piracy/buying bootlegged cds: justifiable?

No, you aren't wrong. You may have broken the law in some places. But you haven't offended against any "natural justice". Music recordings are information, which is infinitely reproducible and not scarce in any sense.

The decision that music should be made artificially scarce, and not reproduced unless you buy a copy, is a pragmatic one made by society when copyright laws were invented.

These laws were invented in the hope that they would stimulate production of more of hte information product. However, these days we can see clearly that musicians will create music anyway; and give it away. Furthermore copyright is continually extended by cynical lobying from the Recording industry.

Typically, although artists DO get paid by the system, the majority of money received through legitimate payments is used the recording industry to pay for marketing, packaging and distribution.

Should we feel sorry for the recording industry? Clearly when you buy a pirate CD or even pay an ISP to download pirate MP3 you are simply using a more efficient and cheaper distributio method. No shame there.

Should we feel sorry for the artist? Maybe a little bit. But no more than for any person for who changing economic circumstances upsets their income.

If you live in russia you probably know far more deserving creative, knowledge workers such as school teachers and university lecturers who have suffered more unjustly.

And increasingly artists are finding other ways to get paid. By playing live shows, reselling the attention which is given to them. Ultimately, if you love an artist so much you want to make a contribution, get their email address and use PayPal to make a donation.

There's one more reason to resist the recording industry. It actually distorts the popularity of artists. Essentially, the A&R people in the recording industry pick winners, and then hype them continuously until they get bought. As Momus has said, "in the future everyone will be famous for 15 people" meaning that there could be many artists out there that you would prefer to listen to to than the artists you do listen to. But because of the distribution system you are pushed into listening to certain people that the industry designates "important".

I'd hazard the opinion than NONE of the artists who have been succesful throughout the reign of the recording industry really deserve to be as famous as they were. I mean if they were left to compete on MP3.Com with all the other amateurs, none would achieve the number of listeners that they found through this corrupt system.

Recording industry = easy thing to hate
history of copyright = v.confused and apparently irrational beast, partly because of weight of necessity for law to be PRACTICABLE
Phil's portryal = not very historically accurate (copyright was fought for by artists against Recording Industry: also against one another).

Concept of "deserving attention" in absence of mechanism of gaining such attention (ie process of mediation, corrupt or otherwise) = totally meaningless.

Mark :

thanks for pushback.

> Recording industry = easy thing to hate

Hitler too.

> history of copyright = v.confused and apparently irrational > beast, partly because of weight of necessity for law to be > PRACTICABLE

Unclear what this implies ...

> Phil's portryal = not very historically accurate

As far as I can see I only made one historical claim :

> These laws were invented in the hope that they would stimulate > production of more of hte information product.

Is this not historically acurate? Sure its pretty over-summarized, and I admit I'm going by general public hearsay, (other people I read on the web) but it strikes me that the above would only be inaccurate if the framers of the original copyright law DID NOT INTEND to stimulate further creativity but DID INTEND some other aim such as a fair reward for artists. Is this the case?

> (copyright was fought for by artists against Recording > Industry: also against one another).

Yeah, and ?

I mean I'm not saying artists didn't see something in it for them ...

> Concept of "deserving attention" in absence of mechanism of > gaining such attention (ie process of mediation, corrupt or > otherwise) = totally meaningless.

I know, I was being provocative with the word "corrupt" :-)

And I totaly agree with your point. Nevertheless, if there is no mechanism independent notion of "natural audience" there can be no real notion of an artist's "true" value. So you can't judge whether an artist is "fairly" rewarded.

Now you could say that the "fair" reward for an artist is the number of copies made; but is this any less arbitrary than counting the number of people listening (what if two people listen to the same recording, should the artist be payed twice? What if someone starts listening and falls asleep, should he receive a discount?)

And once you accept that thee is no "natural justice" in the connection between the artist's reward and the number of copies in existence - then buying and contributing to the production of pirate CDs has no ethical implications ... which is the point I was really trying to stress.

Easy to hate: didn't mean "go pick on someone *difficult* to hate, phil yer lazy sod." I meant: yes, industry has acted in v.hateable ways over many many years.

Copyright vs patent: you're historically right abt Patent Law, but copyright was never just an extrapolation of same. Patent = American law orig.? Copyright = French originally? (in respect of books and songs anyway: the medieval laws of guild restriction were actually a kind of copyright: where you were inducted into the Place Which Had a Right to Make Silver Jugs, before you got to make 'em)? The concept of "information" that you're use is a post-WW2 idea, so I really really don't think eg Jefferson would have thought of it in terms very like that. (And the terms patent and copyright were expressed in were deemed from c.1900-1940 not to apply to eg music on disc, which IS information (in the cybernetics sense) but not covered by the strict practicable whatever of copyright is it applied to writing. So the "natural right" transfer which wd mae you think books and records were nterchangeable was held up by a feeling that music only existed IF WRITTEN DOWN. (cf Legal Decision in re [x] vs the Original Dixyland Jass Band, where ex-member sued for cash garnered by million-selling Tiger Rag on grounds he had played on the record. Judge — in effect — said, "the law does not even cover this kind of horrible noise f.off you wasters"

Latter part I think we mostly agree. I'm leery of "corrupt" because I think if you push it it turns out to be a way of saying "mechanism". Re all the figures who were better than Elvis who never got recorded etc: I just don't know what "better" means here. It's too speculative for me to get my head round. "He was the greatest novelist who never put pen to paper": i mean, yes, there's a rhetorical force in this, an argumentative shape, but that's mainly what it is, a critique of the actual process as exists (which it doubtless deserves) disguised as something else.

I have no problem with piracy.

