I remember the days where computers were still only for business purposes...Back then we had taperecorders and vinyl records...Ofcourse we taped all of our records and made our own potpourri of beloved songs...we exchanged tapes ofcourse to not go broke on buying records and nobody saw this as theft. Nowadays, you just copy to CD, rewriteable or even to DVD...Now everybody is starting to try to prevent all this, we start to copyright everything and try to be as quick as possible to fine someone who broke copyrights. The incredible hunt has started, I think back of the days of McCartyism now...I might copyright my housebricks...windows...limbs...eyes...fingers....paintings...selfmade clothes...gardens...plants...new seedlings...actually everything. And the higher prices are set the more I am willing to buy copies from my neighbour of music CD's, software etc... yep, let's flame away

Oh we knew it wasnt legal by law, we just didnt see it as theft. It wasnt a stealing of music, put it on an album to produce and redistibute on a large scale...It was to lower costs.....The thing is that prices stay high, not because of common guys like you and me copy some stuff, it is because organized crime is making lots of money by redistributing artists works...And that happens in all branches: expensive clothes, jewelry, music..you name it... I tend to adress that as a much bigger problem than just us copying a few songs. When it comes to artwork, and I mean the famous painters, lots of paintings are fake and just hang in museums and we admire the greatness, and the incredible worth it represents yadda yadda...Sometimes genuine ones get stolen and then miracallly found back again, and 10 years later someone finds out its a fake...I agree with you it can't be solved T-Man...What I wanted to say is, that most of the time industries point towards the common civilians that don't do much harm, but are easily seen as the big thief, while hundreds of thousands of dollars are made by the "mafia" that copy everything what brings in money.

About Napster: Napster was finally bought by a German company called Bertelsmann. It was seen as a new tool for customers that wanted to download music for low costs and then burn it themselves on CD. Somehow, the company wasnt able to start this new experiment after the success of Napster when it was a free tool to exchange contents from computers worldwide. I guess there were too many legal issues around it and perhaps wasn't an advantage for the music industry. I don't know. Together with the fall of Napster, Bertelsmann ceases to maintain its large internet media shops and withdraws from the scene. Bertelsmann never made any profit from its online business.

sometimes you aren't able to regulate processes that start en masse

I mean here sometimes one isn't able to etc... I keep on mistranslating

LeCrayon;

The difference with Napster and the like is degree, not kind. With the advent of Napster, what was once something you did with a few friends, (every bit as illegal but extremely limited in scope) became something you did with thousands of strangers. Where before it was unlikely that a bootlegged copy of an album would go farther then ten people, now thanks to file sharing it, could go to ten thousand. Who needs the Mafia? With peer-to-peer file sharing, the common civilian has better distribution channels than the Mafia and without all the overhead. Your argument would actually equates the common civilian with the Mafia and, in regard to pirating, you'd be right.

And to pick nits with your reductio ad absurdum, the piano maker didn't invent the piano he just built it. That would be like Ford trying to license the automobile

Corporate mergers have reduced the entertainment industry to a few immense names, each with the lobbying and legal resources to buy both the destruction of anyone who differs with them and the legal means to hold onto those victories. They throw dissent out with their lawyers, and bolt the door with their lobbyists. Does anyone want the entertainment industry equavalent to De Beers?

To think this whole thing has been about file-sharing is infantile. Do you really, really think that mandating how media is created and distributed doesn't give them the ability to hamper the competition? This is a method by which the entertainment industry will cement themselves as a necessary step in the process of creating for-public entertainment media, ensuring them an untouchable amount of control of newcomers, under the guise of an (RIAA, MPAA)"association" (mafia style syndicate).

picture it for a moment.

"No one cometh to the consumer except by me... We'll need a licensing fee if you want to be able to play it on our CD players, and the file format is proprietary, so cough up for that, too. Oh, and if you want commercials and maybe a bit of product placement, you'll have to deal with our network television and motion picture divisions. If you want a video running on our music network, you'll need to give us the right to use it on the next Dawson's Creek spinoff... Welcome to the entertainment industry, here is your complementary jar of petrolium jelly"

Miraculously, against the tide of hateful piracy, Sony has had a revenue record-destroying year in the first 7 moths of 2000. One Sony executive was quoted as saying they would have been very, very pleased if their revenues for the first 6 months had been all they made this year. What they say to their stock-holders and what they say to lawmakers seems to be very, very different.

