Tired of the pathetic rubbish spouted by the majority of comments
I'd just like to add my support for Smell My Finger and others who have chimed in. No, I am not in the pay of "The Man", just incredulous at the blatant lies, denial and stupidity that passes for justification of filesharing.
1) OK, so you find CD prices are high? Where does this end? Bread's a staple and some of it's over £1 a pop, shall we steal it because we don't want the bread companies to make profits? OK, the music industry is clunking and outdated, going direct to the artist would be great, but why do people extol this as a virtue only in the music industry? Going back to the example of bread, as everyone here hates companies, why not go direct to the farmer growing the wheat and buy direct from him and make your own bread? Naahhh, that's just like too much like hard work isn't it? Really, if you're honest with yourselves, you don't hate companies you just want the free ride? Cynical, moi?
2) Music isn't even an essential, if you can't afford it then tough. Cheap retailers (Internet, High St, and Supermarket) all now sell CDs cheaper than previously making purchases more attainable. OK "The Industry" do take a large wedge of the cash and the artist not so much. How does downloading the file for free really help the artist though? They used to at least get 3p (or whatever) from each sale, now they get 0p. With some artists having to bank roll costs towards video production etc they are effectively making a loss.
3) There is no contest to own all the music ever produced. Prizes will not be awarded to the person with the largest MP3 collection. Buy what you like, leave what you don't like alone.
4) "...a car drives by with music playing and that's sharing...will the industry sue them?..." Don't be an idiot. Sharing the actual music in a format that you can keep is massively different from a transient sound wave stimulating your aural faculty. If this does count as sharing though, and this is what you are so keen on protecting, why not listen to the radio (it's free!!!) and you can obtain as much music (for free!!!) as you want whilst listening. To really stick it to "The Man" why not invite your friends around to listen to the radio with you? Yeah, you're sharing that music now man and there's nothing those vile companies can do about it coz it's legal. Sticking it to the man, man!
5) Yes, there's always been piracy but it's been on a relatively small scale and so it hasn't threatened anyone's (artist and industry) profits to any great extent. The Internet, however, makes this more easy to achieve and so there's a massive threat. Example, a shop suffers 1 shoplifting a week. This isn't too bad, the extra cost of employing security measures (guards, tags, barriers etc) is too prohibitive to offset the loss from the theft. The shop then starts experiencing 5 shopliftings a week and suddenly employing additional security to ward off this loss is a worhtwhile investment. What else should the shop do? Lower prices to make it's products more attainable, protect its profits and employ security measures, or close down and tell everyone to go direct to the manufacturer any buy their stuff?
6) Wind your neck in. Coming up with spurious reasons as to why pirating\stealing\copying\etc is ridiculous. Just because you don't want it to be illegal does not make it so.
7) Legitimate uses of P2P. Yes, there are many. Perhaps the P2P community would like to police itself then? To the person whose a law abiding graphics designer; perhaps a community for sharing your works not associated with piracy would be a step in the right direction? If you align yourself with an illegal group you have no grounds for complaint if it is shut down. If you love P2P, for the love of P2P and not the illegal file sharing, then perhaps start policing yourselves. Kick out the illegal material from torrent sites or networks. Don't let the criminal element spoil it for everyone.
8) If you don't like the industry then do something proactive about it. Set up a campaign for cheaper music prices, no DRM, dealing direct with the artist, re-releases, etc. Raise awareness about this great injustice you so passionately care about! Except you don't really care do you? As I said at the beginning, you just want the free ride!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