I have lived in the boonies for 25 years. I lived in Vancouver for two . But i was used to travelling outside or having things shipped so i could get my fix. I love piracy because i can get what i need w/o overpaying for it. This is purely selfish .

everyone wants everything for free and then they want even more. i guess i am old-fashioned but when someone sends me a tape of something i come to enjoy i go out of my way to go and support the band or artist by buying their cd myself. music is more labor than information, surely when you work you expect to get paid or is it alright when your boss decides to pirate your services?

Paying for records = agreeing that it is OK for record company bosses to pirate from musicians.

Would it be 'right' to pirate/copy a record on Incus or FMP or Estatic Peace or any label run by artists in a collective-profit-sharing type arrangement? Or where there is little or no 'profit'? Is it 'right' for Table of the Elements to issue recs by Captain Beefheart and LaMonte Young when both artists are against their release? Should we be bootlegging 'The Well-Tuned Piano' because Young now issues it only in a ridiculously overpriced edition?

Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
No.... OK, I lied: Yes again.

Andrew : No! Pirating is not "just punishment" for record labels behaving badly. So it doesn't become good if the label is bad. Nor bad if the label is particularly worthy.

My point is that piracy is a morally neutral act. Morality is simply NOT RELEVANT here.

Why am I so emphatic about this?

Because I'm a fairly fundamentist moralist. I believe in morals wholeheartedly. There really is right and wrong in the world.

And one of the things that most pisses me off at the moment is morality being hijacked by business interests. Right now in the UK there are plans to teach "citizenship" to kids. And one of the things on the curriculum, will be "intellectual property rights" and a concerted effort to teach children that piracy is "wrong".

Apart from the fact that this will be seen as a joke by the kids - its a fucking disgrace for a government which allegedly takes ethics seriously. If we believe in absolutes like right and wrong, we can't let them be up for sale to business interests.

So basically I hate an industry which tries to pollute the human understanding of important issues, by passing its own self-interest off as the real thing ... the end result it drives us all into moral relativism.

Couldn't have put it better, Phil! I don't think you can put value- judgements on commerce, unless you are going after the entire ideological enchilada. Piracy being a natural, fractal extension of commerce, will continue to exploit the technology until those controling production build better fail-safes and protect artists. Bigger fences? Perhaps, but they won't ever be 100% falliable.

Interestingly enough, there's this article in Salon:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/07/16/abc_ip/index.html

...Perhaps this is a chilling sign of teaching Copyright Morality in the classroom?

What Phil said, totally — except that I'm a fundamentalist moral relativist, obviously. But a *real* one: not just a trend-surfing fake Morry Relly in hock to the Big Corps.

The technological means of piracy — cassette tapes first, then digital aural imaging [sorry, there's a proper term for it which seems to have escaped me] – has HUGELY increased the amount of music in circulation, paid for or free, anyway. Tho I don't think this wd have been the case if not for the sifts and tides down the decades in extreme small business/big business, consumer/producer/distributor friction. ie if copyright had not existed, then the pent- up energy piled against the limititions and absurdities it creates (inc. a severe justice differential among difft types of music, musician, consumer) would not have been pent, and the flood-through at breech-point would not have occurred.

The fact that audiences have no moral problem with taking stuff for free should be a revelation for artists - i.e., it's now apparent how much artist labour is valued, i.e. zero. Which should remove ANY obligation any artist may feel toward the audience.

RESULT!!

Yeah, I was about to say. The music should be even crazier now! ;-)

I tend to slide between camps. I now have more mp3s by more people than I ever thought, and that's a tip of the iceberg. But I also still buy happily and actively, though with very few exceptions such purchases of full-price releases are either directly from the band, the label, or from my favorite local indie store. As it is, most of my CD purchases are used anyway, which arguably falls in between stances, I suppose -- especially when so many of them are promos.

BTW I don't just mean 'no obligation' as in 'musical adventurousness'. I mean that if artists aren't craven, love-starved cowards they'll start ACTUALLY ATTACKING their audience. Metallica suing their own fan clubs was a great start. The non-actively- creative public makes life miserable for 'artists' all the time by either a) not buying their stuff, b) buying it, then bitching about it, and now c) taking it for free and bitching about it - it's about time that artists reclaim the arrogance that is rightfully theirs and return the firepower.

I don't know! On the one hand, I've burned CDs that I don't intend to buy (the ones that I never listen to anymore). On the other hand, before I started using Napster (and now Morpheus), I'd never even heard most of the artists I listen to now, and I surely would not have bought the CDs I have bought without that exposure.

I want to try to buy the CDs I've burned and enjoyed a great deal because the artists deserve what money they get, but as a rule I'm pretty much broke. In good time, in good time.

I first listened to Metallica on Napster. The music's actually not bad. It's a pity that I have to hate them on principle for that lawsuit.

I don't understand the "doomsday" towards music in the
digital age. Will it be a great loss to the world of music
if artists can no longer sustain themselves solely by
their music? Many great songs and albums have been released
by part-time musicians. It has been argued by some that
copyrights stimulate creativity - I disagree. We have a
wealth of fantastic material created before the codification
of copyright law. Authors will write and musicians will play,
it's in their blood.

its utter bullshit anyway. do we really think artists would not be able to make ANY money at all to live on doing it full time? Madonna is surely going to shift a good few million copies of her new album worldwide despite the fact that a) its got lukewarm reviews and b) it will be downloaded more than bought. the argument is that it could sell more without internet piracy. prove it.

and artists at the bottom of the ladder, making less money from album sales possibly, but getting their music heard by more people around the world - it balances out as the latter provides opportunities they would not get if not for internet piracy. and which of the two ways would they/we really prefer?