Napster is dead. Will I buy more music? I used to buy over a dozen CDs a year, even (especially?)when I downloaded music with Napster. I haven't bought a single one this year. When I see a record store, music isn't the first thing that crosses my mind, instead I have a knee-jerk reaction to not buy their product. Not a week goes by that I don't hear about how they are lobbying for the right to hack my compter, DOS attack my IP address, include shrink-wrap EULA on books, and various other products, etc. How's that for advertising? I don't trust subsidized, extorted popular radio, I don't trust MTV, and frankly the thought of seeing something new and rushing out to buy it feels like some sort of consumer mind rape.

Software developer geeks can take the high-road on Slashdot messageboards all they want, but the efforts they are cheering on are solid precedents that and and will be used to stifle open-source and IP rights in the coming years. When hardware-level intellectual propterty protection and the hardships of legal (licensing) compliance prevent the average person from developing an OS, or a skinnable app, or making a indy album, or an indy movie, then what was gained by the creaton of the internet in education and openness will be dead for ever. This is soo much like the middle-ages guild system of economics it makes me want to puke.

Wanna work? You better join the RIAA, or SAG, or the Baseball Player's Union, and be ready to pay licenses for stuff that no one should own, because free market competition is dead. RIP

should read: "revenue record-destroying year in the first 7 months of 2002."

for some reason every year is 2000 with me now...

This is a guy that made an app that might easily have gone unnoticed had there not been IMMENSE demand. When in history has there every been demand for a technology that didn't somehow appear soon after to fill it? The demand is the issue, and all the counter-intuative reasoning and fascist oversight by the industry will not make the slightest headway in addressing the actual reason for the demand.

A venue was created and users did with it what they wanted. What they did speaks volumes, imho. For every indignant rant about stealing, there were thousands of understood exactly what they were doing. How does one weigh crime on that scale? If tommorow tens of millions of people simply walked out of stores without paying, what would we do about it? Jail them all, or address the cause? That is essentially what happened with Napster, and yet somehow the software is to blame.

Napster wasn't a cause, it was an effect. It was a natural response to an unnatural economical environment. Robin Hood and countless other historical figures were theives, too, and yet somehow we don't use those myths as moral stories against stealing. To address our cultural loathing for theft, and ignore that many times such things are winked at, is telling half the story. There is a lot of winking going on, should it be ignored?

If Mr. Fanning is lauded it is because millions of people got *joy* from the software he made. Is that to be overlooked? Should it be overlooked that people from all over the world were enriched musically when they might not have ever had the resources to otherwise? To villify him for the phenomenon is to completely ignore the millions that used his software and continue to use alternatives.

Oops, it didn't appear as I hoped it would.
This year's September is already showing signs of being much better than last year's!

Robin Hood and countless other historical figures were theives, too, and yet somehow we don't use those myths as moral stories against stealing.
I never remember Robin Hood trying to profit from his ability to steal from others. I also think there's a difference between taxes one are forced to pay and music one isn't forced to purchase.

If Mr. Fanning is lauded it is because millions of people got *joy* from the software he made. To villify him for the phenomenon is to completely ignore the millions that used his software and continue to use alternatives.
Millions of people receive joy from pirated software as well. In fact, the majority of people that I know love free software, but that doesn't make it right. Besides, I'm sure that people had the resources to go to a music store or a Wal-Mart or a Target and purchase a CD.

Messiah:

"What, you can't afford music? Go to wal-mart and be satisfied with what you get. Sorry, but you have been designated this particular selection because of your existence within this geographical and economic demographic. Here, again, is your complimentary jar of petrolium jelly."

While I am sure that Wal-Mart is the great humanist answer to all financial struggle in your locale, it has a sad selection of music, and no validity at all outside the US. ( a rather ethnocentric point, I might add ) If you want to boot-scoot or listen to the backstreet boys, sure, go to wal-mart. A free market is about giving people what they want, not restricing their choices.

