If you have a newsstand that carries “The Wall Street Journal,” hie over there to read the page one article (yes, page one) about Harlan’s endeavors against AOL and his Kick Internet Piracy Crusade. After which I suggest you bop over to www.harlanellison.com and click on the icon that will tell you how to contribute to his endeavors. If you felt any anger over the kind of mindset that had no problem stealing the latest “Harry Potter” novel and posting it on the net, then you’ll want to support this cause.
PAD
• 
>An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Either that, or (as Colin Quinn once pointed out on Saturday Night Live) it leaves everyone with just one eye.
As for the post about the profit margin of singles, yes, it is very low when it’s not venturing into loss-leader territory. Still, the music industry didn’t really have a problem with them until the early 90s, when they decided they pretty much just wanted to sell CD albums, box sets, and remasters. Which I understand (that’s where the big money is at, after all), but I think they shot themselves in the foot with younger (and less wealthy) consumers by marginalizing that format and its low price-point.
In a way, it would sort of be like if the book publishing industry phased out mass-market paperbacks (although not in the strictest sense, since mass-market editions tend to cost twice as much as a regular, non-discounted single.) They would be squandering that opportunity to get youngsters into the habit of buying books. I know I never bought any hardcover editions when I was a kid, and had that been pretty much the only retail option available, I probably would’ve just lived off the fat of my local libraries (i.e. a free source, sort of like the younger music file sharers of today are doing) for a good long while.
-Dave O’Connell
A few thoughts about this.
1) Harlan Ellison pulled the tacky “40 years old and still lives with his parents” thing. Why does that matter? Maybe his parents are older and he lives with them to help them out. Great lack of class there.
2) Eric, while I appreciate your position, it will do you well to differentiate “stealing” from “copyright infringement.” Legally, they are two entirely different critters, and you should start thinking of them as so. Why? You may find yourself having to litigate over one of your works, and you’re not going to be able to say, “But judge, he stole from me.” In the court of law, legal definitions are more important than the common American Heritage Dictionary definition.
3) “An eye for an eye makes the world blind” is a bit morally simplistic as far as copyrights go. It isn’t just that corporations own the rights, so I should respect that and behave well no matter how they treat me. If corporations get their way, and things continue as they do now (see “Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act”), no work copyrighted after 1923 will enter the public domain. This is against the will of the founding fathers, who decided that, yes, a creator should have a set period of time to profit from his/her work, but then it is to be used by the public at large for the greater good. Corporations are abusing copyrights to the detriment of consumers, artists, and society. They are “stealing” in a way that, in the long run, is much more damaging than an individual downloading some songs. Yet it’s legal, so they get away with it. Times come when “legality” has to be ignored because it’s become corrupted (the American Revolution wasn’t exactly legal, but it was warrented). This isn’t an excuse to pirate to your heart’s content (I don’t, and I don’t encourage others to), but I don’t have the money to fight the corporations to protect my rights in the legal arena. Sometimes the fight has to be fought in other ways, even if they aren’t “moral” on the surface.
Legal/Illegal
DOES NOT EQUAL
Moral/Immoral
OR
Right/Wrong
This entire discussion was started in reference to Ellison’s case against AOL. Ellison’s potential income was being affected by the illegal AND immoral online posting. Ellison and his work is a corporation. So is PAD and his works. This is a neccessity in this day and age. Are some of you guys saying it’s okay to steal their works just because they are a corporation?
Go back and review these postings. A lot of the postings are simply justifications for stealing.
Have you no morals? Is this what you would want your children to learn, that it’s okay to steal as long as you can justify it?
How base, how common, how vulgar.
While it’s no doubt a lotta fun to come up with ludicrous notions of “Revolution” and grand notions of “surface” morality, the real bottom line continues to be that GETTING SHÍT FOR FREE IS MOST EXCELLENT, DUDE.
“Bladestar” seems to want to make the evil corporations pay for what they’ve done, but I notice he didn’t once mention why the artists deserve punishment as well (“collaborators”, maybe?). Also, BS, my last reply to you went zingn’ right over your head: when you set certain moral standards, especially ones which don’t have a leg to stand on, you have to sorta be prepared to accept it when those same standards are imposed on you. If the world operated on your mini-manifesto, you wouldn’t want to live in it for long, believe me.
Better than listening to corporate tools like yourself who want to let the corporate dollars control the laws and make sure nothing ever becomes public domian again.
I’ll fight on the side of right, thank you very much.
Yeah, that’s EXACTLY what I think and what I’ve said here. Excellent reading skills there, BS.
You’re very welcome. Keep up the fight!
You’re funny. You’ve bought into it all. The last line of my first post was very accurate it seems…
Jack Collins, Doesn’t matter. It’s free to the end user, so it’s free.
But the rights holders are getting PAID, so it isn’t the same as file sharing. If Kazaa (or whatever) paid the publishers and producers for the songs that were transferred, and covered these fees through subscritons or advertizing, there wouldn’t be an issue
So far, they’ve been wrong each and every time. Yet, when a new technology comes along, instead of embracing it and making it work to their advantage, they still try to kill it because “it will drive them under.”
The difference here is one of scale, speed, quality and access. Making analog copies of something reduces the quality, and the only way they are going to get distributed is by physical media. Imagine dubbing 20 casettes with home equipment and mailing them out to your friends.
