Really good opinion piece on PC piracy

[Ail]

Lord N said:

cleveland124 said:

Lord N said:

 

1I have yet to find one article where a company is praising piracy for their profits.  But feel free to post some.  30 billion illegal downloads.  How many would have purchased the song?  I don't know.  You don't know either.  I know they lost money and I'm not really going to argue how much sense it is nearly impossible to prove.  I guess I could just call your explanation nonsense, act superior, and move on?  No, that would be too easy.

The industry had its highest sales when Napster was at its peak in year 2000, when everyone was going platinum.

22Entertainment for the most part has experienced large growth from the 90's.  You do know Napster shortly went legit (i.e. paid downloads) after 2000 and their are several other free websites out there?  Comparing one web site to an industry isn't the best comparison.  You act like growth in an industry is proof that piracy does not affect it.  And Napster went down the tube due to the lawsuit.  It's not a pirate tool anymore. 

Their sales began to decline thereafter because people got tired of paying $20 for a CD with two or three good songs and ten filler tracks. In short, their sales declined because their product sucked and their business model sucked. It also didn't help that they started condemning their fanbase as "thieves" and "pirates", and it really didn't help when they started with the legal threats.

3True to an extent.  Their business model could have been better.  But they didn't call their fanbase "thieves" and "pirates".  That's what they called the pirates.  And their message was clear, buy our music.  CD's were expensive but they now have a downloadable music model which is much better for the consumer and revenues are still going down.  But hey all music should be free right?

People turned to P2P not because they were thieving ingrates who wanted to get everything for free, but because the industry wouldn't give them what they wanted, so they found a way to get it, even if it meant that they weren't paying for it.

4I think this is the exact defination of stealing.

[quote]If P2P were such a threat, then Itunes should have tanked a long time ago, because who would pay to download music that's already available for free?[quote]

5Maybe because some people are ethical?  I've been away from the illegal downloads of music for quite some time, but I know you can download any song for free.  You just have to find it.  So why does the music industry exist?

 

 

1) Did I say that any company was praising it for profits? Where did I ever make that point? Furthermore, where are you getting this 30 billion illegal downloads. I'm sorry, but there is no way to tell how many downloads are illegal because everything traded over P2P is not illegal. There is also media that is out of print/discontinued/not available as well as the fact that some people who download and don't buy never would have bought it anyway. The burden of proof is on the industry because they are making the positive assertion that P2P is crippling them, it's not on anyone else to prove that it isn't true. So far, they haven't done this. They've only provided gross speculation on dollar amounts that they've lost every year and the number of illegal downloads, which are two things that they can't possibly know or prove..

2) Are you paying any attention? I think you damn well that I'm talking about Napster before it was legit. I never said that P2P had no effects whatsoever, now did I? I said that the effect is nowhere near what the industry claims. This is why I brought up Napster, not to compare it to the industry, but to show that P2P can't be having such a serious effect if record labels were seeing record highs when Napster was at the height of its popularity.

3) When the industry demonized people who enjoy listening to their music, they were indeed assaulting their own fanbase. You do realize that there are people out there who use P2P and buy the music, right? Demonizing their fanbase and conducting legal threats against children and elderly people did nothing more but tarnish their image in the eyes of the public. If their intention was to get people to buy their music, then they fucked up.

4) Then you're wrong. As has been stated time and time again, theft involves the taking away of physical property so that the owner no longer has it. If you keep arguing that it's theft, then you're either wilfully ignorant or just plain stupid. Neither one looks too good.

5) It's because someone in the industry finally provided a palatable way for people to get what they wanted. It has nothing to do with ethics. Had they focused on improving their product and business model from the outset instead of branding people as pirates and making legal threats, then they'd hve been a lot better off.

 

You can argue the theft thingy all day long in a court of law and you will loose.

And at the end of the day I believe that is all that matters, wether it is a bannable offense that is currently being punished by the law or not...

Like someone pointed above Intellectual property is property too......

The criminal penalties in the US for software piracy are actually a lot harsher than those for petty theft too...