With the spread of the internet, we have seen a massive rise in copying or "piracy". I remember in the late 90s when Napster was toted as the death of the music industry. A few years ago it was The Pirate Bay, only this time it was killing the film industry. Lately the cry has been against the video game pirates, with programmers forcing draconian DRM software into their games. Software that only hurts the people that actually buy the games because it forces them to jump through hoops and does nothing to actually prevent piracy of the game.

After all this, after this decade or more of copying and piracy of all forms of media, we still have that media. The music industry is still alive and kicking. Movie studios are pumping out bigger budget movies every year, and video games are still produced, with a noticeable addition of many more independent developers getting their games to light. Games like Braid didn't come to the mass market 5-10 years ago. Now it is a name most every gamer knows.

If the sky has really been falling the past 10+ years, shouldn't we have been hit with something by now?

I'm actually going to disagree here. Stealing music and the lost proceeds does hurt people, but not the ones you typically think about. Fuck the Madonnas and Britneys - they really aren't hurting if you bit torrent yourself an entire MP3 library (or home tape the radio) However, there are hundreds of other artists and technicians who have a direct stake in the sales. How about the composers? Somebody writes all the trash that the pop stars sing, and you can bet the amount of artistic input from most the actual performers is next to nothing. Instead, the composer is counting on his 7 cents (literally) from each CD sale with his song included on it (remember, most songs don't get radio play time so radio royalties, which are paltry anyway, can't be counted on). Same goes for the nameless sound engineers, recording techs, and session musicians who count on a healthy industry.

Also, I don't think the implied comparison between home taping and modern digital formats is a fair comparisons for a number of reasons.

1 - When home blank tapes came on the market, I believe that the recording industry did negotiate a royalty deal whereby they received a small portion of every blank tape sale - this helped cover the record sales losses. However, nobody is receiving a royalty payment for every "blank MP3" that is distributed.

2 - Taping the Top 40 off the radio is inherently messy - shorter tracks, announcers cutting in, commercials, etc.... There is still a very clear incentive to go buy your favorite artists for the higher audio quality free of distractions. However, MP3 reproduction is pretty darn perfect with very little quality loss - - save me the reply about MP3 quality vs loss-less formats.....the average listener can't hear and doesn't care.

3 - Also, only 1 or 2 tracks from an album may receive radio play time - if you are taping from the radio, it is nearly impossible to get an album recorded. However, in under 5 minutes I can have any album I want, in its entirety, on MP3, and an entire artists' library is not out of the question.

Now, I am not saying the recording industry isn't shit stupid for their resistance to digital media for so long, and I'm not saying they aren't complete ass holes for suing college kids for more money than they will ever earn because they put their MP3 collection up on Napster. Also, I know the whole argument that having access to free music will encourage someone to go out and actually buy the albums they like. However, the numbers don't lie - CDs sales are tumbling, and the lost revenue is not made up for through legal digital sales. Plain and simple, it is stealing, and there are a lot more (middle class and nameless) people counting on a paycheck from RCA than simply the front man recording "artists." Yes, if the industry finally gets its act together, they could offer legitimately compelling digital sales, but until then, the little man shouldn't pay the price for record executive dip-shittery.

Avoiding the DMCA issues (unfortunately as said before, its a broken law and YouTube has to act like a dick because of what it dictates) YouTube still has other problems in usability that has come up recently.

My biggest gripe is that "Whats Related" on the side bar AND at the end of the video no longer shows ratings anymore. Far too often I've clicked on a video thats just spam with lots of views, but if I saw its 1 starred rating I could have avoided it.

Google paid alot of money for the site, and its still burning through money unless things have changed recently through the extra advertising I imagine they are worried more about making the site finally turn a profit. YouTube got popular fast because honestly it had lots of stuff that it should not have had in the first place (Napster syndrome?) but once they got rid of it all, it became a site with a very low signal to noise ratio. Clearly, there is still good material left as evidenced by the sift here but finding it can be a pain in the ass.

Probably a good reason to say why I look around here alot more than just randomly browsing YouTube.

oh yeah! one of my favorite bands.
btw all credit goes to Napster for allowing me to discover new music.
cheers!

uh....no. I have an ipod, and have on it all the crap i downloaded in grad school from napster. They have also "unlocked" their format so that they can be traded and played anywhere.

I've got nothing against zune, though.

TPB is going the same way as Napster. Unless the new owners actually manage to create a business model that people actually want to USE, instead of just turning it into a lame copy of iTunes.

Also see:

http://www.videosift.com/search?q=napster+bad

Like all issues, Piracy is not black and white and I find that people arguing for either side are frustratingly dogmatic about pointing out arguments that only support their side. Ironically, the people that I've seen that argue from a wider perspective are the people that set up and run piratebay.

