to them anymore, they're in a folder somewhere on my old, now-unplugged computer).

It was fun for a while, but the ethics of it kept bothering me to the point where I just plain stopped, and its easy enough to sample on Amazon, the artist's website or other services anyways.

I have a few textures I've photosourced from google images and heavily filtered, but most of what I have is from open sources like wikimedia or powerpoint or images which have been put into the public domain. I guess that means I'm not totally white or black but light gray fading to white.

i am not running a club or a business..and nobody can get the stream url unless i give it to them..so it's no more than me playing my cd player in my house or a store for background music..the online server is a relay.. my files are not sitting on the net in a server..
they tried to shut down free internet radio a couple years back..

another corporation move to control music and failed

seriously if i were to burn my songs from my cd's and stream them and people could record them ..they would get a hell of a lot better quality version than the versions of them i have downloaded lol

Ok, from what I think you are saying, is that the library gets government funding--Is that what is used to purchase the books in the first place?? My question was asking how does the author receive payment for the 100's of people that read that book through the library system?

hmmm. really can't answer that one, though it's possible it could fall under the realm of what allows used bookstores to sell used books and that the laws in place are to prevent 'reproduction' of works.

see you were doing what most do though..you found music you liked and went and bought it..
music you would have never been exposed to unless you had a channel to it..so really did you hurt anyone?

SL exposes us to all kinds of music around the world as well..
instead of using amazon..you should go to billboard for your samples..register there and you can play the whole album there..

plus you can buy there..

With a few rare exceptions, I pretty much stopped buying CDs years ago. I simply cannot see my way around paying 10-15 dollars for a couple of songs I like and a bunch of songs I don't. It seems completely senseless when I can simply buy and download the individual songs I like; and since Amazon has joined the ranks of music merchants who value fair use over digital rights management, I have no qualms whatsoever about buying my tracks from them.

Oh, and there is a LOT of free music available for download from Amazon. Sure, most of the artists are obscure, but there are some real undiscovered gems out there.

Even with the digital age, however, with more and more merchants selling downloadable music, we are still stuck in the album/CD paradigm. When you buy a CD, you typically pay around 10-15 dollars for about 10-15 tracks, roughly. A bulk of the cost of a CD goes toward paying for the physical medium, the process of pressing the music to the medium, the packaging, the distribution, the space on a store shelf, the store employees' salaries, and so on. With digital distribution, most of these costs are eliminated - yet we are still content with paying up to a dollar a track as if you had bought the CD itself. When stores continue to hang onto obsolete paradigms even though there is no financial reason to do so, is it any small wonder that music piracy is still so rampant?

ya i don't buy them anymore myself..i buy music from a few places on the net..i burn them to cd's for my jeep.. CD's are a ripoff because they are so cheaply made..

you can't collect them without putting them in a safe..15 to 20 dollars for something they hope you scratch the crap out of...
thats corporations for you..

lets charge more and make it cheaper instead of the way mainstreet used to do it..
quality that last for a lifetime..

Professional athletes, like American NFL, train constantly, hone their bodies into these machines of physical combat with average shelf-life of 4 years and the rare ones that make it 10+ years leave the sport with a broken body, permanent pains, limps, nerve damage, back damage, knee damage, necessity of prescription pain killers, and more. As much as i despise many professional athletes because of my intimate past with the field, i do respect what they do and think that when they risk being in a wheel chair for the rest of their lives that they deserve the 20 million dollar a year contract which the owner can obviously afford to pay.

With that said...

I don't agree with Mickey Mouse having what appears to what will be a 100+ year copyright/trademark registration.

All my software is legal or open source. In many cases I prefer open source alternatives, as opposed to the purchased software. (OpenOffice/Firefox/Filezilla/Paint.NET/etc.)

I own a couple hundred CD's and I have downloaded those songs onto my computer to listen to on my computer, in my MP3 Player, or put onto a MP3 CD for my car (more music on one disk). I don't distribute those songs to anyone else, they are personal use only, which is still legal.

I buy DVD's and BluRays, but don't copy them at all. I watch them at home, or DVD's on my portable DVD player. My computer is a pain when trying to play DVD's, keeps saying invalid format, even though I have the appropriate drivers installed. Go figure.

