ok I recently saw the RIAA went after a women for downloading off kazza they sued her for 24 songs (even thou she had thousands somwhere around 15,000 if I rmemeber.) and they got 9,250 per song. that is a wopping total of 220,000 dollars. I guess it could have been worse since the max is 150,000 per song so lets do the math.. 150,000 x 15,000 = 2,250,000,000... yes sir 2.25 billion dollars in damages to the record industry caused by 1 woman and 1 woman alone..... ummmm I call Bull Shyt!!!!! Ok I can see fining her a few hundered mabye even a thousand.. and that is a strong mabye! but serously I honestly as a recording artist myself dont think its right to fine people for downloading.. I say let people download.. if people want to suport there fav artist let them goto shows, buy there endorment products, buy there murchanice ... but to me by them downloading there music they want to lissin to it. heace if anything they are doing good as in lissinging to it and others will here and they will get more fans to show up to shows buy more crap they artist promote and sell...

I understand how some can be a bit pissed about them "stealing" there music.. but they need to releize times change and they need to adapt and quit ****ing.. serously

just my 2 cents

ORIGINAL: Jessie Sammler

Yeah, really. I just put a whole 300-disc CD changer worth of music into iTunes. It took a little effort, but I got consistent, complete rips of every song on every CD that I own. Lawsuits or not, there's no way would I depend on a bunch of faceless wankers on the Internet to do it for me.

downloading requires less effort than ripping from CD

Maybe if you know how to do it. I download from iTunes and find it easy enough (provided that I can find something that I want to hear), but it's kind of a stretch to imagine myself looking for free music out there in the untamed wilds. If I want to get music that I already own into my computer, why would I go looking for it online when I've got the CD sitting across the room?

if you are disabled and can't move across the room it starts to make more sense. two of the cases mentioned by the EFF, if of course you are willing to believe they didn't just make these people up out of thin air, involve disabled individuals for whom ripping CDs would have been quite an effort compared to downloading.

Besides, it's not really about which takes less effort. I rip from my CD's because it works. It's free, legal, safe, and guaranteed to be a complete, quality import.

for us ambulatory, computer literate types, i agree. i know some people though who don't know how to rip a CD (they copy the .cda tracks to their hard drive and wonder why they won't play) but they can use p2p programs just fine and in many cases aren't aware that it is illegal, particularly if they already owned the CDs in question. i've had to tell several relatives that they could be sued if they used downloading programs.

Bottom line, I really look down on people who are involved in illegal online music sharing, and I think the IRAA should nail them to the wall -- but there should be safeguards in place that require them to have all their ducks in a row before they take action on an individual. Without proof, it's just a legal form of extortion -- kind of like what a certain cable company is reported to be involved in.

that legal form of extortion is what is going on now. in fact it used to be worse until a judge ruled that the RIAA's methods for obtaining IPs was a violation of privacy. since then they actually have to go on the programs themselves to determine if music is being shared.

for my part, i think that the RIAA should have to prove in each individual case that the person has stepped outside the bounds of fair use. there is a difference between someone who uploads thousands of songs for days on end and a disabled person who downloads songs they already own. deposing a little girl for allegedly downloading songs just shows how far they are willing to go.

You keep saying this. iTunes is there. Rhapsody is there. There are various others. They are providing easy and convenient online purchase of music. In what way haven't they adapted? And what does this have to do with people stealing their stuff? Just because it's available for digital purchase isn't going to stop all those folks from just continuing to steal it.

.

.

did you not think i was serious?

Well, I guess that makes it easier to debate when you don't answer people.

You are mistaking not agreeing with you with being illogical. I pretty much think the same thing about your responses, but I'm not going to stop responding because of that. I said that the EFF was just as biased as the RIAA, which is also biased. The EFF some time ago, IMO, moved from being a responsible advocate for consumer rights, and quoting things from them is no more useful than quoting things from the RIAA. I don't believe any of it on face value.

You assume that the IP owners are by default evil and everything you argue comes from that basis. I believe that, though they certainly aren't in this for the good human kind, they do have the law and morality on their side, while the public is broadly ignoring the rights that IP owners have under the law. As long as this continues, the public and the EFF really don't have a moral or ethical position to stand on. If the public wasn't breaking the law on a large scale, then the deeds of the RIAA might stand out as beyond the pale. But, as it stands, they look to me like an industry attempting to protect the rights they have by law and which are not being protected for them, as they are for other industries.