As an example, I often see people citing the following in favour of piracy:

1. 'Piracy' as try-before-you-buy to prevent getting defrauded by lying marketers.
2. Piracy allows people to make use of works where the user would otherwise be unable to pay for them.

On the first note, if you're being realistic it's a nice ideal but one that isn't representative of the whole truth. I have downloaded games from the piratebay and other sources; played them through to the end and thoroughly enjoyed them. Often, I have then not gone on to purchase them. I would imagine the same is true for many people who give this argument, as well as those who don't.

On the flip side, I have purchased said games where the game gives me a large amount of replayability and I continue to play it; or where the games has online functionality that requires a purchased key.

However, I should point out that I have also paid for shareware with the exact same reasoning. Software and games that are legal to copy, distribute and use freely where payment is optional, that I have then gone on to purchase.

On the second note, being 'unable' to pay for them is contextual. Like everyone else I have a budget (be it $40/£40 or a bazillion cash monies). For each individual, this budget is quantifiable and correlates to a specific amount of possible purchases and profit made. Being unable to pay for something may not mean that I literaly don't have the money to pay for game X, but that I don't have the money to pay for game X and movie Y and have chosen instead to pay for game X and pirate movie Y instead.

This leads to arguments against piracy:

1. Piracy is theft.
2. For each copy sold, an amount of profit has been taken away.
3. It's the people at the bottom of the industry chain that suffer the most.
4. If nobody paid for intellectual property, nobody would create it.

The first argument has been made many times, and countered with the fact that stealing results in somebody having less of something; which leads on to the second point.

However, as I pointed out, people have quantifiable budgets; and I believe that people spend their gaming / software / entertainment budgets (for that's what defines them). There's a mistake on the part of people who are against piracy in imagining that there is somehow an infinite consumer budget for their property. Meaning that for every copy of a $40 game pirated, they have lost $40. But if my budget allows for me to purchase two games, and I purchase two while pirating two then I have given my entire budget to the games industry. It's not possible for them to have received double my budget, therefore they have not lost half of it regardless of what I do.

I'll repeat the point: I have given my entire budget. What more could somebody who provides a service want? The fact that I gave that budget to person X and not person Y has no bearing on the effects of piracy and is more about the quality of the product which lead me to my purchasing decisions.

I can't imagine that all of the people downloading from piratebay are stockpiling their money into a giant vault with a 'Money we didn't use to pay for intellectual property' label on it.

Going back to points made by the guys who run piratebay themself, along with many individuals with their eye on modern forms of distribution; the above misconception and imaginary infinite budget comes from a dead capitalistic culture where distributors (agents, publishers, managers and other middlemen) have come to assume that payment for creativity is somehow a virtue and not a benefit to be grateful for.

By the same logic, I should start creating simple matchstick men; or drawing squares on paper and wonder why I can not sell them for money (although Martin Creed may beg to differ).

Making profit on something that you have created is a boon, and should not be taken for granted. If you fail to sell something in a world of digital distribution then you have to change either what you are creating or how you are distributing it.

Another point that is often unmentioned is that; in terms of intellectual property (rather than a physical manifestation of work) your sale is based entirely on limitation and restriction, rather than production. You are taking profit on providing the service of not stopping somebody from making a copy of your work; rather than taking profit for creating a copy of your work. This is what licensing, patenting and copyright is all about.

For those who say that it's the people at the bottom of the industry that are hurt the most from copyright infringement (the people who actually do the work), I propose that this isn't a symptom of piracy at all and is entirely about how companies own, sell and trade intellectual property, and how corporation and public companies obey their bottom line. If their sales are hurting, they recoup their costs by hitting the people at the bottom while protecting the incomes of those at the top. This is an entirely different subject of wrong that would take us way off topic and is in no way limited to the effects of piracy.

However, to say that entire industries will die if people stopped paying for them is, in fact valid. So lets imagine for a moment that we live in a world where there is no copyright law; no intellectual property or patents. Is this a world without music? A world without movies or games? In that world, the first thing that would happen is that people will start paying other people to make these things; and that might just be a world where people pay other people for creating something that they want, rather than paying a middleman who takes the largest cut of profit using a retroactive 'license' for some sub par product that they bought from someone else and then marketed as good.

In a world without the expensive middleman, artists can take more risks; independants who work for pleasure rather than profit can thrive; and the enthusiast can sell without trying to satisfy a middleman's arbitrary bar of statistical sellability for a publishing deal.

With Radiohead, NIN, iTunes, netflix, steam and the slow rolling back of DRM, it's a world that we are heading towards; and a world that the piratebays and napsters helped to create.

Look how the persecution of Napster increased the media exposure of file sharing to people who didn't know about it before.

Same thing will happen here.

