mlsstl wrote: > Pippin, guess we'll just have to agree to mostly disagree regarding the > impact of piracy on the music business. You seem to want to > substantially discount the impact, preferring to assign blame to various > aspects of corporate greed. >
No. That was absolutely not my point. I have no problem with greed by companies, that's their job. If they drive it too far, it's their death. All of this is called "business", it's OK and it's what we all live from. There's also no question that piracy is a problem, however, it's vastly exaggerated because piracy is mainly a problem from people who otherwise would not pay anyway and the complaint is not new. The comparison with physical theft is ridiculous as are the reactions. Ridiculous but completely understandable. The record companies are trying to cash in for as long ans as much as possible. Which, again, is their job. Also, bad weather in parts of a world is also a rampant problem, yet the only thing you can do to it is to adapt to it. We are seeing a complete disruption in service business models. Not from piracy, but from a change in the value chain. Everybody has to cope with that. Try running a travel agency, a book store or a newspaper and you know what I'm talking about. What the record companies do right now (and movie industry as well as publishers start to line up), however, is to try to lobby to write laws that secure them a better position at the cost of customers, competitors and even fundamental liberty rights and even the fundamentals of the legal system, they ask to privatize it and take away the presumption of innocence because it "hurts their chances to enforce their rights". Even today you have law by which they can get you punished by merely stating that you had done something bad, without real proof and you have no chance whatsoever to get a judge involved in this. And the worst thing is that they succeed in using government resources to do this. The US foreign office (in it's role as an "ambassador" for US content industry) is trying to force other companies into far reaching legislation that would never ever be considered in the US, in a lot of countries (Spain being an example I know about) they were successful. They do all this by means of exaggerated claims. And the above article was a very good example of that because it stated that piracy actually KILLED musicians while in one case it was clearly now, well, the whole truth. > > Time will tell if the music industry figures a way to live with the new > reality. Of course they will. Especially "music industry" as a whole as opposed to only record companies. Will it be the same players? Certainly now. Some will, some will change. That's how it is with disruptive change. But molding the status quo into concrete by means of law will make everybody lose. I fully understand that they try but we must not follow that propaganda. And they are not alone, what publishers do these days is just as bad. Besides the lex-Google they are trying to push through (which is probably the most ridiculous claim I've ever seen, asking money beyond what you can get on the free market from somebody who's service you are actively ASKING to use; but the Google is big enough to defend themselves so I'm not concerned) they are trying to kill of competition by bloggers through means of law which certainly will hit the freedom of speech. Well, it's their right to try, at least they don't try to sue their customers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pippin's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=13777 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=95541 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