I think I've answered your points as succinctly as you've answered mine, we just don't agree on the answer.

for your own education, i'm going to list the assumptions you've made in your post without any sort of backing evidence, which is what i call thin on logic:

You are mistaking not agreeing with you with being illogical.

wrong. i am saying your arguments do not have much merit based on logic, which simply leaves a difference of opinion.

The EFF some time ago, IMO, moved from being a responsible advocate for consumer rights, and quoting things from them is no more useful than quoting things from the RIAA. I don't believe any of it on face value.

the EFF in your opinion isn't a useful source for information in this discussion, and neither is the RIAA. yet you believe the RIAA when they say they are losing money to pirates. if they are as biased as the EFF, then they are probably making that up, by your reasoning. since i've offered information from sources besides the EFF, i guess i win, unless you want to declare all my sources biased. then i suppose we can just argue in the confines of our own unfounded opinions, which as i've already said, i find a waste of time.

You assume that the IP owners are by default evil and everything you argue comes from that basis.

wrong. i know the RIAA is evil based on the things they've done, which i have quoted at length from various sources (not just the EFF). my argument is based on copyright law, fair use, court cases and economics. i haven't even gotten to the studies that support the title of this thread although there are a couple links in the quotes and links i posted. but why bother? you'll say the sources are biased and you don't believe a word of it on face value.

I believe that, though they certainly aren't in this for the good human kind, they do have the law and morality on their side, while the public is broadly ignoring the rights that IP owners have under the law. As long as this continues, the public and the EFF really don't have a moral or ethical position to stand on. If the public wasn't breaking the law on a large scale, then the deeds of the RIAA might stand out as beyond the pale.

suing innocent people is moral now? putting rootkits on CDs is moral? and legal? show me any evidence where the public is broadly ignoring the rights that IP owners have or breaking the law on a large scale. post one link. i won't do it for you.

But, as it stands, they look to me like an industry attempting to protect the rights they have by law and which are not being protected for them, as they are for other industries.

more of your opinion.

I think I've answered your points as succinctly as you've answered mine, we just don't agree on the answer.

you think? the only part of 'succinct' your answers qualify for is short.

ORIGINAL: droddey

yet you believe the RIAA when they say they are losing money to pirates. if they are as biased as the EFF, then they are probably making that up, by your reasoning.

No, I BELIEVE IT, myself. I don't depend on the RIAA for this belief. I can look around as well as the next person and see the massive amount of copyrighted material being uploaded to newgroups and file sharing systems, and I see around me how completely oblivious people are to the fact that this is illegal. And I think someone would have to be a fool to think that people downloading all this music for free isn't coming at the expense of legimate sales.

you think? well that settles it then. i guess you are much smarter and more informed on the state of file sharing than

Felix Oberholzer of the Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

who

analyzed the direct data of music downloaders over a 17-week period in the fall of 2002, and compared that activity with actual music purchases during that time, coming to the conclusion that spikes in downloading had almost no discernible effect on sales.

some guy in japan thinks the same thing:

But a more recent study by Dr Tatsuo Tanaka of Keio University in Japan, using the now famous Winny p2p application, says there’s, “not sufficient evidence that file sharing systems are responsible for the recent decline in CD sales”.

but then i already posted this, and you didn't respond to it. here's a link to the first study (so you know it wasn't made up by the evil mp3 site):

http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf

and here's a link to the second:

http://www.iir.hit-u.ac.jp/file/WP05-08tanaka.pdf

That is my opinion of course. But it's a legitimate as yours.

you can think that the easter bunny exists too, but that doesn't make it so. you have a right to your opinion, but it isn't legitimate unless you can provide some kind of evidence to back it up. unless this is a religious issue for you, and then i'll respect your faith and stop talking to you like i should have twice now.

my argument is based on copyright law, fair use, court cases and economics.

But your 'argument' is that downloading files isn't illegal, which is clearly incorrect on the face of it.

it isn't illegal until a court determines that it is. that's how the law works. in the first case (mentioned earlier in this thread), the woman was found guilty for sharing (uploading), not downloading, and i've always held the position that uploading violates copyright law.