For SL, I have a number of freebies, which I assume were intended to be freebies. If I come across something that was stolen, I will remove it from my inventory after I find out and (eventually) replace it with a paid version. I have a number of paid items as well as my free ones.

I'm against stealing, but I do look for ways to avoid paying more than necessary when possible.

In the UK, our public libraries are mainly funded by local govts (the money is a mix of local and national taxation) and they would have a budget for buying books and other materials.

The fees to authors for loans that you're describing are paid via a Public Lending Rights system (PLR) here and in many other countries. Books are licenced for public library lending and a fee paid back to the authors depending on loan numbers each year. There's a Govt body that deals with working out and distributing the payments and it's based on a sampling from various libraries' lending statistics. Although it all sounds amazingly complicated it seems to work!

http://www.plrinternational.com/established/plradministrators/uk.htm

I can't say how it's done in the US - I think you have a separate system but presumably something similar?

--
Aes

I don't think an author is actually missing a sale each time someone borrows a book from the library, though, because that presupposes that, if I couldn't borrow the book from the library, I'd go and buy it from the bookstore. Generally, that's not the case.. if I couldn't borrow it, most of the time, I'll just not read it. And, similarly, if it's an author I like -- often because I've discovered his or her books through the library -- I'll buy that writer's other books anyway rather than wait for the library to get them.

Friends of mine who work in publishing have mentioned that my book-buying habits are pretty much the norm; they reckon the number of sales they make because people have come across their authors' works in the library well outweigh any sales they lose because the books are available on free loan.

The loss of income is primarily an ethical argument used to bolster the legal argument. It does factor into fair use, and can factor into damages, but it doesn't come into play by itself. It's the copying that's the issue (or other rights associated with copyright). The library isn't making copies, and there's no expectation that people are photocopying entire books.

As far as I know, libraries in the US don't pay anything to provide royalties to book authors.

Thanks so much for that info. I would assume that we probably do have something similar here in the US.

Ahhhh. . .so like free advertising, lol.

Hmmm. . .You're right, I hadn't thought of it in that way. So, in theory, it's not the same. Thanks for the information

Oh my! Aren't you striking a blow for the "little man" with your MP3 player and your car stereo and all your modern gizmos and OUR music and whatyouwill. The "legal leeches" do artists a favour; protecting them from pirates like you.
It's amazing you listen to the music at all considering how you obviously despise the artists.
So you wont mind if "they" steal your MP3 player? Don't call the police, coz obviously you can afford it and wont miss it since you also have a car stereo.
One poster assumed you bought your cds - if you did you can make a copy. If you didnt well, you know what you are.

Stop there.

I pay for movies and music I download - Amazon or itunes. That is all.

(No it's not I decided to add more.)

I do like how Issa does things, though. Why should the fatcat record corporations continue to exploit artists either?

http://www.sheeba.ca/store/home.php

She used to be called Jane Siberry.

P.S. Jig I do believe in unlimited personal use although I leave itunes things on itunes etc.

It's pretty simple.

If you don't like laws then try to get them changed.

In the meantime, if you break laws be prepared to take the consequences.

Pep (Discussing it here won't make any difference.)

In Canada, we pay 30% tariff on blank media to compensate copyright holders.

With this compensation, our courts have ruled that downloading music from the net is now legal as long as we burn downloaded tracks on the the marked up media.

Works for me

And if you're not down with that, I've got TWO WORDS FOR YA....

Library books, authors and illustrators of books do get paid lending rights. A friend is an illustrator of children's books each year she receives thousands of pounds in lending rights.

So does that mean that everyone buys blank media at the correct marked up price or do they seek out the cheapest blanks often sold at "discount stores"?

They didn't assume I brought my CD's they just actually read and understood what I wrote about buying more CD's.
And it's not YOUR music it's THEIR music and MY music

The RIAA isn't some faceless suited corporation that makes all kinds of money off record sales; it's an association comprised of music artists and industry workers, that represents the interests of music artists and industry workers. Like a union, if you will. When the RIAA brings a lawsuit it's on behalf of its members who wanted the lawsuit, and who actually do have something of a legitimate stake in selling music.