Metal Reviews

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What the Law Says and What it Means
If you make unauthorized copies of copyrighted music recordings, you’re stealing. You’re breaking the law, and you could be held legally liable for thousands of dollars in damages.

That’s pretty important information to have, considering how serious it would be if you were caught and prosecuted by the authorities or sued in civil court. It’s even more important that you understand that when you illicitly make or distribute recordings, you are taking something of value from the owner without his or her permission.

You may find this surprising. After all, when you’re on the Internet, digital information can seem to be as free as air. But the fact is that U. S. copyright law prohibits the unauthorized duplication, performance or distribution of a creative work.

That means you need the permission of the copyright holder before you copy and/or distribute a copyrighted music recording.

What the Courts Have to Say
For all the public confusion, a long series of court rulings has made it very clear that it’s against the law both to upload and download copyrighted music without permission.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re dealing with sound recordings, pictures, software or written text. The courts have consistently ruled that P2P and other unauthorized uploading and downloading inherently amount to copyright infringement and therefore constitute a crime.

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I personally don't care if you do it or not. I do not have a strong belief that it has a negative impact on the industry as a whole. I am guitly of it myself. I download music and I buy music (I own almost 1400 CD's). But I am under no illusion that I can justify it, as it is illegal in the US - whether you download or distribute. If caught you are subject to very large fines...

A quick google search quickly brought this back:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/315599_music14.html

"On average last year, Western Washington residents sued by the record companies paid $4,924 for their illegally obtained playlists."

It certainly sounds to me like you can be fined for simply downloading... ask these people in this article...

WHY THE FUCK YOU SO FUCKING BOTHER ABOUT THIS FUCKING DOWNLOADING!!!! As I said before I find downloading a good thing because it will revolute the music industry actually it already has began so you or anybody else cannot do a thing to stop it! muahahahaha!

What he said.

Downloading, or 'stealing', as it's properly called, isn't going to revolute anything. This is like people robbing banks to try to convince them to change their interest rates... If you're going to download something, don't try and pretend that you're some kind of Che-alike revolutionary. Just admit you're a goshdarn thief!

Your analogy is a little wrong. If more and more people copied their paper money (or stole) instead of using the bank for loans, then eventually the banks would start loosing money and think that something needs to change. Sure it would be illegal but it's not always so easy to gather up the guilty ones and condemn them.

See this:
Case A: 1 man steals 1.000.000 $, the bank loses 1mil $.
Case B: 1.000.000 people steal 1$, the bank loses 1mil $.
The amount is the same but in the second case it's not so easy to go after 1 mil people and condemn them for that dollar they all stole. And then there's the problem of who is going to like the bank after their actions.

This is just to show that the bank or most analogies used are not making much sense. But the truth is illegal or not, millions are downloading music and movies and software today. Almost all of them have copyrights so almost all of those downloads are cases of copyright infringment (not stealing and we can argue about that as long as anybody likes) which is punishable to some extent in many (or most) countries. But it happens and the pressure for it is so big that there's no realistic way to do anything against it. Nothing. The record, movie, software companies have to find ways to addapt as soon as possible otherwise they risk losing more by each day that finds them inactive.

Unfortunately they have hardly understood that entertainment has entered a new generation through the digital revolution. This is a completely new form of existence for music, one that requires radical and imaginative thinking if one is to find a way to exploit it (which is what they've been doing until now). Even if they hunt and shut down all torrent and p2p networks and have a death penalty for all downloaders and sharers, there will still be downloading and sharing of digital material. Books and most printed media are next, faithful and easy reproduction of those is just behind the corner, hhmm how will the publishers fare ?

Legal or illegal, honestly who cares? Here's the future, coming at us like a freightrain at full speed. Let's see how many flies try to stop it or change its course. The stupid stand still, the wise addapt and the clever predict.

I was thinking.

Why don't record labels change their maket model?

Someone posted here an excelent link about an article concerning downloads. The article mentions the news industry, and more specifically, the new york times.

Newspapers got their money selling papers and by advertisements. But now, the internet made people forget about buying the paper, they just read online. See, before you had to PAY to get information, now you can get it for free. And as the article mentions, the new york time still exists. And it is still BIG.

So why cant record labels become internet websites? Websites that make their money through advertisement?

Think about it. If a record label treats its music as WEBSITE CONTENT, they can still make a lot os money with advertisement. There are dozens of ways to make money in the internet. The statistics are far more accurate than TV ratings, as you have pageviews. You can determine precisely how well a song is doing by counting how many times it has been downloaded.

So basically they could just put the whole albums online, say with 128kbps encoding, for free. Make them DRM protected so you have to go to their website to get the songs. And then charge LOTS of money from companies willing to show their commercials on banners and such. You can sell banners per artist, per album, per genre. Depending on the IP address of the visitor, you can load advertisement for his/her country.

