Pirated Music Or Legal Downloads?

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Pete1950's incomprehension of this matter is truly mystifying.

Copyright protects an individual's intellectual work.

There are farmers around here who grow pumpkins or flowers and sell them on an unmanned stall, or in a field where you pick your own. There is a place to put the money they cost. It might not be economically viable to man the stall, so the products are sold on trust. You want a pumpkin, you pay for it. Of course, nothing is stopping you stealing the pumpkin, but if everyone did that, there would very soon be no pumpkins for sale, as the farmer wouldn't go to the trouble of growing them - why should he?

Music piracy is a similar game (in a game theory sense). Creating music takes time and effort. Recording studios are not cheap. Engineers, producers and musicians can't live on thin air. The idea that just because you can appropriate something without paying for it means you should, is patently ridiculous. Why not shoplift in supermarkets in that case?

Failure to understand this seems to imply that intellectual work which has no concrete manifestation as an physical object is fair game to steal.
As has been pointed out, whenever you hear something on the radio, or TV, or on an internet stream, it is being paid for - for you to hear it once. If you want to hear it multiple times at your own convenience, it should be paid for.

It's even worse with books, which can be scanned and distributed, as the author (who will have spent months and years writing the book) has no other source of income - he can't make his living doing book readings. At least a performing artist can perform her work. But having created enjoyment which through the recorded medium can be had over and over again, why should she not be paid for it?

On a purely technical level, most music streams are dire quality such that the bit rate is not remotely comparable to the CD. Indeed buying from iTunes is still ripping you off, as a full album costs almost as much as a CD and you are getting about a third of the bit rate. Still for the odd song, it's a useful resource.

I am saddened though, that some music publishers prohibit on-line guitar teachers (for example) for creating lessons enabling students to learn to play a particular song. Generally, the songs concerned are from multi-million pound-earning supergroups. You can whistle or sing the tune (no one can stop you) but you can't learn to create your own rendition on a musical instrument, even for purely personal enjoyment. I think this is taking copyright a little too far.

 

A law that doesn't have widespread support or can't be effectively policed is doomed to failure. Copyright and how it relates to music and film is an example of such a law.

 

Don't worry - of course I use it, but on-line videos can be really handy for helping you learn the actual technique.

CD sounds extremely crisp. What it lacks is warmth, if your equipment is good enough to hear the difference. iTunes stuff isn't a lossless format. It's 256 or even 128 kbps on occasion, compared to a CD's 700 or even 1400 kbps. If you can hear the difference between vinyl and CD, I can't see how you can stomach such low quality. Amazon will sell you the CD for about the same amount of money - a bargain in these times. The actual masters are well above CD bit rates now, so even CD is "dumbed down". And you're right - it's hard to see how the CD can be worse than the vinyl if the recording process was entirely digital. Strange.

I agree, but vinyl takes up a lot of room and weighs a ton.

 

They are AAC files, but the bitrates are well down and on top equipment, you will hear the difference. It is not unlike comparing jpeg files to RAW files.

 

I made it clear I was talking about music performances. Printed sheet music is similar to printed written material, as far as copyright issues are concerned.

 

"Theft"? Your definition of what constitutes a theft must be different from everybody else's.

 

But that 'income' is entirely hypothetical, is it not? It is money which does not exist, has never existed, and might never exist in any event. Given that the customer may well be able to listen to the same piece of music broadcast on radio free of charge, the hypothetical deprivation is very far-fetched.

 

Some straw men here, I see.

Pumpkins are physical objects which somebody owns. If you take them away without paying the price to the owner, that's theft - you have deprived the owner of his property permanently and without his permission. He no longer has the pumpkin, and he cannot then sell it to somebody else. The same goes for shoplifting goods from supermarkets. But all that is in no way analogous to the situation under discussion here.

As I have mentioned, I thought clearly (but evidently not clearly enough), the whole point about electronic copying or recording is that does not deprive any owner of his property, and patently does not amount to theft.

The argument about musicians not being able to make a living surely misses the point. Before sound recording was invented, musicians could never earn money from the sale of recordings of their performances. Recording came along, and that became possible. Then unlimited multiplication of recordings came along, so it is becoming impossible again. Developing technology creates jobs and money-making opportunities, then further technical development takes those opportunities away. Such is the way of the world.

