Downloading Music & Legality

[Madroxx]

Well I was prompted to post this after reading this new article Jury rules against Minn. woman in download case - Yahoo! News
Now I know that strictly speaking downloading copyrighted material without a liscence is illegal, but this is just ridiculous. Almost everyone I know downloads music 'illegaly' I mean how do they actualy catch you downloading music? I myself have been doing so for years, simply because i can rarely afford to spend money on albums, if i had the excess cash i wouldnt mind but why in the christ pay for something you can get for free? Cus the record companys profits will be down 10%? well boo-*******-hoo I feel terrible for them. There are killers getting off scott free because of technicalitys and a single mother of four is being fined a million dollars for downloading 20-something songs? I guess my real question isnt how can it be justified because it cant but just more out of interest how do the legal proceedings with something like this operate? As I say I know numerous people who download music and have done so for some time without any problems? Are they just trying to make sort of an isolated point to try and put people off doing so?
Anyway anyone who know anything on the subject your knowledge is appreciated.

[Tiggi]

Having just read the article, it seems the case is not about downloading music, but about uploading copyrighted music on a file-sharing site. These are the people that the industry will pursue, since they're sharing what isn't theirs.

Downloading is seen as less of a crime, but there are moves afoot to hit the downloaders harder in the UK.

The morals of this sort of thing can be debated to death, but she's being made an example of for breaking the law...

[kvincent5555]

The whole concept of "intellectual property" has been a load of crap quite apart and long before the downloading/uploading issue. It's just another matter of corporate America selling the public an imaginary set of "ethics" to protect their interests. And apparently they've been quite successful, if the thinking of that jury is any indication.

Nobody "owns" a song or a recording. They have been influenced by other songs and artists before them. Thus, no true originator can be traced.

While the musicians themselves may be the lesser evil here, the way to settle this is to make them sing for their supper every day like the rest of us, as opposed to making an album or video and sitting by their mailbox waiting for royalty checks to show up.

When you finish a project at your cubicle farm job, you get no royalties. You get to do it all over the next day for a salary or hourly wage. What makes "artists" and the record companies who pimp them out more special than the rest of us, and deserving of multiple payoffs per hour of labor?

The fact that you can download music at no cost per song to either yourself or the record company proves that it has no market value in terms of labor, materials, or other scarce resource, regardless of what the record companies would have you believe, or would like to squeeze from you in the courts.

[Iota]

As Tiggi said, downloading music isn't much of a big deal and goes scot-free in the majority of cases. Just stay away from reselling pirate copies.

I myself have been doing so for years, simply because i can rarely afford to spend money on albums

Yeah, especially when the country you're living in changes it's currency from DM to Euro. And instead of converting the prices they just changed the icon next to the numbers on the price tag... (20DM=20€? WTF?!?!)

The only reason I can imagine for those horrendous prices is that the record industry has to cut their losses for what they themselves are responsible for.

As the filesharing sites (e.g. OiNK) grew bigger, record copanies just missed out on reforming their marketing /selling strategy.
They could have made a 'download flatrate' or whatever instead of offering albums to download for nearly the same price you have to pay to get your albums with a jewel case and booklets and stuff. I'd cost me ~30000$ to fill up my iPod if I bought every song in the iTunes Store.

Platforms like OiNK that kept or keep them self afloat through voluntary donations clearly show that the users aren't criminals who don't want to pay for music per se. Most of them would have paid a monthly fee for downloading since this was a concept that provided access to pretty much every song you could have ever imagined (in awesome quality and DRM free).
But the record industry just sticked to their anachronistic views of raking in as much money as they could - which proved not to work out very well.

[s-system]

Gosh, that sounds too commune-istic for some people I guess. It's unfortunate that this lady did nothing but promote and not directly impede the greater life prospects of these suing individuals, all while her chances of greater life prospects get stomped like Voltron. A moral issue to be debated? Are you expletive serious? I would not give these animals a dime and probably form a posse. There should be, at very least, total leniency.

If these artists had the mind of a genius, they would concern themselves with inspiring others and nothing more. It is clear an artist may have a brilliancy or two, but most of what they have "invented" was done by way of inpiration from others.

I so hope one of the tracks involved was not Beyonce. Those lyrics of hers reminds me of me when I was a year-old. What a bunch of feminist garbage.

And thus, my first post.

[jazzboCR]

This whole issue of intellectual property goes way deeper than this Thread would have you believe but this isn't the place to hold this debate anyway (discussion maybe; debate not so much--too much intellectual knowledge and rigor required). The whole issue has been obviated by streaming and cheap resales anyway. I will agree that property-rights holders fumbled badly in not reformulating monetizing opportunities to produce win-win situations but that ship has sailed.