Imagine EMI announces that the next Iron Maiden album will be available FOR FREE DOWNLOAD (128kbps for example) in their website. How many pageviews would they get in the first day? How much would Sony pay to have exposure in such a well-visited page?

I believe that if you force DRM into free MP3, no one would complain. Why should anyone complain, it's free. You just have to visit their website to get it. And if 128kbps is not enough, they could enable 256kbps in other page, and then see the pageview count, determine the marketability of that.

Do you think this might work ?

Maybe and maybe not. The thing is that when you read a newspaper online you visit their site everyday and open several pages there. The ammount of ads you get is adequate on a daily basis and becomes huge when you visit that website repeatedly.

It is not the same for songs. You download 1-2 albums & you're done for the week. Maybe you won't visit their webpage for a month or even longer. But I think at least it's a thinking step towards new ideas and marketing notions.

But I believe the ones that come up first with some really new, clever and viable ideas are the ones who will reap the best rewards. It's the same all over the internet. The problem is that the CEOs of those big mamouth record companies are unwilling to try anything new since they've had it really good until now and they are not very happy about any change. That's why they are trying to drag everything down and keep it the way it is. I don't think it's a battle they can win, it's more about how long they can last.

Edit: (Thought about continuing that about the newspapers.) You see how it worked so well about them though. The guys who value quality and ease of information, they realize that they can find it at i.e. New York Times website so they more they visit, the more they appreciate the work behind it and so it continues. This quality and effort is rewarded by repeated visits thus more ads income for the newspaper. Plus, next time they are at some station or without internet they will not hesitate to buy the NYT. Plus the price for the printed newspaper has not gone through the roof during the last years and most newspapers offer really lots of extras and shit that you want to buy eventhough you might not care about the news. So in short it comes down to this, the consumer gets both a lot of quantity and quality for what he pays. The same is not true for media. Furthermore, unfortunately media is a very different kind of product than news. The same marketing idea will probably not work that well with mp3s or flac or whatever.
Anyway, keep the ideas coming. Maybe one of you is destined to become the next internet prodigy millionaire!

Being honest, I don't think the record labels are actually losing that much. They're still in existence, still thriving. It's an annoyance, and one that hits the little labels harder than the bigger ones. It's the little labels that you have to be thinking of here, not the big ones.

And I don't think that entertainment has moved on that much. Enough people still listen to the radio, to vinyl! As I've said before, I will always prefer the physical package of a cd to the mp3s on a screen, and enough people agree with me... I don't like reading huge amount of text on-screen (which is where ebooks are bound to fail unless they can come up with cheap new visual technology soon).

My point was basically right, I think. Stealing something from someone who's 'stuck in the past' doesn't stop it from being stealing. You don't care? Fine, neither do I really. Until they can make the downloading experience as good as that of buying a CD, then I'll stick to my guns. Eg: I'm about to pre-order Meshuggah - Obzen from Amazon. This is much, much more exciting than downloading some poor-sounding MP3s...

They're all being sued for copyright infringement, and, technically, the infringer is the person uploading the songs, not the person downloading them (afaik, I haven't seen any news of a trial where the person was only downloading songs). Since they were on p2p networks most of those people were probably doing both, but if you stuck to using Google Blog search for rapidshare/megaupload/whatever links you're not going to get punished.

I must admit, I do download music videos through Google Blog...

Of course you cannot have just the mp3s available for download and some banners. You must add content enough to have people visit often. Better to let people create content, as in message boards, etc. I gave the example of news, but there are other types of websites that have free content while being completely marketable. Maybe record labels and bands can merge their websites and make an all-in-one experience. Forums, news about the band.

But even if you as a music downloader just visit a determined page once a month ... I'm no marketing expert, but isn't 1 million people seeing one advertisement just one time better than 1 thousand people seeing the same advertisement lots of times? Isnt it all about pageviews?

And Zad, I'm not imagining this as a replacement for music CDs. People love CDs, people love to have material property, a collection. This website idea is just an idea to make labels earn money trough ads in a website that has free drm mp3. I think this can help even small labels. There are lots of websites out there that start small but then get a lot bigger just because the content is awesome. The more pageviews you get, the more appealing you are to companies to wish to promote their products. I know, I worked in a website here in Brazil that now rivals Google in street maping. And it was a tiny, tiny company. But they knew how to make money through ads ...

And this free-form of distribution will prove my point that it WILL HELP small labels and small artists ... not the other way around.

No, you are a goshdam infringer of copyright. When did such a hysterical term as "thief" begin to apply here? Ah I remember, it was when various people decided they needed a high horse to sit prettily upon, in order to appear more righteous when riding about the interwebs.