>> ^CaveBear:
Okay, let me do a closer analogy.
1. I hack every users computer on the sift and find each persons credit card number.
2. I build a website called "Steal Sifters Credit Cards" that points to your credit card number.
3. Since the website is so popular, I make serious revenue from ad placements.
4. A bunch of mafia guys go to the site and get your credit card number.
5. The Mafia guys go on a spending spree, and you pay.
You're saying that I did nothing illegal? Maybe this exact scenario is not spelled out in current laws, so the prosecutors have to to use existing laws and push their interpretation. Do you follow the letter of the law, or the Intent? The name of the Pirates Bay alone shows their Intent.


That is not a valid analogy. The Pirate Bay does not hack anything, they do not rip movies off DVDs, or games, or TV shows, or anything else.

To correct your analogy, it would be more like this:

1. I notice that people's Credit Card numbers are easily found through Google, Yahoo, and other search services. (Of course they're not, but just for the analogy, go with it.)
2. I find this fact entertaining, so I make a web site that makes searching even easier.
3. The site gets popular... and so on.

Another way of looking at it is this: I'm walking down the street and I notice that the back of an armored car is open and money is within easy reach. Of course it is illegal for me to take the money, but is it illegal for me to stand there and point at it? How absurd.

The Pirate Bay is not stealing anything, and any information found on their site can also be found through many other search engines.

Even if you can shut them down, other sites will simply absorb the traffic and do the same thing. Or another digital file share system will come along. Floppy disc -> FTP -> usenet -> Napster -> Gnutella -> eMule -> suprnova -> Pirate Bay -> ?

Services like The Pirate Bay highlight the need for a paradigm shift in digital distribution. If you lose money due to the theft of your video games, then you need to come up with a better business model, one that takes into account modern internet usage.

Dick Dale is speaking from the perspective of not only one of the worlds great guitarists and musicians, not only from the perspective of someone who basically started the genre of surf guitar music, but also from a highly respected infamous artist.

Most people are not and will never be where he is.

I am glad I'm signed to a major. They have the PR and distribution tentacles that wrap around the globe, something I could NEVER do on my own. I am now on Amazon (in every country), iTunes, Bleep, Napster, Rhapsody, Starbucks, and every other major music outlet around the world. Again, something that almost noone could DIY.

Giving away a bunch of mp3's on myspace (or your own website which noone will ever look at) is a fools errand. It's just more noise to an ever-expanding signal. The trick is breaking through that fuzz, and getting some attention which is nearly impossible to do on your own. There are exceptions to this rule, (and I'm sure someone will say, "oh yeah, but The______Band made it just on their MySpace page!!) ... but it's pretty much "The Rule".

Bands have always given away their music for free. We call them "Demos".

I can say for years that I too detested iTunes for the DRM. But after a while, and given my patience with computing (which led me down the path of working in IT) I kinda gave in, bought a second hand iPod Nano, and have been happy since.

But to answering your questions:

1. I consider the old experiment of putting a frog in boiling water vs cold then slowing boiling them to death. The idea is the frog gets use to latter and won't jump out even when it's near death.

The RIAA, on the other hand, reacted like the former when presented with Napster. It existed, almost literally, under their noses. They had no "warming up" period to the idea of digitally available music. Because of the initial knee-jerk reaction they whole of the association is still reeling from the notion that anyone could rip them off in a few clicks. The slowness is due to the hard coding of the idea, in executive heads, that the control of the physical media the music is listened to on is paramount. Given that you can rip tracks from a CD or convert files from one format to another and from one device to another, this isn't possible. Draconian is my usual word for mentality because of this. They missed the boat for the digital age and are slowly dying at an industry because of it. A very slow death, but a death nonetheless.

2. All that above being said, your options right now are limited.

• Buy CDs, use software to legally rip them into mp3 or wav (windows media player can even do the former if you'd like automatically). Then store the CDs away for safe keeping. I've been doing this off and on for years myself and have quite a collection of MP3 files to show for it.
  
• Find the limited websites out there that sell DRM free music. I won't list any personally because I find their selection not worth buying from.
  
• Become a digital miscreant and convert files out of their DRM state. Out here in the states that violates the DMCA (Section 1201 if you are wondering. It signing into law is the only action I have yet to forgiven Bill Clinton for, and I even forgive him for the whole lying under oath about blowjobs). I cannot really get you in the right direction on this other than to tell you to google for something... gah, I can't remember... the HYMM of our fathers PROJECT makes for an interesting REQUIEM.

I was seaching for "Porn music" back in the crazy Napster days of 1999, and saw "Girls of Porn" turned up in my search results. This is how I discovered Mr. Bungle.

Money GOOOOOD!! Napster BAD!!

http://www.campchaos.com/blog-archives/old_cartoons/napster_bad/

Upvote because I love this song dearly. Plus, while searching for it on Napster (back in the day), I found Esthero's "Heaven Sent," which introduced me to the wonderful world of Trip Hop.