I gave you the test to prove it. Upload a bunch of files

do you see how you just contradicted yourself? uploading and downloading aren't the same thing.

, and send the RIAA a challenge telling them you've done this, and then don't back down when they take you to court. If you are right, you'll win and you can get your court costs back from them and counter sue them for damages. But you won't win, because it's clearly illegal.

and this is the only part of your argument that is true, and only because a court actually did find someone guilty for uploading, not downloading. at the time you made your argument, no court had found anyone guilty. i even said that when it did go to trial i expected the courts to find for the plaintiff, in cases of both uploading and downloading.

but if you read everything i've posted so far, you wouldn't get to make things up about what i've said, and what fun would that be?

You can talk about technicalities all you want, but you will lose, because it's so clearly against the spirit of copyright law that even if it' snot explicitly mentioned as a means of illegal distribution, no court would ever believe it's not.

it's not quite as clear when you consider fair use, although i still see things going the RIAA's way even then. i'd post the fair use law again, but i've probably already exceeded the number of paragraphs you read in a post so why bother. besides, i think that the US government site is biased and just made up fair use, so i don't believe anything they say.

ORIGINAL: droddey
I read that Harvard study a couple years ago, unless there's been a new one since then. There was a long and brutal thread in which it was heavily discussed on AVSForum. But I reject the methodology out of hand.

of course. but forgive me if i don't take your opinion over that of people who've actually studied the phenomenon, rather than simply opined about it.

You cannot prove that downloads don't affect the sales of a song, because there's no control to the experiment. There's no second planet in which people cannot download the song so that you can see how it would have sold had they not been able to.

the RIAA stated that downloads have a significant detrimental effect on music purchases because people are stealing and not buying. that supposition is contested by both of these studies. despite the absence of a control group, you can still make some logical conclusions based on the facts. no one is trying to prove anything, just offer structured, contrary evidence to a statement.

i would go through all 70 or so pages of the research but at some point you have to trust the scientists - i freely admit a lot of the math is over my head. or you can just reject it all because it doesn't agree with your opinion.

Just measuing sales of the song and then trying to measure downloads of the song is meaningless because you don't know why the people are downloading it, and what they would have done if they couldn't.

it isn't meaningless. if there's no correlation between downloads and sales then you can hardly argue that downloads are causing lost sales due to IP theft (and even if there were, correlation isn't causation). it's your burden to prove that downloads cause a significant loss of revenue to the RIAA. it's my burden to reject that position, not prove my own. why? part of the fair use clause has to do with the impact on the industry, and so the burden would be on the industry to show there is an impact. these studies state there is not, and if there isn't, then the RIAA's tactics show their lack of understanding of the markets, the consumers and their own products, or greed and extortion (or both).

OTOH, another one that was discussed was a British foundation which did a study where they actually interviewed young people and asked them about their buying and downloading habits. And the result was that they are not buying as much by a fairly large percentage because they can download it.

if you had read the first study i linked to, you would have discovered the following:

In an on-line survey of actual file sharers, users acknowledged both crowd-out and learning effects. While 65% of users say downloading led them to not purchase an album, 80% claim they bought at least one album after first sampling it on a file sharing network. The net effect is reported to be positive. According to the survey, file trading led the average user to purchases an additional 8 albums. While these results are suggestive, there is a concern that users might overstate their additional purchases to make their file sharing behavior appear more favorable.

not sure if this data came from the study you are referring to, since you couldn't be troubled to post a link to it. and this is another of many examples in my final argument that debating with you is a useless exercise.

That kind of evidence, where the group in question (young people who are traditionally the biggest buyers of music) say explicitly whether they do or do not buy less because of downloads, I am more likely to trust. They would have every reason to say otherwise, so if anything that would have been a conservative result.

i reject all such questionnaire-based studies out of hand, particularly those you can't even produce, on the basis that questionnaire-based studies are by nature inaccurate, particularly when people analyze their own behavior. the truth is these people don't know whether downloading the music was the difference between buying a CD or not. they may not have bought the CD anyway, or they may have copied it from a friend, etc., which would not indicate the loss of a sale.

they can, however, make the objective determination that they bought a CD because they listened to the downloaded songs first. those are two positive actions which are pretty clearly related.