It doesn't matter that people don't *need* music. They think they do. Monkeys don't *need* to have bright pink asses to mate, but somehow it has translated itself into the process. People covet, and people need to have and enjoy what other people have and enjoy. Covetousness drives your economy and puts food on your table, like it or not.

Zachary :
People will simply not be ruled by these morality statments. If demand outweighs supply, products and services get cheaper and more available over time to match the demand. This isn't happening because pricing and availablity in the entertainment industry is completely artificial.

The arguments being presented here sound almost like conservative Christian dogma. "Right is right, and it doesn't matter if the whole world disagrees. Strait is the Gate..." Oddly enough, things tend to change from time to time.

Go ahead and make Mr. Fanning out to be some big, evil baddy-waddy, and ignore the fact that tens of millions of people had no moral qualms with using his software, world-wide, and enjoyed the hell out of it. Sure, you are discounting the practice and opinions of millions of fellow human beings, but that is the modus operandi of most moralists. If everyone agreed, it wouldn't seem so smart and special.

this argument has been done-to-death, and it always comes down to personal belief. If it wasn't reasoned into you, I can't reason it out, so I yield the field.

bakerstreet: There are also stores that cater to people outside of America. What about online music stores? Those existed before Napster, and they still exist. Therefore, even if Wal-Mart or Best Buy or any other store with music didn't exist in their country, they still had online stores.
How is monkey anatomy and an uncontrollable desire related? Anyway, how does wanting something so badly that one feels they need it an excuse to steal something? Also, how does stealing drive the economy? One would think if people stopped paying for services and goods and demanded that they all be free, that it would hurt the economy.

OK, here's a few thoughts addressing a few issues that were raised.

20 years ago, yes, we made tapes for our friends. Yes we knew it was illegal, but then again a lot of things are illegal even if we don't think it's wrong. J-Walking is illegal but everybody does it without feeling guilty. The difference between sharing tapes and P2P file sharing may be in the volume. Sharing a tape with a few friends was illegal, but if we had made mass production of our tapes and distributed them to hundreds of people, then our illegal activities would have been a lot less trivial.

Everybody wants free beer. But what makes the success of files sharing is its facility and the lack of danger. If anybody could walk into any records store and take all the CDs they wanted without any risk of being recognised or caught, you can be sure there would be millions of people doing it. So the fact that there is "demand" does not make it right, since the "demand" is nothing but the desire of getting everything for free, as seems to be human nature.

On the other hand, theft goes both ways. The RIAA is nothing but legal mafia, both to the artists and to the consumers. They are thieves. Remember when records and tapes use to be $8 to $10? Then they came up with CD's and suddenly the price for music was $20-$25. The argument made sense: at the beginning there was not enough demand and therefore the cost of production was higher. The RIAA promissed that prices would go down to that of tapes and records once the demand gets higher. Well, hello! It never did. That's for theft towards the consumers. Do you know that most artists (except the handfull of top 10 artists) gets approximately $1 per album sold? the other $19 goes to the label. I understand that the record label has to pay for the promotion, the production, etc. I understand that they take a risk and often end up not making their money back. But so does the mafia when they lend money. An artist is tied via contract to its label and is not allowed to distribute his songs on his own. To be, that's organised crime. I'm all for giving to the artist all the money he deserves. I wish I could just write a check directly to the artist's name, but I can't do that, because the mafia is there to prevent it.

I don't buy music. On average, I buy 1 album a years or so. Music is just too expensive anymore. The same goes with movies (theaters). I just can't afford those things anymore. Ironically, if the price of music cames back down to a normal price of say $10 per album, I would probably spend 10 times more on music than I do today. I can't bring myself to spend $20 on a single album, but I would probably spend $100 on 10 albums over the course of a year.

I completely agree with you migellito on your answer to the RIAA. Besides emusic, there's also IUMA. Although such sites don't contain music from the most popular artists, they do contain music from artists that might be as good, if not better, and if supported by more people, might actually send a message to the RIAA without sinking to or below the RIAA's level.