I really admire that, and it’s one step beyond what I do (I always buy merch directly from bands I like, I just bought two Grace & Tony CDs and a Dom Flemons CD this month). You’re helping make the world a better place by helping to support artists; Beauty Matters. Rock on, man!
Nah, most people I’ve asked aren’t thinking about it enough to need to justify themselves. Often they’re purposely not thinking about it, because they really have no way of knowing what the right thing to do might be (EEEVIL etc.) so they just do what feels good.
But as per the theft thing - and helping to discern the difference between illicit copying and theft - you know all the great artists ripped each other off right and left, right? In fact Howard Pyle stole woodcuts line-for-line from Durer, for example? And your favorite bands are almost certainly playing licks they did not invent first themselves? It really does matter to make the psychological step of realizing that it’s not theft, ripping off art truly is a significantly lesser evil than theft.
Yep. If I go into a person’s medicine cabinet rummage through, and walk out of the house with $2,000 worth of chemo drugs, that person could die, because they don’t have the drugs anymore. If I download $2,000 worth of software, music, movies, and books, someone might die, but probably not, because everyone who wants to buy the art and software legitimately still can, and it’s highly unlikely that I would have spent $2,000 on what I copied anyway. They never had my sale, so they lost nothing, while I still gained. The producer doesn’t experience a lost sale, nor are they deprived of their goods. Stealing, theft, conversion explicitly requires a scarcity and limited number of goods. It requires the economics of a zero sum game. But since copying has negligible cost, the zero sum game is completely broken, a victim of it’s age and inflexibility. And the current copyright system, originally set up to promote the arts and sciences and encourage further creative work, has now become unjust in the face of technologies it was never meant to address.
Patent especially makes me angry. It no longer works as a social contract. Originally, a patent was meant to contain all of the required information to create a novel, non-obvious invention. It was supposed to be so clear and thorough that, for instance, a patent on a specific kind of gun could be read by a gunsmith of average skill, and he could build a copy right from the patent. But today patents are really just saying “dibs! I called it!” on as vague an idea as possible. I defy anyone to actually write a decent program from most software patents because it almost never can be done. And whatsmore, a lot of patents are for things that can’t possibly exist anyway.
But I’m rambling. My point is, copyright and patent are in dire need of reform. Possibly they need to be scrapped and re-written to be made just and equitable again. As it stands they don’t serve their stated purpose anymore, and are used as a heavy bludgeon against the general public rather than the partnership with the public they were intended to be.
That’s disingenuous and you know it. Pick a random kid on a street corner and examine her music library, obtained entirely through downloading, whether legitimately or otherwise. Now take away the ability to download digital copies in seconds, with a single click of a button: suddenly it’s 1985 and you have a kid like me. Did I possess no music library since I had no way to obtain it for free by pushing a button? Hell, no. I saved money and bought it. “Never had my sale,” yeah right. You downloaded it for free because you could, so don’t pretend you wouldn’t have paid money for music if that were the only way to get it.
I still have a stash of cassette tapes copied from friends, from about 90’s. My dad had couple kilometers of reel-to-reel tapes, obtained in a similar fashion. (Todo: record to digital.) So it is not a new phenomenon.
Before downloads but after MP3s there was an era of copying harddrive-to-harddrive. Whole libraries were swapped that way.
It was however a more social thing back then. The downloading is removing the human factor, for better or worse.
I still mourn the original Napster. It is not difficult to find the most-wanted tracks regardless what the industry does in terms of crackdowns, and it was not hard even in the Age of Tape, but the gems and oddities from the far side of the Long Tail are now way more difficult to find than during its heyday. Though some now find their way to youtube…
No, in fact I didn’t. I went to The Wherehouse a couple times back then, where they had this rig called Personics, and they had a catalog from which you could choose singles to add to a custom mixtape (even then they were something like $0.99), and you’d end up with something like a 10-song custom playlist on a single tape.
