A post I made on another blog that I wanted to share from http://sigfrid.wordpress.com/2008/01/07/decriminalize-file-sharing/
Friday, January 11, 2008
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Liberated NakedPenguins by Keith Worrell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and nothing presented in this blog is meant in any way to be legal advice. That is what lawyers are for (unless they work for the public defenders office of Santa Clara County in which case you should get a real lawyer, or a priest to perform last rights. <--still not legal advice.)
January 11, 2008 at 7:29 pm
The Recording industry will never accept the fact that the recording industry is DEAD! RIAA has NO purpose to the creative artist. The model has always been pay RIAA to produce and advertise an album. RIAA gets all profits from CD sales. In return artist gets famous and people buy concert tickets. RIAA owns large amphitheaters, RIAA gets a big part of concert ticket ticket sales, and the rest is split up between the artists. Bands get all proceeds from t-shirt sales.
The internet has made this model obsolete. Artists can build recording studios from free recycled products, and make CD masters on a computer with excellent quality with FOSS (audacity, etc), and mass produce them for less than $2000. Give away the CD online, and post videos on YouTube for promotion. No more need for big concerts for small bands to be heard or noticed or sell tickets. For fans that want to show their appreciation they can buy CD’s at concerts or online that include album art and such. At $5 for a CD, bands would make an unprecedented killing on profits versus the 5 cents they get for every sale over 2 million, if in the past they have sold over 5 million of any 2 CD’s.
Copyright law, for the purpose of actually protecting artists, was necessary because IN THE PAST, it was hard for individuals to distribute their own work. big media solves the problem of the market barrier expense. The market barrier today is FAKE and created by big media through copyright law that HURTS artists.
If the free exchange of ideas was instant, and copyright law, as it is in the US was gone, artists would be put on a level playing field where talent produces profit controlled by fans, not big media. No more of the .0001% famous artists and the 99.9999% that only get to do it because it is what they love.
According to ‘the law’ (government, not society) and big media, If you have ever sung Happy Birthday, and didn’t pay a royalty, YOU ARE A THIEF! If you listen to CD’s on your computer YOU ARE A THEIF! If you have ever played music in a CD player in such a way that it is audible to another person, YOU ARE A THIEF! If you have paid license to (most often Microsoft) software and even TRY to fix it, YOU ARE A THIEF! If you buy software and individually use it on more than 1 computer, YOU ARE A THIEF!
If it must persist that we will use that as our definition of stealing, then YES, LEGALIZE STEALING!!! Don’t be manipulated by BS nomenclature and jargon.
The only necessary thing that is necessary to protect creative works and artists is trademark law; other people may not produce a creative work and intentionally misrepresent it off as somebody else’s, commercially or otherwise. That should be the purpose of a watermark, authentication, not tracking down which credit card was used to purchase the copy of a work that was distributed and redistributed in a way that was unintended by the authorized distributor.
The market HAS changed, and dying tyrants will never put down their sword. With their last breathe and their last gold they will try to tell us what to do because it is in THEIR best interest.
But we are free at last when we choose to accept it in our hearts and minds.
January 11, 2008 at 7:34 pm
A must see! “Steal this Movie, Part I & II”. Get it from he Pirate Bay. (Don’t worry, they want you to copy it) GREAT film on the history of ‘Pirates’ through out history that believed in the free exchange of ideas, and the people that tried to hunt them down beginning with Guttenberg. Yes, Guttenberg was a pirate (as were considered all “publishers” in that time. ) He was hunted by governments and their equivelant of “Big Media”, but never gave up on what he believed in.
January 11, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Oh, another note to add after doing a little research, copyright infringement in no form is theft. See Dowling v. United States 473 U.S. 207 (1985). Infringement is infringement, not stealing or theft, affirmed by United States Supreme Count. Another great one to throw in peoples faces, like Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act 15 U.S.C. § 2301 any time a retailer tells you “sorry, your warranty doesn’t cover that”. Anyway, not to distort the issue, there is still the NET act (No Electronic Theft) which provides criminal penalties in cases of non-commercial infringement which has only been in effect since 1997.