Interesting diatribe but the bottom line is that is still STEALING just like shoplifting is STEALING. When you are able to get something of value without paying for it and WITHOUT the permission of the person that owns the item of value it is STEALING.

I come from the older generation and I have never understood how people can say that this is a victimless crime. There is a victim and it is the record companies and the artist. People use the argument that these people are millionaires and they will not miss the royalties from the one copy of a CD and they are probably correct but there are millions and millions of people literally stealing music everyday from the Internet and from peer to peer networking setups.

Walk into your local supermarket and try and walk out with a basket of food without paying for it and see how far you get. Try and walk out of a record store with three or four albums without paying for them see how far you get. Both of these would be considered shop lifting so why is downloading music from the net (which you do not own and do not have permission to use or download because you have not paid for it) not considered a crime? The author of the article does not seem to make that connection.

I am a mastering engineer. I make my living doing mastering for artists. If they can't get signed because the record companies are NOT supporting new artist then I suffer because they do not have the money to use my services. The same can be said for anyone who is in or supports the music industry as we know it.

On the other side of the coin.... The record companies and the RIAA are way behind the technology curve. They have the buggy whip concession all wrapped up and don't understand why they can't sell them. They are doing business like they did in the 1960s and 1970s when they could demand top prices for their products and no one could do anything about it.

Then came DIGITAL and things changed. In the "olde days" you could not make a copy of a record or tape or cassette without some degradation in the quality, however slight, but now days you can make a direct copy of a CD with NO audible change in the quality. You can also post that digital copy on the INTERNET (which you could not do in the "olde days" since there was no Internet) with no degradation in quality and someone can download it and have as good a copy as came off the CD originally.

The record companies are no longer managed or owned by musicians. Most today have an MBA as the CEO and also the CFO and they could care less what they are selling it is all a marketing plan to them. They do not have the brains to understand that music is not just a commodity but is something that speaks to the souls of a lot of people all over the world and that people are more interested in hearing the music than the way they obtain it.

Record companies are in deep do do and it is getting worse all the time. They don't have the money they once had to encourage new artists and they have to go with a "sure thing" when it comes to putting out product.

Record companies and the RIAA are staging witch hunts and going after some grandmother who is burning music onto a CD for their grandchildren and NOT after the cyber pirates that are stealing their music and then posting it on line for millions of people to download. When they do go after the cyber pirates everyone cries FOUL and they say that this is unfair. Unfair to who? To the artist that is losing royalties, to the record companies that are losing millions or are they really saying that they can't have all the music they want for free and therefore this is a terrible thing to have happen.

If you go in to you local big box retailer or into places like Borders you see that DVDs are slowly replacing CDs. Why is this?

CDs here in the states cost somewhere between $13.99 and $18.99 for a single CD. There is about 45 to 60 minutes of music on the CD and maybe their are two songs that are really good and rest are fillers. You can get a DVD for somewhere between $9.99 and $24.99 with up to 4 hours of entertainment on it and if you get a DVD "set" you can have up to 7 hours of entertainment. The CDs don't cost anymore to replicate than the DVDs so why the difference in price? The argument is always made that the movies paid for themselves in the movie theater and that the DVD is just the icing on the cake. But today movie studios depend just as much on DVD sales for their income as they do on the box office take from showing the film. DVDs have continued to come down in price and the quality as well as the hours of content has continued to increase. CDs on the other hand have gone UP in price and the quality has continued to decrease and so has the number of good songs. It also doesn't help that CDs today sound BAD with the over use of limiting, compression and clipping to make them sound LOUDER than everyone else's CD.

Two facts remain. Stealing intellectual property is wrong and it will never be right. People want access to good music and a reasonable price hence the popularity of on line marketers like ITUNES. There was a period where some record companies did not want their product on ITUNES because it did not neatly fit into their marketing plan. They soon learned that if they want to sell product they have to make it available for people to download when they want it AND at an attractive price point.

Record companies should wake up and realize what they are doing wrong and maybe take a look at their marketing strategies compared to the strategies of the movie studios. But I am afraid that they will continue to do business in the same way as they always have and fairly soon they will be history.

FWIW and MTCW

More on that matter for those of you who care.

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2007/10/trent_reznor_and_saul_williams.html