Posted on 02/13/2006 11:02:23 AM PST by nickcarraway
Really? So I can lend a book, borrow one from the library, or read a magazine in a doctors office, but if I lend or sell my i-pod I go to jail or incur heavy civil lability?
USE AN IPOD GOT TO JAIL
Sorry, but we just past the silly point here.
What the Nimrods from the RIAA have managed to do is to assure that doing business with them results in a basic civil rights violation....without making you sign a formal contract otherwise. IMHO, a precedent profoundly dangerous to capitalism.
the silly ones here are the RIAA...
These RIAA clowns are going to keep playing this "Weekend at Bernie's" routine until consumers begin to ACTIVELY look for ways to break it off in them.
Well, they care; they even offer online snitch forms if you want to rat somebody out. But they're mainly concerned with businesses that do things like buy one copy of Photoshop and then install it on 300 computers without paying for the extra licenses. For them, the average Joe unloading an old PC on eBay (which probably contains software two versions out of date anyway) is barely worth bothering with.
I'm all for recording artists making the money that they deserve, but the arrogance of the RIAA is just too much to take at times.
Never forget: The artists never get the money they deserve from album sales; it doesn't matter whether we're talking physical CDs or downloads. First off, for every song sold on iTunes (at 99¢ each), the record company gets 65¢ of that, without lifting a finger; it's purely a rights fee. Of that, the artist gets about 9% or 10%, so we're talking about a nickel. (Most of the rest of the 99¢ is eaten up by costs; Apple as the company that's actually providing the service, has to pay for everything out of its own pocket: hardware, bandwidth, personnel, etc., and has to eat the fees for each transaction charged by the credit card companies; in the end, they're lucky to get 7¢ to 10¢.
But of course, in the end, the artist usually never even sees that nickel. Most recording contracts are designed essentially as loans from the record company to the artist. Yeah, you get "signed", but the record company is only fronting you the money to record the album, publish it, promote it, etc. Until and unless you meet some pretty high sales targets (and most don't), you not only never see a penny, you often end up owing the record company money.
So don't feel sorry about the poor artist the next time you see someone burning a copy of a CD. If you really want to support them, go to one of their concerts; that's where they get their take. Or just buy him a cup of coffee the next time you see him walking down the street; that alone will give him more profit than if you bought a dozen of his CDs.
Yes, it does.
The difference is that the HBO movie was copied off of HBO without paying any additional fees for the right to license the movie for home use. The songs on the iPod were bought at $0.99 each from iTunes. If I have 1000 songs on my iPod, that's $999.00 that is taken from my pocket and simply disappears if I can't resell the rights to the songs along with the iPod.
I like that :Recording Industry Ass of America (RIAA)
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
I would take the theory behind this wording to mean that they didn't want the Authors and Inventors to quit after making one thing. Progress is only promoted if the creators are forced to make something new every once in a while in order to earn a living.
That's exactly right. The patent and copyright laws at one point were enabling inventors and artists a good living. Now the middlemen, producers who cobble together a distribution network and saturate markets with cheap, inferior pop-crap, are the ones who really benefit.
"Does difficult enforcement of a law equate to moral justification for breaking it?"
No, of course not. I didn't mean to imply that it did.
Giving the music away for free....now that might work!
Therein lies the fundamental problem: the industry wants to have it both ways, taking the position "you bought a license" when it suits them (i.e. when you sell media secondhand) and taking the position "you bought the physical media" when that suits them (i.e. when you have to buy the same thing all over again because the original media became obsolete).
That has the same effect on public respect for copyright law as speed traps do on public respect for traffic law.
I've heard of bosses stupid enough to do that and treat their employees like crap to the point where they were actively looking for ways to get the SOB in trouble (and, of course, they quickly happened upon the snitchsite). I wonder how people like that summon up the neural processing power to keep inhaling and exhaling every five seconds.
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