Patents are a very different issue. If you manufacture for sale some product or device the value of which depends on the incorporation of some intellectual property (e.g. a SatNav device), and if that intellectual property belongs to someone else (e.g. a patent, an algorithm), the owner of the intellectual property can reasonably expect to be paid a fee for its use, or a share of the proceeds of sale. Note that the issue lies only between the seller of the product and the owner of the patent; the user of the product has no part in it. It is the selling for profit which is the crucial element here, not merely usage.

I think patents will continue to have importance into the indefinite future, and long after copyright has faded away.

 

I'm struggling to grasp your differentiation here.
Are you saying that if you can see something, copyright exists (sheet music) but if you can hear something, it doesn't or shouldn't?

If Pink Floyd play Wish You Were Here, then they do it on the understanding that they are to be paid for their performance. They record it and put it out as a CD or whatever. If you choose to ignore that tacit understanding, then you are indeed performing a little theft. They have provided a service and you have chosen to use that service but not pay for it.

Is this so very different from saying it's OK to take a train without buying a ticket if you know that no one is checking tickets? You choose to avail yourself of a service which you know to be normally paid for, and avoid paying your share. You might say that the train is running anyway, so your action in no way constitutes a theft.

 

No. If you recall, I had given two examples of the way copyright came about: printing (after c.1450), and sound recording (after c.1900). Then there was a post mentioning that sheet music was printed and distributed long before sound recordings. My response was that sheet music falls into the former example (printing), rather than the latter. Not that it makes any difference.

 

So, taking this on a little, can I resume your position thus:

1. There is nothing special about music. It's fine to digitise a book (despite the dire copyright warnings) and distribute it to other people so that they can read it FOC.

2. In fact, as a service doesn't belong to anyone, making unauthorised use of it is OK if the technical means to do so exist.

If that isn't what you are saying, please clarify in what way pirating music is different from the above.

 

Pink Floyd played their track, recorded it, and issued it for sale on the understanding that the technology available at the time enabled them to secure a monopoly over the distribution of the track; anybody who wanted it had to pay their fee. It was on the understanding that distribution of their track required a manufacturing process (which was complex, expensive, and not available to members of the public), making it feasible for them to prevent any reproduction not authorised by them.

That understanding, whilst reasonable at the time, has been superseded by events. Present day technology enables millions of copies of their track to be made by anybody and everybody at nil cost, and distributed anywhere in the world in an instant.

Shoplifting a 45 rpm vinyl in 1970 was theft; downloading a copy in 2014 simply isn't. To claim that it is is absurdly trying to hold back the tide.

 

So Pete - do you believe its ok to borrow a cd and copy that too? Do you not consider that to be theft?
I believe you were counsel of some kind in the legal world or similar. If you produced a precedent that you charge for the use of as part of your advice then is it theft if I copy it and use it in my practice charging my clients without your consent?

 

Well, that is an interesting point of view, which appears to hold that ethics are moulded by technology and that if you can get away with a small crime, because detection and punishment are unenforceable, then it ceases to be a crime.

Perhaps the Pink Floyd wasn't the best example to choose, as my brother bought that one on cassette tape when it was released. Home taping was already completely possible in the 70s and was massively employed, but it was still a faff and although it surely reduced record sales, it didn't decimate them as piracy does today.

Many records take a long time to make and that costs money. Who is going to go to the bother if there is no financial return? Although there has been some sublime music knocked out in a couple of takes (cf Otis Redding, or much of the reggae of the 70s) things like Wish You Were Here required months of graft. If that money can't be recouped through record sales, it means the death of the recorded music industry and for that most of us are infinitely poorer.

 

If a person finds a deceitful way to get onto train without paying the fare, or to get into a theatre without buying a ticket, that's not theft. It's fraud. The essential element is obtaining pecuniary advantage by deception; the person is falsely pretending that he has paid and does have a ticket. If our hypothetical person were allowed to use the train or enter the theatre without any deception, then there would be no offence.

It is very different from the person who listens to music which he has not paid for (or records it and listens to it again), who has deceived no-one.