Seems to me like musicians today are just like any of the billions of other people in history that have had their livelihoods destroyed by technological advancement ever since the industrial revolution. Because this simple fact makes me sad, I shall continue to buy cds as well as downloading music. But maybe if all the hand-wringing ISN'T misplaced and the record industry does goes down the toilet, maybe it will be replaced by something better, like bands developing a DIRECT relationship with fans without six or seven fucking middle men jacking up prices. That would probably lead to the cultivation of more consumer loyalty, at the very least.

Well, that with the banks may have some similarities but it's not the same thing. I don't find myself revolutionary or anything else. To explain situation i'm currently in. About 2 months ago I was in Austria and with my cousin went in a cd shop. Then the new horizon opened to me. There cd were like 5 to 10€ which is quite acceptable to and I would buy them with no fuss. But in Croatia any foregin cd is like 30 to 35€ what pisses me off and that's why I'm downloading and because I cannot afford it (my monthly allowance is 30€; there are several reasons why is that so, and I'm too lazy to explain)

That doesn't make sense. Who said that downloading helps small record companies?

And also, the thing that convinces me is this...downloading programs have the potential to be much better and much more efficient than CD's ever have been. That's the most important thing for me. Again, i urge everyone to read the article that was posted earlier by Emperor_Me...that's where Antonakis is getting all of his good arguments

On a side note, what's DRM?

It's all in the way that you look at it. Infringement of copyright is stealing, whether it's using another company's logo to sell your goods or copying music.

And I'm nailing my flag to the mast: reduction in price would mean a reduction in music quality. Bands producing music directly to the consumer may sound all sweet and utopian, but I listen to enough crap as it is without having the quality control removed.

I'm not saying that people in countries where CDs are priced truly ridiculously have to bankrupt themselves. But everyone else trying to justify their lazyness and tight-fistedness by claiming that they're doing the world a favour by forcing the music industry to change? Bollocks. Admit it.

has anyone even done this? I think the music industry probably needs to change but I still buy music

I think sometimes there is no other choice, but to download in cases where albums are not available in stores or buying the original is just too expensive. Take the case where I live. Here's what albums are available here.

Motorhead - None except Bastards and a greatest hits compilation.

Megadeth - None after Risk.

In Flames - None.

Iced Earth - None.

Kind Diamond - None.

Amon Amarth - None.

Nile - None.

Sodom, Kreator, Exodus - None.

Deicide - None after In Torment In Hell

and the list goes on and on. Compare this with 3-4 years back. I picked up Immolation, God Dethroned, Carcass, Falconer, Grave Digger, Vader and some more. There were many not so commercially successful bands albums that were available. But now? Forget it. I am left with no option, but to download. A disc here costs anywhere between 250-600 bucks. If I were to order it, converting the dollars to rupees and including the shipping charges, I will end up paying more or maybe even double. There might be other folks who download for similar reasons. Downloading also helps in checking out a band before buying. I think the option to download is a blessing if not misused. But what I am against is downloading even when the original is accessible. I agree with Zad that there is nothing like having the original stuff.

Teh reasons I download:

1. There is precisely 0 places where I can find the albums I'm looking for in my hometown. 0. None.

2. Buying one album off the internet costs me about 40-50 Turkish liras which makes about 1/8 to 1/10 of the money I have to live with in a month.


If anyone got any suggestions how I can buy the albums that I want regularly I'd be happy to hear it because it seems impossible to me right now. And don't give me your high moral bullshit "you wouldn't steal someones wallet because you don't have any money". FUCK YEAH I WOULD. If I had no money to live with I would steal. Period.

No it is not all in the way you look at it.

From Wikipedia, the definition in English law:



With the intention of permanently depriving the other of it. This is not the case with downloading. Again, what downloading is, is copyright infringement, but calling it that, even if more accurate, wouldn't allow people such as Gene Simmons to stigmatize in the way that they do.

Even if you take the vaguer definition, i.e. getting the benefits of something without paying the due price for it, then that leaves problems for you. You're telling me really and truly deep down, you would be willing to go up to your heroes in Napalm Death and tell them that they are guilty of stealing, for their tape trading in the 80s? If so, I would say you have too slavish a devotion to the letter of the law. If not, how are downloaders any different? Just because dling is a bigger threat to the industry than tape trading was, it does not make an individual involved in it any more guilty than a tape trader.

And your second point seems crazy to me. I have seen quite enough terrible, terrible bands polluting shelves in record shops, who have been put there for no other reason than to hijack a market, to think that the industry serves as "quality control". I've also seen truly amazing musicians playing in pubs in Leeds who would never get a chance of being on those shelves. I remember you saying you never go to see live music... perhaps this is why the idea of a direct link between listener and musician seems utopian to you?