I had one of these:
I had a case of cassettes I carried around with it, and I kept it half-full of blanks. I’d record somebody playing and then I’d use the double-speed copy function to run off tapes for anybody who wanted them… the fidelity was absolutely crap, and we loved it anyway because CDs weren’t invented yet. If somebody had a cool tape (commercial or not) that I liked, I’d ask them to let me run off a copy at double speed, and they usually did.
I still have the homemade 12-to-9 VDC car adapter I built for this thing, but sadly the tape drives died long ago (as did the Karmann Ghia I basically lived in at that time).
I still have something similar, not sure if it still lives. Does not have the front panel for ages and would need dust cleaning. Used to be connected to a CDROM-audio input on a soundcard, to listen to tapes while working or gaming, and fed from computer’s 12V via a Molex floppy adapter.
Also had the 2x copy function. I did not use it much because I usually had more time than tapes and the high-speed copy ate some of the trebles.
Unless you really are the size of the fella pictured in your avatar, that had to have been hideously uncomfortable!
At some point in 1988, San Diego’s 101.5 KGB-FM aired “Van Halen A-Z.” wherein they broadcast all of Van Halen’s catalog in alphabetical order. My girlfriend at the time, in an act of love that touches me deeply to this day, sat up all day recording it for me on her home stereo, editing out the commercials, and gave it to me as a surprise gift the next day. I thought that was really sweet and lovely of her, but I was so consumed by guilt when I listened to it that as soon as I could get the money together I bought the four extant Van Halen albums I didn’t already own at that point.
I recognize that that makes me somewhat unusual, and I hasten to add that I don’t believe that this fetish of mine makes me any better a person. We all just do what we need to do in order to sleep at night.
Yeah, I don’t know why any creator of any content I steal would be upset. 100% of my copythieving has been content I would never have purchased. I’ll go so far as to even drop the poor reason, b/c I have copied & enjoyed stuff I simply never would have purchased due to my personal tastes in what media I consider worth keeping & keeping it is the low bar for me, not playing/viewing/hearing/being unable to afford it.
If I keep it, it gets paid for. But don’t ask me to d/l a trial version of anything, I’ll try out the whole enchilada, thanks.
We all just do what we need to do in order to sleep at night.
I think this is the reason why we disagree. The current state of copyright (in the US at least) is pretty much universally recognized to have gone off the rails in an ethical sense. $250,000 per violation plus imprisonment is an unreasonable (I'd say absurd) punishment for doing an act that takes next to no effort and is a deeply ingrained instinct in humans. It almost reaches the same level as honor killings and acid attacks for premarital sex.
What I’m getting at, is there isn’t a logical reason for most people to feel bad about copying in this day and age. The rationalizations are plentiful, and are even true half the time. I mean, if you download Kanye West’s latest album, do you think he’s hurt by not having another $12? Maybe his feelings are hurt, but there’s practically no actual harm done to him, therefore there’s no reason to feel bad depriving him of the sale at an individual level. I could even feel just fine if nobody ever paid for copies of his work starting now. He’s rich enough as it is. I’m sure he can live comfortably for the rest of his life, even if he lived another few thousand years.
The rationalizations do break down with indie artists and developers though. But it’s still a morality based equation that is heavily influenced by human emotions, and not facts. Even so, I’m much more willing to pay a small gamedev I like $40 for their latest title of high quality, than I am to pay a AAA studio like EA $25 for their latest mass market crap everyone’s playing, simply because I don’t see any humanity in EA, whereas I have a good chance of interacting with and understanding an indie dev on a human level.
That’s pretty pessimistic. Most people are just lazy. If you provide a high quality product that is easier to purchase than to download, lots of people will pay for it. Just look at the kindle store, or steam for an existing example.
Well “society needs to pay” is another word for taxes. And what happens when some politician needs to scare up some votes, and YOUR tax dollars are paying for THAT FILTH?
