Okay, that’s probably a bad analogy, but it’s still not good.
As a counterpoint, I will say this: I have read that the only group who can use file sharing without problem is radio broadcasters as they do have to catalog each song and artist they play and pay royalties to the appropriate music writers and publishers organizations, so even if they download a song to play on the air, they’re still paying the original writer and publisher of the music.
A side note, notice I said nothing about the person who actually sings the song. Back when the royalty rates were first organized for these things, it was decreed that the song writer receive a portion and the song publisher receive a portion as the song itself was seen as an advertisement for the singer (and their band)’s albums. Of course, there are some songs that were written by the singer, so in that case the singer does get a royalty.
5. Do you think we can come up with a compromis e to current file sharing laws? Before you can come up with a compromise to current file sharing laws, you first have to figure out the why. Why do people share files? There are a pile of reasons. One is money, we’re in a financial crisis. People are losing jobs left and right, the amount of disposable income people have is decreasing, yet the price of content is increasing rapidly.
A number of people believe that content should be free and easily accessible. One way for that to happen is through an advertising supported model. Several years ago, one such service, called Ruckus existed for several years. It was only open to people who could sign up with a.edu email address, ostensibly, college students. You could download songs, for free. New songs, and even older songs, were added all the time. It was great! I loved it.
There was a few problems though: while you could download songs to your computer and play them offline, you could not remove them from your computer or burn to a CD or transfer to your iPod or other music playing device. They were locked to your computer, and so were you if you wanted to play your music.
The song files also only had a life of 30 days, you had to log back into the Ruckus website and Ruckus Media Player in order to renew the license on the songs.
That was a problem I could live with. But, then one day in 2009, the party ended. Officially, Ruckus said the problem was “overcrowding” – clearly the demand was there for a free music service. Too much demand.
There are two more free music services that recently came online, Spotify and Pandora. I have not had enough time using those services to pass judgment on them.
6. Do you think the laws shoul d adapt to evolving technology? Yes. The problem with the current laws of the United States is that the vast majority of them were written in the 1700s or had lobbyists and corporate interests in mind, and not the average citizen. The original term of copyright was 14 years, renewable to a further 14 years for a maximum of 28 years. Copyright now is “70 years after the death of author. If a work of corporate authorship, 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever expires first” that’s not exactly a “limited time” while technically, it is, but for the vast majority of the people alive today, we will all be dead in 120 years, so to us, that’s not a limited time, that’s a lifetime, plus several years. I would love for copyright to return to its original 14-year term.[4]
7. If you were an artist, would you support fre e distribution of your content? Yes. I intend to release most, if not all material I have created under a Creative Commons license, like the one this book uses. However, several years ago, Prince released his latest album, not in stores, but in the newspaper. Anyone who bought a copy of “The Mail on Sunday” received a free copy of his latest album, Planet Earth. Also, he had concert dates for 21 days in London that completely sold out, most likely due to his free CD advertising.
While this is a different kind of “sharing” than the kind the Internet is blamed for, the principle is the same: Would any of the people who received the free album bought it before? Would they have gone to Prince's show too?
8. Do you believe piracy is stealing? I believe I mentioned it previously, but, everyone who pirates an album, would they have bought that album had the pirated version not been available to them? I think not, at least not in every sense.
Downloading an album is different than walking into Best Buy or where ever, grabbing a CD, and walking out of a store without paying for it.
When you download an album, you’re just making a digital copy of it. Nothing has been removed. The original copy of that digital file is still on whatever computer it originally came from.
But when you go into a store and walk out without paying for the CD hidden in your jacket pocket, that is stealing. The retail industry has a word for it, “shrink” as in “shrinking profits” – it might take a while before the store realizes the CD has been stolen. As long as their computers say they still have one copy of an album on the shelves, they will not order more as they believe they still have one in stock. In this way, stealing one album could in turn lead to further lost sales than just one CD.
9. Who benefits the most fro m piracy? In the long run, no one benefits from piracy. Let’s say you like Band X, you download all of their albums, you give your friends copies of those copies, and those copies propagate e xponentially. On one hand, Band X now has a pile of fans, every band wants a pile of fans, right? But, on the other h and, now that you and a pile of friends you’ve never met have copies of Band X’s albums (for free, mind you), Band X is showing that they haven’t sold many albums because you and your “friends” have downloaded them. Why would Band X make more music when they don’t make any money from it? What record label would allow a band that doesn’t make money to release more albums? In the end, the record label decides not to renew their contract.
However, on the other side of the coin, the band now has many fans. These fans could channel their love of the band into ticket sales for a live tour. Several years ago the British band Radiohead left their record label, EMI, and proceeded to record a new album. Instead of releasing it as a CD, the band decided instead to release it on the internet using a “pay what you want” pricing structure. You could pay nothing for it, or you could pay a penny, or you could pay considerably more. The band went on record as saying they had made more money on the sales of that album than they had receieved for the digital sales of all their previous albums combined.
That marked the start of the self-releasing superstar band. Recently Hawthorne Heights and others have left their labels to become independent bands. While this does not stop piracy of their albums, without a record label, the band keeps more money of the sales they do make and are freer to make the artisitic decisions they want, not what upper management wants.
10. Do you agree with Google’s censorship of terms related to filesharing (torrent, utorrent, bittorrent, rapidshare, megaupload) in the autofill and instant features? What Google is trying to do is move the blame away from themselves in this matter. By having “torrent” pop up in an auto complete window would almost be like Google suggesting someone to download something using bittorrent. But, Google’s results themselves have no qualms about filling the results pages full of Rapidshare and Megaupload links. So basically, Google is trying to cover its rear in that it wouldn't “suggest” those words to you, but won’t stop you from clicking on links from those sites. If it did stop users, then that would raise several net neutrality issues that Google does not want to contend with, such as controlling where users go online.