Re: OT: HOME a movie about our planet

Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply wrote:

In your opinion. If they are as greedy as everyone claims, they would
not oppose piracy if it vicariously makes them money.

MPAA/RIAA are a mafia consortium which controls artists and
distribution, the choice of music which is published and its price.
Think of it of the OPEC of music/movies.

The do not represent the interest of artists. They represent the
interest of their members: the music labels and large movie
distributors/makers.

Instead of adopting Napster/Kazaa, they sued them to extinction. They
wanted to maintain their legacy distribution where they charged a huge
premium for CDs. They eventually capitulated and allowed Apple to sell
music online, with degraded quality and DRM which made the music
useless. They then recently relented and allowed the music to be sold
without DRM and double the pituful quality of the original ones. But
that is still way below CD quality.

In other words, the music industry has been very slow to evolve.
Meanwhile, they allowed pirate distribution to gain momentum.

Had they been *leaders* and adopted electronic diustribution before the
"pirate" systems, the piracy wouldn't be as important today as it is.

Piracy exists because the RIAA/MPAA have failed to make it easy and
affordable to legitimately buy content.

DEC is gone because it failed to make its products affordable and easy
to buy.

Consider this: most pirating is done by kids. Kids can't get credit
cards in most countries, so they can't sign up to services such as
itunes. So their only avenue is pirating the music.

It's a huge difference---qualitatively and quantitatively. Monks copied
books, too, but that is also not comparable to file sharing. Copyright
exists because copying is EASY, not because it is hard. If copying
becomes easier, then copyright needs to be tightened up, not vice versa.

If it is already illegal to copy music without buying it, changing
copyright won't make it "more" illegal.

What needs to happen is for RIAA/MPAA to stop hindering easy modes of
distribution and adopting new business practices that will benefit them.

Did the telcos prevent adoption of the FAX for fear of losing the
Telex/TWX business ?

I was pleasantly suprised the last time I went to a music store to find
a lot of CDs now priced between $10 and $15 which makes it quite
competitive with itunes when you want more than a couple of songs from
the CD. Some say it is atoo little too late. It should have been done in
the mid 1990s.


Most people don't notice the loss in quality with MP3.

Most people don't play MP3 on a real stereo and compare an MP3 version
with a CD version on a high fidelity stereo. Most people compare an MP3
"ripped" from a CD on their PC with one downloaded from the internet.
Both are degraded versions.

I find it interesting that often the same people who claim that artists
get such a small percentage also claim that it does no harm if they get
nothing.

I don't support pirating. But I understand why it is happening.

Also, some artists do benefit from pirating. In fact, Grateful Dead
encouraged people to make recordings during their concerts and give them
to their friends. (and that is not a"new" group ).

Some artists have decided to tolerate pirating because they have focused
on selling trinkets (t-shirts etc) as well as making their money from
concerts.

.

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