With the advent of digital media, it is now possible to make infinite perfect (or imperfect but better-than-analog, in the case of MP3’s) copies of a work, AND to give anybody with a net connection access to it. You don’t have to know someone who has a copy and is willing to dub it for you, and you don’t have to sacrifice quality.
On the other hand, the primary service performed by the record companies was production and distribution. If musicians can distribute their music without pressing CD’s or getting shelf-space in stores, the record companies have a lot less power.
So, yeah, the record companies did shoot themselves in the foot by not embracing the technology quick enough, BUT the danger posed by the technology is much greater than that of the analog past.
Radio stations and music shops give these imbeciles FREE ADVERTISING.
Radio broadcasts of music are not advertising, so much as samples. If a car dealership gives away stea knives to get you to come in for a test drive, they are paying for those steak knives. Radio stations pay for music to get you to listen to commercials. The music you hear is a product in itself, not an advertisement for the album.
Now, there was a day when radio stations DID get paid to play records. Do a Google search on “Payola”.
Kenny:
1) I couldn’t agree more on the technicalities of the American legal system and the general inadmissability of the American Heritage Dictionary. Stealing is legally different from copyright infringement just the same as burglary is different from robbery. However, when trying to explain the simple concept of “Illegal file-sharing is immoral” to someone who hides in a web of half-truths and faulty logic (not you, necessarily, but others on this board), it sometimes becomes necessary to show how, from one point of view, file-sharing really can take money out of someone’s pocket, which is pretty close to stealing, which is something that many people can understand.
2) As far as morally simplistic arguments go, it seems quite the leap to me to equate the American Revolution and KaZaa. Again, couldn’t agree with you more on the Sonny Bono act, and the obvious puppetry being performed on our government sickens me. I would argue, however, that much of that problem comes from the legal concept of corporate citizenship rather than who’s taking what illegally from whom.
3) Regardless of who thinks I am or others are “corporate tools,” there is a rather enormous difference between supporting corporate bribery and arguing that citizens should obey relatively moral laws. People who argue for file-sharing on the basis of “evil corporate record companies” are also arguing against individuals like Harlan Ellison and PAD, neither of whom are people I would deem “corporate tools.” Illegal file-sharing is, by and large, immoral on a fundamental level. Just because you don’t care that you’re hurting entity A doesn’t make it right to hurt entity B.
4) All illegal file-sharing really does is give the record companies more ammo to whine for more and more restrictive and foolish legislation. It keeps ebooks from being the force they could be because people are worried that (gasp!) the books might be pirated! Instead, find legal ways to avoid the record companies. Find bands that produce their own albums and support them. It’s all money, in the end, folks.
I don’t know. I’m pretty much done with this topic. When people resort to calling names (like “corporate tool”), the topic becomes uninteresting to me. Just remember, when you create something and have a legal and moral right to profit from it, and someone steals your creation, that file-sharing was doing the same to someone else.
Eric
Napster offered to pay thr RIAA members, but they wouldn’t accept.
The RIAA must be defeated.
Oh Eric, please don’t go, I find your words of wisdom SOOOOOOO convincing…. /patronizing mode off
Since the tone on copyright extension in the US seems to be uniformly negative, I thought I should share this quote from Neil Gaiman (also not a corporate tool) for a more balanced perspective:
Yes, I’m pleased that the Supreme Court upheld the copyright extension stuff. It doesn’t bother me personally whether my own work goes into the public domain 50 years or 70 after I die, but a world in which stuff went into the public domain in the USA 20 years before the rest of the world (which has a 70 year expiration) would have been deeply problematic for authors and their estates.
\\i feel like an idiot cos i’ve barely heard of harlan ellison. my friends are actually laughing in disbelief at me right now for it. where’s a good place to start if i want to catch up on some of his work?
Posted by ronani\\
…have you tried your local library? You’ll find him listed in the Dewey Decimal System there.
Bladestar,
I am so sorry for having an opinion different than yours. I am also terribly sorry for trying to explain my side of things. What was I thinking, that people might view things differently? Obviously, that is not why PAD allows comments even from those who don’t agree with him.
I will endeavor to be a better person in the future. Goodbye, cruel thread!
Eric
// Better than listening to corporate tools like yourself who want to let the corporate dollars control the laws and make sure nothing ever becomes public domian again.
I’ll fight on the side of right, thank you very much. //
How is protecting the creator’s copyrights being a ‘corporate tool’? How is cheating an artist or a writer of -their- share of the profits being ‘on the side of right’?
Because, more primarily in the case of music, the artist doesn’t own the rights to the music, the music publisher does…
The first thing I want to say about this is STOP, THIEF!
And obviously, from all the posts I’ve seen here, that should be THIEVES.
Not of books, though. Harlan Ellison is stressing out over nothing.
“Radio stations and music shops give these imbeciles FREE ADVERTISING.
Radio broadcasts of music are not advertising, so much as samples.”
Not unless someone has a tape recorder running off their radio 24 hours a day. They certainly don’t at music shops.
In any case, I’d like to see how many albums the music industry would sell each year if radio stations and music shops stopped playing ANY of their stuff.
Chuck Melville: //How is protecting the creator’s copyrights being a ‘corporate tool’? How is cheating an artist or a writer of -their- share of the profits being ‘on the side of right’?//
Bladestar: //Because, more primarily in the case of music, the artist doesn’t own the rights to the music, the music publisher does…//
So, then, theft is all right so long as it involves an unpopular third party.