But, I bet you won't see that study quoted on the EFF.

i don't see it here either, since you didn't deem it pertinent to even provide a link to this alleged study. i found these two studies as the result of googling, and so far haven't found any studies that challenge their findings directly or otherwise. and i'm going to assume you can't find any either until you actually produce one.

So I'm not just pulling random thoughts out of a hat.

yes, you are, unless you can prove to me this study of yours exists. i think i should be allowed to reject studies you can't even post a link to if you can reject mine based on your feelings.

I've been in many, many very long and very brutal debates on this subject in the past and I've thought about it a lot and looked at a lot of the arguments on both sides. And I have to come down on the side of the IP holders because, though they are far from guiltless, they are less guilty at this time and they are more threatened by the illegal activities of the public than vice versa.

just your opinion, without any supporting evidence.

and this is the only part of your argument that is true, and only because a court actually did find someone guilty for uploading, not downloading. at the time you made your argument, no court had found anyone guilty. i even said that when it did go to trial i expected the courts to find for the plaintiff, in cases of both uploading and downloading.

The downloaders are just a lot harder to catch, so it's very hard to go after them. About the only way to do it would amount to a strategy that would be easily attacked as inticement (i.e. putting up a honey trap and tracing back the IPs to the downloaders) and it's hard to prove even then because IPs can be faked.

they can be faked for uploaders too.

And let's be real here. Uploading files isn't a crime just because you uploaded them to some standalone machine that no one else can get to. It's a crime because they are being uploaded so that others can download them. So to me it's a pretty thin excuse to claim that downloading isn't illegal while uploading is. If no one downloaded them, the RIAA wouldn't remotely care if you uploaded them.

downloading won't be illegal until the courts decide that it is. some of these people downloaded "in good faith", not knowing it was illegal (or more precisely, that they would be sued by a large corporation). in particular, some of these people downloaded songs for CDs they already owned, which in effect was making a fair-use backup of their songs (which some of them, being disabled, could not be expected to do in a normal fashion). so it's not as clear as you think.

But, if you want to test that, download a few thousand songs and then do the same experiement I indicated before. Call the RIAA and tell them you've done this and that you challenge them to a court battle. I sure wouldn't do it, because I have no doubt I'd lose. It's a clear copyright violation.

it's not a clear copyright violation to download songs you already own, because of fair use. and this is my last, final post to you, i've wasted way more time than i ever should have, and believe me, i'll know better next time than to give you the benefit of the doubt during a debate. you stick to your opinions and memories if it makes you feel happy, i'll stick with research i can actually find.

If you like to read, here's some stuff to read:

http://www.serci.org/docs_1_2/waelbroeck.pdf


This one is by an economist who had previously been arguing your side but here indicates that he thinks that it is damaging to sales:
http://wwwpub.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/intprop/records.pdf


A study from the CRIA. Go to this page and select the Appendix A PDF file:
http://support.crtc.gc.ca/applicant/docs.aspx?pn_ph_no=2006-1&call_id=29786&lang=E&defaultName=Canadian%20Recording%20Industry%20Association%20%28CRIA%29

Here's a list of studies on the BPI web site:
http://www.bpi.co.uk/index.asp?Page=piracy/content_file_305.shtml

There's one done by a company or institution called TNS, which I couldn't find a direct link to but it's referenced in a number of places. It's discussed here, and it is another one that actually follows real users over time.
http://www.bpi.co.uk/pdf/BPI_Downloading_Research_250404.pdf


This one is not free to read, but a summary is there on the page. It's $5 for the download:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10874


Here are some references to some other studies:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/19/bpi_p2p_lawsuits/
http://www.entertainmentmediaresearch.com/ADMINNews/templates/emr.asp?articleid=37&zoneid=1
http://www.entertainmentmediaresearch.com/ADMINNews/templates/emr.asp?articleid=40&zoneid=1
http://www.entertainmentmediaresearch.com/ADMINNews/templates/emr.asp?articleid=41&zoneid=1

This one's pretty bizarre for some, I guess:

http://torrentfreak.com/producer-thanks-pirates-for-stealing-his-film-071113/