copyright infringement ≠ theft Why do some people have such a hard time with this distinction?
Theft is taking something from someone and depriving them of it. It is a criminal offense. Copyright infringement is making an unauthorized copy (and deprives someone only if the infringer would have otherwise bought the intellectual property in question. Often he or she would not have.) Copyright infringement is a civil offense, not criminal. Now that we have that cleared up, what is the best and most ethical way to dispose of our now useless CDs? (If I certify that I have destroyed them, will the RIAA issue me some certificate of licensed use of the IP contained on those CDs? No? So I have to keep a large and heavy mass of plastic to prove that I have a legal right to listen to this music? This does not seem reasonable.) What I have done with some of my CDs is traded them on Lala.com. I don't know how active this aspect of lala is anymore, it's been a while since I've been active there. They facilitate 3 way trades for $1.75 including postage. You list the CDs you want to trade and make a list of the CDs you would like to receive in trade. They notify you if someone wants a CD you have, if you OK the trade, you get the address of the member to send the CD to. Then lala aranges for some other member to send you something on your want list. The cool part is that 20% or more of the income of the service goes to the artists involved in the traded CDs, and if these are not easy to find, then to a fund to provide health and retirement benefits to working musicians. Artists get no revenue from used CD sales in a record store in contrast. So you trade for new music, the artists make more than they probably did on the original sale of their CD, and the RIAA gets nothing. Seems like a win win win to me. I should get back on there and trade some CDs. I buy almost no CDs from retail outlets these days. When artists I'm interested in offer new material as lossless downloads, I eagerly support them and buy the music. I buy many CDs directly from artists at shows, because they receive a greater percentage of this sale. The only CDs I keep in the house are ones with particularly interesting packaging (like Tool) or CDs by artists with whom I'm personally acquainted. If the music industry would get hip and start offering what I want to buy, lossless music that doesn't come on a piece of plastic, I'll buy. Why are they so stupid? They have brought their downfall on themselves. -- bephillips More than 40,296 songs on 2,789 albums by 2,126 artists. Mostly flac, some mp3 and aac. Version: 7.3.3 - 24799 @ Thu Jan 29 03:01:48 PST 2009 Operating system: Mac OS X 10.5.5 (9F33) - EN - utf8 Platform Architecture: ppc Perl Version: 5.8.8 - darwin-thread-multi-2level MySQL Version: 5.0.22-standard On a 1.2GHz G4 Mac iBook with 768MB RAM http://db.etree.org/bephillips http://www.last.fm/user/bephillips ------------------------------------------------------------------------ bephillips's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2588 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=66387 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
